Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece

Yesterday, conservative Skynews commentator Andrew Bolt discussed a proposal by you to consider introducing British style AI intelligence cameras to Melbourne.

Mr Bolt asked his audience: “Do you want to be safer or do you want to be spied on?” and said that rising crime and terrorism is turning Australia into a “surveillance state, Chinese-style, you know where they even have a system of recognising you in the street and if they don’t like, if you’ve got a bad social credit, they can stop you doing things like catching a train.”

You told Mr Bolt “As Lord Mayor, I am very firmly committed to doing everything I can to make sure that Melbourne, everyone in Melbourne is safe and not only that, they feel safe as well.”

In this context, I ask you to consider the following deeply traumatic experience of mine in the Melbourne CBD on 9/11/2022, when you were Deputy Lord Mayor.

I was taken away from the memorial church service for Queen Elisabeth The Second at Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral and physically and sexually assaulted by what I believe were incompetent police.

I can prove it.

At the door of that cathedral, I had told a woman in uniform (perhaps a woman working for the church, but I do not know) that there were human rights issues to threatening an aboriginal man with arrest after I observed her doing that to a Warthaurong elder/activist who wished to enter the church.

During the following exchanges, I demanded that those police, who that night were trashing my human rights and assaulting me, instead investigate a real crime which happened in Melbourne: the criminal culpability of now former Commissioner Of Police, Shane Andrew Patton, in the false imprisonment of Cardinal George Pell. This crime is still not properly investigated.

In 1953, my maternal grandfather, J.R. Blanchard, attended the same queen’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in his capacity as a recent Moderator General of the Presbyterian Church. At her memorial service in Melbourne in 2022, police took me away from the door of the church and attacked me. How times have changed.

Before you, Nicholas Reece, do anything to move in the direction of police state surveillance of all people on Melbourne’s streets, you should make sure that it will work for justice not for deeply traumatising innocent people on the city streets as has happened to me.

Both my grandfathers were prominent theologians. In the 1930’s Professor A.C. Fox was one of the first people in Australia to speak up for Jewish refugees who wished to flee Nazi persecution and live here instead. When I spoke up for an aboriginal guy on your streets in 2022, police attacked me. Again, how times have changed.

My protests to Council at that time were ignored.

Nicholas Reece, I demand that you review what happened to me on your streets and to Cardinal George Pell in your city before you do anything to give Victoria Police more power to hurt innocent people in Melbourne than they already have.

Geoff Fox, human rights activist, victim of police brutality, May 8, 2025, Melbourne, Australia

A couple of young Indonesian friends holding up a poster of me and Boon Wurrung, Taungurong, Yorta Yorta, Mutti Mutti and Palawa Elder Uncle Talgium Edwards.