Where are you?
Where are you?
To all the Victorian Liberal Party Members within OUR Victorian parliament.
As a life time Liberal voter since 1981, I have one simple question to ask each of you.
Where are you?
I have found myself asking this one question of our Victorian State liberal members of parliament on several fronts.
On Friday the 1st of October the Victorian Premier announced mandated vaccine requirements for all authorised workers. This has been rightly and wrongly that workers need to be fully vaccinated if they wish to keep working. God knows how many Victorians are now being bullied, coerced and intimidated, through their, work, via their loved ones and in a constant campaign of belittlement and demonization through their television sets. Through this announcement, this once great city and state officially entered into a state of dystopian existence.
Where are you?
Where are you fighting back against this mandate? Where are you fighting for ALL Victorians right to choose? Where are you fighting against discrimination of your fellow Victorians whether you agree or disagree with the decisions or choices?
Instead, on Thursday the 14th of October, despite some noble speeches from your parliamentary members speaking against the concept your entire parliamentary party with the exception of the honourable Neil Angus voted shoulder to shoulder with the Daniel Andrews ALP government to introduce medical apartheid into the very heart of our democracy, our Victorian parliament.
Has any political party in our state and country’s history ever betrayed democracy in such a manner. Let alone one that claims to embrace individual rights and freedoms as you do on your website.
Considering this how can you justify your vote in parliament. Quite simply there is no justification for it.
Where are you?
On your State website under your beliefs page, your first stated belief is the following.
A belief in the equal rights and dignity of every person. All people should have equal rights and equal responsibilities to their fellow citizens. Policy should empower individual people, not limit or sacrifice their interests because of the race, or class or religion to which they belong.
How do you stay silent when so many of the people you hope to govern are having their rights trampled, oppressed and destroyed? If policy should empower people why are you not defended them and their right to individual choice and opinion? Isn’t that what the Liberal party was supposed to stand for? Isn’t that why the legendary Sir Robert Menzies chose the word “liberal” in the first place when he formed what was then the great Liberal Party?
Stated values and beliefs are only words on a piece of paper if in the most challenging times you are not prepared to defend those stated values and beliefs with actions. Where are you?
People have taken to the streets of Melbourne out of frustration and despair to exercise their god-given right to protest this government’s actions. They have been met with a militarized police force armed to the teeth who have no hesitation in assaulting citizens no matter their gender, age, background, culture or faith. Police have shot at their own citizens, used tear gas, batons, assault vehicles armoured uniforms and capsicum and pepper spray. They have attacked old women, young women, pregnant women, they have assaulted people calmy talking to their colleague with sling tackles from behind, they have assaulted people lying on the ground and attack only when numbers allow like a pack of hyenas.
They have acted and behaved like cowards and thugs and done what I consider irreparable harm to the reputation of a once widely and highly respected police force.
No more. On these assaults of your citizens, where are you?
Your shadow police minister at the time, David Southwick, shamefully defended the police and demonised the protesters when they were first fired upon with rubber bullets. This is the behaviour of despot communist dictatorship such as you see in China and North Korea. Are you members of the CCP or the Victorian Liberal Party?
Where are you?
I quote again from your beliefs page
Governments exist to protect the rights and dignity of the individual person and to establish a framework of laws and institutions which empowers individual people so they can achieve their values.
Does protecting the rights and dignity of your citizens include the use of weapons and assault vehicles, the demonization of their protest as misguided, far-right and the foul accusation of being a Nazi.
I know who are acting like Nazis and it isn’t the protesters. Where are you defending your citizen’s right to protest and in a peaceful and unhindered manner? Why are you defending their vile and unlawful police behaviours instead of calling it out? Have you no courage? Have you no honour? Have you no comprehension of what “classic liberal values are?
Where are you?
There are so many contradictions on your website compared to your silence on behalf of Victorian citizens. Let me list them.
People should be free to pursue their values and control their own lives, so long as they do not harm others. Everyone is different. Policy must recognize the importance of variety among people, and not assume that everyone is the same.
If you really believe people should be free to pursue their values and be able to control their own lives, why are you not speaking out against vaccine passports and mandatory vaccinations? This one subject alone would win you the election if you opposed these points of policy overreach.
I have asked many of you via your Twitter feeds your stance on this subject alone many times. The silence is deafening. I know you have staff read through these threads as you have them block and censor so many people on them. Bizarrely most of them are “former” Liberal voters.
Where are you?
Governments should help those whose opportunities have been damaged by life’s chances and who need assistance. Government assistance should aim to help people back to control over their own lives, and not create dependence.
You say this, but you sit by silently as tens of thousands either lose their jobs and careers or are forced to tolerate a medical procedure they don’t want. For those losing their jobs simple due to making a choice the government dislikes how is that helping people control their lives and relying on the dependence on government support. One would believe that this is what you want through your mute protests.
Where are you?
People are the best judges of their own interests. Government can never really know what people value for themselves.
I couldn’t agree more with this statement. So why do you stand silently on the sideline watching as people are denied their judgement of what is in their best interest?
Where are you?
Communities are created by people who respect each other and work together to achieve common interests. Governments should empower communities, not try to substitute for them.
Judge yourself by your actions or lack thereof, judge yourself by your silence, judge yourself by your politics. Are you treating certain sections of our community with the respect you mention or are these just words as well?
Where are you?
Peaceful voluntary relationships between people in communities contribute greatly to individual fulfilment and provide the most effective support networks in society for those in need.
Not sure how people can be people when they are being fired upon, assaulted and arrested for the crime of walking their streets.
Where are you?
The rule of law. Laws should give the same rights to everyone, and not be used to create special privileges for sections of the community or organisations. Policy should aim to achieve the public interest, not pander to special interests.
Do you believe these words or do just mouth them? For two years now we have witnessed, celebrities, sportspeople, the rich and you, our politicians being extended privileges that have not been extended to the rest of us.
Where are you?
The law should guarantee equal rights to participate in markets for goods and services.
How can you keep this on your website when you don’t oppose vaccine passports which will significantly take away the rights of hundreds of thousands to participate in these markets you speak of.
Where are you?
All citizens are free to organise themselves into associations and unions to protect themselves against exploitation and to advance their values.
You say this, yet you say and do nothing to defend people who organise themselves to protest against this vile government in the streets. Instead, you join in the demonization of them as a group. Why do you not speak out on their behalf?
Where are you?
Freedom of speech and respect for others provides the best guarantee that false ideas will be replaced by true ideas, that harmful policies will be replaced by beneficial ones, and that ineffective policies will be improved.
If this is the case why does your party and the government demonise those with significantly more knowledge and experience in these areas from having their say? Why do you stay silent or even join in the demonization of those with a different opinion to the government or their bureaucrats who give them advice? Why not listen to them and embrace more than one point of view.
Where are you?
Democratic political institutions provide the best form of government, enabling people to peacefully debate and compromise their differences.
Is that what we have all been witnessing in Melbourne peaceful debate and compromise? How is that achieved through state-sponsored violence against its own citizens? Why are you not screaming from the rooftops against this?
Where are you?
The Federal system, based on the division of powers between State and Federal Governments, has provided a decentralisation of authority that protects individual freedoms and allows States to compete to provide the best laws and services to citizens.
How is that going? Why are you not speaking out against Scott Morrison and his national cabinet who have divided and oppressed the citizens of this nation? Is it because he and his government belong to the same party as you? Does party allegiance come before the oath you swore to serve the citizens that you represent in your respective electorates?
Where are you?
Australia is one of the world’s pioneering democracies providing liberty under law to its citizens.
Providing liberty to its citizens? Our citizens have been locked down, forced out of work and businesses treated like children, made to stay inside, stopped from letting their children go to school and play at parks, endured unnecessary curfews and mask-wearing. We hear you on some of these matters but on the whole, you take a position that is a lighter shade of grey to the ALP.
Where are you?
All people in Australia have over-arching responsibilities to respect Australia’s democratic institutions and the principles of equal rights and freedoms that support them.
Unless you have been asleep at the wheel, Victorian citizens and Australian ones more generally have had their faith and respect for our institutions demolished as those institutions have trampled all over their rights and freedoms or stood silently by and watched. Why have you not protested on your citizen’s behalf more loudly?
Where are you?
We believe in the fundamental freedoms of individuals and groups within society to think, worship, to speak, to choose and to associate.
This is from your values page. It’s very noble, but how do you compare this statement to your silence on vaccine passports, your silence on mandatory vaccinations, your silence on unacceptable police behaviour towards your own citizens?
Where are you?
In times of the greatest crisis in human history, true leaders have fought for the rights of their people, been jailed for those rights and even sacrificed their lives for those rights. Think of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior and Mahatma Gandhi to name a few. They didn’t sit back waiting for their government to fall into their laps due to the incompetence of a ruling government.
They spoke out, they led protests, they led marches they were arrested and went to jail and tragically some of them were killed as they were perceived as too much of a threat to the establishment.
Am I asking for you to be arrested or to sacrifice your life, no I am not, what I am asking is, are you legitimately prepared to do whatever is required to make the fight that is needed? Are you prepared to stand by and fight for the values and beliefs that you proclaim on your website? Are you not only prepared to speak out on behalf of your citizens, but to join them, to listen to them, to march with them, to speak to them. Are you prepared to break rules and even laws to fight for your people’s rights and freedoms? The giants of history I mentioned before were prepared to do that.
If you are not prepared to do so, if you are prepared to hide behind focus groups and polling companies, if you are prepared to wait out time in the hope that this Andrews government will self destruct to hand you government as opposed to you winning it, then I will steal a line from Mel Gibson’s legendary Braveheart film.
“If you’ll not stand up with us now, then I say you’re cowards.”
If you indeed engage in this cowardly behaviour then millions of your fellow Victorians will be asking at the top of their lungs; Where are you?
