Tag Archives: melbourne

Police outside the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, Australia on Wednesday afternoon

This morning.

Further to continuing protests against covid measures across Australia….

…public health physician David Bell writes:

‘As an Australian, I want to write something on the significance of what happened in Melbourne this week, and the destruction of societal values. About the scenes of black-clad police firing rubber bullets at protestors at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.

The Shrine of Remembrance is as close as non-Aboriginal Australia comes to a sacred place. It’s an unusually moving place of quiet and reflection. It evokes the memory of many who chose to risk death, and died, so that others would be free, not live under totalitarian regimes.

This was not empty garbage. As a child I knew people who had suffered greatly and survived, an uncle died well before I was born. A family member still had the nightmares 30 years on. As many have, in many countries, in the sufferings of war.

Australia, despite many faults and suffering internally, particularly for indigenous people, has been an unusually inclusive society.

Police have never, to my knowledge, fired rubber bullets.They don’t use armoured vehicles. They only recently started dressing in black.

To see these black-clad police, replete with weapons and body armour, firing on civilians at the Shrine, forcing the type of regime that the Shrine’s solemn defiance is set against, with the excuse of ‘public health’, brings a profound sense of something gone terribly wrong.

We have to realise the enormity of what is being done, through promotion of fear, and through incitement of hatred against others for thinking differently.

Not just in Australia, but wherever people hold that all are born equal, and oppression is wrong.

If we don’t work together to stop this, stop the people doing this, and tell them this is unacceptable, the Shrine will signify effort spent in vain.

The effort of those who have fought to keep truth, openness and respect as a basis for society will have been betrayed.’

Hundreds arrested for illegally protesting across Melbourne (9News)

Pic: Sky News

Earlier.

Melbourne, Australia.

In pictures: Police arrest protesters in Melbourne on third day of demonstrations against vaccine mandates (News9)

Getty

taxidisgusting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jj9Q4OsdCE

A female cyclist was knocked from her bike on Collins Street in Melbourne yesterday when a man opened the passenger-side door of a taxi.

The woman captured the incident, and the follow-up conversation she had with the man who stepped out of the taxi, on camera.

Would never happen in Dublin.

UPDATE: Man comes forward to police over CBD car-dooring (The Age)

Police urged to charge passenger after cyclist car-doored in CBD (The Age)

Thanks Mark Geary

Melbourne

“Victoria’s most senior Catholic has told a parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse the church was too slow to act in the past when dealing with paedophile priests.”

“The Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, is giving evidence at the inquiry, which is investigating the church’s response to allegations of abuse.Archbishop Hart admitted that in one case it took the church 18 years to de-frock a paedophile priest.”

“But he said ‘it was better late than never’. He said he and the church wish they could have acted earlier.”

“‘We were restricted by the fact that the law had to be changed,’ he said.”‘We were restricted by him (the priest) being in prison.'”

“He also acknowledged that one of his predecessors, Archbishop Frank Little, had kept information about two paedophile priests secret and moved them to other parishes.”

 

Archbishop admits church too slow to act against abuse (ABC News)

Thanks Mark Geary

As the hearse prepared to pull away slowly along Flinders Street through a guard of honour formed by Melbourne players donning blazers presented to them by Stynes just days before his death, cheers erupted from Federation Square.

Sam Stynes blew kisses and waved to the thousands of mourners gathered as she [and her children including son Tiernan, and daughter Matisse, above] got into the funeral car. The claps from the crowd – which numbered at least 16,000, according to state government estimates – began quietly but quickly rose to meet the volume of St Paul’s bell as they rang out.

Then came three cheers, more applause and whistles for the much-loved man who had come from Ireland as a teenager and adopted Melbourne as his home.

 

‘All A Bad Dream’: Widow Farewells Jim Stynes At emotional Melbourne Funeral (The Age)

Previously: If You’d Like To More About Jim Stynes

Thanks Mark Geary