Draft declaration for Occupy Melbourne #occupymelb

An interesting text. The sentence in bold needs correction but… and the statement possibly requires something about the right to a tent arf arf.

In others news, Jon Faine expresses pain @ Lord Mayor Robert “Magnets How Do They Work?” Doyle in an interview on 774. Doyle and the Melbourne City Council will next week quash a motion by Greens councillor Cathy Oke for an independent inquiry into WTF happened when police violently evicted Occupy Melbourne from City Square on Friday, October 20.

Interestingly, Doyle makes two main claims in support of his decision to authorise police to evict the occupiers:
1) occupiers had earlier promised him to leave upon being ordered to by police (I still can’t find much infos inre this alleged promise) and;
2) he was provided with police intelligence to the effect that “…a number of the people who were instigators in the resistance to leaving the Square were well-known to the police. A number of them were looking for trouble. A number of them simply wanted to fight police…”
Doyle sensibly fails to provide any further details regarding his claims. He makes similarly unsupported claims regarding issues of “public safety, public welfare and public health” as providing grounds to justify his decision, laments the involvement of violent “professional protesters”/droogs in OM and yadda yadda yadda.

Pretty standard ideological fare from a professional Tory.

Note that, in an interview with Neil Mitchell on 3AW on October 24, Acting Police Commissioner Ken Lay blamed the “anti-Jewish” BDS group and the Socialist Alliance for the police violence.

Draft declaration for Occupy Melbourne

The following declaration prepared by the “Declaration Working Group” will be presented to the Occupy Melbourne General Assembly on Saturday 12th [November] in the Treasury Gardens.

We stand in solidarity with the people in the Occupy movement in Australia and across the globe. In the name of freedom and democracy, we stand resolutely in opposition to unjust, unrepresentative, and unsustainable systems and practices world-wide.

Our Vision

We recognise that we occupy already occupied land and that Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded. Acknowledging the ongoing impacts of colonisation must be the basis of our solidarity with Indigenous peoples.

We seek to create a just and equitable society in which political and economic power is not concentrated in the hands of a small minority.

We seek broad social change and aspire to end all forms of exploitation, oppression and marginalisation.

We envision an economic and financial system that is sustainable, democratic and just. We believe this requires fundamental changes to the current system and to structures of state and corporate power.

We believe that there is nothing more powerful than an engaged people inspired by the vision of a better future. Out vision is of a world in which all human beings have the opportunity to flourish peacefully within the ecological limits of our planet.

To realise this vision, we occupy Melbourne and through this Declaration, invite people to join us.

Our Group

We are an open and evolving grassroots people’s movement. We welcome, support, and are comprised of all ethnicities, cultures, abilities, genders, ages, sexualities, and faiths. We embrace our differences and choose not to be affiliated with any political party or organisation.

Our Process

We seek to understand and learn from one another and to open up spaces for discussion and dialogue. Our movement is leaderless and non-hierarchical.

We make decisions through an inclusive, participatory, and direct democratic process. We aspire to consensus-based decision-making in which all voices are heard and taken into account.

We do not believe it is enough to demand change from the top down not wait for change to arrive. We strive to live our values to the best of our ability, by reflecting our commitments to inclusive democracy, justice, community and sustainability in all our actions and pursuits.

We proceed with unshakable conviction: humbly, passionately, and in the spirit of celebration.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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7 Responses to Draft declaration for Occupy Melbourne #occupymelb

  1. Tinkerthing says:

    “Acting Police Commissioner Ken Lay blamed the “anti-Jewish” BDS group and the Socialist Alliance for the police violence.”

    C’mon, everyone knows that a lot of the BDS crowd are just commies using the suffering of the Palestinian people for their own ends, but blaming them for the violence? Uh, no.

  2. LeftInternationalist says:

    Sounds nice, but I think there is a conflict between consensus-based decision making and ‘direct democratic process’ (in some cases, not all- especially if it’s not 100% but a more modified version, maybe 70%). For evidence, I give you Murray Bookchin:

    How, then, would society make dynamic collective decisions about public affairs, aside from mere individual contracts? The only collective alternative to majority voting as a means of decision-making that is commonly presented is the practice of consensus. Indeed, consensus has even been mystified by avowed “anarcho-primitivists,” who consider Ice Age and contemporary “primitive” or “primal” peoples to constitute the apogee of human social and psychic attainment. I do not deny that consensus may be an appropriate form of decision-making in small groups of people who are thoroughly familiar with one another. But to examine consensus in practical terms, my own experience has shown me that when larger groups try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted — precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue. More disturbingly, I have found that it permits an insidious authoritarianism and gross manipulations — even when used in the name of autonomy or freedom.

    To take a very striking case in point: the largest consensus-based movement (involving thousands of participants) in recent memory in the United States was the Clamshell Alliance, which was formed to oppose the Seabrook nuclear reactor in the mid-1970s in New Hampshire. In her recent study of the movement, Barbara Epstein has called the Clamshell the “first effort in American history to base a mass movement on nonviolent direct action” other than the 1960s civil rights movement. As a result of its apparent organizational success, many other regional alliances against nuclear reactors were formed throughout the United States.

    I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell Alliance, consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by members of a dubiously “anarchic” commune that was located in Montague, Massachusetts. This small, tightly knit faction, unified by its own hidden agendas, was able to manipulate many Clamshell members into subordinating their goodwill and idealistic commitments to those opportunistic agendas. The de facto leaders of the Clamshell overrode the rights and ideals of the innumerable individuals who entered it and undermined their morale and will.

    In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision, minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. This practice, called “standing aside” in American consensus processes, all too often involved intimidation of the dissenters, to the point that they completely withdrew from the decision-making process, rather than make an honorable and continuing expression of their dissent by voting, even as a minority, in accordance with their views. Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings — so that a “decision” could be made. More than one “decision” in the Clamshell Alliance was made by pressuring dissenters into silence and, through a chain of such intimidations, “consensus” was ultimately achieved only after dissenting members nullified themselves as participants in the process.

    On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the passionate dialogue that still persists even after a minority accedes temporarily to a majority decision, was replaced in the Clamshell by dull monologues — and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of consensus. In majority decision-making, the defeated minority can resolve to overturn a decision on which they have been defeated — they are free to openly and persistently articulate reasoned and potentially persuasive disagreements. Consensus, for its part, honors no minorities, but mutes them in favor of the metaphysical “one” of the “consensus” group.

    The creative role of dissent, valuable as an ongoing democratic phenomenon, tends to fade away in the gray uniformity required by consensus. Any libertarian body of ideas that seeks to dissolve hierarchy, classes, domination and exploitation by allowing even Marshall’s “minority of one” to block decision-making by the majority of a community, indeed, of regional and nationwide confederations, would essentially mutate into a Rousseauean “general will” with a nightmare world of intellectual and psychic conformity. In more gripping times, it could easily “force people to be free,” as Rousseau put it — and as the Jacobins practiced it in 1793-94.

    The de facto leaders of the Clamshell were able to get away with their behavior precisely because the Clamshell was not sufficiently organized and democratically structured, such that it could countervail the manipulation of a well-organized few. The de facto leaders were subject to few structures of accountability for their actions. The ease with which they cannily used consensus decision-making for their own ends has been only partly told,6 but consensus practices finally shipwrecked this large and exciting organization with its Rousseauean “republic of virtue.” It was also ruined, I may add, by an organizational laxity that permitted mere passersby to participate in decision-making, thereby destructuring the organization to the point of invertebracy.

  3. TinFoilHat says:

    I notice there is nothing about non-violence in that statement. Oh dear, maybe the views of those who obsessively tweet are not always representative of the whole!

    Great to read!

  4. heather.rigby says:

    robert doyle, imho, is corrupt.
    his complaints to the corrupt victorian police about a 71 yo man were vexatious, and any cop could see that, had they heard the 71 yo mans complaint against doyle which proves the complaint was vexatious, and indicates doyle has them paid up in full.

  5. @ndy says:

    Hey Heather, what’s the stuff about the 71 yo man about?

  6. Paul Justo says:

    The kidz are still holding out in QLD… all going well in getting the non-authoritarian revolution off the ground except for the problem of the blocked shitter in Musgrave Park.

    _____________________________________________

    General Assembly Minutes – 18th November 2011
    Posted on November 20, 2011 by bwest

    toilets: council is cleaning them

    _____________________________________________

    Might have to get the Flash Cleaning Mobs going?

  7. Jolly Rodjer says:

    Voting and representation methods today are suiting the one percent, due to use of money plus media promo resulting in denial of broad public input, lack of choice, disparity of policy plus a brake on sustainable/equitable human development.

    One way to improve this voting and use of all concerned public input to make future policy would be to use the internet to monitor a developing public issue that goes on to become a subject to be voted on, by having a process of registration as a voter that can not be duplicated each individual having one vote.

    Voters are subject to penalty if found to be manipulated by others also penalty for “others” as breach of democratic rights conferred by this system.

    The vote now is not directly for a person but an issue that is developed by the public and has reached a stage requiring an electronic vote, prior to this the pros and cons of the issue to be discussed in the electronic public forum, established media is not permitted to put a viewpoint and can only report on the public consensus of a developing issue that reaches the point of becoming a issue to be voted upon say 60% of activated voters. (Laws & restrictions apply to maintain individual input.)

    Once voted upon and reached a majority of a set percentage of voters say 70% of voters the issue has to be put into practice by a government that has also been elected by electronic popular vote for each person who can only be selected by his/her own promotion of vision that goes on to become a popular selection by merit of the vision promotion without money and limited to the individual input by law.

    Further development of this voting system would see no need for elections as we know it as a person selected by the people without promo or money and by his/her own merit in a political blogosphere governed by new laws covering corruption like lobbyists, privileges, or payment and favours, if found to be failing the people the electronic dismissal system reaching a dissatisfaction percentage is activated.

    By the above means politicians would become facilitators of public policy only and hold office only in the favour of the public, voters would be encouraged to be more responsible in administrating their government and there would be a greater sharing of knowledge on policy subjects simply by knowing they now will make a difference.

    I believe that such a system can be devised, it needs more than my input as it is an idea only at present, it is based upon the fact that millions of heads are far more wise with less chance of being manipulated as is the case in our governing methods that do not work for us today and only work for the 1% that is becoming more visible each year.

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