New anti-bikie laws could spell danger for community groups

This new attack, for example, is intended to ban members from wearing their intimidating "club colours". One problem with that aim was touched on in recent reporting on the killing of Gavin "Capable" Preston in 2023. Preston had "declared his loyalty to the Comancheros inside prison by having the gang's insignia [ACCA] tattooed on the back of his shaved head". Can you really pass a law decreeing someone has to wear a hat indoors?

Apparently the tatt raised further ethical cruxes in that Preston wasn't actually a form-filled-out member of the Comancheros, who take copyright infringement seriously.

Furthermore, the ACCA motto, we're told, is held as a pledge (which Preston hadn't signed) "to observe and obey the rules of the gang and its leadership". And what are those rules? Well, you can look them up online, because the Comancheros is an Australian public company, which doesn't sound particularly outlaw to me.

Most not-for-profits have fairly basic rules, but the Comancheros' constitution goes the extra mile, including a declaration of ethical values, which is more than you can say of the Melbourne Club (another male-only organisation, by the way).

Members of the Comancheros are forbidden to "conduct, promote or support criminal or anti-social behaviour", and no member of the club "may engage in acts of violence against any other person". Doing the parliamentary draughtspeople's job for them, really.

There's also a declaration of core values that supports the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), acknowledges First Nations people have never ceded sovereignty, and claims members will "always stand up for and help the poor, the weak and the sick". It also holds that "no person is beyond redemption, reform or rehabilitation" - and the Comancheros ought to know, many members having indeed undergone from time to time extended spells of rehabilitation under government auspices.

It's possible these aspirations are less than sincere. You may very well say that, and I couldn't possibly comment. They do, however, underline the difficulty of drawing up laws intended to apply only to bad people.

The last Victorian push, for example, made provisions for clubs to be really outlawed if the organisation "is engaging in, organising, facilitating or supporting serious criminal activity; or ... any two or more members, former members or prospective members of the organisation have used or are using ... their relationship with that organisation ... for a criminal purpose".

And yet the Comancheros are still here and have large facilities with plenty of parking space.

The thing is while a number of Comancheros have ganged up, so to speak, with other Comancheros to commit crimes, it's by no means exclusive; they crime quite a lot alongside members of other clubs, or even with civilians. Sorting out the place of the club in these interactions is complicated, which is presumably why in practice the police never - never ever - bother to throw these club-based offences on top of the ones they've actually caught the perps doing.

The old Act is a nullity, having been invoked over the past eight years a total of zero times. The new one is unlikely to work any better.

This kind of legislation is purely rhetorical. Then again, bikie clubs are themselves largely rhetoric. After all, it's not suggested the difficulties the CFMEU now faces are to do with its relations to bikie clubs, just bikie club members. Many bikie club members have committed crimes, but legislation providing extra sanctions on people who have committed crimes, other than locking them up for a period of time and then letting them out, do involve considerations of civil liberties.

Clubs like the Comancheros provide a useful service for prospective felons, in that the patches, tattoos and other paraphernalia add an element of theatrical swagger to the otherwise sordidly commercial processes of the drug trade.

This is not, however, central to the operations of the not-for-legal sector. The government's attempts to legislate away crime are just PR - government spin, police spin, police reporter spin.

I'm reasonably sure some members of the Melbourne Club have associated with each other to plan criminal activities - breaches of the Corporations Act, say, or tax evasion, or non-payment of wages.

The business sector has even in the past been accused of associating with bikie gangs itself. I don't expect the Melbourne Club to be hauled into court to account for this, because the law isn't intended to be a law of general application. It's expected these laws, if ever taken out of their tissue paper, will be applied only to the groups which everybody - or at least the tabloid press - dislikes.

The law itself doesn't say that, though. The trouble with laws that are drawn up to meet a particular moral panic is they are then available for other uses when a government runs into other troubles it can't handle within a single news cycle. The police and the bikies are collaborating to puff up the image of bikie clubs as meaningful and important. It's a twisted form of identity politics, and by this time we should know better.

It's never a good idea to bring in legislation just to signal the government is tough and manly. It's a particularly poor idea to tamper with the rights of free association to do it. No, this government isn't going to come after your squash club; but precedents are being set that might allow it to. This is an occasion for the not-for-profit sector to make a stand on principle.