Various people are weighing in on Victoria disease and its causes.
The adipose are calling for a police state.
Eddie McGuire says Melbourne may need a Los Angeles-style crackdown on crime to encourage people back into the city centre.
While the city remains electric at night and during major events, Mr McGuire said weekday activity in the city centre had lagged since Covid lockdowns reshaped working habits, while the recent crime wave and protests were discouraging people from going into the CBD during the day.
More sensible voices are looking for underlying causes.
Josh Roose, an extremism expert and sociologist at Deakin University. “With the emergence of the extreme right, there have been protests that turn violent and cross the threshold from extremism into violent extremism. The clashes between the extreme right and the left are probably due in some ways to Victoria having two committed ideological groups – the skinheads and the socialist revolutionaries, not that there is any moral equivalence between the two.”
Errr, where are these skinheads of whom he speaks? There have been periodic appearances of a few neo-Nazis.
These are not the meat or even the fringe of the problem.
March for Australia demonstrations are not “extreme right”. They are overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against falling living standards for native Australians owing to the immigration-led economic model.
Nor is the left extreme. Protesting for the right to chop off a penis, pivot to Palestine, or supporting immigration are largely bourgeois concerns. Nobody is protesting for revolution.
The question is why the organisers are finding traction with the centre. One reason is obvious.
“The impact of lockdown was immense in generating a sense of anger, frustration and marginalisation among the population that hasn’t existed in other cities that weren’t subject to the same strict restrictions,” Roose says. “There’s a latent trauma among the wider community, particularly those who didn’t emerge out of the pandemic and go straight back to work. They weren’t able to capture what they had prior to the cost-of-living crisis, and then increasing economic inequality, especially in Victoria.”
Nicely put. Equally important is this.
Seek co-founder and Melbourne businessman Paul Bassat says there’s a “malaise” in Victoria right now, reflected in the economy and higher levels of crime.
“People are feeling the combination of higher taxes, still coming out the back of COVID, impact of protests, the impact of crime,” Bassat says. “It just feels like one blow after another, and frankly, a complete absence of leadership and solutions to address all these.”
What is so bemusing about the Melbourne protests is that the so-called extreme left is, in fact, on the side of the traditional right.
By supporting the mass immigration-led economic model and sticking with internationalist concerns like the pivot to Palestine and cancel culture, it is the left that is arguing for centrally planned class war, anti-Semitism, and crushed freedom of speech. It’s weirdly similar to Nazism!
The so-called extreme right and its core concerns about the immigration-led economic model, which is little more than a wage suppression/housing inflation sop to capital, has become the class warrior. That’s socialism!
That’s the central problem for Hellbourne: it is Australia’s first post-truth city. In consequence, it has absolutely no idea what it is doing or where it is going.
All it knows is that it is angry about it.
