Bikies and a mass murderer

The Western Australian Bikies’ war is still simmering. Last night a local tattoo parlour run by one of the groups was firebombed for a second time. As I passed it on my way to the Post Office this morning,I saw a large contingent of cops, TV crews and a surly looking mob of bikies standing opposite the Tatpalour. After I had done my post...a couple of DVDs to Bernie in Canada, I returned home to get my camera and see if I could get a picture for the blog. I didn’t want to get too close to the tattooed, bearded nasties so my pic is from from some distance. Nothing to see here folks....move along. Got to be some payback coming soon!

The Norway tragedy is horrible. I taught a Norwegian exchange student at Willetton SHS in the late 1980s. We got along well although he seemed a little more mature than most of his year 12 cohort. He came across as a bit cold, which may have been because he hadn’t yet thawed out. A couple of years later he returned to W.A. for a visit and specifically came to visit me.

Back to the massacre in Norway. It is quite strange how ill prepared the government of Norway was for an act such as this. Utoya, where the youth camp shootings took place is only about 20 miles from Oslo. Even though mobile phone calls alerted Oslo as soon as the shooting started, it took police and military an hour to get there. They didn’t have helicopters capable of taking security forces and presumably couldn’t borrow any, so they drove to a point near the island of Utoya and commandeered local pleasure craft with almost disastrous results. meanwhile Breivik had 90 minutes to casually murder 85 people.

I am sure more transport and personnel are available in sleepy Perth should something similar happen here.

Probably not the time to mention it, but the island is owned by the Workers Youth League and all the youth on the island were members of the political party presently in government. I think the average Australian would worry about political youth groups. I would see it as a little too similar to Hitler-Jugend.