Communications Workers Union secretary Len Cooper released this statement on October 25.
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Melbourne Lord Mayor Doyle has been responsible for one of the most disgraceful episodes in this city's history.
The Occupy Melbourne protesters were holding a peaceful, disciplined, well organised protest, largely confined to the city square, thus preventing inconvenience to most others.
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9.30pm: The general assembly passed several other proposals (which happened after GLW's laptop had a temporary power emergency).
These included: a decision to lodge a schedule one with the police outlinining a march route from Town Hall, to Wynyard Park, to Martin Place, and back to Town Hall.
The assembly also agreed on the statement read out earlier that night. Now occupations in Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide have a common statement, which will be printed by Fairfax by Friday (so we were told).
Newly-elected Wollongong Mayor Gordon Bradbery gave this speech at a October 16 rally against coal seam gas, organised by Stop CSG Illawarra. More than 3000 people attended the rally.
Oakland police stormed the Oakland Occupy protest encampment outside City Hall just before 5 a.m. PDT. Police lobbed flash grenades and reportedly fired tear gas. Initial reports say at least 70 people have arrested and the police tore apart the protest camp.
The Refugee Action Coalition Sydney released the statement below on October 25.
Stuart Munckton, co-editor of Green Left Weekly/Green Left Online, speaks on a new flowering of independent media and activist journalism in the global movement of occupations against the tyranny of the world's richest 1%.
The Darwin Asylum Seekers Support and Advocacy Network (DASSAN) released the statement below on October 25.
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A Burmese refugee has resumed his protest on the roof of the Northern Immigration Detention Centre (NIDC). The man, who has been in detention just under 2 years, began his protest on Sunday night and was up there for several hours before receiving an electric shock from the fence surrounding the Centre and coming down off the roof.
The Lock the Gate Alliance released the statement below on October 19.
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The Lock The Gate Alliance claims that the Murray Darling Basin will be another casualty as Precautionary Principle is thrown to the wind in the resources boom.
Lock the Gate President, Drew Hutton says pressure from States addicted to mining royalties is most likely to be behind the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s (MDBA) plan to allow massive increases in groundwater use in the forth-coming Murray Darling Basin Plan.
Many commentators and politicians have argued that the global movement of occupations that followed the Wall Street occupation against the rule of the richest 1% will not take root and grow in Australia, which has so far escaped the current global recession. Simon Butler, an activist in #OccupySydney and co-editor of www.greenleft.org, disagrees.
Occupations in Sydney and Melbourne have been violently broken up by police in the past few days, but the Occupy Brisbane camp at Post Office Square is going well so far.
Between 80 and 100 people gathered for an open-air Occupy Perth general assembly in Perth on October 22. It began at 11am and finished around 5pm. The main purpose of the assembly was to make plans for establishing a Perth occupation at the end of the Chogm Protest (taking next Friday, October 28) that would last at least throughout the CHOGM summit. There was quite a constructive discussion and a lot of enthusiasm to begin an occupation next weekend. Eleven working groups were established.
Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy
By Lindsay Tanner
Scribe, 2011
232 pages, $32.95 (pb)
Lindsay Tanner, the former finance minister in the federal Labor government, laments in his book, Sideshow, the rotting core of democracy in Australia that plumbed its most dismal depths in the lacklustre, “non-of-the-above” elections of 2010.
The commercial media, he says, have been responsible for dumbing down the quality of political debate and sapping the level of popular political engagement.
There is much in Tanner’s critique that is accurate.
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