The Australian state of Victoria, the capital of which is Melbourne, Australia's second-largest city, has seen some of the world's most draconian COVID rules.  The latest order, mandating vaccines for the construction industry along with a two-week industry-wide shutdown, sparked huge, violent protests from trade unions.  Most strikingly, union members turned against their own union boss.

The Daily Mail described the frenzy of two days of protests (with "tradies" referring to the trade unionists):

Furious 'freedom' protests have erupted across Melbourne with anti-vaxxer tradies massing outside Victoria's Parliament House and a TV reporter assaulted and doused in urine in vile scenes.

Hundreds of construction workers and anti-vaxxers took to the streets for the second consecutive day on Tuesday — many of them distraught after a tradesman took his own life at a construction site earlier in the day.

Demonstrators sung Advance Australia Fair and chanted 'f--- the jab' in protest against mandatory vaccination orders for the industry, and Premier Daniel Andrews' decision to shut the industry down for two weeks, amid soaring case numbers.

The protest began outside the boarded up head office of the construction union, the CFMEU, which was badly damaged by violent demonstrations just 24 hours before.  

More than 100 police officers walked up Swanston Street in pursuit of the crowd, with officers warning demonstrators on a loudspeaker to turn back.

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It comes as Victoria recorded 603 new cases on Tuesday, the highest daily tally in the current outbreak and since August 2020, bringing the number of active cases to 6,000.

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The Melbourne protesters are also using encrypted platform Telegram to call for an end to lockdowns, mandatory mask orders and the immediate reopening of the construction industry.

Three of the demands called for Victoria's leading figureheads in its pandemic response to stand down — Premier Daniel Andrews, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton and Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton.

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Their final demand was for the 'mass distribution of invermectin [sic], Vitamins C, D and Zinc' as alternative treatments for Covid-19.

Writing at The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance explains just how serious these protests are, insofar as they've seen union members turning against their own union boss:

As he was attempting to hunker down in his office headquarters, union boss John Setka physically came under attack from his own union membership over his political relationship with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.

This is the U.S. equivalent of AFL-CIO members launching a violent uprising against former union President Richard Trumka; and then Trumka running to Joe Biden for help and protection from his own membership.

The CFMEU members are the heavy-hitting blue-collar construction and dirty fingernail workers, and the leadership of the CFMEU are the thug-like mobsters who run the union.

Just like the AFL-CIO or UAW in America, the union leadership in Australia is politically corrupt and disconnected from the members they serve. Earlier today (AU-time), the union members organized to confront the union leadership.

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This is a very interesting development. If the heavy-hitting labor unions start striking back against government leadership they previously supported and installed, the entire dynamic of power shifts. We must keep watching this closely because this is also the dynamic we could see play out in the United States, only on a much larger scale.

Fear is a powerful motivator.  For 18 months, ordinary people across the West have handed their freedoms over to their governments in exchange for the promise that those same governments will do everything necessary to keep us safe.  However, we're not safe.

As events in Australia cast into high relief, what we're seeing isn't safety but, instead, a massive realignment, not along political lines, but along the lines of insiders versus outsiders.  On the one side are the elites, who benefit from their increasingly draconian rules (gaining money or power or both), and on the other side are the rest of us, who are seeing our livelihoods destroyed, our children and their mental health destroyed, our freedom gutted, and our bodily integrity now the subject of mandates that we inject marginally tested substances in our arms, knowing that they may badly harm us, as opposed to being allowed to treat an illness with medicines that have safely been used for decades.

The Australians, like Americans, have long been used to being a free people.  However, because the restrictions imposed in certain Australian states are even more extreme than those imposed in Democrat-run cities and states, the Aussies are ahead of us when it comes to explosive anger.  It remains to be seen whether, now that Biden is pushing forward with an admittedly unconstitutional mandate to force vaccines on 100 million workers, Americans continue to be passive or also begin to agitate for the constitutional liberties.

UPDATE: A knowledgeable Australian reader has explained that, even though the Daily Mail may have been referring to trade unionists, the word "tradie" in Australia has a much broader meaning: "It's an Australian slang word for someone who generally works with their hands ie carpenter, plumber, electrician, bricklayer etc most of whom in Australia are self employed and certainly not members of a trade union. These work in industries such as new home construction, renovations and general jobs about the home eg fuse box repairs." So now you know!

Image: Protests in Melbourne.  YouTube screen grab.

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