Vaping is a disgusting habit, worse than smoking tobacco, and it defies belief some of us choose to suck made-in-China mystery vapour into their lungs.
Australia was right to ban it, with new laws coming into effect on January 1 outlawing the importation of all disposable vapes and the prescription-free sale of all e-cigarettes containing nicotine.
But when the so-called reforms came into effect nothing happened – the new rules are being completely ignored by Australia’s mainly immigrant-run city vape retailers, tobacconists, convenience stores and small supermarkets.
The government is either unwilling to enforce the law, or incapable – one of the hallmarks of a failed state.
But recent events prove that police resources are not the problem.
There was no shortage of officers when it came to handing out tens of thousands of fines for mask violations during Covid, and this week police spared no expense tracking down three individuals who pulled an Israeli flag off a pole.
When the police are told to crackdown they usually do, but when not the law ends up being selectively enforced.
Melbourne is in the midst of a Middle Eastern tobacco war, where every week there is a new firebombing, but police don’t seem interested in stopping the chaos.
Every capital city is awash with cocaine and stricken by ethnic gang violence that is censored and minimised by the police and the media, and every town is riddled with ice and menaced by bikie thugs.
Aboriginal youths run riot across much of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, breaking into homes and stealing cars.
Also in Melbourne, Christmas Eve saw the most concerning escalation in political violence in years, a firebombing carried out by left-wing terrorists that destroyed a car and could have spread to a family home, yet police carried out only the most cursory of investigations, leaving key evidence in the rain for days.
This type of violence extremism is supposedly a priority for ASIO and the police, but there have been no raids by counter terror cops, no arrests, no public appeals for assistance or releases of CCTV footage.
When a Palestinian-owned burger store was firebombed amid high tensions between Melbourne’s Jewish community and pro-Palestine activists there was a half-hearted investigation, no arrests, and a laughable declaration by police that the attack was not politically motivated. How would they even know?
This rampant selective enforcement of Australia’s suffocating web of laws means that at any given point a responsible citizen can be punished by the system for breaking one by accident, while being preyed upon by the criminal class at the same time.
You won’t be let off for making a mistake on your taxes or speeding past a camera a few kilometres over, but the unscrupulous vape seller who is peddling poison to your children is allowed to operate with impunity.
This phenomenon has been described as “anarcho-tyranny” and is now prevalent across the Western world, particularly in the UK and the US.
But while we do increasingly suffer under anarcho-tyranny, the problem here runs deeper than selective enforcement. Something more fundamental is broken.
For there is no question that in the case of the vape ban, the government would like to enforce it – Health Minister Mark Butler has been humiliated by the instant failure of a pet project he is clearly very proud of – but simply cannot.
The government cannot even keep illegal immigrant paedophiles behind bars, let alone deport them, even when it is costing them huge amounts of political capital and when the lawmakers themselves want to act.
Somewhere along the line Australia became a fake democracy, where no matter who you vote for, the system remains unchanged, a system which handcuffs our elected representatives and prevents them from acting in our interests (all though few of them seem interested in doing so).
At the same time, our lack of guaranteed rights mean laws can be written to prevent us changing the system through political activism, which is the purpose of Australia’s new “hate symbols” ban. We will soon see if that ban is treated the same way as the one on vapes.
But without structural change our country will slowly devolve and head further down the path towards becoming a genuine failed state, where the government is not only incapable of law enforcement, but struggles to collect taxes, maintain vital infrastructure and prevent corruption.
