Protests are a funny one aren’t they? Lately I’ve been to a few that have stuck in my craw. On Saturday it was FuckWalk, a protest against Baillieu’s swear laws, but the protest was also used to promote a broader social agenda. I didn’t originally intend to go, but found myself at Bourke St mall and the protestors just marched up to me.
It was a pretty young crowd, with a a predominance of hippy left-wing fashions – dyed hair, dreadies, piercings, badges, berets, hoodies, sloganed T-shirts. Socialist Alliance and Resistance spoke at the rally and SA had a large banner right at the front – it seemed like they had organised it.
As I arrived, one of the speakers was yelling ‘Unfuck Victoria!’ and getting the crowd to repeat it after him. They obliged. I stood on a bench to get a better view of the speakers.
‘You’d think they would have thought a bit harder about what they were going to say!’ a girl behind me commented.
I turned around. ‘Yeah, Unfuck Victoria?’
She laughed. ‘Sounds like they’re trying to give back its virginity or something!’ Then she offered me some of her popcorn.
‘Since when was all these Nazi views imposed on us as a country?’ asked the last speaker, a burly guy in a black shirt with an Aboriginal flag on it. ‘Fuck being a conformist – fight now!’ He compared our gathering to the Arab Spring. ‘All over the world, people are getting together and telling the government to get fucked! Well fuck you! We are not fucking prisoners!
Finally he invited people to come to a meeting at Melbourne Uni (the Economic and Social Outlook conference), where Abbott, Ferguson, Swan and other politicians would ‘talk about how they control you and the resources boom.’ ‘Come along and tell them to get FUCKED!’ he shouted in a sandpaper voice. It was quite brutal on my hangovered ears.
It’s one thing to rev people up, but this level of aggression doesn’t seem like the best tactic to get people involved.
I’m also not sure why the swear-law issue needed to be broader to encompass a whole socialist agenda, and the whole issue branded as Socialist Alternative. What’s so so socialist about freedom of speech? It reminded me of the Wikileaks protest, where there was a sea of red Socialist flags and a crackly loudspeaker which denounced neo-liberalism and the Northern Territory intervention. Some of my friends who rocked up to that protest in full solidarity with the cause, but left quickly because they felt the issue had been hijacked by the ultra-left.
The thing with Socialist Alliance is, whether or not you agree with all of their views, at least they’re out there and doing something about issues they care about. If people feel so strongly about Socialist Alliance dominating protests, they just need to organise other types of people to show up, and then the composition of the crowd would become more diverse.
Finnish Whaler 