Monday 15 December 2008

Brisbane Politics: Report on Sat Dec 13th anti-Internet-censorship rally #nocleanfeed


Brisbane nocleanfeed rally from Natalie Perkins on Vimeo.


Yesterday, Saturday December 13th saw rallies across the country to protest against the Government's plans to censor the Internet. This article is going to gather all the online photos, reports and videos I can find about the Brisbane rally, which happened in Brisbane Square, the large open space in between the new city council building and the Treasury Casino, just across George St from the end of the Queen St Mall. The video above is by Brisbane blogger Natalie Perkins, and just below is the story that ran on the local ABC TV news last night:



Blogger Ian Kath made this live report, and also this one, using Qik, a service that lets you send live reports to the Internet from an Internet-connected mobile phone.




This slideshow from flickr shows over a hundred photos from yesterday's protest. People who took the photos include flickr users flickrsquared, Mighty Mullet, gnuchris2, 5cheherazad3 and definatalie. There's also some photos from Surrealist1983, max_wedge, rahook2000 and master_gopher, and a short photoblog post at the OCA Research Review blog.

I helped to organise the rally, and I was the first speaker. My preliminary report of the rally is here, and I really recommend you have a look at this discussion at the brisneyland LiveJournal community between several people who went. It's a serious discussion of what could be done better, and how to win this fight. I'd also suggest you have a look at this comment at the Strange Times blog which discusses what should be happening at a rally - it was about the Melbourne one, but the ideas there are relevant to every city. There's also an article at Strange Times which says we should go more on the offensive and take some skin off Conroy, Hamilton etc by pointing out that THEY are the ones who are sexualising children - this issue really needs to be thought about and thrashed out.


There were also online articles in the Brisbane Times, and two reports online at the ABC website - the first ABC report is here and the second report is here. There are also articles about the rally at the Off Topic With Ashley blog, and here at Public Polity, both of whose bloggers spoke at the event.

That's all I've found for now, but I'm sure there will be more photos, articles, videos and such in the next few days. So if you know of something that should be here and isn't, just leave a comment and I'll get on to it.

EDIT 1) I forgot to link to the two voice posts I put onto LiveJournal. I called these posts in live from the rally. Post One is here and Post Two is here.

2) Brisbane blogger Ian Kath has made a podcast of interviews he did at the rally. Click here to go to his blog post, where you can download the podcast.

3) Brisbane blogger gnuchris has a report on the rally here on his blog, and a short YouTube vid of the crowd here.


4) Brisbane blogger Nicole Jensen has a report of the rally with some constructive criticism. You can see it if you click here.

5) If you're on Facebook, you can see videos of Mike Fitzsimon and Tiara Shafiq talking at the rally. There are also about 200 photos at the Facebook event page for the rally.

6) Brisbane blogger Michael Meloni of somebodythinkofthechildren.com has coverage and photos of the rally up.

7) 6 photos from Flickr user Alegrya

8) Mike Fitzsimon, who spoke at the rally, has written a blog post "Cancer and Colitis vitims Condemn Conroy's Censorship".

9) Camilla Percy has 23 photos she took up on Facebook

4 comments:

Sam Clifford said...

Thank for the link to my article. I think the rally was, overall, quite a success. It's good to see that it's sparked a bit of debate over at LJ's Brisneyland community about what the pros and cons of the rally were and where we should go from here.

I reckon next time we should have some animated academics give a bit of a speech as well.

David J said...

I think you're right about getting some academics to speak. One thing we need is to have a bit more good technical knowledge behind us, so we can give good references to people when we're talking.

That debate at Brisneyland is awesome. I was going to jump in a lot more, but I was doing this article yesterday so didn't have time. I think you answered a lot of the concerns very well, especially about what it means to form alliances - you made a lot of the points I thought needed to be. I'm going to do my best to answer some comments as well as soon as I can.

Anonymous said...

Great wrap up of the weekend rally. It will be good to move forward and see just how far we can spread the message to the average Joe.

David J said...

Thanks, Nicholas. Yep, our next task is to organise more people who agree with us so we have people to go out and convince others. We need to be better at organising people at meetings and rallies, but that will happen when we get more helpers at the rally - everyone there from the organising team was pretty busy all day.