A possible future Australia was on show outside Sydney’s old Eveleigh Railway Workshops on Friday night and it is not at all attractive.  The situation there is the result of governments, state and federal, ignoring and mishandling their core functions while handing the streets over to the criminals and the thugs.

On Friday night I had been invited to go to the old Eveleigh Railway workshops in Locomotive Street Redfern, or as they now say, Eveleigh. It was a Liberal Party function to hear Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and Nick Greiner.  I’d last been there with my father when I was eight, when it was a real workshop.

As we approached the area, I could hear the sounds of an expected demonstration.  A police car, with lights flashing, was parked across the intersection of Locomotive Street and Garden Street, so I had to get out of the car in Garden Street and walked.  The driver of the police car was on the phone, so I continued walking into Locomotive Street. I assumed that if cars were not allowed to bring people into that street, that obviously the police had things under control. It was, therefore, safe to do what the police apparently wanted guests to do, walk. There were a few other guests walking towards the building.

Then, for what seems like five or more minutes, I was surrounded by hordes of the usual suspects, screaming at me about Manus Island.  According to reports I read later, there were two to three hundred demonstrators. They constantly came very close, pushing their leering faces into mine, screaming into my ears “’Aren’t you ashamed… The world is watching…’’ and occasionally even “Tell The Queen…’’ etc.

I could not help but think of some of the other guests, women in high heels, trying to walk down the steps and across grassy areas while they were being harassed, to say nothing of those who were not in the best of health, including those with mobility and heart problems.  I could only see two or three other guests, so thick was the mob. I saw one or two valiant policemen protecting one or two people but surprisingly very few other police, at least until I approached the security of the gates where there were several.
In a situation like this what is especially disconcerting is wondering what the thugs behind you are doing and worse, will do. One woman screeching into my ear, suddenly ripped my white pocket handkerchief out of my pocket holding it over her head triumphantly as it were a prized trophy. I later told people later at the function that I felt naked at the function without a handkerchief in my coat.

I decided when the harassment began that it would be pointless to respond to the screams or even to take much notice of them. So I walked at a normal speed, looking mainly ahead but watching what the most unsavoury people were up to as they continued their extreme harassment and intimidation. The thought did cross my mind that they could have injured or even killed me. I did think of the way the mob taunted those on the way to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in France. But for some curious reason, which I don’t understand, I was not especially worried and certainly not shaken — I have been more nervous about making a speech. My feeling was that whatever was to be my fate, would be my fate. In other words resignation. Believing in God, I am embarrassed to say that I did not pray. From my father I learned that it was wrong to pray for trivial matters, but it wasn’t that I thought this was trivial.

These were the usual suspects in the mob, obviously mainly funded by the taxpayer and therefore with the time to engage in campaigning about all sorts of issues dear to the elites, such as ‘’refugees ‘’ or ‘’marriage equality’’, or to pose as homeless so as to acquire prime housing commission locations.  These were not part of Marx’s lumpenproletariat, which he defined as lower order often-criminal elements who are not at all interested in revolution. They are the type of person who would often end up as guards in concentration camps after some communist or fascist coup.
These were a subset of the bludgerati, healthy individuals of working age whose lives centre on unworthily enjoying a life of taxpayer-funded leisure with the result that, for example, farmers have to engage foreign backpackers to collect the harvest. (Fortunately, the backpackers are still coming to Australia after the Turnbull government failed in their attempt to confiscate almost a third of their meagre income, although they did manage to seize almost all of their superannuation). The bludgerati  at Everleigh were those taxpayer-funded dependents who are politically engaged in far left causes and are trained in and ready to use tactics for which the communists and fascists were and are notorious.

They are subsidized and generally looked after by a federal government which has neither the courage nor the diligence to see that vast sums of taxpayers’ hard-earned money are not wasted on them.  (If you doubt that, just recall that whenever some jihadist is in trouble, he seems so often to be a disability pensioner.)  They are also tolerated, if not protected, by a state government which readily gives them accommodation when they affect homelessness, but is not prepared to properly fund the police or endow them with the authority necessary to deal with their thuggish behaviour.   Nor is the government prepared to take effective action to require the bench never to indulge these people.  Hence these bludgerati are free to engage in unlawful behaviour with impunity as if it were granted under the authority of the Great Seal of New South Wales.
As for the Manus asylum seekers who came through Indonesia, even those who may have at one stage in their lives been a refugee, not one could have possibly retained that status. This is unless there is some rule, of which I am totally ignorant, which declares that “once a refugee, always a refugee”.  The fact is that each of them had, in coming to Indonesia, reached a safe haven which dissolved their refugee status. They and the economic migrants then chose to negotiate with criminals to enter Australia illegally. Quite apart from our obligations to the PNG government, what possible obligation could we have for these clients, indeed accomplices of the criminal people smugglers?

What the night demonstrated was the failure of governments to attend to their core functions, tolerating and indeed patronising criminal and thuggish elements, while so lavishly engaging in in a succession of wasteful and foolish activities most of which are of little benefit to the nation and many of which are damaging.

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