The mainstream media want to discredit us, they want us to fail because they are part of the 1%.

oh hogwash. And you're not talking about "mainstream media", you're talking about TV news. As I've said a million times, TV news sucks. Do not get your news from television, and if you do, don't whine about how bad the "mainstream media" is.

There are no leaders and there is nobody in charge of the movement as a whole, so everyone can have their voice heard and can propose that Occupy takes on their grievance as something it will support.

Perhaps, but OWS does appoint official spokespeople to give interviews. And they have been consistently raising the specific issues I've already mentioned. Y'know how I know all that? Mainstream media.

^ That sounds very similar to the Perth occupy movement. I have a friend who is really gung-ho about it and has camped out nearly every day since it began, and I've been asking her questions about it since day one.
The thing I can’t really make peace with is the methods of protest. She told me there are folks down there who are occupying because they want to push for equal rights/gay marriage, or because they want better treatment for aboriginal people.

I am a huge advocate for both of those things. I've done a lot of work on campaigns and contacting MP's to ask for same sex marriage. I'm also hugely interested in indigenous affairs and disgusted with the gaps between your average Australian and the majority of the indigenous people, particularly in the more remote parts of the country.

However, try as I might, I fail to see how living in a tent in public space for weeks on end is at all pro-active in bringing about change on these things. I don’t mean to be facetious. I do think that the movement started out with potential to inspire pro-active group action through a powerful and unique kind of protest that would get people talking. However now? It just seems to have grown into a cluster of people who are pissed off about such a broad spectrum of things – that no one outside to occupy sites knows what issue to talk about anymore! It has lost its effect. I think the current state of the occupy movement, at least in Perth, is actually alienating the people you need on board the most if you want change; those who are against whatever it is you are for.

I am all for showing solidarity for a cause, but up to a certain point, things like rallies and camp out movements become redundant. Great, you’ve got all of the supporters of your cause in one place, pumping each other up – but you all believed in your cause in the first place, whether the rally or the camp out happened or not. Numbers are needed for action in the current political climate, and I always think that focus of activists should be trying to spread the real story behind their causes, and trying to change minds that are standing in way of progress.

I am all for peaceful protest, but I define that as intelligent, strategic and politically effective methods. Obviously that kind of stuff wouldn’t work somewhere run by a dictatorship, but in countries like Australia, I think we take the power of it for granted. Writing and calling MP’s, developing the PR of a cause first so the public don’t write you off as a bunch of loons before you’ve even said what it is you need to say is SO important to lending real credibility to any cause, and ultimately achieving change. I think the occupy movement is detrimental that vital aspect of effective activism.

I've hesitated to add my opinion here, as I know there are DDN members who I have a lot of respect for (Erin, for example) who are involved in the movement.

Whilst I understand the good intentions behind it, I think the Australian Occupy movement in particular has completely missed the point of what protesting is about.

Odessa wrote:

You know, we're all occupying for different reasons. Everyone I have spoken to at Occupy Melbourne is there for unique reasons. Some of us want the banks to be better regulated. Some of us want mining giants to be held to account for the damage they are doing to our national parks. Some of us want better funding for mental health services. Some of us are just expressing a general malaise with the way the world is at the moment, and have come to Occupy to learn more about fractional reserve banking, or government lobbying, or fiat money, or whatever else.

Unfortunately, to me, this is the problem. The purpose of a protest is to draw attention to your cause. Protests exist because the general public and law makers are yet to throw their support behind this cause: the whole point is to make your cause interesting and accesible to those who are affected by it. In my eyes, the Australian Occupy movements are failing to do this.

The Australian movement has such a broad range of causes, it's really difficult to communicate a clear, concise, uniform message about what you're about. For this reason, I agree that yes, it IS very easy for someone who only accesses mainstream media to feel as though the Occupy movement in Australia is purposless. It's no good for Occupy participants to blame this on the mainstream media- the fact is, this is the media that the vast majority of Australia consumes. I've driven past my city's Occupy site a number of times, but it wasn't until reading Erin's posts here that I was even able to figure out what they were protesting about. To truly communicate your cause, you should be able to sum it up in a sentence. "We want change" isn't enough.

The majority of Australians support marriage equality. A large proportion of us (myself included) are hugely concerned with the state of the country's mental health services. The Occupy movement is meant to be representing the 99% (which I would argue is inaccurate in Australia, but I won't go into that now). But if the ONLY people who understand and actively support the cause are those hanging out in the tent cities, if a huge proportion of that very same 99% think the Occupy movement is a waste of time... Well, I think it's necessary to re-think the movement's methods.

I think, at this point, that it's important to stop looking at the Occupy movement as a "protest". It's not like most protests you'd be familiar with, such as in 2003 when thousands of people took to the streets in opposition to the imminent Iraq war. That protest had a very clear single objective, and some 200,000 people took to the streets in my city alone to protest in support of that objective.

But the Occupy movement isn't a protest - it's a movement. It aims to engage the average person with the issues that affect them most - whatever those issues may be. It takes place in public space because it seeks to be inclusive and egalitarian. Having meetings at set times in set places excludes a lot of people who may not be able to get to said meetings, or not be able to attend certain venues. So we occupy public space 24 hours a day so people can come and go at any time and take part in workshops, skills sessions, education sessions, to talk to people, or even just for a free feed at our kitchen.

The issues and the things that are wrong with our society are too intermingled with each other to be able to single out one issue and ask for that to be fixed. We could focus on the need for greater funding for mental health services, but in order to get the government to fix that, we also need to lobby them to pay themselves less so they can pay health-care workers properly, to fund increased psychiatric care through Medicare, to waste less money on things like a one million dollar (Christian-centric) Christmas display at City Square and a 2.6 million dollar fireworks display for NYE.

Case in point: last week, the Victorian Premier announced the cutting of 3600 public service jobs, and an increase of $35 per year to car registration. Stamp duty on new cars (but not new cars that are in the luxury tax threshold) will go up from 2.5 to 3.0 percent. This was all done because the Premier wants to increase our budget surplus from a projected 181 million to 1.3 billion dollars by 2014/2015.

Now, I agree with and support the keeping of the budget in surplus. It’s important to have a healthy economy, especially considering how bad things are elsewhere in the world. But I question the methods he’s using to achieve that - sacking people from their jobs to keep the budget healthy but then dropping millions on some Christmas trees and fireworks seems like cognitive dissonance to me.

A Melbourne City Council document I read this week outlined the distribution of money to a few different social programs. It set aside one million dollars for the Christmas display at City Square and it set aside 500,000 dollars for helping people out of homelessness. However, right now, at our Occupation site in Flagstaff Gardens, members of the Victoria Police and agents of the Melbourne City Council routinely harass and intimidate homeless people.

Our Lord Mayor himself is a patron of the White Ribbon Foundation, an organisation dedicated to helping women who have been subject to violence, and yet, on White Ribbon Day itself, one of our female activists was assaulted by a police officer while attempting to photograph another activist’s arrest.

So we’re not a protest. Not in the traditional sense. We go out ON protests, such as our White Ribbon Day action where we formed a line at Federation Square and displayed photographs of the violence done to us on October 21 whilst the White Ribbon marchers entered the area, and such as our Towers of Power march, where we visited some of the bigger corporate criminals around the area, and such as the rally outside the US Embassy in response to the violent dispersal of Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park. But over and above that, we are a movement - a movement that sees that there are fundamental, systemic and institutionalised problems with our society and government, and seeks to devise ways to solve those problems.

Erin.
::righteous babe::

Don't we already have a thread about this? Did we really need a new one? Because I said everything I wanted to over there.

ten days and two pages too late

Gee whiz, I wonder why?? LOL.

I didn't see one in this forum and never saw one in another forum...therefore one was started here and it was being discussed.

I still think the "movement" is trying to be all things to all people. The Civil Rights movement was about that...not about 101 different things. I don't feel the people out there "protesting" are representing me even though I'm part of the 99% they claim to be representing.

We have an Occupy camp in Edmonton, it's just a few tents, not a big affair. I saw it when I had to go for some training back last month. I have a huge amount of respect for anyone who will live in a tent in -20 that turns into -30 with windchill. That is dgrees C just in case you think we're wimps here in Canada.

Albertans don't stop in the cold weather Louise, everything just keeps on happening.

The main problem I can see with the whole Occupy movement is it's very diversity.

When I was a kid I lived near Greenham Common in England anyone who's ever been into the anti nuclear or peace movement will have (or should have) heard of that protest. Everyone knew why they were there, whether they agreed with them or not, they knew what the movement was trying to achieve. Same with the anti Vietnam protesters 15 to 20 years before them in the US. There was a clear cut objective that could be stated to the media at any time.

If Occupy could put their complaints in a succinct way they would probably gain most peoples sympathy. At the moment most people are just confused, if they can pay their mortgage what's the problem?

Capitalism is Crisis is just a punch line. It's a bit like John and Yoko having their sleep in for peace, some people just went ? others thought it was amazing but it did nothing in reality.

FWIW, www.dance.net . . .