Balding multimillionaire leftist Peter FitzSimons, who is as much a historian as the Fifty Shades books are great literature, recently had quite the dummy-spit over Australia’s Freedom protesters adopting the Eureka flag. With his characteristic grasp of historical fact, FitzSimons blustered that the protesters “know nothing of Eureka”.
The beam in your own eye, Pirate Pete.
Self-awareness, though, is not one of his primary qualities, as FitzSimons proved when he ranted that, “If calling a black man a ‘gorilla’ and an ‘ape’ is not racial abuse, what the hell does it take?” — before going on to pen a column in which he called a black man a “gorilla”. Then again, with a mug like his, no wonder Pete is so averse to looking in the mirror now again. And so his lack of self-awareness continues, as he tries to attack the Freedom protesters while quoting the Eureka rebels: “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties”.
Which, um, well, sounds almost exactly what the Freedom protesters are saying.
But what really seems to have got Pete and his fellow wealthy lefties’ satin knickers in such a right old twist is that ordinary people are not just rebelling against what their “betters” from the quinoa belt are telling them, but co-opting a symbol that the left have long regarded as their own to misappropriate.
The ‘miffed’ are principally unionist, republicans, and avowed leftists who hold that their causes shine bright under Eureka’s Southern Cross. To them, lockdown protesters are engaged in the theft of (their) sacred symbol.
In fact, the Freedom protesters and the Eureka rebels have a lot more in common than Pirate Pete and his chardonnay-quaffing pals would like to admit.
Most especially that they’re primarily self-starters rebelling against crushing regulation by the Big State elite. The villains in the Eureka rebellion were the Squattocracy, the elite of the day, who imposed unfair taxes on what were, in fact, self-employed entrepreneurs.
The diggers were self-employed. They were ‘workers’ and ‘bosses’ all in one. This shatters the Marxist, Leftist, unionist myth. The Eureka revolution arose from ‘workers’ who deserted their ‘bosses’ to become their own bosses. They took their luck in the marketplace of gold prospecting. Their revolution was against the bureaucratic government elite who sought to (and did) distort their free market, thereby creating massive harm. The elite cared not for the harm they did.
Likewise the Covid ‘rebels’ are drawn heavily from the ranks of the self-employed. Under Covid, self-employed and small business Victorians have carried the financial burden, with some pushed into comparative poverty. These are the people most damaged by the world’s longest and harshest Covid lockdown – all staged in Victoria.
Victoria is, not coincidentally, the home of not just Eureka but the core of the Australian Freedom movement.
And where do these Covid rebels come from? Mobile phone tracking analysis identifies the bulk of them from Melbourne’s outer ring of suburbs. These are the homes of the mortgage strugglers and low-income earners, says the analysis. They are heavily the self-employed hairdressers, personal trainers, tradies, and more.
These are the people who’ve carried the financial burden of the Covid lockdowns. Anyone on the financial teat of a heavily indebted, harsh, authoritarian Victorian Covid government has financially sailed through. Here is where the Covid government played the politics of dividing the community; to oppose the Covid policies was – and is – to be considered as scum.
Such was the story also of colonial Victoria. The Colonial Governor ran the line that the Eureka rebels threatened the very safety of the colony and the population.
Both the colonial and Covid Victorian governments resorted to harsh, even brutal police action. The Eureka Stockade massacre was the end product of increasingly brutal police tactics in enforcing the diggers’ licence. The firing of rubber bullets by Victoria’s anti-terrorists squad into the backs of fleeing Covid demonstrators was the end product of months of police activity arresting demonstrators for not ‘locking down’.
Spectator Australia
The left love to bleat about “the right side of history”. Pete might want to have a good long look at just whose side he’s on, here.