Politics, Activism, Culture and Fun in Brisbane, Australia. How will we take over the world and run it ourselves instead of having to work for the bosses who own everything? One thing's for sure - we'll need exciting, powerful, curious and free people on our side, not the boring pseudo-left
Palm Island, 70 km away north of Townsville, in North Queensland. Click on this photo, and then click on the photo that pops up, to see the image properly.
Now the coroners report, released just this last week, says that yes: S/Sgt Hurley did bash Mulrunji, and he died of the injuries after being left in a cell. Click here to read the full report as a pdf file.
Palm Island, approx 2000km north of Brisbane.Click on this photo, and then click on the photo that pops up, to see the image properly.
The coroner's report said that Mulrunji hit S/Sgt Hurley in the jaw, which made Hurley and Mulrunji fall over. Hurley got up and, while Mulrunji was still on the floor, punched Mulrunji three times, which are the blows that killed him.
The coroner also found that Hurley did not tell the truth - he tried to say that the fatal injuries happened when he fell on Mulrunji, after Mulrunji threw the first punch - but the report doubts that the fall ever happened.
A close-up view of the Queensland Police HQ in Roma St, directly opposite the Roma St train station/Transit Centre. Click on this photo, and then click on the photo that pops up, to see the image properly.
A view of Brisbane's inner city, showing Queensland Police HQ in Roma St, directly opposite the Roma St train station/Transit Centre. Click on this photo, and then click on the photo that pops up, to see the image properly.
Update...Saturday 1337 Australia Eastern Standard time
But not before the boring leaders in the anti-war movement talked for far too long. Here, this vendor of "The Big Issue" (in the yellow top) did some guerilla marketing and quickly used the mike to remind people that The Big Issue, a current affairs and entertainment magazine, only costs $4, and $2 of that stays directly with your vendor.
I'm glad he did it too, because the guy who was speaking was REALLY bad. He spoke for at least 20 minutes in a fast, angry voice that was very unpleasant to listen to. He covered, in brief, just about everything that the pseudo-left is meant to be angry about at the moment. I haven't found his name yet, but he was from the Refugee Action Collective. I was especially unimpressed at the part where he follows the Michael Moore line that the fascist 'resistance' in Iraq are the 'good guys'. But here is a 3 minute sample of 2 parts of his speech, so you can judge for yourself:
I'll be going to an anti-war activist rally in Brisbane city on Saturday. I won't be agreeing with most of what people say there: I think troops should stay in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I don't think the USA is planning war on Iran or Syria, despite the current blustering.
What I am interested in is the Freedom for Palestine bit. I do belive that the Palestinians must have justice, and I also think there is far too much anti-Semitism from some who oppose Israel. George Galloway's statement that 'We are all Hizb'Allah now' is in my opinion very wrong. It is one thing to say that Hizb'Allah has the right to resist Israel's aggression. But you have to recognise, in my opinion, that they are quite reactionary (fascist?), certainly not democrats, and should not be blindly glorified.
Galloway's line looks pretty bad when you compare it with the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, who are very much anti-war (including the Iraq war), but refuse to chant anti-Semitic slogans, and support Israel's right to exist.
The pro-Palestinian activist who told me about the rally is, from what I have seen of him, unlikely to make this sort of mistake. He recommended Fair Go For Palestine, another Brisbane pro-Palestinian group.
The rally is in Post Office Square at 11am. To get to the Square, go to the end of the Queen St Mall on Edward St (the Valley end, not the River end), and walk along Queen St away from the mall. The big Post Office (the GPO) is about 200m away from the mall, and Post Office Square is just across from it.
If you are going by train, get off at Central station, walk straight down Edward St and turn left, or Creek St and turn right, into Queen st after you get past Adelaide St.
Aerial photos below powered by Google Earth and Google Pages. CLick on the photos to get a much better view..
Robin Sivapalan, a classroom assistant at Quinton Kynaston school in London, organised a protest of school children when UK Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the school to make a media announcement about his retirement, on September 7th.
Now, I disagree utterly with the politics behind the protest - at least as far as the Iraq War goes. I think getting rid of Sadaam Hussein was a good thing to do, and therefore disagree with the 'No War' chants, and the description of Blair as a 'warmonger' in the leaflet is wrong.
But do I support the right to hold this protest? You bet I do. I even signed the petition.
I was part of a very long discussion about this at Harry's Place. It's a pro-Blair site, and a lot of people were against the protest because it was organised by their political enemies - although the author of the post about the issue did come down on the side of free speech. I copped a fair bit of flak in the comment boxes for taking the free-speech line, but after I kept my cool and held my ground, we got some interesting things out of the discussion.
The most useful and striking thing that was said by the anti-protest people was by Graham:
... some of us had our own school education seriously affected by middle-class wankers palying at being "the vanguard of the proletariat" in the seventies and we are not going to stand around and let self-satisfied puffballs ruin the chances of another generation of working-class kids.
I thought this was a step away from just saying "It's a school, students aren't there to protest, he should be sacked!". While I think teachers should be able to discuss politics at school, all kids deserve a top-class education, so anyone who wants to see protests like you can see in the YouTube videos also needs to think about how we are going to deliver that education.
My reply said:
The vast majority of parents would place their child's success above free speech, so anyone who wishes to encourage messy, time-consuming democracy for 11-year olds would need to make certain that students were also taught to thrive and survive in society as it is.
There are a number of measures used by parents - behaviour, exam results, employability are probably the big three - to judge a child's education.
Is it, for instance, possible to teach students that it is ok to protest, and that is ok for teachers to talk politics and encourage protest, while also providing a solid education turning out smart, employable students?
I'd ask the people who criticise Sivapalan to say what they most want to see out of high school graduates?
FWIW, I think kids in primary school should be drilled in arithmetic and spelling till it comes out their ears. Its the only reason I can do long multiplication and division by hand today.
Which got us onto some useful discussion, as Graham replied:
I'd most like to see them not having to come to me as adults in order to learn basic literacy - in other words, I'd be quite happy if I was out of that particular job.
and continued:
In the next week or so I will probably be allocated about 30 GCSE English students with ages ranging from 16-60 (Schools do have a habit of offloading troublesome younger students to adult ed sometimes nowadays, but we will leave them aside for now.) At the first lesson I will ask them about their experiences at school and I would lay a bet that 95% will say they either had teachers who didn't care, a different teacher every week or they messed about and bunked off (and lets not forget that they were ALLOWED to mess about and etc.) All will state that their experiences of school education were "shit." All will be nervous of returning and expect the worst.
and:
In London now David teaching is just not an attractive career option. In my opinion once upon a time (and at least at my own school) pupils really were confronted with teachers from totally different backgrounds leading to a standoff of mutual incomprehension. Over the last few years they have instead been confronted by supply teachers who really do change weekly (and who are very often your own countrymen.)
It's too a big subject to really explore in detail but here are just two illustrations of the problem: one of my best friends is from Sydney and has worked in an East end school for years now. He tried forming cricket teams and after school clubs and was frustrated by bureaucracy at every level. The only reason he stays in the country is because he married an English woman, herself a fantastic teacher, who eventually had a mini-breakdown after having too much responsibility piled on to her (along with too little support in the classroom.)
So how can the situation be improved? Well more local teachers (from all communities - but crucially who feel connected to those communities) would be a start. Am I hopeful? Not since I found out that one of my GCSE students (yes, an English GCSE student!) had at the same time as taking a geography degree, been thrown into teaching the subject in a (new) South London academy, was one week in front of his pupils in his preparation and subject matter and was in every way having his career prospects sacrificed just so that the school could say it had another black teacher.
To which I replied:
There is no way kids could ever get the education they deserve if teachers change every week. There is no way a holidaymaker can do this work, except as an invited guest into an already stable environment.
I think the activist Left (revolutionary and social-democratic together) needs to start asking people who are suffering from bad education what is going wrong, and what they need.
More money is almost certainly necessary. Social-democratic governments are still spooked by the need for low taxes (I blame Daddy Bush), so tax rises for anything would be fiercely resisted.
The Left can help to change that by arguing that the money spent on better education is worth it. If a majority actually want and demand it - think that a better country is worth maybe an extra few hundred dollarpounds in tax a year - that could help to change things.
I hope this will lead to some discussion at Harry's Place about what the Left can do to encourage a better education system.
And on a side note, this is an interesting example of what happens when ordinary people have access to cheap video cameras and a worldwide publishing system like YouTube. In this case, apparently the protest was reported on mainstream TV. But what happens the next time the police riot and attack a rally? I hope there will have dozens of videocams/cameraphones trained on them, and videos of police brutality all over YouTube.
Its becoming harder and harder to hush things up. And I love it.
I've just posted 1500 words over at Last Superpower in response to "Remembering Mao Tsetung", a post about the 30th anniversary of Mao Zedong's death, on September 9th.
One of the keys to the original post is the quote:
I just checked back on an old article It is right to rebel first published in The Age, (Melbourne Australia), on Friday 24 December 1993 under the title 'The revolution lives on long after Mao' for the Centenary of Mao's birth. Should be easy enough to pick out some obviously faulty analysis that could explain why nothing that could plausibly be described as an organized communist movement with a grasp of the ideas Mao developed has become visible again in the 14 years since then.
Sorry, still beats me. We obviously hadn't figured out what to do then and we still haven't now but I honestly still cannot see what we got wrong about the direction things were going.
I've come up with some ideas about what to do, and what to think about, right now:
We can do little to start a revolution. In fact, one of the almost-certainties of history is that if there is a genuinely revolutionary situation in Australia in our lives, we will be tagging behind as the working class finally decides that it has had enough.
What we can do is ask:
What sort of working class would be most likely to revolt, given the chance?
What sort of working class would be most likely to successfully build socialism, stop the certain counter-revolution, and progress towards communism?
and, once we have an answer:
What can we do to help working class people be like that?
Keep your feeds open. And remember - Post No Idiots.
This is a set of photos from the Taking to the Street Exhibition, which is being held at the Museum of Brisbane, inside the Brisbane Town Hall, until Sunday September 10th.
The exhibition is about the 20 years of radical protest in Brisbane, and is packed full of information and details. This short set of photos shows nothing like the full range of info there.
The town hall is right in the middle of downtown Brisbane. This is a link to the Google Map. The Town Hall is the big brown dome in the middle of the map, next to the paved open space.
Both these sets of photos have a buuilt-in slideshow so you can sit back and let the exhibition pass you by.
All these photos are my work and are in the public domain. However the original text of posters , explanations etc are copyright to the original authors.
A big screen TV showing a counterculture performance, satirically praising Premier Bjelke-Petersen to the tune of Cabaret's song 'Tomorrow belongs to Me'.
This means that you may use any work by me, David Jackmanson, that you find on this site for any purpose at all, as long as you give credit to Let's Take Over and include the site's web address.
It's your responsibility to check that the work is created by me and not somebody else. Accounts on sites like flickr or Odeo that are listed as belonging to 'Let's Take Over' or 'djackmanson' will probably be mine.
If you'd like to try a simple way to get all new stories from Let's Take Over (and many other sites) sent to one place, 
click here for info on the Let's Take Over 'news feed' (sometimes called an 'RSS feed' or 'XML')
