WHY DO THE OCCUPIERS SO PREOCCUPY OUR MASTERS?

Ray Cassin October 24, 2011
THE City Square has mostly been noted as one of Melbourne's less successful public spaces. Crowds just don't throng there as they do to Federation Square or Bourke Street Mall. Then briefly, for a week, that all changed. About 100 protesters, a diminutive Melbourne outcrop of the ''Occupy'' protests that began in New York last month and have since mushroomed across the world, set up camp in the square. Some Melburnians actually chose to enter their city's notoriously dud space, and did so without the lure of free entertainment or an oversized, illuminated Christmas tree. The campers came to make a point. And other people came to hear it, or at least to gawk at them. No one was assaulted or obstructed in the course of their daily business. In truth, Occupy Melbourne didn't occupy very much, except public space. It didn't block Swanston Street or Collins Street. Nor did it threaten anyone, though some cafe and bar owners complained that their business had suffered because of the new presence in the square. This complaint, if true, suggests that Melbourne's vaunted cafe culture is not quite the pinnacle of urban sophistication it is sometimes claimed to be. Elsewhere in the world, watching the local street politics unfold is just one thing you might do while lingering over an espresso. But here, apparently, people who hawk short blacks and flat whites can't imagine that a politicised street carnival on their doorstep might be a business opportunity, with happy sippers to be found at least among the gawkers, if not the campers. So the campers antagonised local business, though not the kind of business they had in mind. Occupy Melbourne, like its international counterparts, is directed against corporate greed and the increasing disparities of wealth that have resulted from economic deregulation. The rage of the ''Occupiers'' - though ''rage'' seems like crazy hyperbole when applied to the less-than-strident lot who colonised our square - is a reflection of the fact that since the global financial crisis of 2008 none of the perpetrators has been held to account, though the livelihoods of ordinary people have become ever more precarious, or disappeared entirely. That, grossly oversimplified, was the point of the ''Occupation''. And if you believe the square's whiney cafe proprietors and Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, a week was more than enough time in which to make it. ''They've made their point and should move on'' was the message, and last Friday Victoria Police heeded it. The campers were evicted by police behind riot shields - the public order response team, to use the official euphemism - with mounted colleagues and the dog squad assisting. There were some bleeding heads, and drifts of pepper spray, without which no riot is complete these days. Except that it wasn't a riot, was it? It was a group of people sitting around and talking. Or it was until Doyle decided that a week is time enough to make a point. One imagines him in Colonel Kilgore mode as the riot police moved in: ''I love the smell of pepper spray in the morning … smelled like victory.'' Occupy Melbourne is not, of course, unique among the world's Occupations in having attracted the ire of civic authorities or in having been subjected to what Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana described as ''minimum force''. The early days of Occupy Wall Street were a rash of clashes between police and protesters. And yesterday, Occupy Sydney was pushed out of Martin Place, where the harbour city's campers had been doing their sitting and talking. Whether it was necessary to use force to move them on, however, is another question. People whose idea of changing the world begins with sitting around and talking are usually open to negotiations about voluntary relocation. Occupy Melbourne, for example, intends to pitch a new camp at the weekend, in Treasury Gardens. No baristas and bartenders to annoy there, and they can chat with the public servants over a sandwich at lunchtime. It's where the Occupiers might have been willing to go earlier, if they had been asked. So the Occupiers will decamp, and, provided the state government and the city council can get past their fear of revolution or whatever it was that brought about last week's bizarre overreaction, there will be no further wielding of minimum force. After all, we still believe in free speech and assembly, don't we? Well, we certainly think we do. But when I hear people who ought to know better insisting that a week is long enough to make a point, I wonder how deeply rooted our belief in these basic liberal freedoms really is. Occupy Wall Street and other Occupations around the world may have had some unsolicited intimate moments with their local constabularies, but they continue. And they continue simply because the Occupiers want to keep Occupying. In most of the countries with which we like to compare ourselves it is accepted that protest movements will either become absorbed into the political mainstream, and thereby transform it, or will gradually wither. That is the dynamic of democracy. Here, however, the notion of democratic debate has become so impoverished that people who have been sitting and talking for a week can be told their time is up.
Ray Cassin is a senior writer.
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This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/why-do-the-occupiers-so-preoccupy-our-masters-20111023-1meem.html