Ned Kelly survives today in a number of guises. Politicians who squander taxpayers’ revenue on idiotic schemes such the pink batts rort. Faceless bureaucrats in Departments such as Fair Trading, the RTA and DOCS who use the full force of the ‘system’ to crush ‘dissenters’. Eastern Suburbs spivs who can afford the greasiest lawyers to avoid justice and buy ‘respectability’. Oil industry executives who manipulate the price of petrol. Big banks and monopoly grocery chains. The list goes on.
Australians tend to cheer for the battler who takes these rorters on and their patron saint in this regard is Ned Kelly.
In reality, the people we rely on to protect us from law-breakers are the police. And their job is getting harder and harder in our emerging nanny state. The recent hysteria directed at the police who pursued a serial lawbreaker that resulted in the death of a young family was pathetic. What if Anita Cobby had been in the back of that car and the police had called off the chase? It’s a fair bet the whingeing wallies would have just opened their mouths, changed step, and attacked the police from a different angle.
Our police are the front-line custodians of a civil society. Most of the work they do is out of the public eye as they try to cope with our social failures in dysfunctional areas around the state. They also have to deal with sophisticated ethnic crime gangs who know how to use our ‘justice’ system to undermine and discredit their profession. Criminal scumbags who have no respect for our police or our system even grace our social pages as their criminal careers are glorified in television dramas such as underbelly.
Respect for our Police has been seriously undermined by green-left politicians, lawyers, magistrates and judges who believe criminals are victims of society rather than saboteurs of civil order. One only has to review the rantings of magistrates such as Pat O’Shane, to get a feel for the contempt many of them have for police.
Mandatory sentencing for people who attack, assault or kill police must be seriously considered if we are dinkum about restoring respect for them and protecting them from lowlife misfits and our current system of ‘justice’. Anybody who kills a cop on duty should be locked up for the term of their natural life. Anybody who hurls abuse, intimidates a cop or their family, or physically assaults them, should be sent to prison for proscribed terms. No ifs or buts.
Some would argue that Ned Kelly’s fate should still be an option for killing a cop!
