GARETH Train – one of the evil shooters who on Monday murdered two young police officers and a neighbour on Queensland’s Western Downs – was a genuine lunatic. About the only mainstream tendency he had was the “doomsday prepping” noted by Nine’s Mark Saunokonoko. That, after all, is Albanese government policy. The ambush he carried out has the hallmarks of a suicide by siege. If it was, the camo-clad assassins – Train, his wife Stacey and brother, Nathaniel – got what they wanted: all three were put down by tactical police in a hail of bullets. The event is sure to entice the sectarians who descend on such atrocities like the scavengers who rifled the fallen on battlefields of yore. Left-wing governments and their officials will use the tragedy to characterise all opponents of state tyranny as “extreme.” This became a play-book favourite for presidents, prime ministers and premiers around the world over the past three years. Daniel Andrews called his opponents “nazis” (which justifies shooting them) and Marcia Langton called critics of voice-apartheid “eugenicists.” The smearing seemed to work for Mar-a-Lago raider Joe Biden and old lady horse-trampler Justin Trudeau. The more criminal the behaviour of Western leaders – and the more people whose lives and rights they casually trash – the more “nazis” they need.
A political party that enables the killing of the elderly, the decapitating of unborns, the banning of Christianity, the importation of Islamic terrorists and the rigging of trials should be laughed – and hurled unceremoniously – off the public stage when it comes to “extremism.” In a theatre devoid of critics, however, Home Affairs Minister and ISIS brides travel agent Clare O’Neil treads the boards with supreme confidence. So does Annastacia Palaszczuk who tweeted a picture of the Story Bridge lit blue and white as a tribute to the police officers who lost their lives at Wieambilla. “With honour they served,” she noted. Interestingly, her government’s loathing of the Catholic Church may well have won killer hillbilly Gareth Train’s tick of approval. He reportedly believed that Catholics were pulling the strings in a global plot to diminish and enslave liberty-loving everyman. Loopy but no more so than the case against Cardinal Pell. He was an “anti-vaxxer” but that is far more sane than the idea of “transitioning” to womanhood (or windmills). He was contemptuous of the rule of law, obviously – just like Australian feminists. What, then, is the difference between left and right-wing extremists? The former run governments and have a larger death toll.
My daughter lives in regional Queensland, I spend some time there with her in May 2020, and spoke with her many times over the course of those two years and feel well qualified to make a valid comparison.
The worst aspect was not being free to leave or enter the state.
In fact on return visits in 2021 and 2022, qld locals made sympathetic comments about Melbourne lockdowns.
If people want to pretend the experiences were on a par, by all means do a history rewrite.
It is a specious manoeuvre to place the Queensland murders in the antivaxxer discursive field – equally specious when done by means of a negation. Either way, the manoeuvres absolve the state and its supporters from being answerable for their particular crimes. Meanwhile the significance of the tragedy of the murders at issue is displaced and subject to whatever distortions are called-for. Grist for the mill.
Still, hope springs eternal, as someone said.
I like the word “specious”.
And always avoid “I .. feel well qualified”
Wouldn’t wish to sound uppity.
Thanks Petros and Twostix.
Seems like corruption in Au is not limited to the higher echelons of authority only.
Anti-abortion crusader, Father Pavone laicized by Pope.
Still feeling well qualified to compare the difference between the lockdown experience in regional Queensland and Melbourne.
True; yes you are and were qualified. Green-tick-award qualified and freed to take flight and make comparisons not just between Queensland and Victoria but between global destination on the Continent and the place left behind which was increasingly referred to as once again a penal colony.
Some qualifications should not be framed.
Rosie, did you experience any difference in the effect of vaccination mandates on your employment in Queensland and Victoria?
Thank you, CL — marvellous wordsmithing as always. We need a dozen of you running the OpEd pages of our (now mostly unread) daily newspapers.
Wasn’t discussing vaccine mandates but the effect of lockdowns on the general population.
And as people should know vaccine mandates for QlD teachers were lifted in June 2022.
Mrs Train could have resumed her employment with four weeks loss of pay. Mr Nathaniel Train couldalso have returned to teaching in June . I don’t know what Mr Gareth Train’s employment situation was.
Claiming mandates as the sole catalyst for a triple homicide in December 2022 is drawing a very long bow.
N0tafan you really are just the worst.
While you were galavanting around Europe on the European Grand Tour, jabbed up to the eye balls, vaccine passports bulging out of your handbag, we were being subjected the most vicious campaign of harrasment and vilification since the reformation, starting from the very top of society, to the very bottom. It’s stated goal was to run the remaining 5% of holdouts “out of society”.
That you simply dismiss this out of hand, and have done so since last year all the way through, comparing lockdowns with the terror campaign that was waged August-2021 to June 2022 against us demonstrates yet again, that despite your fake persona underneath it all you really are simply a massive Covid Karen.
So as everyone who isn’t a complete dummy already knew, the QLD police and the media have been lying through their teeth since day one.
Wasn’t a “standard welfare check”, QLD Police had a warrant out for Train’s arrest due to covid border / gun bullshit and had already attended the property multiple times previously looking for him. He was on the run from them over gun charges, they knew it and he and the other two knew it, and it was a thing that was going on.
Prediction: Fugitive paranoia had finally turned their immediate family against them who started contacting police warning them there was a serious problem out there. That triggered the four officer’s being sent out there the final time to attempt apprehension using the fake-cover of a “welfare check”.
That was the actual scenario, guaranteed.
Prepare for the full scale of their interactions to be drip fed out over the next few months, it’ll turn out to be many, which in turn will raise seriously embarrassing questions for the police re sending rookies out, etc. Will also raise the obvious questions of how much the pointless, vicious, vilification / lock out campaign of the start of the year sent these “seemingly normal” people over the edge into lawlessness, etc. Then watch between now and then they’ll attempt to pass laws and make it illegal to ask the obvious questions that will raise. Ugly stuff.
So.
What else have they been lying about.
—
This habit and strategy, and by now it’s SOP of the modern establishment, of initially completely lying about every situation that calls into question their competence, in order to “manage the emotional narrative” delivered to the population, use the situation to their political advantage against a grab bag of their political enemies, then slowly drip feeding the truth over the next x months, really is repulsive. They do it for everything at this point, it’s an addiction.
Brilliantly summarised.
And the Opposition will of course ask no questions because that would be an outrage to the memory of the fallen.
Last week I read one police spokesman saying the “welfare check” was all good, there were no red flags whatsoever and even that the youngsters were looking forward to the field trip together. Seriously.
The other thing that saddens and angers me is that our society is now completely indifferent to the fact that a little slip of a lass was accepted into operational policing to start with.
Rosie is the very least qualified to speak of the effects on people who stood against tyranny.
She immediately submitted, got her nazi pass and flew around the world.
They are facts.
That she, and also now Calli, over at Dover’s blog dismiss these people’s experiences and belittle them is disgusting in the extreme.
Rosie has been wrong, and all she has done has been wrong for the last 3 years.
With citizens like Rosie, Australia needs no enemies.