Did Bracks and Ronnie Walker rip off a gun club?
Douglas Bignall
It wasn't quite what I was after, but it is ripe enough. There are members of a certain club, the Melbourne Gun Club in fact, who are far from happy. They are fuming so much that Indians could use them as smoke signal machines. What would you, reader, make of a chap who approaches you and says: “I want to use your property for, a few hours or even a few months?”
The owner might be interested in an agreement for terms acceptable to him and, therefore, might remark, “Say on”. The potential tenant says on, saying, the property is just right for something he wishes to do, having all the features he needs for the exercise. The owner says, maybe but... He isn't allowed to finish his sentence for the supplicant, eager to be in possession, wastes no words and states what he is prepared to do: “I will seize your property, pay you nothing, vandalise the grounds and, you can pay for the clean up bill, after I have gone. You will not be allowed to even venture onto your property unless you pay me admission fees for each visit. If you object, we will do something nasty to you”.
The owner’s reaction would be straight forward: contact the extortion and dangerous criminal detective squad of the police, to have the extortionist charged and thrown into prison. On my information, that is basically what the Minister of Sports, Justin Madden, and thus Bracks and the Cabinet and the ‘Major Events Committee’ did to the Melbourne Gun Club and its property, the Lilydale Range, at which the clay and skeet shooting Commonwealth Games competitions are being held.
The Bracks’ Junta and Ron Walker’ Major Events Committee seized control of the property 3 months ago. So far, the club has lost 3 months of revenue of at least $70,000. Part of that includes the loss of cancelling a major ISS standard competition scheduled annually for this past weekend, which was transferred to another club.
Deduct say, a generous $15,000 lost on the canclled competition, leaving, say, an average underlying revenue from range fees and sales of ammo, targets, and sundry items, and that leaves an underlying monthly revenue of around $18,000/month revenues lost just for the 3 months to last week.
The losses will be higher, of course, for the period of the Commonwealth games competition until the day the Government vacates the premises. Seventy thousand dollars and still counting might not seem much, but it is a large hole in a shooting club’s annual budget.
Shooting clubs try to keep membership fees and other expences as low as possible. There are good reasons for this: The members of a shooting club tend to form a broad spectrum, from those on modest earnings and up. Shooting is for many a family affair, mum dad and the children join in for a pleasant day of shooting, much more enjoyable and, no doubt, much cheaper than a family visit to Luna Park .
It’s a day away from he house; it’s recreation and the joys of competition in what shooting is, a disciplined, skilled sport. The aim of shooting clubs is to attract and retain members. Clubs run on thin margins and are run solely in the interest of the members. Out of these thin margins have to be paid out all the charges for keeping and maintaining the property and all equipment, and development of the facilities, acquisitions and replacement of new equipment.
It’s not free at all, the members pay for all of that. Clubs’ committees have the task of running budgets to ensure all that is done prudently and at modest charges to members. A forced $70,000 and still mounting loss is a large percentage of the annual budget.
Having basically confiscated the property about three months ago the Bracks’ Government also forced the membership out of the premises. Bracks just sequestered the property, despite it being private property, and overthrew the membership rights of club members.
It is not that club members were opposed to the staging of the Commonwealth games at the range, but they rightly expected that Bracks would compensate them for the use of the property and its facilities. The compensation would equal the amount the club would need to cancel out the lost revenues plus a premium, and an amount for the rental of the property and for use of facilities and equipment.
Members should be compensated for the loss of amenities and their membership rights for the period. No way. Madden, Bracks and the Events and Games Committee decided to sequester what is private property. How could this be done without the use of threats against the club?
Anyone who has visited the property, can see it is a well kept and the grass is trimmed. What the Games ‘enue organisers did’, was to to dump tons of bark mulch around the viewing areas and gravel for ‘walkways’. That is next to the tin shacks and other temporary edifices the ‘organisers’ splattered over the grounds in the vicinity of the clubhouse.
The club is now in a fight to force Madden, Bracks, Walker et al to pay for cleaning up the garbage they have dumped on the grounds and make sure they do it thoroughly, including rectification of damage. A fight, because as things now stand, it is very likely, the club will be stiffed into paying for that too.
The ticket sales to the games’ clay events do not, of course, go to the club. They go into Bracks and his faithful shyster bookie Brumby’s coffers. So, Ron Walker, Steve Bracks, Justin Madden, Brumby and the rest of the cabinet, collect revenues out of a private property they confiscated from the club for a period greater than three months: They used up and abused facilities , equipment and the grounds, leaving the members to bear the costs of repairs.
Now, it is really interesting, because in this affair, the Junta, its bureaucrats, Walker and the Major Events Committee, do not have the tissue thin protection of an act of parliament to rob people of their property. Their actions are therefore nakedly criminal and smack of gangsterism. There would be no point to the Junta hastily making good the damage it did because while the club would be correct in accepting compensation, this would not eliminate the Bracks’ Junta and its Events Committee’s criminal thuggery.
In so far as all the above is true, it follows that every member of the Cabinet and the Events Committee, including bureaucrats, should have criminal charges laid against them. Extortion, property theft through extortion, and so on are not trivial crimes, they are grave crimes, and all the more when it is politicians and all else in ‘government’ who commit them.
I have said it before, many of the ACTs rammed through parliament are not lawful,, they are the overthrow of the rule of common law, asserting that the Junta (including the bureaucracy and those of the judiciary who support the totalitarian thrust of the Junta’s actions) is above the rule of common law and is free to commit major criminal offences.
The Bill of Rights makes certain of that. Yet even before the Bill of Rights has been debated in parliament, the Bracks’ Junta engaged in what was nothing less than serious crimes. They have to be confronted with that fact in the proper way — charged with the appropriate crimes and put on trial.
Once that Bill of Rights is rammed through the House, everyone’s real rights, to re-iterate, as advanced in common law, are completely overthrown and everyone and their property,
including of each in her and his own self, are completely at the disposal of the Junta, enforced by what will be nothing less than goon squads. The treatment of the Gun Club is an indication of what is in store for Victorians should the Bill be passed.
The Bill has not yet passed and thus the government. does not even have that flimsy, rotten resort to excuse its serious criminal actions against the gun club. The actions against the club, based on the information I was given, is solid ground to stop the Bracks’ Junta’s depredations. Moreover, if the information is correct then convicting the culprits on what are grave counts of crime will bars them permanently from even holding the most junior clerk’s job on the ‘government payroll’ — after they have been released from prison.
What has to be done also is that every member of the Cabinet and the various games committees must be penalised and made to compensate the club out of their own pockets and not out of taxpayers’ wallets.
Yes, readers, it seems one has the germ of a scoop in the information that came my way.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 27 March 2006