> Our Occupy was forcibly closed this morning. The group wanted a
> permitted camping experience and the city extended it a few times. We
> met weekly with a small group from the city for status updates and to
> make sure we were keeping the place clean, etc. etc. Mostly it was to
> build good: that’s how most people saw it. Me, I’m a cynical bitch but
> kept my counsel.
Bad news, but good to hear it might be starting up again somewhere else. Occupy Sydney was shut down by police after a week, started up again in a park a couple of weeks later and was quickly stifled again. It's fed into various other things, teach-ins etc - I guess in the medium term Occupies are going to fade or be pushed out in most of the peripheral cities so we need to think about what to do next.
I was delighted to hear this past week that New Zealand police have refused to carry out the council's orders to evict Occupy Dunedin because of a legal precedent set in the case of Police v Beggs:
http://pundit.co.nz/content/at-my-signal-unleash-hell
"The DCC can, as a landowner, issue trespass notices under the Trespass Act. And a breach of such a notice (i.e. staying on the upper Octagon after being told to leave) is an offence, which the Police can arrest you for. However, and this is pretty critical, where the DCC's issuance of a trespass order will have the effect of limiting a right under the NZ Bill of Rights Act, then that issuance will only be valid if it is "reasonable" for the DCC to limit that right in that way. The High Court held this in a case in the late 1990s, Police v Beggs, which dealt with the Speaker of the House trying to use a trespass notice to put a stop to a student protest on Parliament's grounds ... Graeme Edgeler discusses it here <http://publicaddress.net/legalbeagle/begging-for-trouble/>."
Mike