On the corner of a main street in a Southern Tablelands city this afternoon, three elderly people stood waving Palestine flags. Their signs read ‘Honk for Peace’. Nobody honked.
My old boss used to say there is no law against being an idiot. There is also nothing peaceful about terrorism. Hamas is a registered terrorist organisation in Australia yet reports from the Palestinian Health Authority – effectively a Hamas-controlled body – have been treated as reliable evidence by much of the Australian media.
The celebrations at the Sydney Opera House after the October 7, 2023 attacks set the tone for two-tier policing. A man waving an Israeli flag was one of the few asked to move on. Then came the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14, 2025. One of the alleged attackers had already come to ASIO’s attention and the pair are alleged to have possessed firearms without the proper licence.
The NSW government’s response was to crack down on licensed firearm owners rather than on the terrorists.
Ordinary Australians, especially in the regions, have lived with the consequences of a different kind of softness for years. My grandmothers, both in their 90s and living in Far North Queensland, have been victims of youth crime several times in their own homes in the early hours of the morning. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli at least acknowledged the problem when I spoke to him after his Press Club address. Most politicians did not.
In most jurisdictions, governments, and the courts have treated leniency as a form of social justice, particularly when the perpetrator has not been an Anglo male. Earlier this year an ACT Supreme Court judge sentenced a 16-year-old migrant from Bhutan, who had been in the country only six months, to 18 months for rape and then suspended the sentence entirely on a good-behaviour bond. The judge reduced the teenager’s moral culpability because of his ‘prior lack of sexual experience and inevitably limited insight into societal norms in Australia’. Imagine it was your daughter.
In 2024, a Melbourne newspaper reported that Victorian magistrates had received training on how to sentence non-citizen child sex offenders to under 12 months so they would not trigger federal deportation thresholds.
Softness is for other people’s victims. Toughness arrives the moment the political class feels exposed.
The alleged attack on Dr Helen Haines is a disgraceful criminal act and should be punished to the full extent of the law. The death and rape threats against former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and his family are abhorrent. Both deserve the full force of the justice system.
Yet some members of our political class spent years defending or ignoring lenient outcomes when the victims were regional grandmothers or suburban daughters. Suddenly they have discovered the crimes their constituents have endured for years. The language of deterrence, mandatory sentencing, and ‘community expectations’ returns the moment the threats land on their own doorstep.
Their latest solution is to ban social media. If anyone can explain how that fixes the sentencing and policing failures they spent years tolerating, I am all ears. In the meantime, may I say to our political class, welcome to the Australia you created by being such cowardly weaklings.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you’d like to support his writing, please shout him a drink over at Donorbox.
