paintball

Confession time. I could have grown up to be a terrorist – and a racist to boot. I played Cowboys and Indians as a kid and always played a cowboy and the cowboys always won.

And then at high school I went to a cadet military camp and was taught how to strip a Bren gun and fire a .303.

Just imagine if, as an adult, I had played dress up soldiers and gone on a paintball excursion. The mind boggles.

I bring this up because Hume City Council refused an application for a paintball park in the fields of Bulla near Tullamarine Airport.  The applicants understandably went to VCAT. And they lost.

But it is the reason they lost that intrigues me. Tribunal member John Bennett says a paintball park  could be  ‘a Trojan horse for terrorism’. Very alliterative -- but stupid.

Mr. Bennett said the park didn’t break any other rules like green-wedge laws and the proximity to Bulla Cemetery didn’t perturb him. And a paintball could only be fired 25 metres so it was hardly going to damage a plane. But. ‘The paintball facility could, in effect, become a Trojan horse for a terrorist or group of terrorists.’

Yep. I can see Osama Bin Laden right now issuing instructions from his cave near the Afghanistan-Pakistani border. ‘I hear Fred Nerg the Melbourne accountant is having a paintball fight with his mates for his birthday. Get down there and infiltrate them. And take along an inconspicuous rocket launcher and blow up Melbourne Airport while you’re down there. Unless you get tagged with a paintball first and then you’ll have to play dead’.

When you think of it I’m amazed that there wasn’t a paintball playground in Wall Street in the lead up to the World Trade Center terror attacks on 9-11. Or in Bali.

This is paranoia personified. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mr. Bennett has a  Be Alert – Not Alarmed magnet on his fridge door and has changed the message to Be Alert AND alarmed. He’s certainly trying to alarm you.

I have long held the misgiving that VCAT – the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal – has been accumulating too much power and influence. And with this paintball fiasco I risk my case.

Surely, any decision on national security should be made at a national level by a national body not by a state board that crams an anti-terrorist decision in between poker machine permits and the height of your neighbour’s fence.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007