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- Preserving our sanity amidst the consuming madness of the times
- Removing the mask of the insecure babyman
- The internet: from digital democracy to digital dementia
- Doubt as an asset, certainty as an affliction
- Fascism, collective insanity and ourselves
- Navigating disinformation, uncertainty, individualism and the poison apple of conspiracy
- If nothing changes nothing will change: the Voice referendum
- What can we learn from disaster communities?
- New year, a time to embrace the uncertainty of it all
- We could be non-binary
- Adaptive resilience vs safety paternalism
- Left wing, right wing? What just happened to politics?
- Covid, class and the addiction to certainty
- Neoliberalism, the Life World and the Psychopathic Corporation
- Democracy is about our bodies, not just our minds
- What’s your motivation: is it yourself or the change you’re making?
- Mind over matter: The world of abstraction is driving us to destruction
- The real threats to our liberty and survival
- Avoiding the abyss of conspiracy theories
- The difference between a legal system and a fantasy novel
- What’s a conspiracy and what’s just common garden variety corruption?
- Unpredictability, humility and an emerging anthropandemic
- The trilemma – climate change, economic collapse, and rising fascism
- Happy New Normal for the decade ahead
- The race to the bottom in australian politics
- Fires, liars and climate deniers
- Talking about lock-on devices – an article in ‘The Conversation’
- The Ponzi scheme is teetering
- Regenerative culture a key part of the blockade experience
- Staying sane in the late Anthropocene
- Extinction Rebellion
- Major parties have failed on climate, it’s time to rebel.
- Elections In The Late Anthropocene
- It is the Greens that are defeating the Nats and it’s all about your preferences
- Australia’s powerhouse of democracy and innovation is in the Northern Rivers
- Is identity politics a problem for the left?
- The climate emergency and the awful state of Australian politics
- Democracy and rights under threat in corporate police state
- Liberty, freedom and civil rights? Do any of us understand these things anymore.
- The forest wars are back, time to mobilise
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- A Flood of Emotions – Sydney Ideas Event
- Participatory democracy in the COVID era – SCU podcast
- Activism educator Aidan Ricketts explains how and why protests can be peaceful
- Bob Brown Is Taking “Shocking” Anti-Protest Laws To The High Court
- Anti protest laws could arrest nannas, seize tractors
- “They blinked first”
- Colin Barnett quick to protest against ‘activism degrees’ – The Australian, 16/10/2014
- ‘Degrees in activism’ put brake on growth – The Australian, 15/10/2014
- Magistrate throws out vexatious police case against CSG protesters
- Outrage over school PR ‘by stealth’- The Northern Star
- CSG clash a certainty
- Communities use new tactics
- Gas group attacks lecturer
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Democracy and rights under threat in corporate police state
The real power behind neo-liberalism however has always been the large global corporations. These are the entities that have demanded the ongoing disempowerment of the nation state, of democracy and of civil rights in an effort to overcome all resistance to global corporate trade. So-called free trade treaties stripped nations of many of their rights to protect their environment, economies or populations from exploitation by large corporations. The smaller the nation state the more compelling the pressure to conform became, as many global corporations dwarf nation states in sheer economic size and power.
Democracy is about much more than elections. The large corporate sector worked out ways to manipulate our elections a long time ago, mostly through donations and funding of the major political parties (LNP and Labor) and through the establishment of a revolving door between high political office and big corporate power. The mining, pharmaceutical, armaments and agricultural chemical companies are some of the main donors and manipulators of domestic politics.
Where elections can be swayed with money, what had always been beyond the reach of the corporate sector was people power in the form of our rights to organize and assemble and to mobilise public opinion, and that’s what they are going after now, with the help of our politicians in government. The corporate word for democracy is ‘sovereign risk’, that’s wherever our self-determination might threaten their investments.
So let’s look at present day NSW and Australia to see what is being done to erode our civil rights and by whom.
The power of trade unions has been subjected to decades of legislative attacks designed to reduce their ability to mobilise collective power. The the new “Change the Rules” campaign addresses this attack on unions and deserves our support.
But more recently we have witnessed a steady assault on the right of public protest and assembly by the Liberal and National parties. In every state where the LNP has held government in recent years, (Qld,Vic, WA, Tas and NSW) we have seen attacks on the right to protest. At the federal level there have been attacks on charities, attempts to withdraw rights to challenge environmental approvals, even attempts to ban some forms of satire. The latest federal initiative is laws to use the military to oppose civilian unrest.
Most dramatically last month, a regulation was introduced to remove the long standing right of assembly on public land throughout NSW. That right with the stroke of a pen is now just a police officer’s discretion. The Greens are leading the charge against the anti-protest laws. Unlike the major parties the Greens do not accept donations from mining companies, big pharma and other corporate behemoths, so it is no surprise that the Greens are the driving force here.
The National Party politicians in the Northern Rivers are the local face of the global corporate police state and we need to kick them out. There is a very real likelihood the Greens can win Lismore and retain Ballina and a chance that they could obtain the balance of power in state parliament. With the balance of power it is possible to reverse anti-protests laws, and to improve the accountability and transparency of political donations. These kinds of reforms won’t be done by either of the old major parties on their own as they have too much reliance on corporate donations.
So for the rest of this year this is an issue that must not be allowed to rest. The government will be reluctant to move against protest actions this side of the election, but if they are re-elected it will be a different story. It really is a love it or lose it moment when it comes to our rights to protest. It’s up to all of us from here.