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Best Practice Protesting

For some time now I have been reflecting on the inefficiency of farmer protest where a lot of good people spend up to two days getting to and from a protest in Canberra that only gets marginal attention in the media.

This link demonstrates the opposite end of the protest efficiency scale where a single guy has brought Sydney to a 4 hour standstill to give the public ample time to reflect on the issue he has raised. He has converted 4 hours of work and perhaps 16 hours of planning into about $2 million worth of air time.

http://theage.drive.com.au/motor-news/traffic-back-to-normal-as-syd...

And while he has obviously raised the ire of a great many motorists he has achieved his key objective extremely well. The whole city, and much of the country, is now discussing the issue of family law. Review of the comments also reveal a great deal of sympathy for his cause. The vote on whether such actions are acceptable in some circumstances is currently running 72% in favour.

Note that there was also a truckie back in March who dumped a load of fill blocking two lanes of the Harbour Bridge but he appears to have lacked the PR skills to properly exploit the opportunity.

Imagine what half a dozen good men (and women) could do? What do you think?

Tags: Best, Practise, Protesting

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ian Mott on May 25, 2011 at 9:30am

Back in 1980 we spent about 5 hours crawling along the Paris ring road to the point where just a dozen or so farmers were giving the population all the time in the world to reflect on their governments treatment of farmers. Most of them may not have even understood the issue but they did understand that their government wasn't the just and fair outfit they liked to present themselves as.

All governments, and labor ones in particular, need their own supporters to believe that the people they voted for are honest, fair and reasonable, even whenm the overwhelming evidence is to the contrary. This is why the ALP in both NSW & Qld made a big thing (ie repetetive messages) about consultation for the regional vegetation plans before they scrapped the lot and did what they always intended to do in the first place. They built a just and fair public perception before they did the exact opposite. It is the same scam as disgraced celebrities doing charity work to restore their perceptual capital, only they do it after the crime, not before it like the scum who govern us.

What the French farmers did was to take a trailer load of worthless rotting tomatoes and gave them time and place utility in association with the Minister's limousine, to value-add into $1 million worth of air time. They understood that getting into the news actually means MAKING news.

And once a group has demonstrated the capacity to MAKE news then every Ministers door is open to them.

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Permalink Reply by Ian Mott on May 27, 2011 at 4:16pm

I rather like the idea of declaring two lanes of the SE Freeway as "habitat for threatened species" and planting a mix of actual TS seedlings and cardboard cut-outs of farming families.

And every protester should be wearing the open diggers slouch hat and Karkhi singlet to remind people of the kind of values good men and women actually died to protect. Lest we f@#g forget!

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Permalink Reply by Laurel Ender on May 31, 2011 at 11:34pm

Denial of service and supply would work real well.

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Permalink Reply by Laurel Ender on May 31, 2011 at 11:41pm

from historical newspaper items its always a sector of the farm groups protesting a point.

never in a cohesive agreed and determined full on assault on govt idiocy and misrulings.

yeah the industry bodies are More industry than the real working bodies that provide their bread and funding too.

Unite and Fight.

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Permalink Reply by Ian Mott on August 25, 2011 at 11:57am

I am fine, Dale. But given that the convoy was the very opposite of what I regard as an efficient use of resources, I had no choice but to remain silent and let it run its course. I recognise that many people involved did an excellent job on the pure logistics of the exercise and no-one can take that away from them.

But I tend to regard any outcome short of going globally viral as an underachievement. Of course, this means that I am continually dissatisfied with our efforts, including my own. It is a question of how high we set the target and how many outcomes we can achieve along the way. One thing is certain though. This exercise did have the potential to so humiliate Gillard, not just on a national scale but globally, that she would be mortally wounded politically. But it didn't happen because;

1. The enemy was given more than a month to work out their response to the single stated objective,

2. The campaign didn't distinguish between the logistics of getting to the area of battle and the conduct of the battle once they were there

3. The battle was waged on the enemy's chosen ground and on their terms, ie the size of the protest as seen in Canberra was viewed as the only evidence of the scale of the protest.

4. There was no capacity to fry other fish, to achieve other marketing objectives along the way. The only message sent was lack of confidence in Gillard and all she had to do to be seen to win was to refuse to call an election. There was no attempt to make that message part of a dialogue with the Australian public.

5. Many, many more.

But I don't know whether there is even any point left to examining what could be learned from this exercise because the people involved in this one have made such a costly contribution that they are unlikely to make the same scale of investment for a number of years. And that means the next exercise will be done by yet another group of fired up folks who proceed to reinvent the wheel, again and again.

It is ironic that no farmer would ever dream of solving a very serious weed problem with just one application of spray but, time and again, we see people hoping that a single grand gesture will fix a seriously degraded political landscape. We have an intergrated pest management problem that demands the best use of multiple resources over an extended period.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Moore on August 26, 2011 at 11:13am

Just submitted this as a comment!

Richo-
I am not a fan of your ideology but I respect anyone who has the guts to say what they mean -even if it is unpopular.Gary Johns wrote a good piece on the CONVOY.

I was one of the organisers and have just returned home. I want you to personally tell that albino worm-Albenese- that he is finished. There might have only been 2500 of us but like -'the band of Brothers "" a few good men" etc- we are all very insulted.

I might add that a fair few would have been your voters before this green latte sippers club that is there now emerged.
I am a 5th generation sheep and cattle producer and my ancestors went off to war for ALL of us. Many of us were the same- people you could count on - extremely capable - not your union funded "Rent a crowd-Get Up " types.

The ABC and all your lefties can count our numbers and sneer but the 81% support for us on Nine NSM poll gives me great satisfaction for my efforts.

You are quite right Richo - they are history in the making!

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Permalink Reply by Suzanne March on August 26, 2011 at 10:26pm

Good Idea, Look at how the photos of the school in NZ went viral.

Ian Mott said:

Yes Dixie,

Out of the city there are numerous "publishing" opportunities that are underutilised. The French farmers even have messages on their cattle, and at Tour de France time they have messages mown into their paddocks if they have a good exposed hill, and stacks of other "media". There was a guy mentioned on Andrew Bolts blog a few weeks back who had mown or sprayed "ALP Out" on a hillside next to the highway and it has already served both a federal and state election.

My favourite would be to ensure the truth about people like Beattie and Bligh is known to the next 6 generations by shaping the vegetation to say something like "Beattie Lied" to every passing airliner and every person who looks at a satellite image of your farm. Ultimately these people are mostly concerned by their place in history so we need to ensure that we define how history will judge them. A patch of regrowth could be selectively cleared to produce 90m high letters with a message which will evolve into protected remnant vegetation. And if the message is in between two clumps of remnant it would also have connective significance and should never be cleared.

And it only takes about 2 hectares to get that message onto 100,000ha of satellite image. And if it is under a flight path it may get noticed by 5000 people a week for the next 100 years. At $0.20 a dose it will have advertising value of $50,000 a year or half a million a decade.

And we have how many potential vegetation publishers?

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Permalink Reply by Michael Petterson on August 26, 2011 at 10:33pm

Albanese and the other silly dopes that ridiculed the convoy have virtually commited politicial suicide at this point.

Rob Moore said:

Just submitted this as a comment!

Richo-
I am not a fan of your ideology but I respect anyone who has the guts to say what they mean -even if it is unpopular.Gary Johns wrote a good piece on the CONVOY.

I was one of the organisers and have just returned home. I want you to personally tell that albino worm-Albenese- that he is finished. There might have only been 2500 of us but like -'the band of Brothers "" a few good men" etc- we are all very insulted.

I might add that a fair few would have been your voters before this green latte sippers club that is there now emerged.
I am a 5th generation sheep and cattle producer and my ancestors went off to war for ALL of us. Many of us were the same- people you could count on - extremely capable - not your union funded "Rent a crowd-Get Up " types.

The ABC and all your lefties can count our numbers and sneer but the 81% support for us on Nine NSM poll gives me great satisfaction for my efforts.

You are quite right Richo - they are history in the making!