That's (at least) fourteen police officers being paid to defend a statue of a man who claimed to have discovered Australia when there'd already been people living here for 60,000 years who knew very well where the land they owned was. A man whose "discovery" led to the invasion of the Australian mainland 18 years later, with all the subsequent centuries of suffering for those original inhabitants. A man who murdered Maori people, if not Aboriginal Australians.
And he wasn't even an actual Captain. So much for not rewriting history.
Inspired by the worldwide push to topple statues of invaders, colonisers, slave traders and other assorted arseholes, protesters in Sydney intimated online that the statue of Cook has to go. Of course our Prime Minister Scott Morrison says we should keep the statue and his equally useless offsider, Anthony Albanese, agrees with him.
Morrison only had to say the word and it was done. Police swarmed to defend the statue from the braying hordes. Crimes of family violence go unchecked because of lack of police resources, but there is plenty of funding to protect statues of dead white men and strip search kids for drugs at music festivals (though never race attendees - or parliamentarians).
When Rio Tinto blew 46,000 year old Aboriginal heritage sites to smithereens, when BHP announced they planned to do the same, there were no posses of police there to protect the sites. In fact there's a legal mechanism in place to allow such destruction for the sake of mining. But heaven forbid a statue gets pulled down.
At the Black Lives Matter protest in Sydney last weekend, the police refused to join the crowds in taking a knee. I'm glad they didn't. Why should they get to pretend they're the good guys for PR purposes when they were attacking protesters with pepper spray hours later, and they're upholding the systems of oppression at all times? Because that's what the police are for. No one joins the police because they want to challenge the systems of oppression. They join the police to uphold them. It's legal to destroy sacred sites if you've a mining permit but not threaten a statue, and anyone who joins the police is saying "that sounds fair and reasonable, sign me up".
Of course if you yourself call the police to report your house has been broken into, your property destroyed, chances are they'll never find the culprit. Lack of resources, you see. And anyone who's ever tried to report a sexual assault to the police knows they aren't there to protect your body.
The police are there to uphold the system. White statues, not black lives.
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