Monday, August 5, 2013

It's every prostitutes' right to be murdered



Sensible people avoid St Kilda as much as possible. Restaurants are expensive, the parking difficult and there is a good chance the visitor will return to find his or her car pillaged by one of the junkies who make their homes in the suburb’s flophouses and on its streets. Add that any visit will require a drive home, with the associated obligation to divide body weight by standard drinks and, as far as the Professor is concerned, there is every reason to dine much closer to the Billabong, where local knowledge of discrete back streets makes it a much safer proposition to motor home when infused with good cheer.*

Some people are immune to common sense and delight in what they fondly see as St Kilda’s raffish charm. Hey, look at cool ol’ me, perfectly at ease with the prostitutes and their bludgers! Just to demonstrate how cool, they will sometimes crow about buying coffee for the hookers or letting them pat their little dogs, or insist that heroin-addicted street whores have every right to raise their children, just like middle-class folks. Along with its supreme faith in the wisdom and competence of public servants, one of the left’s most bizarre traits is the habitual inclination to admire certain elements within the criminal-Australian community. This is an indulgence best explained by mental-health professionals, although a cheaper diagnosis may well be that life in safe, thoroughly bourgeois enclaves of the like-minded – your Yarravilles, Northcotes and Fitzroys – speaks of a distance from locales where crime and violence is no rejection of patriarchy and propertarianism but a daily reality. One wonders if the same sentiment would prevail if much of academia, along with those who populate the Age and ABC editorial departments, were relocated to Dandenong, where street crime and violence is rather more than an abstraction.

St Kilda has lately seen just such a concrete example of violence: a prostitute, Tracy Connelly, was murdered in the van where she did business, the first “sex worker”, as the luvvies prefer to call them, to be slain on the job in nine years. The ABC’s Kerri Ritchie, is shocked, stunned even, not least because the unfortunate Connelly, a heroin addict, was killed just metres from an establishment known as The Gatehouse, where prostitutes can cook their meals, park their kids, shower (in some cases shave), apply a fresh coat of make-up and get back to work on the streets. It should come as no surprise to learn that a senior Age journalist thinks this is a noble cause, as do many other organisations and donors apparently untroubled by the thought that The Gatehouse, while it purports to be an outreach program, is actually a centre of logistic support for law breakers.

The unfortunate Ms Connelly, for example, had been popping in for a decade, so the services and support available to wean hookers off the streets would not seem to have been terribly effective. But not to worry. All at The Gatehouse who do not hawk themselves on the streets get to feel really great about what wonderful people they are, all the while aiding and abetting public nuisances and criminals, including the heroin dealers the prostitutes patronise and enrich. No doubt, given the left’s typical sympathies, many Gatehouse advocates also support efforts to reduce the spread of AIDS. Cognitive dissonance, what?



Street prostitution is against the law, although you would never know as much from the coverage of Connelly’s murder. So is living off the earnings of prostitution, which appears to have been what Connelly’s partner had been doing for a decade. Legal brothels were introduced to Victoria more than 30 years ago, in part to end this sordid commerce and reduce the crime rate by banishing gutter crawlers’ need to prowl the streets of places like St Kilda. Now that an unfortunate woman has been slain and a killer roams free, the hankies are out and tears flow.

What we are yet to see, nor are likely to, is any examination of the progressive conscience – you know, along the lines of, “If we had only pressured the police to arrest this woman, she would be alive and maybe even off the smack by the stage.”

Instead, Connelly is dead. But not to worry, there are plenty more prostitutes and pimps to be found in St Kilda, plenty more opportunities to patronise the unfortunate while tacitly encouraging them to stick to business as usual. If these people had the decency God gave chooks they would die of shame.


UPDATE: As might be expected, The Guardian (Australia) has come out in support of Connelly’s absolute and unfettered right to be murdered. What the author neglects to mention is that the victim could have plied her trade in safety if she had chosen to work in a legal brothel.

(*The Professor never drives when thoroughly pissed, no matter how short the distance home. A .05 blood alcohol level is too low and should be elevated to .08, as it is in the United States. It is in that borderline area where most arrests and licence suspensions occur. If police weren't waylaying the responsibly cheerful, they might be in St Kilda arresting car-breakers and public nuisances. We could all drink to that.)   

  

13 comments:

  1. I support your comments about DUI, and you are brave indeed going anywhere near this topic. Also, there is a PC anti-alcohol lobby springing up - who, when they do have a drink, really restrict themselves to two standard drinks? After all, Churchill fought a world war by having sherry for breakfast.

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  2. just read the article. love the way the hooker going back to work is now clean and only doing it to "pay her rent".

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  3. Don't forget that Bracks changed the law from over .05 to .05 and over. Doesn't sound like much but it snared a whole lot of new drivers for no result. .08 is a sensible level. but both the Libs and Labor like to be seen to be doing something about road trauma than actually doing anything. You would be amazed at the (relatively) small number of recidivist traffic offenders who are involved in a relatively large number of fatal and serious collisions. But getting them off the road is too much like hard work. easier to get someone at .06 and take away their licence.

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  4. An examination of the timeline will show that the public grief for Tracy was delayed and has come after it was pointed out that her murder garnered nothing of the kind that Jill Meagher's did.

    They should realise that coerced concern is oxymoronic.

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  5. St Kilda has the espy, a bad beach and a terrible footy team. That's it.

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  6. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.August 5, 2013 at 11:06 PM

    St Kilda is the pits, Prof. Similar a bit in its grungy trendiness to King Street, Newtown, in Sydney , which I drove through yesterday and thought how much I would dislike having to live there. At least St Kilda has the waterfront area. Thankfully my days of finding such places 'interesting' are long gone.

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  7. I lived in Greeves St, St Kilda in the early 90s... from my first floor window I'd have a nightly show of seedy goings-on. Not that I was a perv or anything, but on a quiet night you couldn't avoid hearing some of the conversations. "I can't do it for less than 70," was a line I heard often. The attraction of street hookers seems to be the haggle. The cars they got into would more often be Jags and Mercs than Holdens, so it wasn't a question of cost. More like exercising power. Street prostitution will survive as long as customers demand it.

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  8. Street view the drop in centre's address and pan round. A van suspiciously like the one she was murdered in is parked across the road. In 2009. Doubt very much that they had been living in that thing for a month.

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  9. If they changed the Law to make .05 and under .08 an expensive inconvenient but civil offence, e.g. Loss of Licence on the Spot (Walking Home) then a $1500 fine to get a Red "P" Plate licence back (No Drink Driving for 3 Year)but .08 remaining a Criminal Charge the results would be brilliant.

    People might chance their luck at being under .05, judge it wrong and get done, but they sure as hell would not risk it if they thought they would hit the Criminal Charge at .08. There would be I believe a large drop in those at .08 where you really are a danger to yourself and others and also everyone on the Civil Charge would be treated the same and it would free up the courts

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  10. Love the article and pleased to know someone shares a similar opinion. Typical media exaggerating this as a poor battler brutally killed in a otherwise safe and legal situation. Pathetic.

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  11. Sounds like you're a bitter person who's been rejected your whole life. If you don't like st Kilda don't go there. You probably wouldn't fit it anyway because you're an angry, ignorant individual

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  12. Re discrete back streets. Half your luck.

    The geography in Sth Hobart is such that you can block all vehicular access to the suburb with just six big trucks.

    The risk of being nabbed is accordingly very high.

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