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They drove. They parked. They camped. Initially, life within the tent village beside Wellington’s ‘Beehive’ parliament constructing appeared spontaneous and carefree. They didn’t appear to thoughts being soaked by the parliamentary garden sprinklers or being blasted by Barry Manilow’s biggest hits, courtesy of the Speaker of the Home. They’d meals, bogs and a hairdresser’s tent.
Aside from the straight line of plastic site visitors obstacles separating the encampment from the entrance of the outdated and newer parliament buildings, there have been no boundaries. Unimpeded, they expanded into the encircling streets. Then, on day 14, the fences went up. Technically, they have been concrete obstacles: massive rectangular blocks of concrete, forklifted into place. However actually the police have been fencing them in.
As Richard Francis-Jones writes in his wonderful Reality and Lies in Structure (see assessment) “A shortening from the time period defence, ‘fens’ is the fourteenth century origin of the phrase fence. The fence is a distillation of the wall. Maybe an efficient restraint to animal life, however as precise bodily safety to pure and human hostilities it’s weak and subsequent to ineffective. Its energy is just not bodily in any respect; it’s symbolic and representational; it’s a marker of an invisible power. Fences symbolize boundaries that might be enforced.”
These inert sentinels of energy set new boundaries, now blocking entry to Hill Road, the rear finish of Parliament on Ballantrae Place, Molesworth Road close to Pipitea Road, Murphy Road and Aitken Road, Kate Sheppard Place, Bunny Road close to the railway station, the nook of Whitmore Road and Lambton Quay and the underside of Bowen Road, and on the intersection of Lambton Quay and Mulgrave Road.
Over the subsequent few days, the police started shifting the blocks inwards. On day 15, the bollard line on Aitken Road and Hill Road was moved in about 50 metres, and about 100 metres on Molesworth Road.
There was some pushback. On the night of day 16, a number of the campers managed to heave some blocks out of place, sufficient to let about 20 vehicles again into the encampment. The following day, police forklifted in additional blocks to treatment the breach.
Round this time, various campers left. On the seventeenth day, the positioning was named by the Ministry of Well being as a location of curiosity. A few of the campers have been clearly getting Covid though some remained satisfied it was the electromagnetic subject (EMF) weaponry “gadgets” being unleashed upon them. Some donned head masks – tinfoil hats. About this time, you could possibly be forgiven for considering the social contract actually had gone out the window. Lots of the campers appeared to have joined the sovereign citizen motion, whose adherents insist they’re above the legislation. “In different phrases, they arrogate to themselves sovereign powers that not even the monarch enjoys,” as George Monbiot put it in The Guardian, including that such “incoherent protest actions are typically infested with racism and white supremacy.” To not point out rampant conspiracy.
However it was stunning that, as a substitute of shifting in with brute power, the police selected to deploy the fence. Was it an act of kindness? Francis-Jones in Reality and Lies argues: “The fencing of land was a fast, economical and environment friendly instrument of personal possession, energy and the related exclusion.” Right here, the fence was nearly like an act of inclusion, its perimeter encircling a tract of public land given to, quickly owned by, them – the campers.
By the nineteenth day, extra vehicles arrived and tried to enter however the line between inside and outdoors held – the police holding the surface and the outsiders defiantly holding the within. As Francis-Jones explains: “The fence has been a outstanding instrument of occupation, management and suspect claims of possession.”
It messed together with your head. Fenced in, in the midst of downtown Wellington public area was the collision of campers, decided, regardless of how wacky lots of their concepts, to be heard. What was on present, even when it was a minority Aotearoa view, was one thing uneasy, one thing not properly on the edges of the crew of 5 million.
It’s not an enormous leap to match this with the Occupy motion begun in October 2011, when hundreds of individuals right here and in different cities all over the world began to occupy public areas – to advertise a pro-democracy, civil liberty, social justice message and to protest towards company greed and financial inequality.
In Reality and Lies, Francis-Jones argues that occupation was an try and reclaim our public area from governmental and company dominance and that we have to discover an genuine public area. “An inclusive area of civic liberty, tolerance and acceptance, an city area of ‘public look’ that’s not owned by state or non-public curiosity, however to which all of us maintain shared duty and custodian-ship.”
Isn’t genuine public area precisely what’s on present within the Wellington encampment? As Francis-Jones describes it, such a public area inside our metropolis “could be open and natural in character, in a position to answer the urgent wants and problems with the second”. Resembling fencing off a portion however nonetheless permitting protest – an area of political freedom arising from the actions of residents, even when a few of them appear barmy.
Which leaves only one query. When the campers have gone (as I write, they’re nonetheless there), ought to the concrete-block fence, or at the very least a few of it, stay? A monument maybe to the worthy value of inclusive public area in our capital metropolis.
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