NSW Police Minister David Elliott calling for a teacher to be sacked for teaching students the uncontroversial fact that killer cops are bad, actually, says more about his own leadership than it does about the school.
On Tuesday, The Daily Telegraph ran an article about a Year 5 and 6 classroom at a primary school in Sydney which had posters saying things like “Black lives matter”, “stop killer cops” and “change climate change”.
Apparently the most contentious poster was one which read “white lives matter too much.” Interestingly, it’s one of the few slogans which wasn’t backed up by photographic evidence in the original article.
The posters, apparently drawn by the children themselves, would appear to be evidence of students productively engaging with pressing issues of local and international importance. How cool is that!
After NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the teacher could be disciplined because “political activism has no place in a school,” along came David Elliott to remind us all how sensitive cops are about their rightfully dogshit reputations.
On Wednesday, Elliot went on 2GB to publicly call for the teacher to get the sack.
“I can’t believe we’ve got these left-wing teachers out there acting racist themselves by saying white lives don’t matter,” he said.
“Well, they do. Everybody matters.”
If everybody mattered, then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in NSW wouldn’t be targeted with invasive strip-searches at a rate far higher than the general population.
If everybody mattered, then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people wouldn’t continue to die in police custody.
If everybody mattered, three Aboriginal people wouldn’t have died in police custody in NSW this year alone.
It says a lot that the NSW Police Minister appears to be more concerned about children’s posters decrying killer cops than he is with actual, real-life killer cops.
As proof of just how manufactured this outrage really was, NSW One Nation flog Mark Latham, who was one of the main talking-heads in the original Tele article, admitted to providing the newspaper with the photos of the posters in the first place.
Not a single parent was quoted in the article, but Mark fucking Latham, who was apparently responsible for the whole drama in the first place, was.
NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge has been one of the few voices of reason in this whole schemozzle.
“If there’s anyone who should be sacked it’s the machine-gun-toting and road-raging NSW Police Minister,” he said on Wednesday afternoon.
“Fresh from pretending to be a police officer he’s now masquerading as an education expert despite having no relevant credentials.”
Shoebridge went on to commend teachers such as the one in question for responding to students’ interests and grounding their knowledge in the real world. That’s a far more normal response to the photos than any police or education official has given so far.
Maybe, just maybe, on the day ex-cop Derek Chauvin was finally convicted of murdering George Floyd, we can put aside the fake outrage about the Black Lives Matter movement for a second instead of fanning it to get a decent teacher fired.
