Welfare to warfare: Police militarisation and Fortress Australia
The following day, videos of the event, went viral.
News of Floyd’s killing – as well as the intensity, size, and geographic spread of the protests that followed and the policing of those protests – made global headlines, overshadowing the pandemic as lead story for the first time in months. Tens of thousands of people in Australia took to the streets in protest, joining others in the United States and around the world. Others made individual gestures of protest while staying at home or alone or in small groups on the side of the road outside city centres.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said of the protests that ‘There’s no need to import things happening in other countries here to Australia… Australia is not the United States’. He said that things are different here because Australia is a ‘fair country’ and ‘wonderful’. He also denied Australia’s history of slavery.
The ‘same story: different soil’ placards brandished by Australian protesters point to a different reality. While the Black Lives Matter hashtag and subsequent movement were born in the United States in 2013, the embers of grief, sorrow and resistance in the face of police violence have smouldered through generations of colonised and enslaved people around the globe.
Mission creep
In Australia, similar to other Anglo-American countries, there was traditionally a strict demarcation between the police and the military. In 1989, 29-year-old Aboriginal man David Gundy, who had committed no crime, was shot and killed in his Redfern home during a bungled raid carried out by the New South Wales paramilitary Special Weapons Operations Squad (SWOS as it was then known).
Commissioner Wootten’s findings in relation to that death, as part of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987-1991), commented on the confrontational tactics and high level of force used by SWOS and the importance of the distinction between the police and military. He noted that in ‘Australia there is a very well-established tradition that military responsibility is confined to dealing with external enemies under the control of civil authority in wartime’ and
