Veteran Brisbane activist Gary McLennan spoke at an Occupy Brisbane rally on November 5. An abridged version of his speech is below.
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Friends, I want to thank you sincerely for the invitation to speak to you today. It remains for me a badge of honour, a great honour, that I’ve been asked twice to speak to the Occupy Brisbane movement.
I said when I first spoke to you that your movement represented the best hope for the kind of world that I wanted my grandchildren to grow up in.
I believed that then and I still believe it now.
Since I spoke to you first, you’ve been mocked in the media. You’ve been ridiculed and made fun of in the media, the newspapers and in cyberspace. Politicians from all sides have sneered at you.
And their loyal servants, the Queensland police force, have attacked you, harassed you and broken up your camp.
In the face of all that scorn and all that ridicule it is still very true that you are the best hope for a world ruled by compassion, love and decency.
I want to say a few things about the world we have. We live in a world ruled, and organised and run for the very people who have mocked you.
What is the world they have created like? Look north, south, east, west, anywhere — its not working.
This morning I read about the economic crisis in Greece. I also read of an economic crisis in Cyprus, Italy and Denmark. The whole of Europe trembling on the brink of economic destruction.
Poverty and misery is waiting for the people of Europe. And here in Brisbane, politicians and the media dare to make fun of you.
They have destroyed the world. They have ruined the planet. And yet they mock us. The politicians say “you’ve made your point, now go away”.
We say to them, you have not got our point at all. We are saying that you control the world and the world is not working. We want a better world. And we will stay here until we get it.
In America — the heart of capitalism, the heart of the beast — millions upon millions live and die in poverty. And more people are everyday joining the homeless.
That’s the economic system. It’s created a world where 1% owns almost all the wealth and we don’t even get the crumbs anymore.
Now this system can’t stabilise itself. The crisis of 2008: they said they’d solved it. There’s now a crisis in 2011: if they “solve” this it will be worse than in 2008 and the next crisis will be worse and worse.
Some people are saying what are they on about? What are they talking about? What’s wrong with Australia? When their jobs go, when their pensions go, they will come to you and say yes, you were right.
Now there is another source of criticism of the world we live in. And that is a moral criticism. Because make no mistake about it: you hold the moral high ground. You are the good people, and they are the bad people.
They are the rulers of a world run by greed, fear and hatred.
I do not want to live in that kind of world. Instead of a world dominated by greed, I want a world where wealth is shared equally.
Instead of a world of fear, I want a world full of compassion. Instead of a world full of hatred, I want a world full of the power of love. And this movement wants that too.