We all remember the August shitstorm that was #OperationFortitude, yes?
ICYMI: In August, the Australian Border Force released a press release for a new operation, which would allow ABF officers to ‘randomly’ check Visas of people on the streets of Melbourne (and you better believe that the chances of being asked if you had white skin were slim to damn none). So all in all, Operation Fortitude was basically a modern recreation of that whole ‘Papers, please’ thing that Nazi’s did to people in WWII. Fabbo! God, we’re so good at learning from history.
Anyway, Melbourne was rightly pissed. As soon as these details were released, Melburnians stood screaming and yelling in the streets, chanting and demanding change; they rallied, and they rallied damned hard you guys. They brought Operation Fortitude to a grinding halt, using only peaceful people-power and impressively fast-moving collective action. Altogether, it took protestors a minuscule 4 hours to get angry, organise the rally, and consequently succeed in getting the ABF to retract the entire operation.
In the last two months since this happened, the ABF have been satisfyingly quiet about the whole totally embarro affair. The more optimistic among us thought, ‘Great success! Perhaps the fuckers have learned a red hot lesson here’, but sadly, being optimistic is not always the best way to live, because you are constantly disappointed and it is truly the worst.
Today, Department Chief of the ABF, Mike Pezzullo, made a statement about the shameful example of border force action gone wrong, saying that the fault lay purely within the press release was worded:
“It is clear that the media release issued that morning was very badly worded and gave rise to the impression that the ABF has general powers of questioning people in the street,” he said.“It does not, and I apologise for the impression that was wrongly created.
“We certainly don’t rely on racial profiling at all.”
ABF Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg originally described Operation Fortitude as ‘clumsily worded’, but today actually admitted it was just plain wrong:
“Unfortunately in the case of Operation Fortitude, the ABF issued a complementary media release which was factually wrong in describing its role.”“This resulted in public confusion, concern and distress, for which I apologise.”
But then he went on to describe how the operation ‘would have worked’ (???):
Border Force head Roman Quaedvlieg is explaining how #OperationFortitude would have worked, had it gone ahead. pic.twitter.com/5ojcwDWLYj
— Alex Lee (@alex_c_lee) October 18, 2015
So, no stress guys. Australian Border FArce isn’t racist – they’re just illiterate, apparently. They are sorry for being so nonchalantly bad at writing incredibly important press releases, and they are sorry that Operation Fortitude confused our silly citizen brains.
p.s. ‘It would’ve worked tho’.
p.p.s Thus proving that #OF would’ve gone ahead as per the way it was originally written if Melbourne’s collective action hadn’t stopped them.
p.p.p.s. And they would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those stupid meddling citizens!!
Image & story via ABC News.
