Are you sure about that? Or simply blinded by bias?
Police were barging into homes with search warrants, in one case handcuffing a pregnant mother in front of her kids because she encouraged people to go protest on facebook. Simply writing a comment about these protests was enough to be charged with incitement. [0]
There were hundreds of arrests each weekend for attending protests made illegal by public health laws. The same laws people were marching in the street about. Thousands punished by the legal system for exercising their basic democratic right. [1]
How exactly is that "untouched"? What a strange rewriting of recent Australian history to suit your own narrative.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-austra...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/18/hundreds-arrested-a...
They are not advocating for N95 face masks out of concern that the cloth ones are ineffective.
Every Saturday, to this day, there is an antivax protest through the streets of Melbourne despite the fact that there have been no domestic covid restrictions since around this time last year, and international borders have been open since Jan.
It's basically now just a social event for the Q crowd that leaves them feeling important and the rest of us feeling perplexed.
Now, is protesting climate change any less legitimate or any more harmful that would warrant the level of punishment mentioned in the article?
We can all play pretend and think they work. But is that cheap mask thats been re-used, continually adjusted or worn incorrectly really helping?
In Australia we had mask mandates during summer where temperatures would be over 35 degrees during the day. How well does a sweaty cotton mask work to stop covid?
I'm a supporter of Australia's gun laws, but not a supporter of this kind of over-the-top restrictions for, what I consider to be (and that's the rub), the trivial / minor offense of protesting.
The protection of "the economy" is paranoia-level, which doesn't bode well. Corruption is a transaction that encourages more transactions, whilst protest is only ever a restriction, therefore if the economy is the priority then protest is a worse crime than corruption.
No wonder there are climate protesters...
Now I do understand that. A long while ago I understood that.
Do you understand what an economy is? Do you understand that you don’t build your own home or grow your own food or supply your own power and water? That there needs to be a means for you to purchase these items?
Do you understand what impacting services and business means? Do you understand the negative consequences?
It’s so ‘not serious’ that the government has had to introduce new laws to deter people from disrupting the city.
Covid has made the economy much more fragile than it used to be, but it has also removed the veil of the importance of being in the office, so disruption to city streets is less of a hit on overall economic productivity than it used to be.
> It’s so ‘not serious’ that the government has had to introduce new laws to deter people from disrupting the city.
In regards to this, that's the core of the problem and the ideological difference of opinion. What one government legislates against, another government is just as likely to repeal as overreach based on what each government considers important or what keeps their pockets full.
Take this scenario, imagine someone dying in gridlock in the back of an ambulance because a protestor glued/chained himself to the road. Extreme? It's happened. Now for what special reason was this person glued to the road for? So they could hold a sign that says 'end fossil fuels'. Thats it, holding a sign!
One YouTube journalist even got the police on camera conspiring to press fake charges so they could give him no internet bail conditions, and thus stop his future recording of those events. No media reported it.
The leaders were all charged with incitement, encouring others to do illegal things (like going outside).
You could argue the overreach that these people experienced is now being applied to other dissenting groups.