Occupy Melbourne released the statement below on October 24.
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Occupy Melbourne will today write to the Victorian Ombudsman calling for an investigation into at least 43 documented instances of police violence against peaceful demonstrators, including children, during the morning raid of October 21.
Occupy Melbourne have welcomed Robert Doyle’s concern for public safety and have again called on the Lord Mayor to support a full inquiry into the events of Friday 21 October where riot police were deployed against peaceful demonstrators.
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The Darwin Asylum Seekers Support and Advocacy Network (DASSAN) released the statement below on October 23.
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The Darwin Asylum Seekers Support and Advocacy Network (DASSAN) today called on the federal government to learn from the humanitarian disaster that is the Northern Immigration Detention Centre (NIDC) and abandon its plans to open a new 1500 bed detention centre at Wickham Point, 35 kilometres south-east of Darwin.
Tim reads out our first statement endorsed by the consensus of the General Assembly.
Electronic Intifada (EI) brought together three stories in early October that paint a vivid picture of the need for a cultural boycott of Israel. This certainly is no surprise, given that EI is without a doubt the best source out there on the Palestinian struggle.
Occupations in Sydney and Melbourne have been violently broken up by police in the past few days, but the Occupy Brisbane camp at Post Office Square is going well so far.
Between 80 and 100 people gathered for an open-air Occupy Perth general assembly in Perth on October 22. It began at 11am and finished around 5pm. The main purpose of the assembly was to make plans for establishing a Perth occupation at the end of the Chogm Protest (taking next Friday, October 28) that would last at least throughout the CHOGM summit. There was quite a constructive discussion and a lot of enthusiasm to begin an occupation next weekend. Eleven working groups were established.
Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy
By Lindsay Tanner
Scribe, 2011
232 pages, $32.95 (pb)
Lindsay Tanner, the former finance minister in the federal Labor government, laments in his book, Sideshow, the rotting core of democracy in Australia that plumbed its most dismal depths in the lacklustre, “non-of-the-above” elections of 2010.
The commercial media, he says, have been responsible for dumbing down the quality of political debate and sapping the level of popular political engagement.
There is much in Tanner’s critique that is accurate.
On October 15, about 4000-5000 of protesters in London descended on London's financial sector as part of the “United for Global Change” actions that took place in more than 1000 cities and towns worldwide. Occupy London Stock Exchange is occupying an area in front of St Paul's Cathedral and holding people's assemblies to discuss the goals, demands and direction of the movement.
The sense of joy was palpable in the streets of Gaza on October 18 as hundreds of Palestinian prisoners jailed by Israel returned home. It was a remarkable day in the life of the territory’s 1.6 million Palestinians.
During the past five years Israel has levied a heavy price on Gaza's civilian population for the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by Palestinian resistance fighters. It has been extracted with Israel’s warplanes, tanks, bulldozers and relentless siege.
The overwhelming success of the October 15 “United for Global Change” demonstrations (which took place in more than 1000 cities and towns in about 90 countries) is having powerful positive feedback on the indignados (15-M) movement in Spain.
October 15 was the first time since February 2003, with the huge demonstrations in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, that a call for an international action on a specific date has met with such a response.
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