Walk Against Warming 07

Our country elects a new government in a week’s time, so the local enviro groups organised a ‘Walk Against Warming’ march through the city streets.
We had a march last year, and the blog entry is here....

walk-against-warming-06

…and this is the video of this year’s event.

The band is Watusi who played to entertain the folks who walked. The music is South American inspired and there is another video of these guys here…

2006_Newtown_street_festival

About twenty thousand people turned up, which is pretty poor considering the number of bodies living in Sydney.
I hear that Melbourne had fifty thou.
The usual politicking types got up to make a short speech. The crowd booed the Left wing party representative, cause like other liberal parties all over the planet, it’s hard to tell the difference between the left and the right these days.
The Right wing didn’t even bother to turn up. At least those guys never change.

This is the last of my posts on the APEC nonsense that we suffered a few weeks back.

I’ve built another of these new fangle Google maps so that you can ‘wander’ around and see where the videos and photos were taken.
As with the previous one, feel free to zoom in and scroll around within the window. The pins can be clicked on and contain videos and photos.
The purple line is the route that I took.

If the pins don't appear, click here to visit the Google map site and view the map there.

View Larger Map

There were cops on foot, cops on cycles, cops with a water cannon, cops riding motocross, and if not for the equine flu outbreak there would have been cops on horse back.
The only thing missing was cops on roller blades!

Where the heck did all these cops come from?
The tourists were in seventh heaven as there was a cop from who they could ‘ask for directions,’ every couple of meters or so.
That is unless an unfortunate tourist took a photo of THE FENCE and then the cops would swoop in and make the visitor delete the last couple of shots in the memory.

I travelled into the city on a bus, and over heard a family talking about attending the protest. I heard the mum describing what the protest was about and one child said ‘mom I don’t want them to use the water canon on me.’

Continuing the APEC protest march entry...

The ‘demonstration’ convened out the front of the Town Hall, where one elected representative had remarked earlier in the week ‘cage Bush, not Sydney.’
There were ‘a thousand and one’ cameras on and around the street. Nothing happened without a lens examining and recording the event.
Cops went ‘high tech’ with periscopes, the TV guys were STILL lugging around shoulder bending monsters, and everyone else had a phone or a ‘point and shoot.’
It was a bit weird seeing all the cameras arcing out over people’s heads, to peer down at what ever was the ‘interest’ of the moment.

This is a video featuring some of the people that made an effort to communicate their support for a variety of issues in entertaining ways.
The bizarre thing is, that Sydneysiders are so self absorbed, that there was never a chance that events were going to get out of control.
Sure, if the issue was with sport, or a patch of beach there would be trouble. But global warming, or fair trade.
Come on, that’s someone else’s problem!

The city seemed to be deserted for the whole three days. What a master stroke. Give everyone in Sydney a holiday, and they’re all off to clog all the arteries exiting the city.
For such a nice city to live in, a lot of people are desperate to get out when there is a holiday in the offing.

Police State of mind

Welcome to Sydney. Famous for its policing which is either over zealous or non existent.

Initially I wasn’t particularly fussed about this group of politicians holding a meeting in Sydney.
But then it became apparent that that our government officials were taking this little gathering wayyyyy too seriously. To the point were they were actively discouraging people from making their opinions felt with a public demonstration.
For months our officials have been talking up potential violence, blowing our taxes on fencing us out of a chunk of our own city, buying water cannons, and digging up an astounding number of police to line the footpaths.
A hundred and fifty million dollars spent on security, that is able to be breached by a comedy sketch show posing as a Canadian delegation.
I can't believe that NSW tax payers are prepared to accept such incompetence and oppression.

The way I see it, I helped pay for the APEC party. I should at least go down and see what sort of fun I was missing out on.I’m finding it hard to believe that for all those years we were bagging out Queensland for being a ‘police state’ when Joh B was around.
Check this shit out...

It's bizarre what Sydney will spend money on. APEC instead of fixing the country tracks we call roads. Desalination plants rather then recycling.

APEC march

I’m taking a short break from the whales.
I was a part of the APEC march which was held on Saturday, by a variety of groups, for a verity of reasons.
These are some quick grabs and I’ll post something better cut, with a write up later.

APEC protest march 08: Rain

APEC protest march 08

APEC protest march 08: Marching

APEC protest march 08: Billionaires