Politicians must reject extremists at pandemic protests

The Herald's View
November 18, 2021 — 6.28pm

Australia has always had a tradition of lively political protest but the anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown movements seem to be going beyond what can be permitted, even in a robust democracy.

As the Herald reported on Thursday, police have charged a man involved in the protests outside the Victorian Parliament with incitement to manufacture explosives.

A Herald and Age investigation also discovered that the man, Imre Pelyva, posted messages in an encrypted service about bringing “guns and rifles” to the protests and shooting Premier Dan Andrews in the head.

Other participants at the protests made threats of violence and even brought a replica of a gallows to make their point. In September, anti-vaccine protesters ran riot on the streets of Melbourne.

It might have been possible to shrug these incidents off a few years ago as an unpleasant but unavoidable part of a free society but several recent incidents have highlighted the risks of neo-Nazi, right-wing and libertarian extremism. ASIO has estimated these pose a greater risk than Islamic extremism.

Incidents include the murder of British MP Jo Cox in 2016 by a fanatical proponent of Brexit; the massacre at the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand in 2019; and the storming of the US Capitol this year.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday he believed the tone of the protests in Melbourne had crossed the line.

“Those threats and intimidation have no place in Australia. We’re a peaceful society. When we have disagreements, we don’t handle them with violence – and there can be no tolerance for that.”

 Politicians should speak out if they object to government policies about the pandemic but they must avoid language which encourages violence.

It is important for all politicians to send a similar message. Yet several Victorian Liberal MPs and the federal MP for Hughes in south Sydney, Craig Kelly, were present at the protests where the threats of violence were made.

Rather than call for calm, Mr Kelly used language typical of the libertarian right. “We are in the face of tyranny and corruption,” he said. “We’re being governed by insane medical bureaucrats.”

It can be very hard to know when this dangerous language turns into dangerous action, but it certainly creates an environment where violence is more thinkable.

It is no different to the role that firebrand sermons play in creating a climate that leads to Islamist terrorism.

It is not unusual for protests on the extremes of politics, both right and left, to use inflammatory rhetoric. Threats of violence have been made against politicians and their families from both sides of politics in the past.

But the pandemic has spawned a particularly worrying movement, spread through the internet, which links hostility to lockdowns and vaccines with crazy conspiracy theories about institutionalised paedophilia and neo-Nazi and white supremacist imagery.

Politicians have a duty to speak carefully to avoid exacerbating this situation. They should, of course, speak out if they object to government policies about the pandemic but they must avoid language which encourages violence.

When they find themselves at protests that veer into that sort of ugly rhetoric, it is their responsibility to call it out or else be judged for their actions.

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