Re: Palestine march in Christchurch, NZ

["Alan Bradley" <abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Philip Ferguson
> We have about saturated the possibilities of mobilising the left on the
> issue, and there is little point in continuing to walk 60 people up the
> street again.  We need to really get out a lot more and talk to ordinary
> NZers about the issue.  We're starting to build up some good resources, in
> terms of vids, a powerpoint thing on the Iraq sanctions, displays on
> Palestine, and we need to take these out across the city, to local areas
> and starting having stalls and so on at shopping malls, community halls,
> high schools etc.

I find it vaguely alarming that the kind of crowds we can organise in
Toowoomba are larger than those in Christchurch, which has four times the
population.  Toowoomba is notoriously conservative, and we don't have any
particularly energetic or skillful organisers.  Something is clearly wrong
in Christchurch.

Of course, we do have some assets in Toowoomba.  The first is that the local
media is chronically short of actual news!  This means that the left can
actually get good coverage.  In addition, we have a bunch of overlapping
social cliques that provide us with a steady source of "usual suspects",
which means that we can guarantee a minimum size crowd on fairly short
notice.  Our real problem is actually breaking out past these cliques, which
requires exactly the kind of serious organisation we don't have...

Alan Bradley
abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx







~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.