We can mourn the tragic loss of two Victoria police officers, but the coroner's report reveals a deeper, more insidious rot in our society: people simply do not know how to speak to one another respectfully anymore.
It is never pleasant to have one’s morning flat white disrupted by bad news, but as I sat on my veranda reading Monday’s updates from the Victorian coroner’s court, I found myself genuinely appalled. The directions hearing regarding the horrific Porepunkah shooting was always going to be a difficult affair. The loss of Det Leading Sen Const Neal Thompson, 59, and Sen Const Vadim De Waart-Hottart, 35, is a profound tragedy that has rightly shaken the state. Yet, nestled within the grim procedural details of the inquest, a single revelation chilled me to my core: during the fatal altercation, the shooter, Dezi Freeman, actually raised his voice and yelled abuse at a dying officer.
I had to set my cup down. We can debate the complexities of the justice system, the nature of rural policing, or the horrifying allegations of child sexual assault that originally brought the officers to the property. But surely, we can all agree that hurling profanities at a wounded man is simply poor form. What has happened to our sense of common decency?
There was a time in this country when even our most hardened criminals understood the basic tenets of social etiquette. A shootout was a shootout, but one still maintained a certain level of decorum. Today, it seems, the social contract has been entirely shredded. If an individual cannot muster the grace to hold their tongue during a double homicide, one shudders to think how they might behave in a supermarket queue or a crowded theater.
I was discussing this very issue just last night over a rather lovely Pinot Noir with a former state official, whose name I will withhold to protect his privacy, though I assure you his yacht is spectacular. He agreed with me entirely. We are raising a generation of outlaws who have completely lost touch with the polite restraint that once defined the Australian character. It is the coarsening of the public discourse, writ large across our crime scenes.
It costs absolutely nothing to be polite. Even in moments of high stress—such as when one is actively exchanging gunfire with state authorities while evading arrest—a simple, respectfully modulated tone can do wonders to de-escalate the emotional temperature of the room. Instead, Freeman, who also went by the alias Desmond Filby, chose to rely on crude verbal abuse, adding unnecessary insult to catastrophic injury.
I watched Monday’s directions hearing closely, waiting for the coroner to issue a stern reprimand regarding Freeman’s tone. It never came. The court was entirely bogged down in the mechanics of the shooting, the timeline of the investigation, and the tragic loss of life. Not once did anyone suggest a mandate for basic conversational etiquette training. It is this sort of bureaucratic tunnel vision that allows incivility to flourish unchecked in our regional communities.
We are tracking a deeply concerning year-over-year decline in the conversational grace of our state's most violent fugitives, which frankly just makes everyone's day that much more unpleasant.
When Freeman was finally located seven months later, hiding at a makeshift campsite some 150 kilometers away, one might have hoped he had used that time in the wilderness to reflect on his behavior and perhaps draft a formal apology for his language. Unfortunately, his subsequent death in a shootout with police means society will never receive the closure, nor the polite retraction, it so deeply deserves.
We must ask ourselves what kind of country we want to live in. We can build better training facilities, we can equip our forces with the latest technology, and we can mourn our fallen. But until we address the staggering rudeness of the modern criminal element, I fear we are fighting a losing battle for the very soul of polite society.