The Day of Unrest - Occupy Sydney

Apparently I'm part of the 99%. It's not often in my life I'm in the majority - I'm a socialist, after all, which can be a kind of lonely position. Seems though that all over the world, people are waking up to the gross economic injustice which has arisen as a result of free market capitalism, and they want to do something about it. The protest movement which began with The Indignants Movement in Madrid, and spawned Occupy Wall Street, is spreading across the globe, and yesterday it was Sydney's turn, as part of the global day of action. There have been plenty of knockers, and it's true that crowds were modest, but you have to start somewhere. I wonder how many of those sneering at the protest now would turn up if it continues and grows? In any case, I wanted to add my support, and have BabyG see something important even if he doesn't know it yet, so we went along for the afternoon.

Was a little slow to kick off.

It was a lovely day for it, anyway.

Looking west on Martin Place; the Channel 7 studios are in the right background.

The banners mounted over Martin Place at the moment seem very appropriate.

There were so few people holding sings that those who had them were in great demand for photos.

The ostensible organisers. I was rather alarmed at the age of some of them - these kids haven't even started to be screwed over by capitalism yet.

The protest in Australia were a fraction of the size of other nations. The GFC hasn't really touched us here - the unemployment rate in Australia is a quarter that of Spain, for instance, and we've had no austerity measures, so we just haven't developed the intense anger of other nations who've watched their economies turn to crud. Also, let's face it, Australia has a pretty poor tradition of political protest. We're to damn laid back sometimes. What exactly do the protesters hope to achieve? In some ways that isn't important. What is important is they have something to say, and they get to say it, and they have hope someone will listen. It's that hope I want to pass on to my son, to stand up and be counted.

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