Today, Qld Police arrested Jonathan Sriranganathan, Councillor for The Gabba while standing on a public footpath, at a peaceful #DisruptLandForces protest in his electorate. Jonno is out now, but obviously sore from the rough arrest and police compliance methods – For. Simply. Peacefully. Protesting. In. His. Own. Electorate.
More from Jonno:
This morning I was arrested while participating in a peaceful protest outside the Land Forces weapons expo at the South Brisbane convention centre. I’m actually on leave this week so wasn’t planning to be doing any kind of public advocacy, but I stopped by to show my support for the protest against the killing machines expo.
This is the second time in my life I’ve been arrested, and the circumstances were somewhat similar to the last occasion (outside the Kangaroo Point refugee prison) where police wrongly arrested me and later had to drop the charge, which was pretty embarrassing for them.
Today, I was standing on public land, on a publicly accessible footpath outside the convention centre, participating in an authorised peaceful assembly (a notice of intention had been lodged in accordance with the Peaceful Assembly Act).
A convention centre employee came out to the footpath and told me I was trespassing. I asked to see evidence that the footpath I was on wasn’t public/government land but he wasn’t interested in respectful conversation – he just ordered me to move. He then asked police officers to take action, and they arrested me for trespassing (just to reiterate: I was OUTSIDE the building on a footpath that’s usually publicly accessible – the land around the convention centre is government-owned).
The excessive police crackdown against peaceful protest is obviously really concerning, and it’s annoying that I now have strict bail conditions imposed on me which prevent me participating in further protests at Land Forces. In fact it seems like arresting people to slap on bail conditions is a big part of the Queensland police strategy to suppress protest – even if the charges don’t stick, they can take you to the watch house, process you, impose conditions that limit your freedom to move around the city, and then you have to wait until your court date to get the conditions lifted.
But what’s even more concerning than the over-the-top police response is that our governments are putting PUBLIC MONEY towards hosting a military weapons expo where companies from around the world come together to buy and sell killing machines.
They are also gifting public grants and public land to individual weapons manufacturers like Rheinmetall, which has a long and bloody history that includes manufacturing weapons for the Nazis using Jewish concentration camp slave labour. These are not the sorts of businesses the Queensland Government should be supporting.
As one old peace activist commented, these companies don’t manufacture weapons to fight wars, they manufacture wars to sell weapons.
At a time of multiple overlapping crises, when homelessness is rising and global warming is causing a chain of disastrous weather events across the globe, it is utterly disgusting that our state and federal governments are putting public money towards manufacturing and selling weapons (without any regard for who will end up using them) rather than building public housing.
‘Creating jobs’ is not an acceptable justification for turning South-East Queensland into a global military weapons manufacturing hub to churn out killing machines that will be used by dictators and warlords.
There’s heaps more information about the Disrupt Land Forces campaign on their website and social media pages – see links in comments.
People sometimes wonder what they can do to help stop wars and displacement of refugees in far-off places. But the reality is that wars start here, in cities like Brisbane, where the weapons are bought and sold.
If we want a more peaceful planet, we have to end the military arms race, not ramp it up.
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