Dear Premier
Back in October 2012, I wrote to you requesting assistance with giving automotive enthusiasts a place to enjoy their hobby and legitimate past-time. At that time you supported us and kindly arranged a meeting with both Police and Transport. During this meeting, Transport representatives were fantastic, while Police representatives were aggressive and not to be reasoned with. At the time, I decided that it would be better to simply avoid crossing paths in future.
Yesterday, I organised one of the biggest events for car enthusiasts that Queensland has ever seen, at the Rocklea Showgrounds. Over 1200 vehicles attended from a range of enthusiast disciplines from four wheel drives to classics, drag cars, Japanese, and supercars. The Australian Confederation of Motor Clubs and the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party also attended and made presentations, making this a political meeting as well. The behaviour of attendees was exemplary – I have never seen so many enthusiasts behave so well. There were no burnouts, no skids, no antisocial behaviour whatsoever. The event was legal, held on private property and registered with the Special Interest Vehicles scheme.
Despite this, Queensland Police set up a sting operation where officers from as far afield as Ipswich were invited to shoot fish in a barrel. I immediately spoke to officers in charge at both locations, but was met with arrogance and an inability to be reasoned with. At one point, an officer compared defecting car enthusiasts to, I quote “if you want lollies, go to a candy store”. I have heard of dozens of stories of unreasonable force by officers. One example was where a representative from the Motorama Holden car dealership brought along a brand new vehicle from the lot to display it, and was held up for 30 minutes while officers went over it with a fine tooth comb in an effort to find something wrong with it. When he protested, he was told that they would keep going until they found something. I have the gentleman’s contact details if you would like to verify this disgraceful occurrence yourself.
The icing on top of the cake was when two officers attended from another branch closer to the city, and requested to gain access to the grounds to find a child who had been missing for over 2 hours. We assisted them to locate said child, who has been reunited with his family (and had a great time at the event). The community has rightly questioned why the 30+ officers who were manning the defect stations were unable to lower their fine books to look for a missing person for a few minutes, and the more cynical have suggested that it may be that locating a child doesn’t pay as well as fining people for truly trivial things such as slightly too dark window tinting (which I may add was done using un-calibrated equipment).
As a result, there has been a significant backlash from our community of 50,000. I would not be surprised if you and your party lost at least 20,000 votes at the upcoming election as a direct result of this blatant harassment yesterday. All it would take to fix the situation is to command Police to work with us; avoid specifically targeting events where people are trying to do the right thing; and respect an exclusion zone around sanctioned, legitimate events.
When I received your response to my enquiries last time, I was hopeful that we would be able to work together with government and give a significant part of the community events that would be supported by the government instead of being specifically targeted and discriminated against. You claim that you want to address the problem of hooning. So do I. Targeting well-behaved enthusiasts at a legal, sanctioned, registered family-friendly motoring event is not the way to do that. At this point, I’m disappointed and promoting an alternative political party who is able to respect people doing the right thing.
Matyas
Director
Downshift
P.S. For your reference, the reference on your return correspondence is EP/AF08 – TF/12/27960 – DOC/12/221427, dated 18 December 2012.
