BY SIMON TAYLER
In late March, Books Not Bombs national coordinator Kylie Moon met with NSW police officers to organise a march permit for an anti-war protest in Sydney, due to be held on April 2. Not only did the police refuse the permit to march, they threatened to arrest each and every person who attended the demonstration. The police stance was vigorously supported by the NSW Labor government.
Much of the mainstream media — particularly talkback radio and the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph — actively and vigorously campaigned in support of the police position. They had already labelled Books Not Bombs a "front" for the socialist youth organisation Resistance, and had run sensationalist stories about "protester violence" at rallies organised by BNB.
In the days before the April 2 protest, the media campaign against BNB was stepped up, fuelled by the misleading claim that the protest was now "illegal". (Governments in this country do not have the legal power to make a protest illegal; even marches that are denied permits have the legal right to go ahead, provided that no laws are broken.)
On this occasion, the threat backfired. The rally went ahead, with hundreds of people in attendance. The police, who had mobilised in their hundreds, did not arrest protesters en masse. Instead, the police used their numbers to prevent a street march and used poorly disguised undercover cops to "infiltrate" the crowd to provoke scuffles. The Daily Telegraph had little to run except a comical article on how a reporter had secretly "infiltrated" the Sydney central branch of Resistance.
The nakedness of the government's attack on people's right to protest caught some by surprise (including myself). I was less surprised at the anti-protest campaign run by the media. The hypocrisy of the media's championing "freedom and democracy" in Iraq on one hand, and campaigning against people's right to publicly dissent at home, was hardly out of step with the double standards of the most of the media's coverage of the war as a whole.
In hindsight, it's easy to see that perhaps my surprise was naive, because the preparation for this attack had been going on for some time. Moreover, this was not the first time that the NSW Labor government had attempted to ban a protest.
The previous November, Premier Bob Carr's government had "banned" protests against the World Trade Organisation mini-ministerial meeting and the police launch physical assaults on anti-WTO protesters.
Perhaps what made the attack on the April 2 protest so surprising was that the government chose an anti-war demonstration to flex its muscles. The media and the NSW government have had some success in portraying anti-globalisation protesters as being a violent minority, but the movement against the war was widespread and popular. The third BNB demonstration came less than two months after perhaps 500,000 people had marched on the streets of Sydney to oppose the war on Iraq, yet here was a government attempting to stifle a rally called for exactly the same cause.
If this had been a one off, perhaps we could dismiss it as being less than serious — the NSW Labor Party simply trying to crush a developing movement that threatened it from the left, for example.
What made the attack of more concern that it is part of a pattern. Whereas police have traditionally reserved their heavy handedness for individuals and groups that can be considered politically isolated, in recent times they have broadened their horizons. For example, prior to the war on Iraq, the movement against the federal government's refugee policies was rapidly becoming a mass movement, yet the South Australian police still saw fit to send 200 of their officers in full riot gear to face down protesters at Baxter this Easter.
The broader movement against the war itself has been subject to some of the same treatment. Even the more "respectable" anti-war rallies, such as Palm Sunday, have been shadowed by noticeably large contingents of police, many dressed in the intimidatory "boiler-suit".
At the end of the day, the attack on the Sydney BNB rally in April was defeated by a show of solidarity — there were enough people there to convince the police that to carry out mass arrests would not only look bad on the nightly news, it would have been too difficult given the size of the crowd.
But as the saying goes, we might have won the battle, but not the war. There is no reason to believe that the NSW government has lost any of its hostility towards left-wing protesters simply for having been defeated by the BNB protest.
The NSW Labor government has had some success in demobilising many of its left-liberal critics — there has been a noticeable lack of concern over excessive police presence at demonstrations, and some people — including representatives within the peace movement of the NSW branch of the construction workers' union — were convinced to switch sides and support the attacks on the BNB protesters.
Unless we are able to mount a strong challenge to this agenda, governments such as the Carr's will only be encouraged to attack our rights again.
From Green Left Weekly, May 28, 2003.
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