Shownotes Transcript
Just some breaking news from the New South Wales Police. I'm just being alerted to this. I think I've brought you exactly the same announcement from the New South Wales Police every afternoon around this time for the past fortnight. A woman has been charged with conducting an unauthorised protest in the Hunter Valley. She's been accused of blocking a train. Yes, yet again in Singleton.
Officers from the Hunter Valley District Police, along with Police Rescue, attended the site and they've arrested a 27-year-old woman. Guess where she's from? Victoria. She's been taken to Singleton Police Station. She has been charged with a range of offences. She is appearing before Singleton Local Court today. I have brought you these stories every single afternoon, it would seem, for the past fortnight. Now that's the 24th person charged.
from Blockhead Australia, the Daily Telegraph, did their sums on this one this morning. And of those 23 people, now 24, more than three quarters are from interstate. So this has been a coordinated campaign from the Blockheads to target the Hunter Valley. They're not even from here.
And as I've been explaining for the past fortnight, the New South Wales government two years ago introduced a jail term of two years for blocking infrastructure, $22,000 fines. And then when you throw some other offences in there, if they are found guilty through the courts, they can actually serve even more jail time. So they could be looking up to three years in prison. Well, what's happened over the past two years since those laws have been introduced, those penalties? Has anybody been sent to jail for two years? No.
Has anybody been handed a fine of $22,000? No. There's been a handful of people who've been sent to prison, I suppose as a warning, for a couple of months. That is it. In all these cases over the past fortnight, fines have been handed out. $750 fines have been handed out. And what this proves, the fact that we've been reporting on this afternoon, afternoon, it's acting as zero deterrent. Zero.
The Police Minister Yasmin Catley was on with my colleague Mark Levy on the breakfast program this morning, and she admitted when Mark asked her about those penalties, she admitted it is a matter for the courts. Well, why should it just be a matter for the courts when clearly the blockheads don't take any notice of the law? Isn't it time that Parliament actually introduced a mandatory sentence for this sort of behaviour? And it might seem extreme for a simple protest, but it happens day after day after day after day.
And potentially it puts lives at risk because if the train driver and some of these activities have occurred at night in darkness, some of these activities could lead to a train, for instance, and thank goodness it hasn't happened, being derailed. I wonder how the magistrates who are handing out the fines would feel then if a train is derailed. They are not getting the message.
Eight have been from Victoria. Now, with this latest arrest and charge, make that nine. Four from South Australia. One from Tasmania. Three from Queensland. $750 fines. The police, though, the police refused bail. So when somebody is arrested, say, in the evening or the afternoon, they're kept in the lock-up overnight and then they appear in court the next day. But the court says, oh, ta-da, sweet. Now, of course, the magistrates, and I haven't sat in every one of these court cases, of course, to hear exactly the words of the magistrate.
The magistrate will condemn them, no question, and they have done that in the past two years. But given the nature of this campaign, they don't care what the magistrate has to say because it keeps happening time and time again. These are professional protesters, make no doubt about it. They are actually funded through this national organisation. I'm not going to read it to you because it just gives them publicity, but they sent me a press release this morning detailing their campaign is into an 11th day.
So what's going to happen this weekend? Am I going to receive an email from Transport for New South Wales in the next couple of hours to say that tonight and across the weekend buses will be running because they can't guarantee safety? There's a good chance it's going to happen. Eventually they'll get the message, but only if the magistrates get tough.
