For the last week or so, we've been prisoners in our own city. Or at least, we've been made to feel that way. Here's a nice snap I tookof what it looked like in one of the busiest tourist areas in the city on Friday (and it's with a proper camera this time):
Various leaders have been in town, and in order to "protect" them, AU$170 million has been spent on security. This has involved that awful fence (7 kilometres in total)and thousands of police officers being brought into the city to do partrols.
Even though the system was shown to be clearly quite useless in preventing terrorists (as the Chaser boys managed to prove so spectacularly), we all knew that the big reason is to keep protesters away, because they're all violent, or so the government and police have been telling us. For the last few weeks, it seems as though the police and government have been using every opportunity to use the words "protesters" and "violent" together as many times as possible.
Yet the protesters were fairly well-behaved. Only17 protesters were arrested at the big march yesterday. Two of them were because the protesters were naked. A few others because of offensive language.
But the news clips of the protest show just who really was violent (if the links work properly). Such as this where the police threw a photographer onto the ground. Notably, the officer who did so didn't seem to be wearing his badge - an increasingly common practice here for police officers who don't want to be identified for assaulting members of the public. Or this one (CAUTION: Contains blood) where the police appeared to be excessively violent on the guy they were arresting, and were very keen to stop the media from getting images of what was going on, being aggressive to the people from the media as well.
Perhaps if the government had a little faith in us, they wouldn't need to put these ridiculous measures in place. And perhaps if the government would listen to the people, there wouldn't be any protests to turn violent. Hopefully they're never going to try this sort of operation again, or else I may just go out and protest about it (without being violent).
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Basically, if I started to rant it would all be a bunch of crap anyway, so I won't bother.
As for civil rights, what civil rights? We're one of the few Western democracies (although I really wonder) without a bill of rights, and the current government (which won't last until the end of this year) doesn't like the idea of introducing one. There are rights implied in the constitution (only very basic, such as free speech in parliament), but for historical reasons nobody thought to include any explicit rights because the constitution was really only supposed to join the colonies into a federation and give a layout of how the country was to be structured.
To put it simply, it's our right to do anything that's not illegal. And what's illegal can change at the whim of any politician in power.
Honestly, I think we do need one. Legal concepts like the presumption of innocence and even free speech have been thrown out the window as of late as part of the "war on terror".
And for a bit of fun, here's the video of the guys sneaking Osama into the area, proving once and for all that we wasted millions of dollars.
That right there is messed up. Why hasn't the U.N. questioned your government about this? Oh, I know why... 'Cause you all are on the 'good' side. (Allies with U.S.) Whatever.
I hate politics with a passion, but I think I have mentioned that before.
BTW: Hi! I'm not dead.
Question: What were people protesting (besides the lack of protected civil rights?)
I think our constitution needs a fairly big overhaul, to be honest. It's a shame we can hardly even get people to approve of the most minor changes (also largely the fault of the constitution because of how the referendum votes work).
DarkNinja1994