The judge was scathing. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported –
“Passing sentence, Mr B. Riley, SM, said he agreed people had a right to demonstrate.
“But that right is restricted to a proper place, a proper time and proper conditions, and never at the inconvenience of other people.”
Sydney Morning Herald, September 17…
And of course, this is from September 1970, a lifetime ago.
Meanwhile, fifty three years later, as the Anthropocene properly gets going, the South Australian government, run by “Labor” politicians is trying to chill all extra-parliamentary activity, especially if it targets their big donors. These politicans got where they are thanks to decades upon decades of union and community activity, but are busy doing the bidding of the oil and gas sector (they literally said “we’re at your disposal”) because they think the fact that South Australia has enormous amounts of renewable energy capacity (1) is some sort of moral offset, or political cover for being meatpuppets and shills. (To be fair, #NotAllSALabor – see here for a report about internal divisions).
On the whole, I can’t do better than point you to the staggeringly good video by the staggeringly good outfit The Juice Media (give them money, I did).
And on Tuesday, there’s a protest you can attend if you’re in Adelaide.
What is to be done.
In the short term: get hold of a copy of Animal Farm by George Orwell [here’s a free version thanks to Project Gutenberg] and (re)read it, thinking about how the perversion of language and the hollowing out of democratic structures applies to the here and now.
Get hold of a copy of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and read it. It is prescient about how states will do the bidding of the fossil fuel sector. And there is a huge amount of other wisdom in there. Fill your boots.
In the medium term: understand that protest is VITAL, but insufficient. If we are to survive what is coming – and to have a shot at making what is coming less horrendous – we need protest but we ALSO everything else that used to be a normal-ish part of the democratic ecosystem. We need to have effective, sustained social movement organisations that can do more than turn up with clever placards every so often, or do performative NVDA. We need cross-class, cross-generation etc coalitions. That means getting out of the smugosphere, the emotacycles, giving up the short-term benefits of (usually appallingly bad) meetings and film showings that are all about the sage on the stage, all about sharing the hopium pipe. Looking at YOU, Greens: do better.
In the long term: Oh Gaia, I do not know. How long is the long-term anymore? Asking for a friend.
Footnotes
(1) SA’s renewable capacity is where it is because a previous Premier, Mike Rann, saw an opportunity in the Federal renewables ‘support’ system to make SA attractive, and – fair play – took it. It was visionary, or at least clever, but only in the sense of exploiting John Howard’s general horribleness. It’s nothing intrinsic to SA Labor – they are not very green.
marchudson.net 
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