There is a resonant moment taking place in Britain.
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On March 3, a 33-year-old woman walked home at night along brightly lit streets. She called her boyfriend as she walked. She was then, according to the allegation in court, abducted and murdered.
On Saturday, a vigil was held in her memory on a common in London. The police told mourners beforehand that the gathering would break public health laws during the pandemic. The police had been urged by the government to enforce the law against such gatherings. This gathering happened, and the police broke it up, arresting some of those present.
Depending on which paper you read, the arrests were either an egregious display of police brutality, or police doing their job during what remains a pandemic. Which side you take depends on your politics, and perhaps your generation.
It turns out that audiences to news programs are split down the middle on the matter. Where hard evidence of public feeling is available, the division is fierce and even.
The "woke" left demands the resignation of Britain's most senior police officer - who is a woman and therefore, you might think, a role model for aspiring young women. The crusty right vents its anger at the demonstrators.
But the audience reaction reveals that beyond the cacophony of loud voices, there is another less vocal group which thinks the rule of law should apply, even against those who are protesting in a just cause - and what could be more just than wanting to diminish male violence against women?
We do not know what the great Australian public makes of the current allegations swirling around Parliament House. A bit of light, rather than heat, would be nice.
I have a woman friend who is aghast at the "all men are bastards" narrative, even as she concedes that she doesn't feel safe walking home at night.
There is a quiet, nuanced position between "Men, Own Your Guilt" (as a placard in Canberra put it) and being soft on the unequal treatment of women, whether it's by holding them back at work or by giving a pass to men who commit aggression, sexual or not.
It is moral both to abhor male economic and violent ill-treatment of women, and also to believe that the rule of law should apply.
The rule of law includes the principle that people accused of crime are innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt (though the burden of proof in a defamation court is not so strict, as the lawyers for the ABC and Christian Porter no doubt know).
It is a tenet of fairness under the law that "it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer," as the English lawyer William Blackstone put it in his defining text, Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 1760s. Australia follows that principle.
Much of the commentary from the woke left has been along the lines of "innocent until proven guilty - but ..."
I have read pieces pointing out that Mr Porter has previously been married twice. Well, so have many of us, but it's not quite proof of rape. I would no more dream of ill-treating a woman than I would of flying to the moon. I do not own my guilt.
In Britain, the divide emerges in the audience reaction to the death of an innocent woman. In Australia, the divide is yet to emerge. The papers are split down the middle in a completely partisan way. The voices of those who abhor violence against women but also believe in due process in the administration of justice are unheard.
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I have no idea what the great mass of the public believes. It is untested. Activists invariably purport to speak for the people, but may or may not.
When, in 1989, hundreds of thousands of candle-holding demonstrators walked peacefully in Leipzig every Monday, Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin got the message that there were simply too many opponents of the puppet regime in Berlin to shoot them all.
When East Germans started to cross into West Berlin, soldiers held their fire and the regime was doomed. Demonstrations can move mountains.
But not always. One of the lessons of the last federal election in Australia is that the left got it wrong. There were countless protests against global warming (who could be for it?), and some on the left came to believe their own propaganda. Finally, they thought, global warming would be the issue to topple the right-wing climate-change deniers who only continued their love-affair with evil coal because of their moneyed pals.
It didn't work out like that. When the votes came in, the left was surprised that many quiet citizens had voted with their wallets against Labor's perceived threat to their retirement incomes.
We do not know what the great Australian public makes of the current allegations swirling around Parliament House. A bit of light, rather than heat, would be nice.
I do not believe in trial by media. I think I would have taken part in the protest - but kept to the edges.
- Steve Evans is a Canberra Times reporter.