‘Eco worriers’ meet their match during Sydney CBD protests
Extinction Rebellion — the radical climate action group responsible for mass acts of disruption, chaos and vandalism in cities around the world — met its match in Sydney on Monday.
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Extinction Rebellion — the radical climate action group responsible for mass acts of disruption, chaos and vandalism in cities around the world — met its match in Sydney on Monday.
From Hyde Park to Broadway, a few hundred activists tried to bring Sydney to a halt with their form of extreme protest that mixes an unshakeable belief in science with a near-religious conviction we must all repent because the end is near. Nice try.
Instead, with the sun shining and the first hints of summer in the air, all but the most radical Sydneysiders decided that going to the beach beat going home in a divvy van, even in the face of rising sea levels that threatened to claim their towels and car keys.
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At Belmore Park, would-be activists assembled to hear a series of sermons — er, speeches — urging them on their way.
Guardian Australia columnist Jeff Sparrow bizarrely compared the handful of marchers to protesters against segregation who held sit-ins at lunch counters during the civil rights era, though Extinction Rebellion has a way to go before it can match the crowds drawn by Martin Luther King in Washington.
From there, the group pressed on to their goal: to disrupt traffic where George Street becomes Broadway and cause a giant traffic snag right next to Central Station, all the while singing and chanting snatches from Greta Thunberg’s UN speech.
At Broadway near Central, around 500 demonstrators showed up at midday, attempting to halt traffic at the busy intersection — a scant showing when compared to other demonstrations charted on The Daily Telegraph’s exclusive Crisis-o-metre.
But police acted swiftly to move demonstrators on, making 30 arrests and ensuring the key intersection was blocked for only minutes, rather than hours, at a time.
Former Peakhurst Greens councillor Anne Wagstaff screamed as she was carried to a waiting police vehicle in the protests. She collapsed as the crowd around her booed police.
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One Extinction Rebellion member took notes of police badge numbers and names as protesters were carried off.
Biology academic Martin Wolterding, 75, was one of those taken to a waiting police van after refusing to get up during the sit-in.
“Leave me alone, you’re hurting me, I’m 75 years old for God’s sake”, Wolterding said as he was dragged 50m to a waiting police van.
Police also had to contend with a group of protesters who locked their arms into a giant metal pipe inside a giant hot pink water tank emblazoned with the words WATER IS LIFE and REBEL FOR LIFE.
Police rolled the entire apparatus out of harm’s way as casually as mates might help you move a sofa, before leaving a rescue team to begin the work of cutting the protesters loose.
“We are aware that this particular group of protesters intend to cause significant disruption to the community, and any future activity of this nature will not be tolerated by NSW Police,”
Assistant Police Commissioner Mick Willing said. It was a different story at a picnic at Hyde Park earlier in the day, where Extinction Rebellion attempted to put on a friendlier face.
The Daily Telegraph went along expecting to find protesters gluing themselves to things, angry cultish chanting, cops buzzing away at lock-on devices and generally unremitting hostility.
Instead, it was like a Byron Bay retreat, complete with yoga and meditation.
It was like turning up for a night of mayhem at a Megadeth show only to find out the lead act had been replaced by Shannon Noll.
Or, as it turned out, a woman playing Big Yellow Taxi on a ukulele.
The Daily Telegraph stopped to have a chat with Jim McElroy, who said he was a retired public servant.
As he handed out copies of Green Left Weekly, he was asked about the sort of economics necessary to stave off annihilation at the cruel hands of Mother Nature.
“Myself, I’m a socialist. I think we will need at some point in the future to take the ownership of the main industry into the hands of the people — into communal ownership,” he said.
When asked to point to a socialist country that’s turned out to be an environmental success story, Mr McElroy thought for a moment.
“We haven’t had a lot of socialist governments … the Soviet Union was a false start, but that being said, we have to look at poor old Cuba, and they have tremendous environmental policies … they’ve planted massive amounts of trees.”
— Additional reporting by Danielle Gusmaroli and Perry Duffin