Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 15:39:23 +1100 (EST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?anthony=20hayes?= <antyphayes-AT-yahoo.com.au>
Subject: AUT: Canberra demo report


today's anti-war rally in canberra was somewhere between 5 & 10,000
people. i'm crap at estimations, however i know the demo was at least
2-3 times the size of the largest city gulf war demo here in '91 and
that was over 2,000. also i've had reports of 10-15,000 at the demo
tho' i'm sceptical of the last figure.

the last large demo in canberra was the national rally of trade
unionists and others on aug 19 1996. this demo was more confrontational
than the anti-war demo, with hundreds trying to smash their way into
parliament house.

just a brief note for those that don't know canberra - it's the capital
city of australia, built as the *perfect* bureacratic nightmare between
sydney and melbourne. the pop. is c. 300,000 and the public service
makes up over half of the working population. there seems to be a
diffuse social democratic outlook around town, where despite the
conservatives having a run in local government, labour m.p.'s are
consistently returning to federal seats.

we handed out a few hundred of our leaflets, tho' were unprepared for
the sheer size of this rally. i know i've commented on the problems of
quantity before, but i wonder about quantity as a moment of qualitative
development. there are simply not the shades and cracks in opposition
that i remeber from 90/91 when many amongst the left ghetto equivicated
over opposing the war drive. this war is so unpopular, and as i arrived
at the rally late radial streams of people were flocking to the city
centre for an activity that *wasn't* shopping (tho' the cynical amongst
us may quip about shopping amongst the ideological supermarket). this
is a very wierd sight for a canberra. the city centre is structure
*exclusively* around the shopping mall - as canberra was a planned city
there was no mix of residential and commercial zones in the central
zones. the city centre is quite literally one huge mall.

anthony

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