Iemma The Annoying  

Local tinpot dictator (aka NSW state premier) Morris "Mussolini" Iemma is causing quite a stir by outlawing "annoying" behaviour in order to protect the delicate sensibilities of all the attendees arriving for the "Pope Fest" (also known as "World Youth Day") here next week. T-shirt shops are doing a roaring trade in offensive shirts, as everyone competes to see who can cop a $5500 fine first.

Personally I was planning on completely ignoring yet another major disruption to Sydney's traffic, but now I'm hoping every nut in the country comes out and makes a nuisance of themselves. I also recommend voting against Labor at the next election you get a chance to do so.

Larvatus Prodeo is annoyed by Mr Iemma. Does this mean he gets locked up and/or fined ?

To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated before, their sense of authoritarianism compensates for their total ineffectuality in governing just about anything else than public events. (Compare - “public services”.) But the latest bunch of regulations for the Pope Fest really take the cake. It’s more or less private governance. Where’s the public benefit in preventing pilgrims attending World Youth Day in Sydney this month from being annoyed? Will their world really come to an end if someone hands them a condom or wears a t-shirt with an anti-homophobia message? What possible public justification does the NSW government have for denying basic rights to freedom of expression at the instance of the fragile petals in Cardinal Pell’s hierarchy?

Pharyngula demonstrates that Morris is a famous little man now - notorious worldwide.

I must have a lot of Australian readers, or the few of you are really upset about this, because I'm getting a rising volume of email about World Youth Day. This is a bizarre Catholic get-together for young people — bizarre because, well, the idea of a pack of Catholic priests herding a flock of young boys and girls into one central mass sounds like the preliminaries to a feeding frenzy to me — which is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, a substantial chunk of which is being subsidized by Australian taxpayers. Isn't it a bit peculiar that a secular government is paying for a massive membership drive for sectarian superstition? Furthermore, the Australian government is expanding police authority to restrict protests at the event, levying prohibitive fines for even trivial expressions of free speech.

The SMH reports that Catholics are split on freedom to annoy.

THE prominent Catholic priest and lawyer Frank Brennan has condemned new police powers for World Youth Day as a "dreadful interference" with civil liberties and contrary to Catholic teaching on human rights.

The Catholic Church yesterday stood firm behind the State Government's laws restricting annoying and inconvenient public protests.

Father Brennan's attack came as groups that had had no plans to protest during the event vowed to do so in response to the new laws. World Youth Day organisers said they had no objection to the open-ended nature of the regulations and confirmed the church had "discussed" with the Government the use of "standard laws" for the efficient running of the event.

Father Brennan said the Catholic document on human rights, Pacem In Terris, the 1963 encyclical of Pope John, said the responsibility of all authorities was "to safeguard the inviolable rights of the human person".

"As an Australian Catholic lawyer, I am saddened that the state has seen fit to curtail civil liberties further in this instance than they have for other significant international events hosted in Sydney," he said.

"The rights of free speech and assembly should not be curtailed only because visiting pilgrims might be annoyed or inconvenienced in public places." ...

The director of GetUp.org.au, Brett Solomon, did not rule out a campaign of protests or pranks among his 280,000 members to highlight what he called the "absurdity" of the rules, even if it meant fines of $5500. Many had not been angry before about the papal visit. "We could organise 1000 people in annoying or inconvenient T-shirts to people the route," he said.

Crikey reports that PopeFest organisers are denying having anything to do with the laws. Does this mean Morris actually had an original idea ?

The NSW Government’s chief WYD apologist, Kristina Keneally, defended the regulations in the SMH today, by arguing that they’ve been repeatedly used at other occasions such as major sporting events.

That’s just the problem. The NSW Government has an appalling record of savagely infringing civil liberties in its quest for law and order at "special events" (many of which are unwanted by Sydney residents). The entire CBD was locked down, businesses closed and hundreds of thousands of people subjected to massive inconvenience as part of the Government’s over-the-top APEC security measures last year -- which the Chaser exposed as being essentially hollow.

Last November, they made permanent extraordinary "temporary" police powers to stop, search and seize established in the wake of the Cronulla riots.

The NSW government is not alone in this sort of garbage. All Australian governments since 2001 have been guilty of a national security state-style hysteria under which they have dramatically expanded their powers of surveillance, harassment and criminal enforcement under the pretext of protecting their citizens.

These are governments that are afraid of their own people, or significant sections thereof, and see in any expression of legitimate protest a threat to themselves. Of all our Federal and State leaders, only Jon Stanhope in the Socialist Republic of the ACT has had the guts to question this.

But under this relentless pressure, bit by bit, our conception of what is reasonable and tolerable has slid toward absurdity, as any trip through an airport these days shows.

Keneally also conveniently omits one point from her apologia for her government’s attack on its citizens’ rights. Have a look at the regulations. The requirement not to annoy or inconvenience WYD participants (I refuse to use the rather Chaucerian term "pilgrims") doesn’t just apply to Randwick Racecourse or the Sydney Opera House or wherever noted homophobe Joseph Ratzinger (stage name: Pope Benedict) is putting on his act.

The affected areas encompass a huge part of Sydney -- every Catholic school and church, a huge number of public schools, and all railway stations as well as much of the CBD. Be careful where you talk about child abuse during the World Youth events.

This is a government that tries to manage the media cycle by relentlessly expanding its powers to inconvenience, arrest and imprison its citizens, in the vain hope that its heavyhandedness will be mistaken for the competence and good judgement it so clearly lacks.