Mardi Gras, police and yet another culture war get the Sydney media excited

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions deceased persons.

Last week two Sydney men, Jesse Baird and Luke Davies, were murdered in what looks to be an incident of either domestic violence or stalking by an obsessed acquaintance of one of the victims. The alleged perpetrator is a police officer. It’s one of many similar tragic homicides across NSW and Australia. In 2020-21, just over 40% of the 78 domestic homicide victims were male.

The prevalence of domestic violence among serving police officers, the effectiveness or otherwise of police investigations of perpetrators within their own ranks, and the astonishing instances of officers continuing to serve despite convictions for domestic violence, have all drawn attention in NSW and other states in recent years.

The amount of coverage the crime has drawn is interesting compared to that afforded most victims of domestic homicide. The search for the victims in the wake of their killing and the alleged role of a police officer undoubtedly elicited more coverage than more quotidian domestic homicides, but the connections with the media industry of one of the victims appears to have further fuelled media interest beyond what normally is given to such crimes.

That may well be a good thing — perhaps now the media will regularly devote more resources to all victims of domestic homicide, and the way police respond to them. NSW police commissioner Karen Webb betrayed the extent to which police attitudes to domestic violence remain problematic when she referred to the murders as a “crime of passion”, a phrase that diminishes the horror of domestic homicide and automatically elevates the perpetrator to some sort of honourable status.

But despite the higher level of coverage, the horror of the murders has been strangely subsumed within a debate about whether police officers should participate in the Sydney LGBTQIA+ community’s annual Mardi Gras. Organisers have asked for police not to march this year because participants were concerned Mardi Gras be “a space to protest, celebrate, and advocate for equality, as well as to honour and grieve”.

The sheer heat of this debate has been remarkable. Police should not march, Nine’s newspaper editorialised, reflecting on the “killing of two beautiful and much-loved young men”. On the contrary, banning police would set the LGBTQIA+ community back “decades” countered a News Corp columnist. “Fuzzy-headed capitulation to victimhood” opined an LGBTQIA+ contributor to Nine. LGBTQIA+ police were pressed by News Corp to denounce the ban. The Daily Mail claimed there was “uproar”. Headline-hungry Lidia Thorpe rushed to support the ban, attacking “empty apologies and hollow gestures”.

Right-wing shock jock Ben Fordham also attacked the ban and had NSW premier Chris Minns, presumably taking a break from looking after the gambling industry and thinking of ways to silence critics of Israel, joined him to criticise it as “a regressive step”. The prime minister was then described as “weighing in” on the matter, when he had merely been asked a question by an ABC presenter. Albanese wisely said it was a matter between Mardi Gras organisers and NSW police, but couldn’t resist adding “I think it’s been very good that the police have marched.”

In other words, it’s become a culture war, with right-wing media lining up to support the right of police to participate in Mardi Gras, even if a large number of LGBTQIA+ people object, and politicians appealing to their bases. The Sydney Morning Herald, anxious to make up for its own shameful history in relation to LGBTQIA+ people in Sydney, has allied itself firmly with Mardi Gras organisers.

The stakes in this clash are, apparently, almost existential: not only is there “uproar” and individual LGBTQIA+ police officers who feel offended and angry, but the LGBTQIA+ community will be set back “decades” by what one writer described as the “fetishising of victimhood”. On the other side, Thorpe linked the issue to the killing of Kumanjayi Walker in the Northern Territory and demanded the prime minister bring together the states to fix police accountability.

To this old, straight male who has no stake in Mardi Gras and has enjoyed the privilege afforded to heterosexuals all his life, the participation of police, large corporations and even major party politicians has always seemed peculiar, given the event’s historical basis in protest — protest that was met with appalling police brutality and media complicity in that brutality. But it’s up to the LGBTQIA+ community to determine how that is addressed, not anyone else.

However, the transformation of the decision into yet another culture war by the media and politicians who either eagerly, or out of an inability to avoid the issue, have engaged with it, is emblematic of how our failing media operates. Like many culture wars, there is little or no substance behind it. It is a simulacrum of a public issue, which is why News Corp and the Daily Mail have had to expend so much breath inflating it into “uproar” and apocalyptic consequences for the LGBTQIA+ community unless they fall into line, and Thorpe has to drag in wholly unrelated events to dress it up as a systematic problem requiring urgent prime ministerial intervention.

Jesse Baird and Luke Davies, let alone the other victims of domestic homicide across NSW and the rest of the country, thus become props for the media’s game of endlessly trying to excite audiences and provoke division.