Re: AUT: parliament house

[Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 28/11/2004 10:48 PM, "David McInerney" <borderlands@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hi Thiago
> I believe the action in Canberra was in 1996, when the Howard
> government put in its first budget.
> I was there in the gift shop - maybe you were next to me!
> Perhaps we should ASIO for the photos.
> ASIO, if you are reading this, please send the photos to us as jpegs ;)
> As I remember it though, it was the CFMEU who broke the doors in, the
> same people who were supporting Howard at the last election because
> Latham did not support their bosses' plans to send the whole Tasmanian
> rainforest to the chipper to make dunny rolls and ballot papers and
> whatnot.
> I don't remember the Class War people, maybe you were standing in a
> different area to me.  I remember that one of the ISO (Cliffite)
> leaders (in stereotypical brown corduroy) cut his finger and was filmed
> by television crews being patched up by the ambos, effectively
> trivialising the police violence.  I also remember the television
> footage of Howard walking through the 'rubble' of the gift shop, and
> the way it was shot to evoke the wartime footage of Churchill walking
> in the rubble during the Blitz.  As I remember it, the gift shop looked
> a lot more orderly when I was in it.  I think the feds knocked the
> crappy gumnut statues on the floor and tread on them for insurance and
> propaganda purposes.  The media made out that it was 'looted' -fat
> chance!  The shop was full of crap.  Just goes to show the lengths that
> the media here will go to.
> Were you a student at ANU?
> David

I was jammed against the door - didn't get into the building. Yes Howard as
Churchill - in  a wrecked giftshop. I heard that the Aboriginal folks who
stormed in had put a lid on the looting. It was amazing how close we
actually came to occupying Parliament House - and being killed, probably. It
would have been an event without parallel in first world democracies.

I think that that action was very important. Between that and the wharfies,
industrial resistance was crushed, but I'd put the weight of history more on
the earlier event because there people tried to go on the offensive.  After
that everything took on a pathologically defensive character. The backlash
to the storming of Parliament house led to the utter destruction of the
union left ­ during the S11 preparations that all we heard from them: it'll
be like 96 again, blah, blah, blah. Nothing like sitting in a picket four
years later with Fabian scum strolling by warning us not to be violent like
in blah blah blah.... while the police absolutely caned us. I STILL hear it
from union types that the CFMEU had been infiltrated by, you know, people
who cared.

There was a scene at that rally when Kim Beazley  came out to tell everyone
how much the Labor party was working hard, etc... He was just booed. This
guy showed up with a helmet taken form a cop, there were massive cheers.
That mood would evaporate utterly within 24 hours. "Unaustralian" made its
first public appearance in the front page of the Sydney Daily Telegraph the
next day, relayed from Howard, channeling McCarthy. It was pretty obvious
what was going to happen next, once this third hand nazi slander started to
do the rounds. But Howard could not even make up his own slander; he had to
be tutored by the yanks even in that. It's very embarrassing.

There were precisely three class war people there, if I recall it right.
Sorry. I suppose that was important information.

1995 was the ANU occupation. Them were the days...



Thiago








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