The timing is perfect: a book recalling the 2005 Cronulla riots by the key decision-makers at the time, New South Wales Police Minister Carl Scully and Police Commander Assistant Commissioner Mark Goodwin. The Albanese government’s decision to allow potentially pro-Hamas Palestinians to enter Australia has close parallels to the Fraser government’s appalling ‘Lebanese concession’, allowing ‘unskilled, illiterate’ Lebanese Muslims of ‘questionable character’ to seek asylum in Australia. The sons and grandsons of these people were central to the Cronulla riots.
The spark for the unrest was misogynistic language directed at young bikini-clad Caucasian women by young Lebanese men congregating at Cronulla Beach. There were also differences in acceptable behaviour at the beach, years in the making. Kicking footballs in others’ spaces was unacceptable to residents and visitors alike: ‘the towel versus the soccer ball’.
Lebanese Christian barrister Stephen Stanton explained, ‘there was… an arrogance in the members of the Lebanese community…. The perception as to how women were to be treated was culturally out of kilter with what was the accepted norm within the Australian community.’
By July 2006, police had laid charges against 104 people, 51 because of the original Cronulla disturbance and 53 from the retaliation riots. The latter were charged with ‘malicious damage, possession or use of a prohibited weapon, assaulting police, rioting, resisting arrest, threatening violence and affray’. In time, 200 people were charged.
The authors reveal that ‘Middle Eastern men’ were planning an attack on the ‘Northies’ Hotel at North Cronulla, including a drive-by shooting with machine guns, throwing a live hand grenade into the beer garden of the hotel from a mobile vehicle and speeding away before the blast.
Another plan was for fifty cars full of Middle Eastern men to pull up at the front of Miranda Westfield’s shopping centre. They would alight and rampage through the multi-storey shopping centre, smashing the shops and violently assaulting as many people as possible with baseball bats, iron bars, knives, guns and other weapons. This act was intended to ‘Rip the Christ out of Christmas’.
Good policing averted these and other shocking plans for violent revenge. Thousands of weapons were taken off the streets at roadblocks and in targeted searches. Weapons seized included guns, knives, home-made petrol bombs, improvised explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, metal poles, baseball bats, golf clubs, crates of bricks, rocks and lumps of concrete, wooden bats with nails protruding and shopping trolley handles.
The second most crucial part of the book is the report on the police response, triggered by Police Commissioner Moroney’s mistake of instigating an inquiry into police conduct during the events. Of course, the authors’ account has an air of self-justification, but the inquiry that ended the authors’ careers appears unjustified.
The events unfurled because CCTV footage of the Muslim revenge attacks was of night events and difficult to interpret. The video footage of the daytime events of the first Sunday were plentiful and straightforward, and arrests were made of offenders who caused the original disturbance. It appeared there was bias in policing. The Anglos were arrested for pushing around some Lebanese youths at Cronulla; arrests for the Lebanese revenge came later.
Frustrated shopkeepers released their CCTV footage to the media as if the police were unaware of it. They were aware, they had the footage and they were working on tracking offenders, but they had to be sure. The Commissioner panicked. This is an excellent account of poor leadership, venality in the media and opposition, and weakness on the part of the premier. The media acted like a pack, agreeing on the story and collectively presenting the first day of the ‘Cronulla Riots’. The ‘pack’ missed the main story, not the demonstration during the day, which turned nasty, but the violent, property-rampaging attacks in revenge.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/he-pushed-me-first-bro/This sort of venality by the media is not, as Tom Jones pointed out all those years ago, "not unusual".
Forum
Pages: 
