A lot of talk on Twitter this morning about the teenage reveler at the Mardi Gras who appears in video footage being slammed on his back while handcuffed and then appears stood-on by the officer who slammed him. In the footage a second officer instructs the person videoing proceedings to stop without authority.
Police have said this morning that he has been charged with assault police, resisting arrest, and offensive language. Some folks in response have uttered a low whistle, remarking that “he has been charged with a serious offence”. Between that police comment, and the reaction to it from everyone else, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s now two sides to the story and we can all stop being so judgy about NSW police who have a “hard job to do”.
Nonsense.
The person has been charged with what some lawyers and others describe as “the trinity”. The trinity refers to those specific three offences, and they are called the trinity when they police charge someone with them because they have nothing else to charge with.
Why those charges? Quite simple; they are the three things police can charge people that creates the impression that the accused has done something wrong (otherwise why would they be charged right?) but also they are the three charges there is no public backlash for if they fail in court.
Why no backlash? They are simply the three charges that nobody cares if they fail.
- If a court dismisses a charge of assault police, it’s still believable that the accused was doing something wrong, but it’s just when they were apprehended by police they didn’t also behave in a manner which constitutes assaulting police
- Similarly if a court dismisses a charge of resisting arrest, the public are invited to believe that while the suspect was guilty of an offence he was being arrested for, his behaviour during that arrest was just not itself enough to also constitute an offence
- The offence of offensive language is slightly different. The first two charges are about believing that someone has done something wrong but just didn’t also didn’t make it worse when the police tried to apprehend them. The offensive language charge is more an overarching issue about being able to give a shit either way. It’s something the police can charge for (and now say the accused is facing three charges relating to events during the mardi gras parade) and if it’s dismissed (it almost always is) there will never be a public outcry that police appear to have fabricated a charge of swearing. Because nobody could care whether the accused swore or not.
One offence nobody cares about that shouldn’t even be an offence, and two which don’t actually address what an accused is supposed to have done, but rather what they did when police sought to apprehend them for it.
The trinity is not “serious offences”, it’s effectively a character assassination designed to give somebody a charge record in the absence of having genuine recourse against behaviour which is genuinely societally unacceptable. It’s an abuse of process so that homophobic (or more commonly racist) police can assert authority without accountability.
Lee Lin Chin - World News Australia (via ichthyologist)
Do you remember when Australia’s federal education minister was Brendan Nelson? When Australia’s minister for education was in the media telling Islamic schools to teach Australian values or “clear off?” When, to promote the teaching of said Australian values in schools, Dr Nelson required “that all schools have a functioning flagpole, fly the Australian flag and display the poster Values for Australian Schooling” in order to receive federal education funding. That all schools display a poster about values featuring the image of Simpson and his donkey. When Minister Nelson justified his threat to Islamic schools on the basis that “if we lose sight of what Simpson and his donkey represents, then we will lose our direction as a country.” Remember all this? I know I do.
Well this is Australia. Today.
So what are we to do when, after a century of veneration, the legend of Simpson and his donkey is officially punctured and new evidence emerges that the story is largely a myth inflated and exaggerated by the sloppy work of journalists, amateur historians and jingoistic politicians.A year-long inquiry by a government tribunal last week flatly rejected the long-running populist campaign to have Simpson awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross - the highest award for gallantry in the Commonwealth. But, more significantly, the tribunal found that Simpson’s deeds were no more exceptional than those of hundreds of other stretcher bearers working at Gallipoli at the time. The inquiry’s report said there were many accounts describing Simpson’s conduct. ”The tribunal was, however, unable to find any witness accounts of a specific act of valour … which could single out Simpson’s bravery from other stretcher-bearers in the Field Ambulance.”
In the process of what has been the most forensic review of Simpson’s war service, the tribunal heard startling evidence that much of the legend of the man with the donkey has been built on false or faulty evidence, richly embellished over the years as history has been turned into hagiography.
Source: Taken for a ride?
Original pdf (50kb) of the Values for Australian Schooling poster can be found here.
The Trinity
![“Ted Baillieu was [the] second-longest serving Premier in the country at 2 years 4 months” - Ben Raue
For those that don’t know, this man is Eddie Obeid, a man who was essentially the top power broker, a.k.a. “factional warlord,” in the NSW Labor party when we burnt through three premiers in one term and who’s family’s business dealings have been the subject of an explosive ICAC inquiry. Prominent members of the NSW Labor right faction were also behind the push to dump Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister in 2010. The tendency for political leaders to be rolled or swapped mid-term is now being called NSW disease.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/efc9631390317cbc528b34367646d9f8/tumblr_mj8k6xtuqM1qbjzg5o1_400.png)
“Ted Baillieu was [the] second-longest serving Premier in the country at 2 years 4 months” - Ben Raue
For those that don’t know, this man is Eddie Obeid, a man who was essentially the top power broker, a.k.a. “factional warlord,” in the NSW Labor party when we burnt through three premiers in one term and who’s family’s business dealings have been the subject of an explosive ICAC inquiry. Prominent members of the NSW Labor right faction were also behind the push to dump Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister in 2010. The tendency for political leaders to be rolled or swapped mid-term is now being called NSW disease.
Glorious
Via http://twitter.com/angrygoat/status/296455068163649537/photo/1
In the eyes of News Ltd, Julia Gillard is a woman first and our Prime Minister second.
I would love to see a small media organisation (New Matilda?) ask Tony Abbott at every one of his press conferences about his fashion choices.
Clickbait gonna bait
Linking a vote at the UN to the date of a federal election is what separates the men from the boys
