Opinion: Goading police isn’t what fighting for freedom looks like

From the plight of the orange roughy to the appalling treatment of asylum seekers, I know what it means to protest and those peeing on The Shrine stand for nothing but themselves.

Aclie Coster knows what it means to be a professional protester, rallying at the gates of the Baxter Detention Centre for asylum seekers in Port Augusta.

The sun was starting to set on the desert skyline and it would have been breathtaking if what was happening wasn’t so frightening.

Police who resembled Storm Troopers from Star Wars were dressed up in their body armour and riot gear.

Others were mounted on horses that also wore visors and leg protectors. Cavalry preparing for war.

The frontline Star Force tactical response team had further weaponised themselves, this time with pins on their gloves, which made them look like Wolverine.

But it was 2005, at least four years before Hugh Jackman would make Wolverine and his claws of swords a global movie franchise, so the reference was lost.

What wasn’t lost was how mighty scary and out of this world the now hundreds of riot police looked as they started to close in tighter on us.

All we could do was tighten our resolve and our linked arms.

Alice Coster protesting at Baxter Detention Centre.

Behind us was just the razor-wired fence of Baxter Detention Centre outside Port Augusta in the brutal South Australian desert.

Outside the razor wire, there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. There was a sense of total isolation. I was there by choice, but 250 people inside were locked down in “Compound B”, without charge, without trial, locked in a desert purgatory.

We were flying balloons and kites. A teacher had brought his class along to sing messages of freedom.

Police later popped our balloons, giving reason to their taloned gloves. The sweet, high choir voices could be heard over the pop of the balloons, constant chants of freedom and the clatter of a police helicopter that was always circling the crowd, covering us in its wake of red dust.

It had taken more than 24 hours to get there by bus and I was on my Pat Malone. Hundreds of others were too. But we had one commonality, to express outrage at the hard line immigration policies of the conservative Howard government and to express our solidarity with the people in detention.

A front-page newspaper photo of one of my mother’s university contemporaries, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Make Love Not War” at a Vietnam War rally in the swinging ’60s, was always spoken of in high regard around our dinner table.

When the time eventually came to vent my own political frustrations, taking to the streets was a way to voice for change.

An overwhelming feeling at community inertia, mixed with a dash of rage that still exists, made me easy pickings for what now is termed a “professional protester”.

In primary school it was all things green. I have somewhere a signed letter from then prime minister Bob Hawke saying yes, he would do his best to look after the environment.

Later it was the plight of the orange roughy (do not buy this fish, also called deep sea perch, which takes 35 years to reach breeding age).

By university it was refugees and the (still) appalling treatment of asylum seekers in Australia.

I joined what was called the Refugee Action Collective. We called ourselves RACtivists and I went to meetings at the Melbourne Town Hall painting banners with “Justice For All” as we listened to what tactics we would use for our next planned peaceful protest.

Police confront anti-jab demonstrators at the Shrine of Remembrance. Picture: AFP

I blu-tacked posters of Che Guevara to my wall and pinned his image to my hessian uni ruck sack. I was chained up to the Indonesian consulate in Melbourne, protesting crimes against East Timor. I attended rallies against the World Trade Organisation, even though I wasn’t quite sure exactly what it was about, chanting “Attica, Attica!” like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon.

My boyfriend at the time got charged for assaulting a police officer after copping a baton to his head. We both wore fisherman pants and had dreadlocks (whoops, cultural appropriation) before they became nit infested and had to be cut off. In hindsight we fit the stereotype.

For months I have wrestled with my thoughts to the anti-lockdown protesters filling our streets. Their tactics seem intent on violence. And in a time of a global pandemic, so counterintuitive.

But then I would rationalise that they, too, were at a crossroads, that they felt as if there were no other way for their voices to be heard.

Isn’t democracy all about having the freedom to voice your opinion?

Demonstrators on the steps of the Shrine of Remembrance. Picture: AFP

But it was this week watching the mainly white ragey men in their servo sunnies, flicking their Winnie Blue butts on the sandstone of the Shrine of Remembrance in their newly purchased high-vis vests, that I understood.

The anti-vaxxers say it’s all about freedom, as in the freedom gained by soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice.

What a load of deceptive drivel. Watching the agitators goading police, then spitting on what is a sacred shrine, sickened me as it has sickened others across our great city.

What freedom are they fighting for? Freedom from a deadly virus?

These people are not taking to the streets for justice for others, or for the downtrodden.

They are taking to the streets to fuel rage and incite violence.

What makes them different from anti-war protesters of yesteryear?

It is the most pathetic reason of all.

They are there for one thing and one thing only.

Themselves.

Alice Coster is a Herald Sun columnist