Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

Greens Senator, Bob Brown, 2004
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of organisations that managed much of the
logistics for the protest, from the stage to
radio communications, and also engaged
with AWOL – the autonomous web of
liberation – a more amorphous network of
activists who planned actions, events and
infrastructure. Realising the fact that the
media were beating up the possibility of
violence, FoE initiated the idea of the Green
Bloc, the picket of the Haig and Clarke
street car-parks, which was an autonomous
blockade under the s11 umbrella. Green bloc
had been billed as a ‘disciplined, targeted
non-violent blockade’ and this is what we
delivered.
There was some controversy because of
our decision to let off-duty workers out
through our picket line. This was based on
our assessment that blockading workers who
simply wanted to go home did nothing to
impact on the WEF delegates. FoE was at its
best, with the building acting as a check-in
point, and FoE people doing blockading,
media, police and worker liaison, and
endless mediation on the picket lines as
well as acting as a link between the more
radical and more conservative groups. And,
throughout the blockades we articulated our
vision of a just and sustainable future, not
losing sight of the bigger picture.
There can be little doubt that the world is
a different place from September 2000. It
is unlikely that ‘summits’ of this type will
keep going: the annual meeting of the WEF,
held in January in the town of Davos in
Switzerland, happens in incredibly tight
security, and the World Bank, IMF and other
international institutions can’t meet without
mass movements and opposition. In this
sense, Melbourne played its part in the in the
movement that defined the last decade of the
20th century.
FoE 30 Years 90