I'm going to continue my little bit that I had to say at the end of the last post below. These stop and search laws are shitting me.
The idea that you are innocent until proven guilty is a base construct of our legal system in Australia. It's how things should be, and Karl O'Cockface needs to learn when to stay in his box. Police are there to enforce the laws that our society has. They shouldn't be campaining for new ones or trying to alter the way things are done. A person should be able to refuse a police search if they think it is inappropriate.
The thing that really shits me is that O'Cockface and the Police union dude are always saying "go into Northbridge at 3am and have a look. You'll see what we mean." The thing is, I've spent a lot of time in Northbridge at 3am, 4am and even 6am.The levels of violence are amazingly overstated and primarily caused by the big venues with their arrogant door staff and bouncers. The violent douches go there because there's a level of anonymity the venues provide that is only available in places with large numbers of people.
I also don't blame this whole situation entirely on Mr O'K. I lay the blame fairly and squarely on the media too. It's in no way a subconscious choice on their part to constantly publish inflated stories of violence on the front page of the newspaper. They make Northbridge out to be something that it is not, and it really shits me.
Shitting me more than that is the fact that they don't give equal weighting to the new laws in their publishing. On the weekend when the whole thing got elevated to the upper house of Parliament and made it's way towards restricting our freedoms, there wasn't any front page story. There wasn't any real story. In fact, as I believe, the only thing published on the weekend was about one politician's remarks regarding Nazi Germany, whilst completely skipping over the more pressng fact of the legislation that his marks were about.
Add to that the sub-standard level of shit reporting that is Today Tonight and Sunday Night (which is pretty much all of the news that the cashed up bogans in Perth watch) and you've got a situation where there are needless totalitarian laws being created to fix a problem that doesn't really exist.
Before we know it, half of the population of Perth are going to wake up and find themselves in a Police State and wonder how it happened.
And it's going to be the younger people, the most oblivious, that find themselves being discriminated against and driven out of the state.