Yesterday, as I sat in the rain on the road in front of Parliament House, with a cop’s knee in my back, the crowd broke into a powerful chant of:

Show me what democracy looks like

This is what democracy looks like!

With Parliament House at our backs, where the Prime Minister had just personally intervened to kill the negotiations between his government and the Greens over nature laws, where fossil fuel lobbyists still hold sway over people and the planet, Rising Tide’s nonviolent protest was met with some of the harshest policing many of us have experienced in the parliamentary precinct.

After some pretty rough handling, I chose to walk away and join the four wonderful Greens MPs who had come to chant with us on the footpath. But 22 people were arrested and charged with obstruction – highly unusual for Canberra.

This escalation of the clamp-down on the right to nonviolent protest is very much part of a wider trend – a trend we will be discussing next Thursday evening in our final webinar of the year.

The NSW Government did everything in its power to stop the Rising Tide blockade in Newcastle last week in order to protect the coal corporations. They denied it official permission to go ahead, and even tried, illegally, to put in place an exclusion zone to keep us off the water – an attempt overruled by the Supreme Court at the 11th hour.

Of course, this clamp-down and over-policing are a clear demonstration of where power lies and who is using it on behalf of whom.

I mean, look at this beautiful picture of the rebel alliance vs the Imperial Death Star:

I’m going to write up the remarkable experience at Rising Tide in detail soon. It was a superb example of not only saying NO to the old world, but also a hearty YES to the new.

Alongside blockading the coal ships and the parliament, we had a fabulous experiment with deep democracy through the spokescouncil, which I had the privilege of co-facilitating, as well as a wide array of mutual aid and solidarity economy work, with everyone chipping in to cook and clean and look after each other.

Here, at the end of the world as we know it, with our governing systems crumbling around us, this is what democracy looks like.