How they smeared Posie in Melbourne

To mark yesterday’s disgraceful violence towards women in New Zealand, I’ll be posting a few pieces today by people who have attended past events. The first is from a woman who attended one of Posie’s Australian stops. My thanks to her for this account.

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Several male factions turned up outside the Victorian Parliament last Saturday and one group of women. The male factions included Victoria Police, antifa, transactivists, photographers and journalists, and neo-nazis. Except for David Limbrick MP and Moira Deeming MP, I am unaware of any other politician present who listened to the voices of women.

The female side was the only side to apply for and hold a permit to be present on the steps of the Parliament of Victoria. They represent women from all religions and none, retired, disabled, single, married, employed, unemployed, young, old, same and opposite sex attracted, indigenous, immigrant, and non-immigrant women of many ethnicities and economic classes. These women were united in their concerns for the inalienable human rights of women as a protected class in Australia and Victoria and for the safeguarding of women and children in our society. They came together to speak, to listen, to learn, and to share each other’s company. Could it be more civil?

The organisers had liaised with Victoria Police for weeks prior and into the morning of 18th March. They organised security, insurance, sound equipment, banners, first aid because that is what women do, and they did so around their usual care-giving roles and employment. They organised themselves to arrive in groups well before the start because they were aware of the inevitable counter-protests. Women were scared but determined.

The Police were asked to perform their legal duty to protect a lawful and peaceful public meeting. The women ignored the nazis, antifa, and transactivists who were uninvited and unwanted. These men gate crashed the women’s event as men seem to become restless when women are meeting without them. They made the women’s event all about them. And the men from the press abetted their incursion with the closely cropped photos of the nazis in their antifa-like gear. This was their days’ work for the lazy pre-conceived tropes in that afternoon’s copy. Have a look at this photo and then how the Guardian reported it.

And this cartoon, a complete inversion of the truth.

Not one journalist seems to have listened to the women’s speeches.

The ensuing days have shown the Victorian and Australian women how much Australian politicians and the media hate women. It has shown how deep the repression of women and the suppression of their voices has always been. We women have lived with a set of protections on paper only and made of the thinnest gossamer. Our language has been stolen and now we have few legal protections in law in Victoria. There is no more pretence of how much men hate women in politics and society.

John Pesutto’s knee-jerk denunciation of Moira Deeming MP is reminiscent of the early excesses of China’s Cultural Revolution. There is no way Mr Pesutto knew what women were saying, what they are angry about, or how he and the Liberal Party could facilitate a dialogue with those of us who represent a cross-section of the Victorian Electorate. His debacle is a missed opportunity to create an honest discourse around issues that touch every single Victorian.

Mr Pesutto’s ill-advised attack on a woman with life knowledge in education, grass roots politics, and motherhood shows how much the Liberal Party elite hates women. He would prefer to keep politics ring-fenced for those who are easy to whip into the party line. Australian citizens deserve a shadow government that protects the interest of all. A party that will sit down with other parties when conflicts of interest arise and when rights clash, as they frequently do.

The most regrettable fall-out of Mr Pessuto’s Liberal Party is that he has been whipped into line by Dan Andrews and his Labour Party. Was Mr Pessuto keen to get the boot into Ms Deeming before anyone else for the optics on social media or was he scared and jumped before he was pushed? Whatever his motives, he showed no regard for women and their legitimate concerns.

Mr Pessuto, women are angry because Dan Andrews’ government forced through Self ID in Victoria without consulting women as stakeholders in their own sex based rights. You would do well to listen to 50% of the electorate rather than to fresh-out-of-university pollsters and spin doctors. These millenial desk jockeys have been groomed by academics into Queer Theory. You’ll do well to find out what that is.

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As someone who attended, I will share my observations:

10:45 and the women had already set up. I noted a scuffle between some counter-protestors and the female marshals at the bottom of the step shortly after. I knew that they would attempt to take the steps and the police had told the women that if the activists arrived first and seized the steps first they could, or would (not sure which) not move them on, despite the women having a permit to be there. The marshals were indignant that the police did not intervene as the assault occurred in full view of dozens of Victoria police who had lined up on the first level of steps.

Shortly before 11am a second scuffle broke out, this time near the top of the steps we were allowed on and within inches of the police line. The activists had thrown water or some other substance on the marshals.

I noticed the antifa marchers to the far right after this scuffle - probably about 11:20 am. I saw the mounted police and many officers leave their posts on the street and steps on the right (facing the street) and move toward this area. I didn’t see when and how the nazis arrived at the time but have now seen a photo online which leads me to believe they arrived about 10 mins before antifa.

I was unaware of the presence of the nazis till I ventured into the buffer zone between the transactivists and the women about 12:30pm. It was an activist who was miming for me to look at the steps that brought them to my attention. Going by the video of the Real Rukshan, the nazis took to the steps of Parliament unchallenged by the police within 5 minutes of the beginning of the Women’s Event. It was here that the media mobbed the nazis as if it was a celebrity photocall. The nazis had arrived by 11am and they stayed till about 12:45 when to my surprise the police allowed them to march between the women and their counter-protestors.

(Ed’s note: Notice how ‘Antifa’ had zero interest in challenging the nazis.)

It was now, during the speeches that more women - and the majority were facing away from them and toward their speakers would have seen the nazis. Kelly Jay Keen and Moira Deeming arrived at about 12:12 and they were never near the nazis. In fact, there were so many women around them, they would have been oblivious of what was happening more than 20m to either side of them.

In my own photo, notice the women who are facing the speakers and their backs to the n@ais. Notice the police officer behind the area where the women are gathered - there was a line of them continuing over to the far pediments. Notice NO police officers behind the nazis. Were the optics going to be too bad? Why did the police let them climb the steps and leave them on the steps unchallenged? As the nazis stayed within the letter of the law otherwise, it would have been interesting if they would have heeded the police’s request calmly or not. But the police didn’t try to find out.

Why hasn’t the press released wide-angled photos of the nazis on the steps?

It was clear that the nazis were present to antagonise antifa and the transactivists. They did not care that they were usurping women. They hate us anyway. Many of us are lefties in ‘lefty’ careers - we work predominantly in caring roles in education, health and social services. We are lesbians, single mums, divorced…to them we are degenetrates.

The police

The police treated the women well, all things considered and I remain grateful for their service on the day to allow women to speak. However, they also had a civic duty to treat all present within the remit they were given. This meant restricting all other parties, men, from the steps of the Parliament at the time of the women’s permit.

The police, possibly by oversight and overwhelmed, relinquished the women’s steps to the nazis who spent a long time posing on the street and remaining within the letter if not the spirit of the law. To give the police the benefit of the doubt, when the nazis climbed the steps, they may have been caught off guard. I am giving the police the benefit of the doubt here. The police did not at this point attempt to remove them. This looks terrible for Victoria: the government they serve, and the people they represent. We had nazis on the steps of parliament unchallenged - they invaded the women’s permit and the police had a remit to move them on. But they did nothing. There was no way women could have protected their permit without the assistance of the police. We needed the police’s help to move them on as we had with the transactivists early on.

The police caused further damage to the women by creating an exclusive pathway through the buffer zone for the nazis to parade through. The police resembled a guard of honour as the nazis passed through with their ‘sieg heils’ and salutes to antagonise the protestors. The optics were terrible for Victoria Police. I work with students with cognitive learning needs. Yesterday an autistic teen told me that the police ‘let the nazis Hitler salute some demonstrators’ on Saturday. Even the inexperienced with limited social literacy could read what happened. Yet the elected party leader lacked the perspective of how it reads to the wider Victorian population.

Like the transactivists who were restricted to the other side of the junction, and antifa who melted away having been denied whatever they wanted, the nazis should have been moved to the nearby park. They had no right to take the steps. Likewise, no assembled group - antifa was not allowed to join up with the transactivists - was allowed to march as a unit through the buffer zone. By walking through the buffer zone, the optics are that the police are nazi sympathisers. However, the press reported that the women are Nazi sympathisers, no, in fact, that women are nazis.

Jewish speakers and Jewish women in the crowd. One Jewish friend of mine was unaware of the nazis till they marched through the buffer zone and sieg heiled their salute. She confided to me that her blood ran cold.

There were many others like her who have never seen such a spectacle first-hand before and never expected it on Saturday. The dereliction of duty needs explaining to the Victorian people. Slurring women as nazis for speaking up for their inalienable human rights is a crime against these women. You Mr Pessuto, have called women, some Jewish women, nazis in your speech that defamed Ms Deeming. You have dismissed the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust by weaponising this pathetic display of fascism to create political grist for your mill. You and the press continue to victimise the descendants of Holocaust victims by reporting that Jewish women and their friends who have no part of the aggression between men’s rights groups take ownership for men’s bad behaviours. We women do not apologise for men.

I will in the future make it my civic duty to encourage women to canvas for women-centred politicians who will challenge Labour and Liberal candidates in marginal seats. I will myself leaflet and door knock for their challengers. You have stepped on a hornets’ nest.