The Australian economy might be tanking under the enlightened stewardship of Labor, but new areas of growth are still being opened up. One such is the protest industry which is ‘expanding exponentially with thousands of new jobs’ according to veteran protest facilitator Joshua Blare.
‘Just look at the successful implementation of our biggest project to date, the protest march on the Harbour Bridge in Sydney against the systematic genocide of the unarmed Palestinian minority in Israel. There were over a million there it said in the Guardian. Australians haven’t seen such intense protest output since the great days of the Vietnam moratoriums to overthrow the illegal Howard regime.’
Economists believe protest growth is being fuelled by research that is constantly discovering new forms of genocide to protest against.
‘People used to think that genocide was the elimination of a whole race but we now know it can happen on a more localised scale,’ says Blare, removing a piece of detritus caught in his nose ring.
‘We have the genocide against the Islamic people of the UK, genocide against black farmers in South Africa, genocide against polar bears in the Caribbean Sea, genocide against Parent Earth by non-Chinese industrial polluters in league with the fracking conspiracy. On top of that is linguicide, which has stamped out so many richly expressive early people’s languages such as Beothuk and Sumerian, and culturicide against historic indigenous wisdoms which go back far longer than the white colonialist systems that have silenced them.
‘Not that our home-made genocide is inferior to anything from overseas,’ he points out. ‘The pogrom against our First Nations in the form of the brutal repression of the Voice is world class.’
Industry analysts say that another reason for protest expansion is that as an occupation it requires no prerequisites. ‘There’s nothing elitist about it – anyone can do it,’ says Blare. ‘Just get a piece of cardboard and a texta pen and your mobile to look up Google so you get the spelling of “genocide” and “Palestine” right. There’s no other qualifications. We have marchers ranging from professionals with tertiary degrees to products of the self-selective education sector – they’re the kids who found school in the white-supremacist sense triggering and exclusionary.’
In the Sydney protest senior citizens were marching in numbers, many of them Friends of the ABC and some old enough to be survivors of the moratoriums. A few elderly ladies looking like retired schoolteachers and librarians sought to make themselves heard with croaks of ‘Maintain your rage’, until, their voices lost against the rumbling wave of ‘From the River to the Sea’, they collapsed under the strain. ‘That was unfortunate,’ Blare admits, ’because no ambulances could get through the crowd.’
With the strident notes of the Palestinian mantra rising from the ranks of keffiyeh-decked protesters high into the great arch (‘All steel and stone like the gate of a colonialist prison for the Gadigal peoples,’ sneered one demonstrator) I asked a marcher near me which river, which sea? He seemed unsure but thought it could be the Hawkesbury and the Coral Sea. Another corrected him. ‘It’s in the Middle East, bro,’ he asserted. ‘It’s the Nile and the Red Sea like. But it’s only symbolic. It means the caliphate and the beautiful freedoms it will bestow against racism in Australia and western decadence.’
Blare, who despite his Irish descent identifies as a ‘proud Tomandjeri person’, is a shining example of a new breed of entrepreneur working to revive the national economy. His cv is impressive. A long-term university student (first-year intersectional environment studies), since he enrolled in 2005 he has found time to facilitate a roll call of landmark protest activity including Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, Blak Lives Matter (where he headed the working group that established George Floyd’s ancestry as Australian Aboriginal), the Tent Embassy committee of management, Same-Sex Marriage Equality for Under 16s, Just Stop Oil, Smash the Trump-Murdoch Axis, and Climate Action Now, where in 2015 he masterminded the campaign ‘Only Five Years to Save the Planet’ (later amended to ‘Only Ten Years to Save the Planet’ and just last month to ‘Time is Running Out to Save the Planet’). He is a founder-member of Pay the Rent (although according to the landlord, his own rent for the basement room in North Naarm he shares with his cis-non-binary male partner Gussie – is ‘months in arrears’. This may be partly owing to the fact that Gussie hasn’t been heard of since he set off for Gaza as part of a Queers for Palestine solidarity delegation).
Currently, between ‘Free Palestine’ commitments, where he’s in charge of the Shut Down a Synagogue department (with particular responsibility for spray-painting operations), Blare is busy launching a new movement, Abortion is a Transwoman’s Right.
Such multifaceted protest production is a bright spot in an otherwise sluggish economy and testimony to the health of the local dissent sector. It should gladden the heart of the federal treasurer and everyone else who cares about the resurgence of national creativity in generating employment.
But do protests achieve anything? After all, the Harbour Bridge marchers went home afterwards to put their feet up, leaving the situation in Gaza much as it was. ‘That’s a piece of far-right bullshit,’ roars Blare through the megaphone he keeps with him at all times. He shakes his head in disbelief at such a question, releasing a cloud of dandruff from the shoulder-length blue hair that covers one half of his otherwise shaven cranium. ‘Obviously their value is the opportunity they give the suburban masses to express their individuality and break free from regimented middle-class conformity by marching in lockstep chanting the same slogans, waving the same flags, behind natural leaders like I.’
