Until Fella’s Bill is law, the use of spit hoods is dependent on ever-changing government policy and the good faith of police and prisons. The current operational ban in South Australia means that at any time the ban on the use of spit hoods could be reversed. Without legislating the ban on spit hoods by law, the use of these devices could be re-implemented and strengthened with the flick of a pen.

From public housing tower lockdowns to the deployment of generals to leadership positions and soldiers to the streets, to the imposition of nighttime curfews that do little if any practical good, the Covid-19 pandemic has provided state and national governments with even more opportunities to look tough in the face of what is in essence, like climate change, a crisis of health rather than law and order.

The truth is, there remains much capital – both political and monetary – to be made from security theatre and ‘law and order’ policy, particularly at a time of acute public anxiety around the social and economic consequences of COVID-19.

The fact of fascism in Australia is quotidian and mundane, creeping insidiously into mainstream culture through policy and broadcast. Most of the time, it is enough to let the logic of a settler colony move to its own authoritarian conclusion. Occasionally, however, things do flare up and remind us of how the table is set. This happened two weeks ago, when the police cracked down on antifascist protesters while protecting the far right.

Now is the time to learn from previous crises, and rather than accede to the power grab, start to question motives, demand transparency and accountability, and take part in a genuine debate about credible alternatives.

But as the past few months have demonstrated, there is nobody more equipped to jump into action in a crisis than independent artists, a group who’ve become expert at making do with rapidly dwindling resources, turning sawdust into glitter.

In the aftermath of a raid that has increased the visibility of the violence of policing for those lucky enough not to be routinely exposed to it, queer communities need to be asking new questions about police use of our spaces, events and movement symbols to promote pride in policing.

During these deployments – many of which lasted for over five years – covert officers lived and organised alongside activists, passing information back to their superiors that would later thwart the actions they were helping to organise. Behind the sensationalism is the personal trauma of the officers’ former partners, and the story of their long struggle to attain some kind of justice.

The world is in the grips of what some are calling ‘a police body camera revolution’ and Australia is in the thick of it. This might be an unalloyed good if we were confident that all body-worn cameras do is improve police behaviour and community safety. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.

It is hard to believe that the rates of incarceration of Aboriginal people are actually higher than the rates of incarceration of African Americans in the USA (2,346 per 100,000 in Australia, 1,408 per 100,000 in the US). The problems that flow from over policing are much better understood in the US, a country we like to think of as much more regressive in the quality of its policing. But Aboriginal communities and their allies can take lessons from the US in how to tackle over-policing.