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Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has played down concerns about impending laws aimed at removing protests like those staged by Extinction Rebellion protesters, while vowing to get the new powers in place as soon as possible so that the Springboks can play a rebel Wallabies team in Australia.
New legislation was introduced in State Parliament last month aimed at increasing penalties for protesters caught using ‘dangerous devices’ and to give police greater powers to confiscate the objects being used in rallies.
She has also called a state of emergency, so that protestors can’t stop her from hosting an unpopular football team to play a rebel Wallabies side on Brisbane’s agricultural showgrounds next month.
It is not yet known why Palaszczuk is going to these lengths, given the fact that the Wallabies could likely play the South Africans in the next couple weeks as part of the 2019 rugby world cup in Japan.
However, QLD Labor insiders say that this kind of flex of powers is mandatory for all aspiring state dictators, as the Premier continues to follow the path of her political mentor Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen.
In 1971, former Premier Bjelke-Petersen seized on the controversial visit of the Springboks, the South African rugby union team to consolidate his position as leader with a display of force.
Springboks’ matches in southern states had already been disrupted by anti-apartheid demonstrations and a match in Brisbane was scheduled for 24 July 1971, the date of two Queensland by-elections. On 14 July Bjelke-Petersen declared a month-long state of emergency covering the entire state, giving the government almost unlimited power to quell what the government said was expected to be “a climax of violent demonstrations”. Six hundred police were transported to Brisbane from way out west to bash some fucken hippies and get pissed at the Jubilee Hotel before the white supremacist football match.
While the apartheid was discarded over two decades ago, the current Premier Palaszczuk still feels the need to show the Boers that same kind of Northern hospitality.
It is a hope that by shutting down the state for an unsanctioned rugby football match, Palaszczuk will show these environmentalists that she doesn’t give two hoots about the widely available data on ‘science’ or ‘atmospheric physics’ and will move ahead with accelerating carbon emissions and propping up the coal industry. In the same way Sir Joh refused to listen to the protesters criticising an entire society built on the racial segregation of blacks and whites while the rest of the world was boycotting any sporting matches they were included in.
The legislation was expected to be passed at the end of November but will instead be debated in the next sitting of Queensland Parliament, which begins this week.
Ms Palaszczuk said while the committee process would be expedited, it would not be bypassed.
