Victoria Police Commander Wayne Cheesman, with his bald pate and forearms the size of Christmas hams, is the sort of no-nonsense cop we could all use on our local street corner.

So when the Big Cheese declares Melbourne’s had a gutful, any politician attuned to the public mood should understand he is speaking not just on behalf of police dodging rocks thrown by left-wing agitators, but a city desperately in need of a break.

A visibly frustrated Commander Wayne Cheesman with rocks protesters threw at police.Credit: Victoria Police

Instead, Premier Jacinta Allan is either deaf to what Cheesman and other police are trying to tell her or blind to what has been going on every Sunday in Melbourne for the past two years.

Allan’s insistence that only a “small number of people” were responsible for Sunday’s violence and claim that this was a “different pattern of behaviour” from other demonstrations overlooks key facts.

The first is that the violence was not an unfortunate outcome but a design feature of what was promoted as a counter-protest to........

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