‘Crowd control’ operations outside the Lodge yesterday. Photo: Wade Laube

Today Canberra residents detail their day with Bush, Natasha Cica inside Parliament House and Malcolm Street in the thick of the protests.

That’s our Bush

by Natasha Cica in Canberra

Thursday, 23 October 2003. Canberra, Australia

03: 00 hours

Woken from sleep. Again. Helicopters, fighter jets.

05: 00

More helicopters.

07:30

Rise, shower, breakfast. Radio says Canberra hospital ward cleared in anticipation of Presidential emergency. Infectious diseases. Wonder – is this joke?

08:00

Leave house. Drive towards Parliament House.

08:25

Stuck in traffic jam somewhere near Parliament House. Swarm of policemen in baseball caps.

08:45

Closer, but still stuck. Very large policeman with gun and baseball cap outside car window, inserting round mirrors in drains on approach to Parliament House. Wonder.

08:50

Closer, but must park outside ringroad. Start walking.

09:00

Stopped by security official on ringroad. Show invitation. Am allowed past.

09:03

Stopped by security official. Show invitation. Am questioned further. Mention first official and am allowed past, on proviso am checked by third security official in pink shirt.

09:05

Security official in pink shirt demands invitation and name of inviter. Both provided. Proceed.

09:07

Another security official reluctant to let me proceed. Despite invitation. Mention first, second, third official. He relents.

09:08

Walk past Stars & Stripes to Ministerial entrance. Present invitation. Encounter gaggle of Coalition Wives in large, elaborate hats. Vowels like Prue and True from Kath & Kim. Think – bit too early for Melbourne cup? Is this a joke?

09:10

Attempt entry. Everything beeps going through security. Shoes, watch, earrings. Fillings, presumably. Wonder – do hats beep?

09:10

Cleared to enter. Walk round building. Many Prues and Trues, many loopy rope barricades. Many men with curly wires coming out of ears. Wonder – is this Matrix?

10:15

Meet parliamentarian for coffee. Has been to anti-Bush demonstration and asked for pass by security official to proceed. (What pass? Since when? Was obliged to jump barricade.)

10:45

Am escorted to Chamber entrance by parliamentarian. Wonder, will we need to jump barricade? Meet another parliamentarian handing out dove badges. Peace, yep, am all for it, take one.

10:47

Walk towards stairs. At bottom of stairs, security official demands invitation. Duly presented. Walk up stairs. At top of stairs, security official demands invitation. Duly presented. Walk towards security screening area. Join long queue, more Prues and Trues, many hats. Near end of queue, remove mobile phone from bag to turn off. Security official says must cloak phone. Leave queue to cloak phone. Resume long queue, more Prues, more Trues. Nearing end of queue, security official inspects invitation and notes no texta mark on back. Sorry? Leave queue for texta mark green. Resume long queue. Stand behind random Ambassador, very friendly, says some diplomats not so happy about security, complaining lots, but he has no problem, the world has changed forever, he likes Australia. Asks what dove is for.

 

Part of the police security ring yesterday. Photo: Penny Bradfield

 

11:03

Everything beeps going through security. Hear later that Melanie McDonald nee Howard exempt from security check after complaint.

11:05

Am directed up more stairs. Find self in area behind soundproof glass, not public gallery as such – that’s full. Chairs here all full too, many security passes from US Embassy. Remember fuss about closure of entire public gallery of Australian Parliament to Australian public. Wonder.

11:06

Security/courtesy official politely asks if visitors from US Embassy would mind accompanying her. To fill empty seats at back of press gallery, in open area of parliamentary chamber, so invited guests to public gallery may sit. None shows interest. None moves.

11:07

Security/courtesy official repeats request. Tell her as invited guest am happy to sit in one of those empty seats if they don’t want one. Not possible. Wonder why, aloud. Offer only extends to people who won’t make a disturbance. Wonder, aloud, why as an invited guest of member of parliament I’m suspected of potential disturbance. No hat? Remember dove.

11:08

Walk off, turn corner into another closed area. See spare seat near glass near American journalist. Sit.

11:09

Security/courtesy official says please vacate seat for one away from window. Tell her would rather not, thanks, need to see what’s happening to take notes for article. Remain in seat.

11:10

Parliamentarians enter chamber. Listen as American journo is coached by baby-faced spook from US embassy on who is what in chamber. That’s the Foreign Minister. D-O-W-N-E-R. Yes, really.

11:11

Announcement of President. All parliamentarians in chamber stand. All in public gallery below stand, including school children in green and gold tracksuits. Security/courtesy official runs up, exhorts us all to stand as matter of courtesy. In the distance, eighteen members of press gallery stand. There are empty seats behind them.

11:15

Howard speech. We are a terrorist target not because of what we have done, but because of who we are.

11: 25

Crean speech. Joining most warmly in the Prime Ministers welcome. Above all, Australia looks to itself [as an] independent people. Wonder. Honesty is the foundation stone of that great Australian value – mateship. Baby-faced spook smirks and snorts. Involuntary memories of Tampa. Excision, anyone? Look at Americans around me in what passes today for public gallery. Wonder.

11:30 am

Bush speech. Man of steel – that’s Texan for fair dinkum. Rudd laughs. Latham looks gloomy. Brown interrupts. The Speaker responds – The Sergeant will remove Senator Brown from the House. Bush winks. Howard reddens. Man in long black coat with tassel tries to remove Brown from the House. Brown sits, Sergeant retreats. Episode assiduously avoided by

Australian Parliamentary vision. Episode caught on American TV and beamed to world. I love free speech. Bush continues. We celebrate the spread of freedom. Wonder – does he mean Vegemite? Remember Victory Gin. Nettle interrupts. The Speaker responds The Sergeant will remove Senator Nettle from the House. Feel bit sorry for Sergeant, approaching, tassel waving. Bush responds – I love free speech. Coalition applauds, many Labor also. Wonder.

11:55 am

Bush ends with God. Entire Coalition stands and ovates. Assorted Labor, Greens, Democrats remain seated. Entire Labor front bench stands and claps, limply. Latham looks gloomier. Bush moves towards Labor front bench. Shakes all hands. Howard beckons, Beazley rolls on down, tanklike, beaming. Abbott sits like bouncer in rear of chamber near door throughout. Wonder. Bush moves towards door, Abbott marshals Coalition human shields to block Greens petition about unlawful detention of Hicks and Habib. Speaker names Greens. Motion passed to suspend them from house. Coalition

applauds.

12:00 noon

Leaving chamber, escaping excited Prue/True scrum, more hats, walk directly into Mrs Habib, looking sad. Wonder.

12:05 pm

Attend Amnesty meeting as guest of parliamentarian. Strangely, Ruddock absent. Wonder if has now handed in badge. Addressed by Melbourne lawyer who works in US on war on terror cases, including Hicks and Habib. Counts 3500 detainees, including Guantanamo Bay. Discusses unlawfulness of arrests and detention, conditions of detention, military tribunals. Recalls rule of law, separation of powers. Describes torture – systematic, deliberate, ongoing. Unlawful, immoral. Wonders aloud why this is not news in Australia.

***

Georgie and the Jets

by Malcolm Street

We first heard the jets c. 4 pm about on Wednesday 22nd; Hornets flying overhead on combat air patrol. It’s not uncommon to hear military and political aircraft flying over Canberra, but only for brief period. Not all the time. This was un-Australian, like a city under siege. Not the quiet, free, dignified capital I and other Canberrans so love.

The cold shoulder given to local journalists backfired – with nothing official to occupy them local ABC radio sent up the visit something rotten, requesting calls from listeners with president/secret service sitings with points for various types of sitings. A piece of typically Australian piss-taking in contrast to the deadly (literally) seriousness and pomposity surrounding the official aspects of the visit.

Around 4:30 pm a big four-engined airliner flew over; it looked like a 707 but may have been a 747, at quite low altitude. Again, aircraft just don’t fly into Canberra like that; obviously part of the entourage.

Through the evening the FA/18’s continued to fly (one ABC listener calculated that their passes were at c. 6 minute intervals) and into the morning, after Air Force One landed, which we heard coming over our outer-west suburban Canberra home c. 9:45. TV film showed the arrival, with John Howard almost leaping up the stairs and emerging with Bush with a huge toothy grin. I felt like throwing up. Our city and our parliament had been taken away from us because of this visit, and here was Howard happy as a (lap) dog with two tails.

Morning arrived and ABC radio assisted by listeners was continuing to send up the visit; someone rang in reporting a dog urinating in the Parliamentary Triangle as a possible subversive, while they played a special selection of Texas-themed songs as part of their “Bigger than Texas” Bush-special breakfast show.

I’m an IT contractor having a break between contracts, so there was no problem with time off. I decided to go to the anti-Bush demonstration, the first of this type I’d been in for over twenty years, and after parking around Belconnen took the bus into Civic with a vague feeling of forboding. Once I got there I found that the bus routes had been disrupted, and I had to wait for another bus. (Canberra traffic anywhere near the Parliamentary triangle was in chaos because road closures weren’t announced until the last minute as a security measure).

During the wait I bought The Canberra Times. Its headline: “Welcome to Bush capital”. Cartoonist Ian Sharpe (with whom I once shared a house), deputising for Pryor, came up with a beauty: Parliament House proudly fluttering a white flag of surrender. Too true to be funny, and the editorial was pretty savage as well.

The bus came, in and along with most passengers I got off at the National Library stop and walked up to the demonstration area. There was a stage and there was a PA system, powered by a hired generator, so that part of the government’s attempt to stifle the demonstration had failed at least. Victory Number 1!!!

Due to the bus change I missed the first few speakers (including Bob Brown and Carmen Lawrence), getting there just in time to see Pat Power, the Auxiliary Catholic Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn speak. There are Christians that I loath and frighten the living daylights out of me (Bush and his mates in the US Religious Right and the current Pope notable examples) and others I have profound respect and admiration for. He was one of the latter. But it was frankly sad to hear this good man’s sane, humble and humane request, a message he’d sent to Bush that morning, for a more internationalist approach from the US when I knew it would be water off the duck’s back in the current climate of USA uber alles.

Next up was David Hick’s lawyer Stephen Kenny, concentrating on Guantanamo Bay. He made the excellent point that this could backfire on Australian troops in future conflicts because the precedent has been set by the US to ignore the Geneva Convention in treating POWs. He pointed out that even Nazi Germany in World War II obeyed the Geneva Convention for Western prisoners. The result was a death rate of US POWs of only about 1%, vs 40% for those captured by the Japanese who didn’t abide by the convention. He still doesn’t have direct contact with his client.

Labor MP Harry Quick came up next complete with white arm-band and described “the bogey man of terrorism” being used by Bush and Howard, quoted the Dalai Lama and said hopefully, “Keep the faith, we will prevail”.

The biggest reception, indeed a raptourous one, greeted the next speaker, Andrew Wilkie, who well and truly let fly. He described Bush and Howard’s “meeting of the minds” as a “staggering exhibition of unbridled arrogance”, that it had increased the risk of global terrorism and encouraged proliferation of WMDs to states who now felt they had to have them to deter an attack from the US. He spoke of Howard using “the national security card for his own political purposes”, “cynically manipulating”, the ultimate example his mention of the Bali bombing victims in his opening speech for the Rugby World Cup.

And he was just warming up! He went on to describe a “whiff of criminal activity” that was now surrounding the Bush/Howard camp, with the actions against the US official who blew the lid on the Iraq uranium claims, and the leaking of classified information to Andrew Bolt to discredit him. He reckoned he still hasn’t been interviewed about this case, and that “the rule of law means nothing to Howard”, before saying that if Howard wanted to be a true friend to Bush he’d tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, notably that he had to reengage with the international community. We were seeing instead the transfer of Australian decision making from Canberra to Washington.

Democracy was “on the ropes”, Howard “lies continuously” and people who “dare to care” were “slandered” by the government and its compliant media. And Bush’s visit emphasised this by restricting the right to free assembly and the rights of the Australian press to report.

It was a passionate, bravura, recklessly brave speech from an outraged man of principle who obviously feels he has nothing further to lose. Hopefully someone recorded it so that a transcript can be circulated more widely. I greatly admired Andrew Wilkie before; now I almost worship the guy.

After this the lead guard of the motorcade started to appear. There was practice in chanting, and the crowd (which I’d estimate roughly at 2-3,000 people) headed, literally, for the barricades, set back c. 200 metres from the entrance and with large numbers of federal police at the other sides.

The entrance of Parliament House was disguised, appropriately, by bushes, big pot plants having been brought in for the occasion so we couldn’t even see him get out. I assume the main justification was to stop a sniper taking a pot shot at him, but they’d also presumably muffle the sounds and hide the sight of protesters.

We did our best though; when the entourage with the sinister big black stetch limos with their green and obviously very thick glass arrived a thunderous, shattering, primal roar of anger came out of crowd. After c. twenty minutes of chanting the motorcade headed off and we went back to further speakers.

First up was a speaker from ACTNOW, the demo organiser, who memorably described the US under Bush as the “thug of the world”. A Palestinian woman then passionately outlined their situation, saying that the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel gave them empathy with the occupation of Iraq by the US. In her view with the new wall apartheid is being resurrected in Israel under the name of democracy, that suicide bombers “have been left with no other choice” and that the US can forget about winning the war against terrorism while Israel’s current treatment of the Palestinians continues.

Next a speaker from the Phillipines, saying how 7 MPs didn’t stand for Bush at their parliament, and the effect of jobs lost in trade liberalisation there. Finally a very very angry Sophie (?) from the Refugee Action Alliance pointing out the hypocrisy of the government in discouraging refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, and using some choice language like “a fire of racism from the government” being used to divide the community, “immoral, disgusting and brutal treatment” of asylum seekers and a final plea to “free the refugees, close down the camps.”

Then an announcement that organisers had arranged with the police to allow a march on The Lodge after all; Victory number 2!!! Off we went, ending up on State Circle, with thundering noise of chanting as we marched under the Commonwealth Avenue bridge. Things went peacefully until it became obvious when we got near the US embassy that we’d been had: we were being herded into a “protest pen” well down the hill from the Lodge. The crowd stopped marching down the marked star picket and plastic tape path and broke out up to the embassy itself with palpable anger.

After some minutes of being just across the road from the embassy, eyeball-to-eyeball with the police, and a couple of members of the crowd breaking through and being recaptured, the crowd moved on to The Lodge, again breaking through the barriers to end up on the verge in the middle of Adelaide Avenue, just across from the main entrance, at least 50 metres up from where the “protest pen” would have left us. Victory Number 3!!! (Despite, or perhaps because, I was in the thick of the crowd at the embassy I missed seeing the fellow hit by a police quad-bike and the nitwit(s) who threw a couple of star pickets at the police).

Chanting, singing and street theatre followed. Police were literally shoulder to shoulder between the crowd and The Lodge, and in places three deep! I was in a couple of demonstrations of over 100,000 in London in the early 1980’s, but I have never seen such a concentrated police presence in one place.

Chants ranged from “Go home Bush” through “George Bush, Uncle Sam, Iraq will be your Vietnam”, to demonstrators pointing over the heads of the police towards the Lodge and chanting “The criminals are there!”. For light relief up came “Whose lunch, our lunch!” and, my favourite, “Barbecue Bush!”.

Despite obvious tension things were reasonably good-humoured. After about an hour it was obvious there was nothing more to be done; obviously we weren’t going to get any closer to The Lodge and no-one from the barby was going to come out. So we started marching back to Parliament House. We could see a group straggling behind, and then things got nasty; this was when several people were arrested and police dogs were used. A lot of us ran back up there, the crowd started chanting of “Let him go”, and then the police pushed us off Adelaide Avenue, after a several minute struggle against a wall of demonstrators with arms linked chanting “The whole world is watching”. Heavy scene, man…

It was with relief that the march back from then on was without incident, apart from a couple of identical late-model silver Commodores going past with passengers displaying identical US flags to us and us displaying upraised fingers to them in return. I assume they’d been guests at the Lodge barbie; as Peter Brewer naughtily put it in The Canberra Times in an article about the chaos Bush’s visit had caused Canberra traffic: “A flag-waving George Bush well-wisher in the streets of Canberra was as hard to locate yesterday as a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Back at Parliament the crowd gradually broke up and I headed home. It was the most violent demonstration I’ve ever been in and could have gotten much worse if it hadn’t been for coolness and common sense generally shown by the AFP (I wouldn’t have been in their shoes for anything) and particularly the role played by the designated “Legal Observers” within the march. Their primary role was to act as contacts for anyone who had run-ins with the police (they had clipboards for taking down details of witnesses etc) but I also saw them talking with police outside the US embassy and helping defuse what could have been a very nasty situation; I assume their apparent absence in the small rump of the crowd left behind at The Lodge contributed to things getting out of hand there.

So what did the demonstration achieve? Not much really, but it was at least for me a piece of cathartic spleen-venting. Even if there is little opportunity to stop the domestic and international rampages of the Bush and Howard governments it is at least important to show that there’s some people who aren’t going to take it quietly.

The crowd very much changed as the day went on and particularly during the march, increasingly becoming communist and particularly Trotskyist-dominated. There’s something that makes me very queasy about seeing red flags fluttering again en mass less than fifteen years after communism was apparently dead and buried (and good riddance).

Yet the pathetic display of opposition provided by Labor to the neo-Fascist agenda of the Bush and Howard governments may well be, in another parallel with the 1930’s, encouraging youth to see in far-left radicalism the only source of real opposition. Certainly the handful of young people with Labor placards looked rather sad compared to the mass spectacle of the more militant parties. Simon Crean, are you listening?!

The jets continued to fly until Bush left. Reports came in over the radio (and in The Canberra Times) of security measures so surreal as to be beyond satire; a postbox welded shut in Yarralumla near the US embassy, rubber dinghies with frogmen under the Commonwealth and Kings Avenue bridges and searches of cyclist’s back-packs.

TV news was full of the Green’s run-in in Parliament. Bush says “I love free speech”, this in a Parliament locked off to the public, with only invited guests in the public gallery, and protesters kept well out of embarrassment distance. Ho, ho bloody ho; the situation was a textbook example of what used to be called “repressive tolerance”.

Friday morning. The Canberra Times does a Bush visit special. There’s some priceless letters to the editor, including: “John Howard must have thought he had died and gone to Heaven… The actual, really President of the United States standing in Parliament to praise John as a ‘man of steel’ (translated nicely into Russian as ‘Stalin’)” and “The jet engines of FA/18s lulling me to sleep, the streets lined with police. Thank you, John, for making my world a safer one”.

And we have our city back, the bush capital, not the Bush capital. It’s like being let out of gaol. I’ve long been a fierce critic of Howard not moving to The Lodge, but if this is what happens when he turns up, mate, you can stay in your taxpayer-funded mansion with the Sydney Harbour views as long as you like! And let’s hope it’s the only time we have to put up with George Bush.