Occupy Auckland charges dropped

Wonder how much this who debarcle ended up costing the tax payer and rate payers ...


http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/7132264/Council-drops-charges-against-Occupy-Auckland

Probably not as much as fixing the grass in Aotea Square.

Occupiers did a pretty awesome job of taking a compelling message and burying it under a mountain of stupid, hippie bullshit :/

who cares how much it cost - thats the price of freedom

meanwhile a banker is shorting the nation

huh? what does this mean? It sounds like something GWB would say tbh

Agree. Huge disservice to the actual real Occupy message, totally failed to translate it to anything meaningful in relation to NZ events and problems.

Edit: While dumping the cost on the 99%. That's right, all that money your mates cost "the council"? Yeah that comes out of our pockets.

Hope you're joking. I think a few months back they said the costs were around $3 Million ... of which the grass amounted to $100,000 .... they never replaced the grass anyway. Just reseeded and watered it ... can't see how that would of cost $100k

I could write a very long rambling and inconsistent defence of my post or I could simply state

GWB is my hero

Gotta keep in mind the media put a slant on this, so unless you stayed down there and saw the process that was being followed and what they were trying to achieve it's hard to be fully informed on this.

After staying there I thought the main problems with the Occupation were:

Internal conflict (there was atheory this was done by the council)
Lack of focus on a few things (but a wide focus on many things)
No real solutions offered (even if you argue that it wasn't their job to offer solutions, some would of been good? To be fauir by the end solutions were being offered but the media never showed this)

Somehing that was not shown on TV was when one Occupier went on a hunger strike to raise awareness about child poverty in Auckland. He contacted all companies from the NZSE40 and asked for a 0.1% contribution to fund food kitchens and breakfast/lunch in all Decil 1 and 2 schools. He went withou food for 3 weeks I believe, but unfortuantly the media didn't show any of this and the companies had no interest in supporting it.

Everytime people ask me if it was succesful I say absolutely. Occupy Auckland made some people think about things that they had maybe neevr ever thought abut before. I'm sure a lot of people n here have thought about the issues of inequality, deprivation, income disparity etc etc etc .... but I think it'd be fair to say that before this protest a lot of people hadn't really given it much though.

I loved livuing there and being the dude who's approachthe scatghing masses in Aotea to talk to them about why we were here and what was going on .... it was amazing how many people4 I talked to who'dbasically end up saying well I don't totally agree with you, but I guess you've got a point.

You could say they fucked up, and they probably did in the end it seemed to just become a shirtless rabble.

But to me that just shows the desperation that is involved in fighing our economic system, becasue what is being opposed is groups who have a lot of money (corporations), the power that goes with it, and the will to devote their lives to gaining more and deceiving the masses about their intentions while manipulating the political system of the state to further advance thier interests.

Against that you have people scraping together internet petitions, donations of petty change, and occasionally having protests and increasingly getting locked up for it.

Power reinforces itself unless all of those excluded from it resist. But the masses live in ignorance about what's really going on. They dont know, they dont want to know, they seek all kinds of petty diversions and comforts. Against that, the victory of those in power is piss-easy.

Nonetheless OWS has had some success in America - it has changed the political conversation. It just didnt become a big enough mass movement. People aren't hurting enough yet. Perhaps they will wake up when everyone is burming in the hell of AGW? That will be a long time too late, and they are more likely to be clawing each others eyes out for what is left of the miserable pie than addressing the systemic issues which are the real problem.

Hah, are you certain about this? I thought as much and said so at the time to haters; dirty, lying government bastards will always invent shit like this to subvert things they don't like in the minds of the public. If correct it's good to see the big whinge that haters of Occupy NZ held having disappeared. Reseeding and watering that grass would cost all of ten grand, and when compared to the amounts stolen by 1% in NZ daily and the effect that Occupy has had on the national psyche that is chickenfeed.

occupy movement globally is still going...

They need to stop "occupying" and engaging the political process..

Yeah man. The major cost (maybe $2 million?) was all spent on legal costs .. way to go getting a QC (Ross Burns) to put your case forward in court .. then the other $1 Million was largely eaten up by renting extra security for Aotea during the occupation and to evict them.

That was the cost like 3 months back ( I think) and doesn't take into acount the prosecutiion of the Occu[piers in that article.

I facebooked Len Brown asking him about the toal cost but he didn't get back to me.

I agree .... but how do they effectively do this?

Same way everyone else does?

Wriiting submissions/contacting your local MPs doesn't seem to have been of much use in recent times ...

To be fair, that is something that should have been taught to the Occupiers by thos there who already knew the logistical way6s of doing things. I guess it's fighti9ng withint a system which you know doesn't work or trying to create a new system

See I always had trouble with that thinking gummi. The Occupy movement was working against a non-governmental group, by and large, which is not engaged in the political process save for subverting it in their own cause, so why must Occupy use traditional politics? Especially when many of the people that allow the 1% to do the subverting of politics are the very politicians you suggest they need to engage.

Doesn't make sense imo

One of the things they probably need is an intelligent and articulate leader.
But in the NZ context that person would struggle to do better than Harawera, Norman and Turei - and it would be very difficult to get public favour for articulating what would be an even more radical message than these three (Harawera excluded possibly - but see how marginal his popularity is).

I dont think NZ'ers are ready and willing to understand corporate manipulation of the economy. Most are wanting to cozy up to the corporations a bit closer so maybe the big guys will look down upon them with favour.

Yeah, not by Facebooking the assistants who manage the mayors Facebook page. You want that information? Official Information Act Request (or in this case Local Government Official Information Act), a powerful statutory tool open to anyone who can write a letter or even fill out a simply online form.
http://fyi.org.nz is a pretty neat service, but you need to know and be able to be specific about what you're asking for.

Well that and their issue is several hundred times more simple for Joe Public to understand than was Occupy. And that teachers, nurses, and cops are beloved by everyone in every walk of life.

*Ah, sorry, yes, I see what you were saying.

You're right, but students are always gonna protest and good on them too. Teachers have politics a whole lot easier though, and have unions which much more easily allow for concerted action, so... yeah, you're right but this is only very vaguely relevant.

given the changing tide of public opinion... globally... I'd suggest the occupy movement has been successful to a degree

that whole 1% thang is now part of the general economic and political discourse

and the slow to rise but ever growing anger of the middle classes has some focus... though in NZ (still) that still does tend to be focused on the poor and beaten... but the focus will change I reckon - as prices continue to rise and wages/opportuinties don't - unless you're 'rich' - refer to sell off of assets, to which few can afford to partake of

The student issue is very simple to understand though. Not letting post-grad students get student allowance when we're trying to be a "knowledge economy" is lolbad retarded... they just went about it in the most retarded way possible :/

Is it me or are my previous posts missing from this thread now

Wrong thread, vato

they've gone into the best man thread it seems

been here before?

hahaha fml

I don't think so tbh. People who have a "cause" need to ask what the point of their protest is, and whether the protest is going to get them closer or further away from their goal. The recent student protests and the occupy movement only served to harm their respective causes.

I'm not against protesting. I'm for anything that actually works.

Just putting this here from the other thread

I don't think either weakened /harmed their cause nor goal

Really? Just from talking to people about these things I think it's clear that they did. Am certainly open to being wrong about this though

for the occupy issues its a long game - the general public can take years to wake up and I believe slowly are (please note I do think the nz version of occupy was more disappointing than inspiring)

for the students, they got heard... with less 'bloody students' knee jerk reaction than for a long time

I'd suggest its what happens in the next few years that will truely reflect the power of either in this country

But what's your alternative gummi ...
Creative theatre?
Corporate advertising campaign?

Remember your participants have no money and limited resources of time

There is no super group with the power to affect real change (in the way you've contrasted teachers to students) to compare the Occupy group against though.
And the struggles of the two groups couldn't be more different either, as an effective Occupy would likely root out the rotten half of the government anyway.

The best I could honestly compare Occupy (I feel like I should say "us" as inclusive of you and I in the 99% but as I didn't do any camping out I'll abstain) and the 99% struggle to would honestly be the proletariat in pre-Communist Russia, so unless you're advocating violent uprising in the streets I don't see what you can be meaning.

Unless you're talking about factional issues within Occupy working alone to take their own issues separately to government to which I'd respond that the fascists won the Spanish Civil War because of factionalism.

Trying to put maximum numbers on the street and hoping it might dawn upon the public "there might be a good reason they are so upset" is about the best you can hope for IMO - and its probalby as far as your time/money resources stretch

To be honest amongst the people with whom I've discussed this I think this has more been a case of closet conservatives not realizing their own leanings than of the Occupy movement having failed and of media sentiment affecting public opinion than anything else. I've gotten a couple of people really fired up when helping them realize that they're now both old AND rightist <:

kiwis are generally quite conservative - refer to our hatred of intellect and the general anti intellectualism within NZ

its embarrassing how proud we are of stupid people and their physical feats

YOU LEAVE THE ALL BLACKS ALONE. THEY'RE A GODDAMN NATIONAL TREASURE!!

don't worry I leave them well alone

you now owe someone $675 for mentioning their name

I tried defending Ritchie's intelligence the other day to a hat0r only to find out that he never finished his agricultural science degree...

"Hi Im AJ Hackett and welcome to Jackass".

*jumps*

<3 Occupy. Think people are being way too hard on them.

To me, saying "they should follow the political process like others" kinda misses the point of the movement. They're not like teachers strikes etc where professional representative bodies are fighting for very specific benefits for a tiny proportion of the population. Occupy was at its core about getting *everybody* to at least think about these issues, question authority structures around them, promote civil rights - ie the interests of everybody (well, 99% of everyone).

They had high-level complaints with society, and everyone just immediately jumped on the bandwagon set off by Big Media about how ambiguous/confusing/obfuscated their message was. It wasn't any of that at all. I loved a quote I read on an early blog: "It's awfully obtuse to claim that people *holding signs* don't have a message".

Yeah they could've handled things better, but wtf did everyone expect. They were a grass-roots movement that sprung up impromptu extremely quickly, with very little chance for any sort of central organisation, and yet still managed to make an incredibly big/meaningful global presence and directly sparked a lot of important/interesting debate. People having a voice and standing up for the monumental amount of shit that we put up with from corporates/governments is something we should be celebrating and uniting over, but nah... yeah let's just write them off as dirty/shirtless hippies, that'll show them

Shit is only going to change when victims stop suffering quietly (or in this case, when victims start learning enough to realise that they're even victims). Nobody is ever going to root out the corporate control of governments by writing letters to senators and campaigning at election time. They're too good at that When the people start asking questions en masse, taking note of the structures in place that control their lives, that's when things will change. Awareness is key, and occupy was a million times more effective at that than any engagement through the standard political process would've been

Yeah because the cause was going so well before Occupy came along eh

Yak - don't confuse sentiments here about Occupy Auckland with sentiments about the wider Occupy movement. Occupy Auckland was a fucking shambles.

Ah k - I am talking specifically about the wider movement, never witnessed the Akld one.
Melbourne one was awesome but people said the same things in the media/forums here that others are saying ITT

I think it's worth remembering which people are saying that, and how informed they are, i.e. it's not like GB to run his mouth about something he's ill-informed of, especially something like this.

I had a field day hanging down there for about 70 days .... helped facilitate meetings, was on theconflict resolution team and fronted to people in Aotea Square .... and met my current gf when I thought she was from the council and was in the process of sussing her out

It was great for nme just running meetings adn speaking in front of lots of people cause that's something I've always been a bit nervous about and quite bad at.

Fond memories ...

All this going on and no Media Works or Eyeworks cameras filming it all?? Would have made a great reality tv show

You can't blame the media for that, because by then end any message was completely overshadowed by the whole shambles of it all. Too little, too late.

It had live streaming most of the time ... again, pity it was not really known

Yup, fair call.

Interview question from me (bottom left image) to John Key and Phil Goff while at OA .... don't think I'd slept the previous night (noisey and stuff)

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/policies/5924900/NZ-can-afford-child-poverty-package-Goff

live streaming from inside the camp?

HOLD TIGHT FOR THE REWIND!

Yeah, every night when they had the daily meetings and at all the marches ... and during the day intemitendly

It was all filmed by this dude who was head of media at OA

he should sell it to Media works, TVNZ or Eyeworks... they seem to love boring shit that they can flag off as "reality tv".

Although they would probably end up filming cutaway scenes to introduce controversial new characters.

Ah OK. I'll facebook him and telll him that ... does live stream get recorded.

depends if someone is recording it or not.

Right. I'm not techy but I always thought it was just live stream .... anyway, I'll talk to him about it