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‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’.
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all’.[1]
Alice passed through the looking glass without being able to identify exactly how it happened. One moment she was in the drawing room giving a stern lecture to her kitten. The next, she had passed through the mirror, leaving the everyday world and entering a world governed by strange rules. Once she had conversed with a garden of Live Flowers and negotiated the peculiar reversals of the Red Queen’s logic, encountering Humpty Dumpty scarcely surprised her.
s11 made me feel a little like Alice. Years of activism have left me unsurprised when activists are trivialised and misrepresented. However, perhaps because I have to negotiate a path through this world, just as Alice needed to navigate the Looking Glass world, I continue to engage with public representations of protest, just as Alice continued to chat with Humpty Dumpty despite their ever more bizarre conversation.
In the days before s11, Melbourne was awash with activists and talk of s11. Helping people with prams out of trams, we were asked why the protest was happening and why we wanted to be there. We also experienced suspicious looks: and no wonder. It was difficult to resist the sense that the public were being prepared to loathe and fear ‘the protesters’ and to accept any violent response to s11 as necessary and deserved. ‘The protesters’ were described as ‘oppressive minorities’,[2] ‘a test for democracy’ and compared to ‘Burma’s military hoods’.[3] s11 was even subjected to monitoring for its capacity to disrupt the Olympics.[4] From an activist perspective, it seemed more likely that s11 might form a venue for the trial of tactics and equipment generated to deal with the terrorist threat to the Olympics about which we’d heard so much.
Potential protesters were getting a complementary message about the reception we could expect. ‘[A]ntiquated cells’ were being reopened to house arrestees.[5] Police leave was cancelled, providing an additional 2500 police ‘to boost numbers for the event’.[6] Meanwhile, legislation designed to modernise the law for calling in the Defence Force to aid civil authorities was before Commonwealth parliament. Civil libertarians raised concerns about its potential use against protest and its contemplation of lethal force.
The Prime Minister claimed ‘the proposed laws were aimed at terrorists, not domestic protesters’, and that the Opposition’s support for the Bill showed ‘it can’t be all that harmful’.[7] However, s11 provided an example of failure to distinguish between terrorism and public protest. Police had ‘conducted anti-terrorist training exercises and consulted the military on tactics’ in preparation for s11.[8] One reporter, discussing pre-protest coverage, claimed that ‘s11 aroused the kind of feelings we normally reserve for outfits like the PLO …’[9]
The Army has also failed to differentiate protest and terrorism. Its Manual of Land Warfare, leaked in 1993, groups together civil disobedience and terrorism, and discusses use of lethal force against unarmed, nonviolent protesters.[10] The last time the Army was called in aid to the civil power was 1989: during a protest at Nurrungar.[11]
I approached the spectacle of s11 with trepidation. It was spectacular! Friendly lawyers, massive puppets and first aiders wandered about. The bicycle couriers were as likely to be wearing dozens of small fluffy toys as to be wearing lycra shorts. There was dancing in the streets not traffic. People with megaphones were not selling products but rapping about freedom or delivering critiques of global capitalism. Strangers were talking to each other.
In the next day’s newspapers, there was little sign of the humour and co-operation that marked s11. The Herald Sun showed police reaching into a crowd of seated protesters, many with their backs turned to the police. Page three: police riding horses into a crowd of seated people. Page four: three police kneeling on a protester, and another being led away by an ambulance officer, bleeding from head and nose. When the headlines read ‘Shameful’ and ‘Mob rule causes chaos’ and the Prime Minister was quoted referring to ‘mad senseless violence’[12] I assumed police conduct was being referred to. Wrong. I am through the Looking Glass now. I’m to understand that the protesters were the violent ones.
Tuesday, s12, begins with a baton charge. The Australian shows police running over a group of protesters sitting on the ground. Protesters are ducking their heads as boots and batons pass over or land on them. By afternoon 12 blockaders have been hospitalised and more than 150 injured.[13]
During 12 September, the s11 Legal Support Group complained to the Ombudsman about police conduct including:
• use of batons in a manner found by the Ombudsman to have been ‘dangerous and highly inappropriate’ during the Richmond Secondary College protest;
• dangerous use of horses in crowd contexts;
• vehicles being driven at speed to disperse protesters;
• failure to observe procedural requirements for arrest;
• failure of the vast majority of police to wear identification, despite mandatory requirements in Police Operating Procedures.[14]
Discussions with police had already failed to halt these actions, or to make police identification reappear.
That evening, I witnessed another baton charge. All but four blockades had been abandoned. Casino staff were leaving unimpeded. Protester numbers at the exit chosen for the baton charge had been as low as 50 in the hour beforehand. When it took place, there were under 100 people blocking the entrance, and approximately 150 more nearby. Without warning, around 200 police in full face helmets sprinted from the Casino where they had been out of view of blockaders. They were followed by at least 250–300 uniformed police.
I stood two metres away as the first officer mounted the barricade, using his baton from above on the heads of everyone he could reach. Others forced their way through the crowd using batons, fists and feet, trapping people inside their lines. Mounted police formed a cordon between the police wedge and those of us not trapped within it. Activists stumbled out, many with blood pouring down their faces, wearing the stunned look of shock and head injury. Protesters struggled to escape, crawling between the legs of police and horses. Thirty people were subsequently hospitalised,[15] representing a fraction of those injured.
When the shock of human horror subsides, what can be said about an event like this?
There was nothing out of control about the baton charges. Rather, they were a calculated unleashing of aggression. This strategy required premeditation, weapons and armour. It also required high level approval, reportedly provided by Premier Steve Bracks after the success of Monday’s blockade.[16] So much for the Prime Minister’s suggestion that the agreement of the ALP should imply harmlessness.
Prior to s11, Chief Police Commissioner Neil Comrie had been quoted as saying that ‘police respected the right to protest.’
‘All I ask is that the demonstrations are peaceful and nonviolent and that protesters also respect the right of people to go about their lawful business.’ Mr Comrie said police would not tolerate any violence, and said they were trained to avoid any unnecessary confrontations.[17]
In case there was any doubt, we are to understand that police will not tolerate violence from citizens. At s11 the police were the primary source of violence. Police themselves were usually reported injured in contexts where their actions had produced panicked crowd movement. Much of the discussion of protester violence depended on an acceptance that blockading was a form of violence[18] which ‘forced’ police to respond by inflicting injury.[19]
Defending the police brutality of s12, the Police Commissioner implied a connection between the evening baton charge and ‘“disgusting” acts of violence by protesters, some of whom had spat and poured urine on police, and assaulted members of the public trying to get to work’.[20] He failed to mention that there was no such conduct occurring at the time of the baton charge. To imply that inflicting head injuries could be a justifiable or reasonable response to spitting, or that any random group of 250 protesters could expect to take a beating for the assaults alleged seems to me highly offensive.
Despite the presence of numerous media and police cameras, I have seen no pictures of officers being ‘showered with urine, screws, nuts and bolts and [having] missiles fired at them’.[21] I cannot believe that the Herald Sun would have refused to print such a picture had it been available. Surely the bulk of the crowd, who chanted ‘nonviolent protest!’ at any hint of aggressive talk from fellow protesters would have discussed and condemned any such action, had they witnessed it.
If police have been trained to avoid unnecessary confrontation, we might ask why paramilitary officers and tactics were deployed to deal with an unarmed crowd. We might ask why low conflict alternatives such as having delegates leave through entrances that were not blockaded or creating a police cordon at a period of low protester numbers were not chosen. We might ask why no warnings were given, to allow protesters to leave voluntarily. We might question why violence was used against people who were not resisting police directions. We surely should ask why violence was used without warning in preference to arresting any activist who was violating the law.
If there was a threat to the public peace at s11, it was the police. In spite of their calls for extra numbers and extra armour,[22] they were the ones who used violence when alternatives were available, against people with no weapons and no helmets. s11 demonstrated the potential ugly results of ‘paramilitary discipline’: systematic, large scale violence. Head and spinal injuries of the kind inflicted at s11 could well have resulted in death. Fortuitously, they did not.
If there was a threat to the rule of law at s11 it was the police. The lawfulness of their actions will be challenged in court as well as through police complaints. The Ombudsman will also be inquiring into police conduct at s11.[23] The process of arrest, charge and trial exists to deal with those who violate the law. Inflicting injury rather than using legal mechanisms exceeds the role of the police in a democracy.
To have this process described by the Premier as acting ‘appropriately right through’ and warranting a congratulatory barbecue is a reversal worthy of the Red Queen. Bracks’ descriptions of activists as ‘un-Australian’ ‘fascists’ who ‘deserve everything they got’[24] join a long list of slurs on ‘some of the most loathsome protesters ever to test a decent, democratic society’.[25]
And so we come to the end of my tale. Unfortunately, there is no sign that I am about to wake up, as Alice did. There is no sign I will re-enter the drawing-room and find the public discussion of s11 was all a bad dream. Humpty Dumpty still seems to be in charge of the conversation, and it’s clear that no protester is Master. It’s hardly a comfort to consider the possibility that if the policing and reporting of s11 seem like a bad dream to me, apparently we unAustralians inhabit the Masters’ nightmares.
Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all … You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course — but then I was part of his dream, too! … Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! … But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn’t heard the question.
Which do you think it was?[26]
References
[1] Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, 1984 [1865, 1872], p.171.
[2] Dabkowski, S., and Das, S., ‘Forum Organisers Attack Protesters’, Age, 8 September 2000, p.6.
[3] Colebatch, T., ‘Must it come to this?’, Age, 6 September 2000, p.23.
[4] Chulov, M., ‘Anti-globalism Games Threat’, Weekend Australian, 19-20 August 2000, p.8.
[5] Silvester, J., ‘“Inhumane” Cells Could Hold Child Protesters’, Age, 26 August 2000,
< <http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000827/A29559-2000Aug26.html> >.
[6] Douez, S., ‘All Police On Duty at Big Events’, Age, 17 August 2000,
< <http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000818/A10747-2000Aug17.html> >.
[7] Daley, P., ‘PM Says Troop Law No Threat to States’, Age, 22 August 2000,
< <http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000823/A20931-2000Aug22. html> >.
[8] Douez, ref 6, above.
[9] Elder, J., ‘s11: Not the PLO, Just a Meeting of Democrats Who Want a Say’, Age, 26 August 2000,
< <http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000827/A29525-2000Aug26.html> >.
[10] Toohey, B., ‘Secret Papers Reveal Army’s Crisis Plans’, Sunday Age, 6 June 1993, p.1.
[11] ‘Troops Fly in to Stop Spy Base Protests’, Sunday Telegraph, 1 October 1989.
[12] Anderson, P. and others, ‘Shameful’, Herald Sun, 12 September 2000, p.4.
[13] Staff Reporters, ‘Protesters Up in Arms Over Police “Revenge”’, Australian, 13 September 2000, p.1.
[15] Douez, S. and others, ‘Police Face Violence Probe’, Age, 17 August 2000,
< <http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000914/A63915-2000Sep13. html> >.
[16] Staff Reporters, ref 13, above.
[17] Silvester, J., ‘Police Plea to Protesters’, Age, 9 September 2000, p.5.
[18] Colebatch, T., ref 3, above.
[19] Anderson, P. and Cogdon, K., ‘Mob Rule Causes Chaos’, Herald Sun, 12 September 2000, pp 2-3, 3.
[20] Douez, S. and others, ref 15, above.
[21] Mitchell, B. and Stevens, M., ‘Wars of the World’, Weekend Australian: Focus, 16-17 September 2000, p.1.
[22] Douez, S., ‘Police in Push for Extra Armor’, Age, 21 August 2000,
< <http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000822/A18861-2000Aug21. html> >.
[23] Douez, S., ref 15, above.
[24] Douez, S. and others, ref 15, above; Schubert, M., ‘Bracks Provokes a Party Over s11’, Australian, 21 September 2000, p.29.
[25] Hamilton, J., ‘A Salute to Our Brave Force’, Herald Sun, 13 September 2000, p.5.
[26] Carroll, L., ref 1, above, p.220.
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