The Wuhan plague has brought out the inner snitch in too many people. Jacinda Ardern’s COVID snitch hotline melted down with curtain-twitchers all-too-eager to rat out their neighbours for the heinous sin of leaving the house. In Australia, the long arm of the law was ever-ready to swoop on dangerous rebels for taking their state-allotted hour of exercise even 100m too far.
Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter protesters in their thousands were not only left unmolested, the same jackbooted rozzers roughing up pregnant women in their own homes dutifully took a snivelling knee.
The message is clear: everything is allowable if you tick the right socialist boxes. Ordinary citizens: watch yourselves. If you’re a known Christian conservative – don’t even think about it.
Conservative political activist Lyle Shelton says a social media post about his weekend run was “in the nature of Australian larrikinism” and he blames “online trolls” for creating the wave of reaction that prompted Queensland police to question him over a potential border restriction breach.
Shelton is the former leader of the Australian Christian Lobby, which was subject to a car-bombing by an anti-Christian gay activist. But it wasn’t “terrorism”, as far as the police were concerned.
But a Christian conservative going for a jog around his local beach? Send in the boot-boys.
Mr Shelton, former managing director and chief of staff of the Australian Christian Lobby, posted on his Facebook and Twitter accounts on Saturday night that he had done a “sneaky run across the border and back” and “avoided the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] virus police” in the process.
He was referring to his Saturday run from Coolangatta on the Gold Coast, around Point Danger on the interstate border, and into Tweed Heads in NSW, before coming back.
As an aerial photo shows, a simple jog around the beach and back at Point Danger takes you across the state border and back.
Indeed, leftists exploited just this kind of cross-border weirdness in the 1970s, when Joh Bjelke-Petersen banned public gatherings in Queensland. Simply by crossing the road, people were free to protest as much as they liked.
In any case, Shelton was well within his legal rights.
Mr Shelton has since been cleared of any wrongdoing.
Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said the tweet was “disappointing” because it took away valuable resources to investigate and clear Mr Shelton.
“He can cross the border because I understand he has a G-Pass. So it was just a funny tweet that, in the end, all it did was take away resources that needed to be in other places,” she said.
As we all know, Stasi-types are not exactly known for their sense of humour.
Mr Shelton said his social media posts were jokes and he was staggered by the reaction.
“I just went around Point Danger and back again, there was no signage or checkpoints or anything like that along the way … I didn’t jump over any police checkpoints or anything like that,” he said.
“It seems strange to me there has been so much interest in one person’s jog along a beach track, but little interest when 10,000 people were on the streets of Brisbane at the height of the pandemic [in reference to a Black Lives Matter rally in June 2020].
“My tweet was in the nature of Australian larrikinism … I made a joke, in a good-natured way, at authority, if we can’t have a bit of a joke, then what has this country come to?”
The Age
I think that should as obvious to us, by now, as it is to Kiwis who’ve had the Thought Police come ‘round for a “chat” about their social media posts.
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