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Beware giving police a bigger stick : Comments
By George Morgan, published 18/3/2009Those who play dog-whistle politics never let truth get in the way of the campaign for more police powers.
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South Australians are not the least affected by bikie gangs. The only time we see or hear of them is when the media beats up the Premier’s publicity seeking and shows a bunch of them riding along the SE Freeway. It’s usually the same bit of footage! They have the odd disagreement occasionally, but that is of no moment to ordinary citizens.
The stupidity of the SA law is that all of the bikies of different clubs got together for their annual ‘poker run’, whatever that is, and it was proclaimed by the same stirring media that Rann had got the ‘rival’ groups together for the first time ever. “Motor Mouth Mike” could only say, “I will not be intimidated”.
This George Morgan, lecturer in humanities (surprise, surprise!) adds more nonsense by referring to Muslim terrorists to pad out his homily on police powers.
“In recent years those from Muslim and, in particular, Middle Eastern backgrounds have endured unprecedented surveillance…” he complains, not bothering about the other fact that there have been unprecedented threats from Muslim would-be terrorists; ‘would-be’ because the surveillance ensured that the Islamic maniacs were put in jail. The same surveillance will go a long way toward keeping other Islamic maniacs under control too.
In comparison, if most bikies are involved in criminal activities, and blowhard Rann succeeds in making them disband, they will simply carry on their activities in the wider criminal community, without their current identifying clothing and motor cycles. Rann has proved incapable of doing anything at all about ‘ordinary’ crime in SA, and the judiciary is no help when they do catch the odd person.
As an aside: the author says that Middle Eastern Muslims are targeted in particular. Of course they are. Asian Muslims and others are not noted for any threatening behaviour in Australia.