APEC security leaves bitter taste in Sydney

A report by Nick Bryant for the UK’s BBC News says that after Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics, a compelling case could be made for holding the games in the city every four years, such was the panache and energy which pulsated through its staging.

After APEC, most Sydneysiders are saying “Never again”, with one of them, Christopher Brown, described as the normally good-humoured head of TTF Australia, a powerful tourism and transport lobby group which had lent strong support to Sydney’s hosting of the 21 Pacific Rim leaders, saying that like many, he is incensed by what he regards as the needlessly aggressive and restrictive policing, which carried a heftier security price tag than the 16-day-long Olympics and led to the construction of the 5km ( three mile) “great wall of Sydney”.

“I’m so embarrassed and annoyed.” “Where was the sense of proportion?” “We replaced Olympic volunteers with riot squads,” he says.

“Somebody in the security operation got very carried away with their own self-importance, and nobody in the state or federal government counterbalanced them.”

“It was totally and utterly disproportionate.”

Consider the experience of Greg McLeay, a 52-year-old accountant and father of three, with on Friday, with his 11-year-old son looking on, he was arrested by the police in the central business district.

Thrown in jail under special APEC powers which allowed the police to hold people without bail, he was strip-searched and forced to spend the night locked up with a drug addict.

His offence? Crossing the road incorrectly during APEC near a cordoned-off area.

From demonstrations of its new high-powered water cannon to night-time exercises involving riot police, the New South Wales police were determined to show they were ready for large-scale protests with the possibility of turning violent.

But had they war-gamed against the wrong kind of protests?

In court this week, when they successfully persuaded a judge to re-route the largest protest march of the week, they argued 20,000 demonstrators would turn up. In the end, though, only about 5,000 showed up, taking part in an overwhelmingly peaceful protest.

Similarly, they had cleared hundreds of prison cells, in anticipation of filling them with protesters.  In the end, there were 17 arrests. Two police officers were injured – one was hit by a dart.

At the tail-end of the protest on Saturday, many marchers and journalists were mystified by the appearance of riot squads, backed up with the ominous presence of the water cannon.

As the Sun-Herald noted: “Police ruled Sydney’s streets with an iron fist.” But the paper’s headline “Police Rule” could just as easily have read “Overkill”.

“They had geared up for so much trouble, it almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Christopher Brown.

Similarly, this is not the first time that the authorities have been criticised for over-zealous policing.

Ahead of the Ashes tour by the England cricket team, Morris Iemma wrote to the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair asking him to identify known hooligans travelling with the “Barmy Army”.

Then there were the decisions to ban the Barmy Army’s trumpeter and ban Mexican waves – all of which seemed like the over-enforcement of the “Killjoy Act”.

Report by The Mole