with thanks to Liam

SBS was right: the world is an amazing place
On July last year, former ‘Independents’ faction NUS office-bearer and now journalist Misha Shubert had an article in The Age entitled : Hotel jobs plan for Aborigines in ’showcase’ of first Australians. This is it:

INDIGENOUS Affairs Minister Mal Brough has backed a plan to “showcase” Aborigines to tourists at five-star hotels across Australia.
Tourism training experts yesterday launched a campaign to entice indigenous people from remote communities to jobs in swank establishments such as the Sydney Hilton.
The new recruits would be trained as receptionists, concierges and waiters in a bid to give foreign tourists the chance to meet indigenous people.
Speaking at an indigenous business conference in Sydney yesterday, Mr Brough praised the plan as an opportunity for indigenous Australians to acquire skills and qualifications in tourism and hospitality.
“But it also provides an opportunity for Australia to showcase our first Australians, and that is exactly what tourists come here to see,” he said.
Mr Brough said the recruits would be given prominent roles in major hotels.
Tourism Training Australia chief executive Bill Galvin said the plan would deliver benefits to all involved.
He rejected suggestions the plan was treating indigenous people like museum exhibits.
“Exactly the opposite,” he said. “What will happen is that once these people have introductory skills, they will undertake further training elsewhere around the country at TAFE colleges.”
But former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairwoman Lowitja O’Donoghue rejected the plan as “patronising”.
Labor’s national president, Warren Mundine, who is indigenous, described the push as bizarre.
“If they want to recruit Aboriginal people, there are plenty of them already living in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane,” he said.
Indigenous Business Australia chairman Joseph Elu said the proposal was a way forward.
“We have to educate kids and get them to have the passion to go and seek employment in the wider world,” Mr Elu said.

I’ve previously discussed the IBA role in the current NT intervention.

who will survive, and what will be left of them?
In the same post I discussed the censorship introduced as part of the NT intervention, which has not been subject to much public criticism or attention. On the 14th of this month The Age ran an article entitled ‘SBS is porn problem in NT: Brough’:

Aboriginal women have singled out SBS television as one of the main distributors of pornography in the Northern Territory, says Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough.

As of today, anyone caught in an Aboriginal community in the territory with pornographic DVDs or magazines faces fines of up to $11,000.

People in possession of five or more prohibited items will be automatically deemed traffickers and face up to two years imprisonment.

The bans form part of the second phase of the federal government’s intervention in the NT but critics claim they don’t target problem areas and will be easily undermined.

“Foxtel R rated channel is still by far the major source of porn going into communities and unfortunately the federal government hasn’t turned that stream off yet,” said Robbie Swan from the Eros Foundation, an adult entertainment industry lobby group.

“The minister is aware of it but he’s finding it difficult to deal with it because big business owns that.”

Mr Swan said only 15 to 25 per cent of pornographic material viewed in remote Aboriginal communities came in the form of a DVD or magazine, while the rest was sourced through pay or commercial television.

He said there as “plenty of evidence” to suggest that Foxtel representatives were promoting the channel in Aboriginal communities, despite the government’s intervention.

Mr Brough today said the Attorney-General’s department was looking at ways to restrict cable salesman from selling their products, but he said the concerns of Aboriginal women lay elsewhere.

During a visit to Alice Springs a few weeks ago, Mr Brough said he was surprised to learn that SBS was considered to be a problem.

“The woman actually said to me their greatest concern of television type programs was SBS, believe it or not,” he told ABC Radio today.

“That is just what they have said is a real concern with some of the women, obviously some of the programming on free-to-air programs as well, we just need to be aware of it.”

Mr Swan said the government could legislate against pornographic pay TV in remote communities but “it is about the political will to go that extra step”.

In addition, he said rogue traders were still operating from Darwin post office boxes, selling unclassified and pirated x-rated films.

To stop this, Mr Swan called for a licensing scheme for all adult movie traders in the Northern Territory, similar to the scheme currently operating the ACT.

“This can’t come about soon enough because if we have a licensing scheme in place of course these people can’t open up,” he said.

Asked if he thought the films were making their way to Aboriginal communities, he replied: “At $12 a DVD, yes I think they could, I mean it’s extremely cheap.”

Mr Brough said he was surprised to learn of the problem.

“I was disturbed to learn that you can sell anywhere in the territory, from your home if you register as a business, x-rated material,” he said.

“I just presumed it was like the ACT.”

See also here and here. The Little Children are Sacred report had already talked about SBS as a source of pornography. The report quotes “Service Providers at a Central Australian community” as declaring that: “Porn is available in the community - SBS and Austar are probably the main sources.” In the same section, on ‘pornography’, those cited more often complain of music videos, and of ‘violent movies’ by which they seem to mean mainstream Hollywood films. A ‘Men’s meeting’ in the Katherine Region is quoted as worried that “the kids in the community were constantly using the term, “mother fucker”".

This is the report which fretted that, because of severely overcrowded living conditions, “it is more than likely that children would be exposed to adults, and others, engaging in sexual activities within the household”.

The legal porn industry, like the legal brothel industry, tries to shift the focus to illegal or informal forms of distribution, partly as a defense but mostly, I’d suggest, as a way to attack the competition. Everyone agrees that these black people can’t be trusted with the kind of material other adults in Australia can legally possess, can in fact buy at newsagencies and convenience stores. The legal porn industry, like their brothel-owning equivalents, try to use the state to shut down their competitors, hence the Eros Foundation has been complaining that “80% of the banned (ie Refused Classification) pornography coming onto the communities has been coming from four pirate operators in Darwin who do not sell X rated material but sell illegal material for ridiculously low like $5 per DVD”, and urging the government to put a stop to these bargains. Indeed, they even claim to be outraged that the Federal Government has “ignored the effect of the big commercial R rated film companies who sold Texas Chainsaw Massacre films”. I will fight to the death for people’s ability to see the Hooper/Henkel original, and even the remake had it’s good points. (I haven’t seen the sequel to the remake yet.)

I have a question: does anyone know of good any writing about the last few years of Redfern’s history, of planning and policy, of struggles in relation to development, land speculation, yuppification and efforts at deliberate deconcentration/dispersal of people deemed to be a problem? I’m looking for accounts which might combine economic with political analyses i.e. the capitalist logic of urban ‘development’ and the state’s intent to ‘deal with’ the people of Redfern? (Not that I want to divide the forces involved into private capital and state respectively, as if this simply mirrored some crude version of an economic/political divide…but I think you probably get what I mean.)

I have just started, again, to look at the Northern Territory ‘intervention’, in part because I am writing an article which attempts a more coherent articulation of the project and its context than I have otherwise managed. The notes I intend to put in this blog, then, are not sections of this article-to-be, but fragments of my notes and efforts at clarification in its general direction. Fragments toward an understanding of the bio-economics of intervention.

At the moment I am trying in particular to think about the ways in which Centrelink, and related welfare bodies, will be required to manage people, and, necessarily, to define them. Which leads me to this note.

preliminary note on an aspect of method, if such a thing makes any sense
Though I make exceptions, I generally avoid using the word ‘community’. I don’t like the homogenising communitarianism, the covert racialisation or attempt to ‘positively’ spin an overt racialisation, or the very notion of this already-constituted sociality, the purposes of which usually seem to me intertwined with a certain political economy of representation, and of self-evidence, and as such often implicated in the border policing of a geopolitics of reification.

And I’m a vulgar-enough marxist to note the occlusion or ‘normalisation’ of what used to be called ‘class relations’ - and more specifically, ‘class struggle’ - in most versions of this concept, though these differences are never forgotten, always operative, in the functioning of the state . (Notions of a ‘working class community’ have their own problems, including quite often their own forms of covert racialisation.) More generally, borders are erected not merely in relation to those defined as outside, but in relation to those whose inclusion is subject to policing routinely and simultaneously effaced and enacted within representations of community. And, for the purposes of this initial note, one word will have to stand in as a faint reminder of an enormous and defining problematic: gender. There is no less deliberate intent in the title of the famous pamphlet of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community”, than there is irony in the title of Foucault’s lecture series, “Society must be defended”. (For the former see also this; for the latter, see below.)

In the case of the Federal ‘intervention’ into the Northern Territory, I have sometimes used the word ‘population’ or the term ‘Indigenous population’ - or ‘populations’, depending upon context - which avoids some of these connotations but reproduces many of the same problems.

The issue is more than terminological, and the stakes are especially stark in instances such as this, where the proponents of a new racialisation try to deploy the rhetoric of ‘positive discrimination’ and of concern for ‘communities’ as code-words to mobilise support for new forms of surveillance and control, for experiments in domination. And I say this even though most visible (to me) criticism and resistance has been equally centred on almost identical notions of ‘community’.

This is not a call to stop talking about/with/as Indigenous people, obviously, but rather reflects a desire to attend to this political economy of representation, both of visibility and of the possibility of the representative. Certainly to attend to the socio-institutional conditions of possibility of identity politicians, so that criticism and resistance does not itself act to unreflectively subsume resistance into the representative capacity and agendas of existing or competing ‘leaderships’, or of caring professions, or of professional mediators between ‘communities’, states and capitals, or even of ‘elders’ just for having acquired the position of ‘elders’. And, just as an axiomatic reminder, I don’t want to assume, ever, that I can actually see more than a fragment of mediation of what is happening, of how people are struggling and resisting - in addition because many forms of resistance and survival rely as much on forms of invisibility as on an insistence on appearance, on refusal of the presumed right of inspection as much as organisation of a claim to representation. The question of visibility should always entail the question, visible to whom? (Famously, the ’secret bombing’ of Cambodia wasn’t such a big secret to the very large part of the Cambodian population who suffered its effects.)

And there is the only-apparently other issue, that the impetus for new ways of defining or framing ‘communities’, or ‘populations’ for that matter, is not merely about claims to representation, or about making possible visibility, but about forming the object of discourse and action - creating and recreating, refining, the categories to be acted upon. Just as practicing urban containment at APEC makes possible new experiments in control and pacification in the future, so creating the socio-institutional apparatus of this ‘intervention’, appalling enough by itself, makes possible new experiments in racialised social control in the future. Or, of course, of ‘populations’ defined in at least nominally non-racial terms. And doing so requires the capacity to classify, to determine, and to prepare people for experiments in inescapable classification.

In his 1978 lectures on Security, Territory, Population, Foucault writes of the emergence of the idea of ‘population’ as an object to be acted upon, managed. In particular, he discusses the development of ‘political economy’ as it moved beyond a state-centred discourse concerned with finance and its control (pp. 76-7):

[…] when it became possible not only to introduce population into the field of economic theory, but also into economic practice, when it became possible to introduce into the analysis of wealth this new subject, this new subject-object, with its demographic aspects, but also with the aspect of the specific role of producers and consumers, owners and non-owners, those who create profit and those who take it, when the entry of this subject-object, of population, became possible within the analysis of wealth, with all its disruptive effects in the field of economic reflection and practice, then I think the result was that one ceased analyzing wealth and a new domain of knowledge, political economy, opened up.

Foucault goes on to discuss the “well-known opposition” between Malthus and Marx on ‘population’:

For Malthus, the problem of population basically has to be thought as a bio-economic problem, whereas Marx tried to circumvent the problem and to get rid of the very notion of population, but only to rediscover it in the no longer bio-economic form, but in the specifically historical-political form of class, of class confrontation and class struggle. That is the source of their disagreement: either population or classes, that is where the split occurs, on the basis of an economic thought, a political economic thought, that was only possible as such with the introduction of the subject-population.

I enjoyed this short film, directed by Frank Capra and written by Doctor Seuss as part of the propaganda produced for an earlier conflict.

Very hastily written notes based on conversations with people in Sydney:

People in Sydney for anti-APEC protest are being hassled by cops, very obviously followed by undercovers all around the city, the whole bit.

So the intimidation is continuing, a significant context for the Stop Bush meeting which took place tonight, attended by approximately one hundred people. This meeting debated how to respond to the police successfully applying to the courts to ban the previously declared demonstration route. The Stop Bush people have until this point publicly emphasized that this route was non-negotiable, that this route would be followed even if the state criminalized this walk down the street, as an act of collective, peaceful civil disobedience if necessary. At this meeting, however, representatives of the DSP, Socialist Alternative and the Greens (in the form of Kerry Nettle’s advisor Damien Lawson) argued that Stop Bush should capitulate totally, and declare publicly that protesters will comply with the ban on the previous protest route and only march from the Town Hall to Hyde Park - maybe a few hundred metres - without ever approaching the heavily policed edge of the walled off “declared area”.

By declaring this capitulation in advance, these ‘organisers’ create the situation where no matter how many turn up, police are under no pressure at all to let people march the previous route - at least if they believe that ‘organisers’ can fulfill this de facto promise to have everyone behave like obedient children.

People from ACDC, Solidarity, the Flare in the Void collective, the firefighters union and others argued that any decision to capitulate should be made at Friday’s meeting, which may be substantially larger, with many more protesters likely to turn up at the meeting immediately prior to the event, and with interstate people having arrived in Sydney by then. However, those pushing public, immediate capitulation insisted that this needed to be declared as a fact to the media now, effectively presenting people with a fait accompli and reversing the very public position taken by these very ’spokespeople’.

An amendment was moved by Firies to the effect that this decision can be revisited on Friday, which was eventually included. But of course by then these same DSP/Socialist Alternative/Greens people will be able to argue that. by having stated in public that protesters will do absolutely everything the state wants, defending our ‘right’ to ‘protest’ by agreeing to only do it in the corner while obeying every repressive law now on the books, organisers have now promised to everyone coming that this will be the case, and to do otherwise, with its increased risk of police violence, would be irresponsible.

Damien Lawson of the Greens also pulled out the one about how tonight’s meeting represented the real organisers of the event and so was the democratic will of ‘the movement’, while Friday’s meeting would also include people who weren’t these real organisers, but who instead were only people who happened to be coming to the protest or who were organising with an unofficial status. Thus, he stated, Friday’s meeting actually shouldn’t be able to overturn anything anyway.

By contrast, members of Solidarity argued particularly strongly that Friday’s meeting should decide if there was to be any capitulation, and when it became clear that a decision was going to be pushed through tonight, argued that Stop Bush should publicly reaffirm its commitment to its already announced route.

The vote to publicly declare the change of route - contradicting, as I’ve mentioned, everything the Stop Bush people had said until that point about their commitment to their ‘right to protest’ - was about sixty-forty in favour of public capitulation.

I suppose that it is imaginable that Friday’s meeting may reverse this decision - it was hardly an overwhelming majority as it is - but even should this occur, these groups and their allies control much of the protest infrastructure: the Stop Bush spokesperson Alex Bainbridge is DSP; the Stop Bush ‘tactical group’, whose membership was determined long ago, is made up of these types and is empowered to make decisions between Stop Bush meetings; and they will probably seek to have as many of the marshals as they can. They are very very likely to act as if this demonstration belongs to them as ‘organisers’, not to the people demonstrating. There are certainly groups and many individuals who are not going to automatically follow the commands of these self-proclaimed representatives/leaders, but they are certainly going to use their control of infrastructure both before and during the event to try to impose their will and present people with a fait accompli.

Those who don’t want to passively comply with these rightward-moving tendencies may have some capacity to contest, but this is something that needs to be thought out - the risks of police violence and state repression are real, the currently hegemonic organisers know exactly what they are doing, and things are moving fast. I’m going to Sydney. Some kind of clear goal would be good, something worthwhile which can be judged possible.

In the land of the hysterically blind, the barely-sighted may end up king, but it probably isn’t a great idea to institutionalise this arrangement. And if the barely-sighted are enjoying the situation, you’ve got a problem.

In the land of the severely near-sighted, the authoritarian optometrist may be king, but it is hard to see why anyone should feel grateful about it.

what I did on my holidays
People keep asking me why I’m going to Sydney. Does there have to be a reason for everything? Can’t they just be happy for me?

In response I tend to cycle through a half-dozen justifications but always back-peddle fast at the first sign of an intransigent critical intelligence. So how about: (i) our police forces and intelligence agencies need to experiment with and practice their urban pacification, and so; (ii) I want to watch them do it; (iii) even though the ALP is doing its now-familiar impersonation of whatever the Liberals look like, maybe that protester violence, condemnation of which police, politicians and ‘journalists’ are ready to cut-and-paste, will give the Libs an electoral boost as admirably tough on troublemakers - and maybe I can help; (iv) I really enjoyed representing myself in court so much a couple of months ago that I’m looking for a chance to do it again; (iv) I either want to be a useful idiot for groups trying to recruit, and what a dull thing to say that has become, or I’d like to see those ‘official protest organisers’, who have been acting as if protesters are going to be peaceful on principle, pushed into the position of trying to explain why they couldn’t even get people to be peaceful when it isn’t even a matter of principle, but rather, faced with the prepared, empowered and eager repressive arms of the state, of simple sanity and self-preservation; the Greens want to use the event for their own opportunistic - not to mention slimy and manipulative - purposes, and it would be nice if this hurt them, and if protesters ended up hating them; (vi) the usual reason I have for going to a demonstration - to see who is there and why, try to sense what people think and want, what people might be up for then or in future; (vii) I just want to fit in.

notes, bits thrown out of early drafts

In the very early twenty-first century, settler-colonial states such as South Africa, Israel and Australia, have still found themselves managing the consequences and continuations of their foundations: aggressive invasions, domination and displacements accompanied by discourses of racial purity. OK, religious and/or racial purity.

While settler-colonial states can enact a politics which declares that the indigenous inhabitants do not exist, or are not people, the problem that is survival remains. Indigenous peoples have neither been killed or exiled, nor been dispersed and integrated, out of existence.

These states of necessity face the indigenous question, the problem of the survival of prior inhabitants. Borders can be erected against the foreign and the impure, and libidinally invested with fantasies of domestic purity, but the indigenous, always-already present, generally find that colonial nation-building entails the formation of numerous internal borders, defining areas of concentration and exclusion, citizenship and its others, relations of command and of ownership.

At first glance the centrality of this question for the reproduction of particular states can crudely appear as if it is in a direct and inverse relationship to the asymptotically complete extermination or exile of Indigenous populations, but more particularly it is a problem of survival and development: the survival and persistence of forms of life in contradiction to the system of social relations upon whose reproduction and expansion the state depends, and the development of political cultures and cultural politics which arise from the struggles and resistances of Indigenous peoples.

white identity politicians

Colonisation is warfare, remaking political geography in the extension of empire or the foundation of new states. As the political form of a settler-colony, founded by the British Empire in violent expropriation from those who had lived there for thousands of years, the colonial Australian state was both. This state has always been the continuation of this colonial warfare by political means, which entails the management of its consequences.

This state and public political discourse have long evinced anxieties about territorial borders and the boundaries of citizenship – concepts, of course, which have never been coterminous. From the beginning the Australian Labor Party declared its commitment to a racially pure nation. The Australian constitution explicitly authorises the institutionalisation of racial discrimination, justified at the time of its creation in terms of white racial hegemony. From that time, through the long period of the now officially repudiated White Australia policy, through waves of mass migration and the eventual promulgation of ‘multiculturalism’ as a state-sponsored discourse of national ethnic harmony and a strategy for the state management of difference, through to the creation in Australia of the world’s first privately-owned, user-pays concentration camps known as “immigration detention centres”, these anxieties have been continually mobilized and instrumentalised.

Along with anxieties over the fixing and policing of borders and citizenship comes the inverse anxiety about, and defensive assertions of, the content of this defended ‘Australian-ness’, whether seen as essentially ‘white’ or ‘Anglo’ or as ‘multicultural’ – or, in various senses, as both. The question of ‘Australian identity’ posed as a question of identity or ‘values’, framed without explicit reference to race or ethnicity, but nonetheless national and no less racialised. Indeed, ‘white’ is still seen as outside of ethnicity, as external the multicultural concept of ‘culture’, thus dividing citizens into distinct if de facto categories. Thus, to repeat an example, the Law Council of Australia, in its Senate submission on the Crimes Amendment (Bail and Sentencing) Bill 2006, continually and somewhat comically distinguished between “people of multicultural backgrounds” and others.

In the context of Australia’s “war on terror”, waged against enemies assumed to be Islamic, these fictitious “values” have been redeployed as that which national enemies are said to lack, whether they are in Australian territory or not, whether they are citizens or not. Though the shift to ever-harsher border control regimes pre-dates the officially-declared “war on terror”, the discourses and practices of both have considerable overlap and have intertwined and reshaped Australian politics and society, as both seek new forms of surveillance and control over mobility and deploy narcissistic cliches as the content of their appeals to nationalism.

This new competitive cretinisation of political performance, tied to rhetorics of nation, of borders and security, was evident, for example, in the ongoing exchange between government and opposition in 2006, after the Liberal government declared that all prospective migrants should be required to commit to a list of governmentally-determined “Australian values”. The opposition agreed but extended this principle: all visitors to Australia, every person applying for a visa, would have to “sign off” on the ALP’s designation of “Aussie values”:

• Respect for Australia’s institutions, including its democracy, laws, courts, parliaments, armed forces and police.
• Respect for different religions and cultures, for the equal treatment of women, and for hard work.

So the “equal treatment of women”, absurdly proclaimed as an essential Aussie value, has become available to even the most reactionary anti-feminist as an asserted distinction between civilised and uncivilised people, a distinction then equally absurdly collapsed into categories of friend and enemy. The purpose includes a not very subtle demonstration of hostility to Muslims as they have come to be represented.

The intersection of border control, xenophobia, and the patriotism of “Aussie values” can be most neatly exemplified, perhaps, by the title some wished to give to these new requirements, metonymically derived from the proliferation of Australia’s most banal figure of nationalism: the ‘mateship visa’. This kind of fantasy politics is pure propaganda, in that the proposals were unlikely to meaningfully impact on anything: they simply act to promote the compulsory racism of the moment, presenting a somewhat ridiculous image in which we are invited to see ourselves, if we are the appropriate recipient.

More recent fantasies, such as those about all those scarily violent anti-APEC protesters, are likely to have much more immediate and themselves scary consequences, as protesters are more-or-less condemned for lacking that very “respect for Australia’s institutions, including its democracy, laws, courts, parliaments, armed forces and police.” which the Opposition leader so wanted visa applicants to have to ritually affirm. But if it is a competition, I think neither are as significant or as dreadful as the ‘intervention’ into the lives of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory - in any case all three illustrate overlapping tendencies making up this violent democracy.

This suspicion of the foreigner always includes suspicion of the foreigner within, and a call for people to enjoy the new racisms and identifications with violent authority decorating this barren lunar landscape.

the looming threat
We are in the middle of ‘APEC Leaders Week’ - 2 and 9 September, though the new powers last until 12 September. With all this rubbish about ‘violence’, protesters have more to fear than anybody else, by far.

As APEC approaches, and on a daily, even almost hourly basis, we can choose to be outraged or laugh at the ridiculous things being said and done by a familiar line-up of media, politicians and police. The misrepresentation of dissenting texts as declaring violent intent when they do no such thing, or of groups as planning violence when this, too, is science fiction, seems like it cannot be accidental, a misreading, chance misinterpretation, but in any case helps create a surreal hysteria about anti-APEC protesters. Since Arterial Bloc doesn’t exist anymore, and since they were publicly blamed for events at G20 by people like Marcus (DSP), the group Mutiny is getting the worst of this, like the ISO did in the early nineties, with ridiculous allegations of Mutiny plotting away and distributing how-to guides to hurting people:

police are continuing to investigate reports that a group called ‘Mutiny’ is distributing a training manual for people wanting to take part in violent protests during APEC.

I don’t believe that police are doing any such thing, since if they were, wouldn’t they just talk to people in Mutiny and/or read the publication in question, which isn’t secret and isn’t a manual for death, or a manual for anything at all really? I think they know this is rubbish. Maybe there is somewhere outside of my world where this doesn’t all seem absurd, but, having some sense of the social and political networks being described, that notional ’somewhere’ could only be defined by ignorance. These aren’t paranoid police; they are liars pre-justifying any repression. These aren’t honest journalists; they are collaborators in lies who know this is all nonsense and propaganda but don’t care to make fun of a nude empire whose participants include every major politician, almost all major media outlets, police, intelligence types. It’s the Gulf of Tonkin every day of the week with these people.

In reality the only real possibility of mass violence comes from the possibility that police will use force to try to stop a large crowd of people walking along the street. Or maybe if police force their way into the crowd to try to snatch people who have been declared troublemakers and second-class citizens “on the basis of their alleged involvement in previous political protests”.

One question for the Stop The War Coalition in Sydney, which has spent a great deal of time being ‘official protest organisers’ and declaring how peaceful everyone is going to be, is surely: what to do if the police, with their extraordinary powers to fuck people up, move beyond attempting prior restraint and won’t let people peacefully dawdle down the road at all? Or at least at all in the very large parts of Sydney called the “exclusion zone”, from which the politer conventions of liberal democracy have been exiled, because that zone is for the leaders? If the desire to avoid confrontation - confrontation which would, of course, be attributed to “protester violence” by Liberals/ALP/corporate media/police - requires that people give up on the planned march, what will the Coalition want to do? And how would they seek to bring this about - with their megaphones and marshals and all? by prior decision (which would give the police zero incentive to let people march, if they believed the Coalition’s claim to be able to stop people themselves)? More meetings will be taking place closer to the events, particularly to Saturday’s events. At the last meeting, Greens Parliamentarian Kerry Nettle’s advisor Damien Lawson vigorously argued that marshals should actively police people at the protest so that the cops don’t have to, but not everyone wanted to go down this route. So we will see.

the void
This is a recent statement from the Flare in the Void collective:

The violence of the state all over the world is always justified by supposed threats of violence from others. It is not protestors that are preparing for violence at APEC, but the government and the police force.

“What has been reported in newspapers as protestors preparing for violent demonstrations, on closer look, is actually protestors preparing to defend themselves against the highly publicised planned violence of the police force,” says Sarah Connor of Flare in the Void collective, which put out that conference reader being described as a manual of death, I presume.

“For months, the police and the government have been training for violence, purchasing new weapons to be used against protestors such as the $600,000 water cannon, and making it clear that they will not be holding back any force in dealing with protestors.”

The extreme emergency legislation that has been put into place for the APEC weekend demonstrates that the state will go to severe lengths to buffer protest, such as limiting rights to be released on bail and effectively locking down the city and restricting the rights of people to be on the streets. This is all part of an ongoing campaign of fear and intimidation, to stop people from demonstrating against APEC and the representatives who will be attending.

“The preparations for police violence we are witnessing here in Sydney are very similar to the violence and militarism that is part of the policies of APEC and instigated throughout the world at the hands of APEC’s constituent governments. We are experiencing an ongoing War on Terror and militarisation across the world, particularly in the military occupations of Iraq, the Solomon Islands and throughout the Pacific, and even in our own country with the recent military occupations in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory,” says Sarah.

“The police state we are seeing created for the APEC summit in Sydney is the everyday experience of ordinary people in such places. John Howard has attempted to blame protesters for the lockdown of the city that will soon begin. Yet if we look at who these measures are designed to protect, it is people that are responsible for the deaths of millions in war, and the corporations that profit from the destruction of the planet and the poverty and working conditions of everyone else.”

In protesting APEC we are protesting against this violence, against the economic policies of APEC that perpetuate inequality and suffering in our own country and around the world, against the repression of Indigenous peoples and denial of their autonomy and self-determination. We are protesting as part of the ongoing struggles of our everyday lives

Flare in the Void is an open space for a discussion of these various struggles, for the development of unity and solidarity in our opposition to state violence and the policies of APEC, but also space to discuss developing alternative communities, because resistance goes beyond one protest. Workshops that will be presented cover a range of issues, from struggles in Palestine, to the military occupation of the Northern Territory, to Community Response to Sexual Assault and Activist Trauma Support.

For more information contact Sarah Connor on 0434 585 264

declared areas

A good portion of Sydney is now considered to be a “declared area” under the new laws. Police can erect barricades and fences, and have, and can create ‘checkpoints’ to control entry, can stop and search cars that are inside the area, or which people want to drive inside the declared area, can search people, including search anything they have. and can thus force people to remove coats, jackets, shoes and hats. Police can confiscate any spray paint, chains, handcuffs and lock-on devices, any poles more than one metre long, marbles or ball bearings, smoke devices and flares, flammable or noxious liquids, laser pointers, and jamming devices.

According to the NSW Police Minister: “As long as a person agrees to surrender the item they will be allowed to pass. As I said before, the general rule is that, subject to submitting to a search if required and surrendering any prohibited items held without a special justification, persons will be able to enter declared areas.”

And of course police can forcibly exclude certain people on the basis that they:

pose a serious threat to the safety of persons or property within the area as identified by the NSW Police Force. These persons will be identified by police on the basis of intelligence information. […] Police will have the power to take action to reduce the risk of large-scale public disorder connected with APEC, with persons disobeying a reasonable direction able to be removed from the declared area.

Police can “establish motorcade and clearway routes” and “clear or remove vehicles, people or other things blocking these routes”, while, and this is an important one, “any person who commits an offence of assault police, malicious damage, or throw missile at police within a declared or restricted area will attract a presumption against bail. While the presumption does not normally apply for these offences, it will apply only for APEC such that the maximum time that a person would be in custody would be 14 days.”