Police have announced they are ready to fight but will not do so unless necessary
Last night’s G20 Summit hosted by Souths Leagues Club and Westender brought to the fore that our rights as citizens to go about our daily business without interference from police have been suspended in the Southbank area during the G20.
While the police repeatedly declared their intent to cooperate with citizens exercising their freedom to express their views and protest peacefully, the law allows them considerable scope to stop and search anyone within the declared zone, demand name and address and a declaration of intent with sweeping powers of arrest should a citizen refuse to cooperate with those requests.
An outline of the implications of these changes to the law has been prepared by Caxton Legal Service and is available here.
It would really help if the G20 conference was open about what they are discussing and open to ideas from the public. In that situation there would be a far more productive range of ideas and much less nee for militarising the police.
Frankly, I am not impressed, I am appalled at the huge amount of public money being squandered in Brisbane on so-called security. We will be suffering more months of helicopters in our skies and a staggeringly high bill for this needless muscling up.
But the G20 want to hold their meetings in secret and not have to submit their work to public scrutiny. This does tend to make people feel angry and dismissive of the value of the event. If the idea is to ram unfair trading agreements down our throats, well, yes we will feel angry about that. The delegates could choose to exhibit more democratic behaviour and we can cooperate with well-behaved politicians. The choice is theirs. We’re listening…