Michael Gray Griffith: Cafe Locked Out

In the trial of Paul Offe, the prosecutor, towards the end, left a free frame of the rear of Paul’s truck on all the screens of the court.

On the top of Paul’s truck you could make out the two bookend Australian flags, and on the rear of his big black truck, in almost luminous green font, someone had written the word Freedom.

This frozen image was from the moments before Paul turned and headed up the ramp towards the top of Canberra Parliament House.

Around the truck, people were everywhere. Some of the police witnesses stated there were thousands of people, then others tens of thousands and finally, later in the same video, one of the officers agreed with the Aussie Cossack, that there were a million people there.

The real number will always be debated, but whatever the amount, they are gone, but Paul is still here, fighting for his Freedom.

At first there were only three minor charges, and after waiting three months to contest those, Paul and his devoted brother Michael, put in a request to get the truck back, stating that the charges weren’t strong enough to warrant confiscating the truck.

This became another point of conjecture, which culminated eight months after the protest with the prosecutor adding two more charges to the list.

Driving recklessly or knowingly at police. And since there were two police, the charge was doubled.
The maximum sentence for this charge is fifteen years jail.

The weight of this has been hanging around Paul’s neck, to this Supreme Court room, where, after almost three and a half years, Paul was finally before a judge.

Over the years, the brothers had raised, with the help of interviews with podcasters like CLO, $60,000. But by now the lawyers had eaten all that up, then informed the boys, to have legal representation in court, they would need to raise a further $250,000, which they were unable to do.

So now, with a family friend, an old man who wishes to remain anonymous, as an advisor—the court refers to this as a McKenzie friend—Paul is representing himself.

Over the years, a series of mishaps, from being king-hit by a stranger that knocked him unconscious, and a car accident that saw him officially informed that he has an acquired head injury.

The other problem he has was his profound dyslexia. Through the entire trial, his McKenzie friend has been typing out questions for Paul to ask, in super-large font on a laptop, as Paul attempted to read them out, mouthing the bigger words first before pronouncing them.

This impediment alone is one of the reasons the court case went from being scheduled for two to three days to, at last count, ten.

Yet within those ten days, despite the intense pressure, Paul has never lost his cool, nor has been rude to anyone, even those few witnesses that had a crack at him.

After court, Paul told me that he had placed himself in God’s hands so was just doing what had to be done.
But then there was one time when he broke.

Near the end of the trial Paul, took the stand to tell his own story. It was here that he began crying. And it wasn’t a few shed tears, and it wasn’t pathetic sobbing, it was a dam inconsolably breaking, not that anyone in the court was allowed to physically console him.

He was crying not out of fear of going to jail, nor was he crying about these three and a half years, where his life has been spent in limbo. Instead he spoke about the main reason he came to the protest.

Paul had grown up on a farm. His grandmother lived with them, and Paul referred to her as his second mother. During Covid she had been placed in a nursing home, due to declining health.

Initially the staff would bring her to the courtyard so the family could spend time with her. Because they were unvaccinated, the family wasn’t allowed in.

Then the nursing home told them they could no longer spare the staff to do this, so all physical contact was cut off.

In an act of mercy, they were granted a half-hour reprieve, where, dressed in full PPE gear, the family was afforded half an hour to communally say their goodbyes.

After that, his Grandmother was left to die alone.

As Paul retold this story, through those tears, he managed to communicate his pain so efficiently we in the audience, many of the jurors, and I’d suggest even the judge teared up.

And so Paul had come to Canberra to help all those who joined the convoy to Canberra, to allow the Government to see that many Australians believed the mandates were going too far.

And while the crowd’s numbers will always be under debate, it is now official, thanks to the declaration by the ABC, that it was the largest protest Canberra had ever seen.

Though this was no ordinary protest. These people had come here, on their own volition, because they had lost family members, or had been kicked out of their families. They had lost their jobs and businesses, some had lost their homes, and so forth.

They should have been furious, which was why, in the basement of Old Parliament House, an army of riot squad officers were waiting in hiding, in case these people began unleashing their wrath.

But the crowd was in such high spirits, based solely on the gift of sharing each other’s company, that despite their numbers, the only incident worth talking about was a truck, driven by what the media call a right-winger, who inadvertently went left.

And so the truck became, inadvertently, a symbol of power — of defiance, both to us and the the police.

For a few dramatic moments it and Paul, became the front line of everything we were protesting against.

But was that intentional?

Originally a country fire truck, Paul had used a small payout from his accident to buy it and restore it.

His goal was to get himself off sickness benefits by creating a business where the truck was used at events and in movies.

He had just acquired his chauffeur licence a few days before joining the convoy to Canberra.

Where, because of his mechanical skills, he was stopping on the way down to help other members of the convoy whose old cars were struggling with the distance.

Helping people is how Paul has derived worth, seeing how his disabilities have prevented him from acquiring a career of note.

He even carried witches’ hats and other gear he’d need to use when working on broken-down vehicles.

And this leaning towards kindness exudes out of his being. Everyone who meets him can discern that he’s simply a good, gentle and kind man, who likes to laugh at innocent jokes.

He is not someone who you would expect to have a chance of surviving jail.

Yet that is our view, for whilst he has been on trial, two police officers have been shot, and the Australian Nazi boys have led many of the marches that occurred on the 31st of August, allowing the politicians and the mainstream media to paint all those who came to Canberra three and a half years ago, and anyone else that questions the government, as dangerous sovereign citizens.

Every day the jurors have had to observe Paul, umming and arghing as he attempts to defend himself against the charges that he drove at police, and every night they’ve gone home to the news of dead officers. Will they judge Paul based on the evidence and on who they find Paul to be, as a stand-alone man, or will they only see Paul through the prejudice of a sovereign-citizen filter, and a conscience wanting and able to enact revenge?

It seems our chaotic times have conglomerated into a cyclone, and in the eye of this perfect shit storm is Paul, and next to him his brother.

The jury, all from compliant Canberra, is now out. And they call it compliant Canberra because the ACT, unlike every other state and territory, never enforced mandates, yet still nearly everyone living here, complied. From Monday they will start deliberating.

Over the years our community has raised millions of dollars for court cases which have all failed—cases where we tried to point out that the Government was acting illegally.

If only we could have had a fraction of that to afford legal representation for Paul, for by doing so we would actually be defending ourselves.

I was at Epic Park for the entire event. It was not properly organised by people. Anyone who was there would testify, I believe, that it was a spiritual event. A gathering of Australians who just happened to go on a big march.

But at the entrance of the camp I recorded the stories of scores of people arriving, and they all said they had no choice, they had to come. It was a calling.

A calling that I suggest was the birth of a great tribe of Guardians. A birth that came with the gift of these few days, where many felt exalted, but a birth that also came with a responsibility.

The job of spreading our glorious light to ward off the darkness that was besieging our country.

And Paul is the one guardian we left behind. A good man been portrayed by the state as an evil one.

So the question is, was Epic more than just a gathering of people who didn’t want to take a jab, or is that all we were?

For in my soul’s rear-vision mirror, Epic is a glow of pure hope that is always there, but if Paul is convicted and goes to jail, whilst the majority of us just got on with our lives as though it was nothing to do with us, then I fear that light—our light—will finally go out.

If you want to help the boys they havea gofund me here, though 60K of that has already been spent on lawyers.

https://fundly.com/help-freedom-truck

Thank you to all who have helped so far.

Paul was ultimately found guilty, fined $2000 and had his beloved truck confiscated. He was facing up to 15 years in prison.

For many in the Australian community the sheer bastardry of the Australian government’s Covid response continues apace, a haunting and destructive episode in the nation’s history for which no senior political figure has ever apologised.

Rinse and repeat, that’s the fear. A very legitimate fear.