The Victorian protest movement and the information wars

The corporate media are creating the very extremism they decry.

I intended to publish the below piece during the week, but caught up in too much stuff. The protest I’m referencing is last Saturday’s (the 13th). Today something like 200,000 people demonstrated.

Well it did get bigger. Quite a lot bigger. The questions now are: how much bigger will it get? How persistent will it be? How sustainable will it be for the Victorian government, and indeed the Victorian state, to continue to have a large and active popular movement shutting down the CBD every week, or occupying the steps of parliament in their hundreds or thousands around the clock, as they are now doing? 

I was there on Saturday. It is interesting to note the mainstream media coverage of the protests, and how it compared to the on-the-ground experience. To be fair, as this movement grows, some media coverage is becoming a little more balanced. But unbalanced reporting is still widespread. Here is a typical example from The Guardian:

It follows weeks of protests against the proposed bill, which escalated on Saturday, with thousands of people marching through central Melbourne in a demonstration that included a gallows prop, protesters posing with nooses, and chants of “hang Dan Andrews.”

One of the funniest things is their seeming inability to acknowledge the true size of the crowds that are turning up week after week. The week before, when an estimated 15-25 thousand people took to the streets, it was common to see media reports say something like ‘over 1000,’ or some other laughably low estimate. This week, once again it was simply ‘thousands’ or ‘over ten thousand.’ While many of these statements are not technically untrue, they really don’t give a real idea of how popular this movement is. 

I’ve been to a number of protests over the years, including the 50,000-strong climate protest ahead of the 2015 Paris summit, and the 100,000-strong union led worker’s rights protest a few years ago. The protest on Saturday was of comparable size to those two. It was hard to get a good estimate because I could never once see the crowd in its entirety. It always disappeared out of view around a distant intersection. It had to be a minimum of 50,000, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100,000 or more. The below drone footage gives some idea of the scale of it. Keep in mind that this footage doesn’t show you how far left and right the crowd goes on Spring Street.

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As more and more people take to the streets, the media’s previous narrative that only extremists were protesting is crumbling, and they are becoming ever more desperate to hide the disconnect between that narrative they poured so much into and true popular feeling. This is one of the reasons people are increasingly turning to ‘citizen journalists’ like Rukshan Fernando, who works under the moniker “Real Rukshan,” to get a realistic understanding of what’s going on. Rukshan has become known for his hours-long unedited livestreams of protest events which often reveal how selective and unrepresentative corporate media coverage is. From a base of nothing only months ago, Rukshan’s facebook page now has 246,000 followers. 

The media coverage also tends to focus on the most extreme behaviour or placards. As per the above example, it was prominently mentioned in many media reports that on Saturday one protester carried a prop gallows with three nooses on it, the implication presumably being that they were for the three Victorian crossbench MPs who voted for the pandemic legislation. 

I did not personally see this prop, but it is indeed troubling, as were reports that some people turned up at another MPs house. There is no excuse even for implicit calls for violence, nor the intimidation of any elected representatives and their families. It’s undemocratic and abhorrent, as well as counterproductive.

But what the media didn’t say is that 99.99% of people did not carry gallows. They did not say that the majority of placards were about medical choice and the pandemic legislation. They did not say that it was diverse, joyful, and at times felt like a big street party. After two years of being locked down, surveilled, controlled and gaslit, try walking down Bourke St Mall with thousands of others, singing, dancing and belting out ‘Living on a Prayer.” It’s pretty good. 

There is also definitely an element of this movement that are prone to conspiratorial beliefs. I did, for example, see a large placard that made some mention about politicians and paedophile rings. This conspiratorial element presents its own danger to society, and cannot be allowed to co-opt the movement.  

It is important, for those interested in something truly positive coming from this movement, to steer clear of more speculative claims, even if they might have some validity, and to focus on the basic human rights issues at play. Any successful movement needs to have clear, simple and consistent messaging. This is the best way to drown out the extremists and reach the uncommitted, who’s support, tacit or otherwise, is needed for success.  

However the media and government must take some responsibility for the rise in extremism. The selective reporting, the constant misrepresenting, ridiculing and gaslighting of protesters and others who have criticised the government’s management of the pandemic has radicalised many. It has created fear and division in the community. It is when people feel alienated from wider society, when they feel that there is no place for them or their sincerely held views, that they are driven to the dangerous fringes.

And rather than quell protests, it has given people a sense of solidarity in their victimisation. People are taking to the streets simply to show that these are not fringe views. People are marching because they feel they are not being heard, and perhaps for the satisfaction of ‘sticking it up ‘em.’ And if nothing else, people will keep coming to the protests just to sing and dance without having to check in or show a vaccine passport.

It is this that the government doesn’t understand. Most people accept that COVID-19 is real and harmful, and that we needed to make some changes to our lives to avoid its worst effects. But we also need something to live for. Part of being human is to occasionally act with gay abandon, to do things you’re ‘not supposed’ to do. This is why people go to the footy and shout at the umpire for two hours, and high-five drunk strangers simply because they’re wearing the same coloured scarf as you. These are the spontaneous, joyful moments that make life worth living, and many people are happy to accept some level of danger in order to experience them.  

Perhaps the best way to understand all this is to remember that Melbourne has been the most locked down city in the world. While it might feel ‘normal’ because it’s what we know, we need to remember that it is an extreme outlier in global terms. On top of this the government introduced one of the world’s toughest vaccine mandates, as well as a complicated system of surveillance and segregation. There is nothing normal, nor proportionate about this.