-By John Corlett
Battle weary Occupy Brisbane protesters will tomorrow hold a workshop in an attempt forge clear goals and refocus the movement.
The meeting comes after the group endured a series of Police enforced evictions across the city, the first from Post Office Square last Wednesday morning. Since then the group has been plagued with internal conflict and pressure from the authorities to leave the CBD.
Occupy Brisbane Coordinator, Kate Hasket, said the meeting was designed to create a framework to help unite the movement under a common goal.
“We just need to have a broader structure…there’s nothing that unites us a group,” she said.
Fellow Coordinator Paul Seils agreed. He said once a structure has been defined, other groups will be able to find their place to support the movement.
“We can then invite in unions, other organisations, and other groups to talk,” he said.
But for some, starting to build a framework nearly one month into the occupation may be a case of too little too late. Violence, gossip, infighting, and an inability to effectively engage the general population, the ’99 per cent’, may have hurt the wider community’s eagerness to accept the group.
This became clear when a number of people openly praised last week’s forced eviction from Post Office Square, commenting in favour of Council’s park clearing decision on the QLD Police Facebook page*. Others have used Occupy Brisbane’s own social media networks to condemn the movement as a lost cause. One movement supporter even claimed the group was resorting to physical violence amongst its members.
“This camp needs to be brought back into control…the occupier’s are always drunk and stoned.We have stand over tactics going on, its a mess and i give it a week till it blows up. There has been a physical fight this morning police are involved and on the way.” – Stitch Jones, via Facebook, Monday Nov 7. **
But occupy core members claimed these rumours were false. They said personnel on the ground had not witnessed such events and accused this particular commenter of spreading misleading gossip.
Now keen to put the events of the past week behind him, Mr Seils said the group was ready to push on and enter the next phase of the movement. He said creating a clear purpose and structure with tomorrows visioning workshop would eliminate some of the internal problems the movement is currently facing and, like many who have walked in his shoes before him, Mr Seils hoped if the group began to look at the big picture, the smaller issues would start to disappear
“[A big picture plan will] stop people getting caught up in small picture stuff, like gossip and that sort of thing,” he said.
But many would argue that the movements biggest problem, the Brisbane City Council, is no small fry and isn’t going anywhere.
Follow this blog for an exclusive story on Occupy Brisbane’s fight with Brisbane City Council.
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*Police Facebook post: http://www.facebook.com/notes/queensland-police-service/police-assist-brisbane-city-council-at-post-office-square/255196117861741
**Stitch Jones post: https://www.facebook.com/TheOccupyBrisbane/posts/124904664285175
Absolutely. Until there’s a defined purpose I don’t know what I would be signing up for by saying that I support them. Every time I look at the Facebook page or read the notes of the GA, I’m none the wiser.
Is there any basis for the claims regarding drug abuse, alcohol consumption and physical altercations? Because I know I wouldn’t wish to be part of a group that allows such behaviour, especially around children. Then again it was a quote from facebook and I know a lot of disinformation has occured on there.
I became disatisfied with some of the reported goings on within the group while keeping up to date online, but, when I went down to the site I was re-energised and didn’t seen any of this kind of behaviour. Yes the movement is reorganising itself after various evictions so it isn’t as big as it was before, but it is a learning process of what does and doesn’t work. This issues haven’t gone away so the movement won’t die out.
In a movement where everyones opinions have to be given weight you expect things to be bumpy at the beginning. You won’t get this sort of thing within say a political party which covers many issues because when you enter into it you have to toe the line or leave. With Occupy it is about coming to a group consensus (as best as possible) – and that takes time.
News today is quick and they want to have their stories. The occupy movement will not be quick, but hopefully in the end it will be done correctly.
The point of whether the Occupy Brisbane group are using drugs and alcohol on site is a hard one to prove. I’m certainly not there a lot of the time, and even if I was it could go unnoticed. In the small amount of time I have been at the camp site I have seen a certain amount of people I believed to be intoxicated, but that’s just my interpretation of the situation. My experience is that there is no overt drug taking going on, but that’s only during the day and anything could be happening behind closed tent doors. I took the quote from a member of the group who, as far as I know, is camped at the site – they should have a better idea of what’s happening than me.