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Present tense: protest and private meetings in a globalising world.

Article Excerpt
It was pre-dawn cold, and the scene appeared as if from another place and time. The mood was disciplined. The morning was moonless dark. The barricaded street was lit by the searchlights of a police helicopter whirring close overhead.

Three-thousand demonstrators, arm in arm, faced a formation of advancing police-officers. Fires which earlier had been blazing to keep people warm, had been put out in anticipation of the danger they might pose if the confrontation began and bodies were dragged away.

Thick white smoke from the dying fires was fanned down by the helicopter and hung over the protestors giving the search beams a war-zone intensity. Eventually the police stood down.

It could have been May 1968 in Paris, or a scene from one of the anti-Vietnam demonstrations across the United States in the early 1970s.

The description is from a 1998 Arena Magazine editorial. It was Melbourne's Swanston Dock at four in the morning.

Compare that scene to the recent G20 demonstrations. G20 was nothing like May '68, even if some journalists led their stories by asserting the parallel. In 1968, Paris was closed down by the people. This time it was the police who were in the ascendency and public streets that were barricaded against the movement of its citizens wanting to express dissent.

This time, on a warm spring morning, 2000 protestors had gathered at the State Library to march to the hotel where the G20 was holding its meeting.

The atmosphere at the demonstration was carnivalesque--that is until the march hit the barricades. They had nowhere to go except backwards. The mounted police-officers moved forward, and unlike the relative...

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