Transcript

Occupy Melbourne: How We Do It and What Has Been Achieved: Jessica Morrison at TEDxUniMelb

um so i also want to acknowledge that we stand today on aboriginal land um that their sovereignty was never seeded and with every occupy meeting thank you with every occupy melbourne event we started with acknowledging um that there has been an occupation of this land um that needs to be the first business that we deal with as australians um for me occupy melbourne has been a dive into a wild ocean sometimes i've been feel like i've been sucked out into a rip other times i've chosen to dive in i certainly haven't been part of every wild storm or been the most rigorous swimmer but somehow occupy melbourne keeps drawing me back i was i was in very intrigued when occupy melbourne was called um i was curious that what i knew as nick said was a hastily drawn strategy led by none of the usual suspects so what i saw on that first day as the pictures showed before um deeply inspired me because what i saw was people seeking to live the change that they wanted to be in the world so occupy melbourne's taken many forms in the last six months so there was one amazing week at city square followed by the brutal eviction that we saw then there was roving evictions in melbourne public parks often without any kind of ability to have tents at all inspiring tenacity by many people who slept out in the rain under taps um and also in a church i'm so there i just wanted to give you a bit of a sense the forms that occupy melbourne has taken and this year has seen the birth of occupy fridays where the occupy movement has returned back to city square and uses fridays to do all of what occupy melbourne seeks to do to share food to share goods to vigorously debate ideas and to seek to build community um i'm a little bit different to nick in that i probably identify as a professional protester or maybe a rabid resistor or something that i have been involved in lots of different movements around melbourne for the last decade or so and for me occupying melbourne shares some similarities to lots of those experiences but it is also distinctly different firstly i think it is different because it's not focused on one issue unlike egypt we're not focused on one dictator to overthrow which i think is both a strength and a weakness but it is based on a passionate conviction that this whole system needs overthrowing the conviction isn't unique many of us think the whole system needs overthrowing but i think its expression is rather than protest and resist the system or to go and build an alternative occupy melbourne seeks to do both together so it seeks to publicly live the alternative while also forcefully articulating the case of why this is so in many ways for me occupy melbourne was a festival of ideas and not just of ideas but of actions so we had anarchists and socialists zeitgeisters people who identified as apolitical or non-political um all working together on this broad agenda and this has created many opportunities for people to learn from each other both formally and informally this diversity certainly has its tension the debates about whether occupy melbourne should be a place of buying and selling was actually about a tussle of ideas about and some differences between different groups operating when we had a passionate debate about whether we would march back to treasury gardens or walk to treasury gardens it wasn't about semantics it was about people passionately wanting to be involved in the sort of change they wanted to be involved in so what i wanted to spend my minutes talking about is what i think occupy melbourne has achieved and i think it has achieved many things so perhaps on the pollyanna to mix cynic this evening so the first thing i think occupy melbourne has powerfully achieved is making the the realization and the and the statement that the process is the point occupy movements around the world have been drawn not just because of the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few but the concentration of power in the hands of the few and the occupy movements all around the world and occupy melbourne itself was passionate to say we can create something different and i think it has we have had hours and hours of debates about how our general assembly should run to our consensus-based decision-making forums and this shows to me that people are deeply passionate to make sure that we don't replicate the power dynamics that sit in the rest of our society i'm really aware that i'm i'm the one five people that are on stage and i happen to be the only woman and this also is part of what occupy melbourne seeks to talk about why is it that we hear from men more than women why is it that we hear from privileged people more more than less privileged people and occupy melbourne i believe has worked very hard to try and get get a whole range of voices heard um to the point where where we've got one of our participants who uses a communication board where you point out the letters he doesn't speak and lots of people have worked really hard to learn a communication board for the first time because they actually care they don't want to just patronisingly smile at the boy in the wheelchair and wish him well they actually want to hear his voice and participate for a while we had um a homeless collective and again this wasn't about patronising this was about identifying a group whose voices often weren't heard um ah great now i've run away from my notes um so thinking about the the general assemblies that one people have queried about whether this direct democracy stuff can work and i remember just after the eviction i was asked to moderate a general assembly the proverbial had hit the fan and i hadn't facilitated a general assembly before but i was asked to take on the role of moderator so that's the person who kind of stands up the front and has a team of people that will work through the crowd and make sure all the voices are being heard so i knew it would be controversial but as i turned up on that day i realized that there were going to be thousands of people there and then there were several national tv cameras and i knew that this moment could spit kind of spell the end of my activist career the possibility of um annoying most of the crowd was way up there and it was a week before the queen went so the media were desperate for a story about how occupy melbourne were going to come and you know wrecked the queen's visit and i'm still not quite sure how it happened certainly it was good will and a whole lot of belief in the process but at the end of something like three hours we had a whole lot of decisions that weren't made by one person or one group but that we'd painstakingly worked through a whole lot of decisions together based on the sort of movement that we we wanted and that to me was one of the high points because everybody wanted that system to break down um in terms of the mass medium we'll come back to kind of the role of the eviction but there was so much stacked against us but people believed in the process people exercise their democratic right both to speak and to shut up that night and somehow we got there um the second thing i think occupy melbourne has been very successful in is the creation of community or maybe called the intensive resistance boot camp occupy melbourne um has given people a sense of belonging but also been a place that people have been able to gather and share ideas and skills and passions so from the practical things such as how to set up a communal kitchen or how to talk to to corporate media and do media releases through to what the difference is between an anarchist and a socialist and in fact all the different flavors of socialist groups and how they how they operate there's been a whole lot of deep learning um just before christmas i was again facilitating a meeting and we we were talking about what we do over christmas um and to me um uh this was one of the most powerful expressions of community because amongst the decision-making process were a number of voices that said there is no one i'd rather spend christmas with and to me this speaks of the depth of kind of the bonds that have been built through occupy melbourne and this has sometimes been a bit of a tension that the community imperatives and what people are looking to get out of in terms of the belonging stuff is often one of the deliberative factors in our political strategic decisions such as what we do over christmas and um and this might be a strength or weakness depending on your own perspective so why is community important well it's been a boot camp so people are better equipped people are better networked and also again it has been a way to put into practice the politics um back thinking again about homeless people um and the way that they've been given both a voice in the movement but also thinking about how different groups of people have been politicized and active so i turned up at an occupy melbourne event there were a whole lot of homeless young people soliciting not money for themselves but petitioned signatures on a petition to support buskers in the city and to me this show that actually occupy melbourne was starting to spring and build up new things i'm not wanting to discount the messiness at occupy melbourne there's been many challenges about how the internal workings have been but i think this must be the case for any group that a wants to to um truly listen to a holiday diverse voices that don't often get listened to um and and work together in fairly radical participatory processes so so far i've talked about two things and they've both been about what occupy melbourne has achieved inside the movement we've been able to experiment and practice radical participatory processes that challenges the sort of top-down decision-making and we've created a community that is passionate and much more ready to engage in resistance in the future but i don't think occupy melbourne has just been effective in here while we might not have had a revolution that's overthrown the whole of the community i think that occupy melbourne has been deeply influential in our communities out there the first thing which nick already alluded to was i think we've changed the discourse i don't know if anybody read the wayne swans piece in the monthly our treasurer but his article was couched in terms of the 99 and the 1 and i think this is relevant because it does it takes the focus off poverty and the poor people who are marginalized and actually puts the focus on the top end of town and asks what they're doing that's problematic for our society not our dog bludgers but our tax pledges um and you know gina reinhart and her kind of creative family probably would have made it in the media anyway um but occupy um movements and occupy melbourne has given it a discourse the second thing i think that occupy melbourne has achieved out there is that we have more resistance in melbourne because of occupy melbourne as well as experimenting with creative ways of resistance and i think this has at least been an irritant to the one percent and putting them on notice that business as usual will be harder there's many regular protest activities that have met much swelled numbers um because of occupy melbourne and it's also sought to be creative about the way that it does resistant so the city of melbourne had an intense crackdown about how tents were being used in public parks and suddenly we had the birth of tent monsters and people that were running around public parks dodging the the enforcement officers wearing tents and i had a ball along with hundreds of others who dressed up in tents in the week before christmas and danced our way down burke street which was fantastic occupy melbourne has also used what we have called mic checking to intervene in a variety of um events so mic checking has been adapted from wall street's human microphone and it basically involves mic check that i say something and then people repeat it and what this means is a group of people who might normally be silenced so that's mic checking a little bit cultish but it actually does in my view um create spaces for people i was involved in a session um where we might check the drone forum so um one a publicly funded university one of our key universities not this one was hosting a forum on civilian use of drone technology and talked about all the wonderful possibilities um it just happened that lots of the speakers at the forum also were involved in the us military um or arms manufacturing companies so many of us who've been following and resisting the war in afghanistan were deeply concerned about this because we've watched the horror that drone technology has been with these unmanned aerial vehicles that are flying over afghanistan as we speak and northern pakistan and dropping bombs on kids it's very hard to tell from a computer terminal in texas who you're bombing in afghanistan so we went along and mike checked the forum a bit a bit like that except i wasn't the speaker that was supposed to be mic checking um so what happened is people just stand up in the audience and have their say and it's happened also um in the city of melbourne events um what at this event um at the university about drones um i was sitting at the front and as would as we finished our mic check and sat down to take a breath the the military brass was saying well i guess this is free speech and i leaned over and i said no this isn't free speech this is about people wanting to rise up and interfere in the parts of our society that we find deeply repugnant we don't want to sit down and just let things happen and that takes me to the third thing that i think occupy melbourne has done and i think it has actually provided the seeds of a threat to business as usual and the main reason i say that is because as you viewed the footage of the eviction of occupy melbourne in city square by many accounts was the most brutal police behaviour towards protesters that people have ever seen and this is relevant because as lots of non-violent theorists tell us people can protest all they like we can write letters and we can have our street marches and we can do all sorts of things that ask for the status quo to be changed it is only when people start to step forward and demand the status quo be changed that that's where you see the state freak out and that's what we had somewhere between um ted value and his new law and order squad and the city of melbourne um lord mayor who's known to be connected with big business somewhere the authorities freaked out they saw occupy melbourne and didn't think that they could let it go on because of what might happen um and to me this shows that that occupy melbourne has got a has shown something that actually threatens that that which is unjust in our society that people aren't going to stand for anymore so as i try and find the last of my notes so in conclusion i believe that occupy melbourne has been very effective we have brought together a highly diverse group of people and experimented with both participatory processes and built a radical community and our creative tactics have impacted not only the discourse around us but put the power and wealth of oppressive forces on notice and i think that's worth diving into the ocean experiment