So some American rocks up and Sydney stops. There were more police than civilians in some parts of Sydney last night (Circular Quay), public transport is stopped, private vehicles are allowed in, and it must have cost an absolute fortune in overtime.
All for some American power-behind-the-throne. If he’s going to be the key string-puller, he should at least stay invisible so we don’t need to concern ourselves with his (admittedly unwelcome) presence.
They were blocking all useful traffic (but letting private cars through? Bizarre…), and claimed to have been using sniffer dogs on the cars they were letting through. Yeah, right. I didn’t see a single dog last night. I was wearing a backpack the whole evening. OH, LOOK, THERE GOES A TERRORIST!
No-one stopped me…
Then, after having blocked off half of the northern CBD, police stop a protest from going ahead on the grounds that it’s going to cause traffic chaos. Like that was a consideration a few nights back.
And, whilst I’m on this little soapbox, what on earth is a “lawful protest” about? “Oh, here you go, protest in a nice little out –of-the-way place where no-one can see you, much less be seen by the person you’re protesting about/to. Just… stay away from the Rocks and everything’ll be okay.”
Because I’ve seen so many rabid gun-toting uni-students trying to blow up the US puppetmaster. Nevermind that Australia has far-more-sane gun-control legislation than the US does… John Howard isn’t the centre of all this rubbish when he travels to the US, even, and yet over here we’ve got to keep unarmed protestors a good couple of kilometers from their target in case they pull out… well, something.
Meanwhile, I don’t know whether I should be satisfied or frustrated that I was wearing a conspicuous black backpack all evening around various protest sites and didn’t get glanced at once.
Go home, Cheney. You’ve wasted enough of Sydney’s time and resources already.
Did you have as much fun as I did trying to get home? It took me one and a half hours. ONE AND A HALF HOURS! Every good exit point from the city heading south was blocked off by the police. Of course, there were no road closures if one wanted to head north… *rolls eyes*
2 of my friends went to that protest. they saw the people got arrested…would’ve been scary i think. but i think they just went to do something ‘political’. yknow.
Mm… there were only 3 arrests, it wasn’t really a big protest. Pretty bad choice of a place to do something ‘political’… it was probably the lowest-impact (high-press-coverage) activism we’re likely to see this year! But yeah… cops on horses = designed to intimidate. Stupid really.
Cops are designed to intimidate. It’s (part of) their job. You can’t be a cop very well when people don’t fear you at least a little. Bearing that in mind, the general public/a law abiding pre-approved protest are not supposed to be deliberately intimidated. I don’t know why it was cancelled or moved or whatever, but the day before they’d been approved the use of George St and there was advertising telling people the CBD would be chaos because of it. In conclusion, the police had already approved that so the reason they cancelled it was not due to traffic. I’d like to see a real riot in Sydney, it would be amusing to watch cops be unable to deal with a crowd that actually wants to cause them serious physical harm and is able to do so. Rant rant rant. Who was at the protest (Ellen)?