The Australia I used to know had an indulgent tolerance for harmless larrikins, whackers and eccentrics. “Shitposting”, as we call it in today’s internet world, is such an Australian tradition that the “Aussie Shitposter” became its own meme.
But the Australia I used to know is long gone. In its place is a nasty, censorious, cat’s-bum-mouthed culture of what we used to call “wowsers”: fanatical puritans. What’s even worse is that the wowsers are more and more often wearing a badge and carrying a truncheon.
Drew Pavlou is an Aussie shitposter, par excellence. The fact that his target is almost invariably the Chinese Communist Party seems to get up the wowsers’ noses even more. Pavlou first came to public attention when his own university (which has deep financial ties to CCP-linked bodies) punished him for holding campus protests.
A few months ago, Pavlou was dragged out of Wimbledon for holding up a sign asking, “Where is Peng Shuai?” (in true Aussie fashion, he snuck the sign past security by hiding it in an R. M. Williams boot). Peng Shuai is the Chinese former No. 1 women’s tennis player who was disappeared after accusing a former CCP official of sexual assault.
Now, Drew has been dragged out of Australia’s own Parliament House, for the heinous crime of having lunch.
Federal police and parliament’s speaker are refusing to say why a prominent anti-Beijing activist was ordered to leave a public section of the building or risk facing arrest.
Human rights campaigner Drew Pavlou had been due to meet the head of Parliament’s intelligence committee on Wednesday but claims AFP officers told him he’d been deemed a “high risk individual” before escorting him out.
It appears, though, that Pavlou is being targeted because the Chinese embassy in London tried to frame him with a ludicrously fake bomb hoax.
“Because of the way I was targeted by Chinese authorities and how they’ve tried to smear me as this terrorist bomb-threat guy,” Mr Pavlou told the ABC.
“I go to our own Australian parliament — our seat of democracy, and I’m not even allowed to be in the public gallery, sit down and have lunch without being accosted by Australian Federal Police”.
On Wednesday morning the campaigner had met with Liberal Senator James Paterson inside Parliament, to discuss what he describes as a campaign of harassment and intimidation directed towards him by pro-Beijing activists.
At lunchtime he was approached by AFP officers as he dined in the building’s public cafe ahead of another meeting scheduled for that evening with Labor MP Peter Khalil, the head of Parliament’s powerful Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security […]
Liberal Senator James Paterson, the Opposition spokesperson for countering foreign interference, says he’s concerned by the events.
“Australian citizens who protest frequently visit Parliament House for meetings, including union officials and environmental activists, without being asked to leave by the AFP.”
ABC Australia
Perhaps stung by the publicity the incident aroused, AFP called Pavlou the next day, to advise that the ban had been lifted. The problem, though, is that they felt empowered to throw an Australian citizen out of the public areas of Parliament House, presumably at the behest of Chinese authorities, in the first place.
In a separate incident highlighting Wowser Australia’s intolerance for shitposters, octogenarian nutcase Danny Lim was seriously injured after being smashed into the footpath by police in Sydney.
NSW Police have launched an independent review after Sydney sandwich-board activist Danny Lim was taken to hospital after sustaining injuries during an arrest.
Video footage posted on social media shows officers trying to detain the 78-year-old man about 11am on Tuesday in a shopping complex on George Street in Sydney, NSW Police said in a statement.
During the attempted arrest Mr Lim appears to be forced to the ground, falling headfirst.
Lim was, technically, “resisting arrest”, if in the most passive way possible. But the police response seems brutally over-the-top, especially to deal with a frail, elderly person.
Lim is a notorious, if harmless, eccentric. His habit of wearing a sandwich board emblazoned “SMILE CVNT” has attracted official attention before. But a 2015 fine of $500 for “offense” was quashed, when a judge ruled that “the message would not provoke reactions such as anger, disgust and resentment in a reasonable person”.
A magistrate in 2019 criticised police saying his arrest then was “heavy-handed and unwarranted,” and that his sign should not have been considered offensive.
At the time he was arrested and fined $500 for wearing a sign that read: “Smile cvn’t! Why cvn’t?”.
This morning Mr Lim was treated at the scene by paramedics before he was transported to hospital.
He has not been charged with any offences.
ABC Australia
I guess he should be thankful, at least, that the cops didn’t pepper-spray him into the bargain, as they did with the elderly woman at a Freedom protest in Melbourne last year.
