Posts by Paul Campbell
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I almost forgot - not long after I moved to the US some sent me that EP - I didn't have a record player and had no idea what was on it - 6 months later I got someone at work to copy it onto tape for me .... and cried all the way home on the BART ... I was deep into that depression thing that happens 6 months after you move somewhere
just look at the '80s hair on Chris ...
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I got to use the tactics I learned during the tour around organising protests a lot - we moved to California and got drawn into pro-choice clinic defense groups - were up against what looked like plain middle class women in pastels trying to peacefully barricade clinics - what the media never showed was the big burly footbal players who would be sent in before they arrived to beat us up - I had them build NZ tour-style plywood shields that could be tied together to form a barricade - I only got one broken bone.
One thing that had really helped during th '81 tour was walkie-talkies - someone could spot the police movements and pass on where weaknesses were in the perimeters of a field - we took that one step further by renting, at great expense, one of those new fangled cell phone things for the day so that when we followed Operation Rescue we could call our phone bank and mobilise our supporters.
We had moles in their organisation, we knew where they were going and they had to stop talking to their people, where I lived (San Francisco Bay) we out organised them and out mobilised them (how do you call 40,000 people? now days I'd build a demon dialer, then we needed a really organised phone tree). They stopped trying to shut down our local clinics.
It's one of the few lefty radical, in your face organisations I've been involved with that really succeeded at it's goal, and while we were doing it we held together a very diverse coalition of supporters - like any good lefty group we turned on each other afterwards ....
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yeah, but they're both always in the garage having something done
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BTW - one of the more surreal parts of moving back to NZ almost 25 years later was having my kids being taught "the Tour" as history ("what did you do during the tour Daddy?")
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I was 22 I think when it happened, for me it was one of those coming of age things - over the months before the cops had gotten very aggressive and in people's faces, they'd been touring the Dunedin Uni pubs with their new shiny phallic batons carefully displayed.
I marched every weekend for 3 months through a cold cold winter - we went to the game at Carisbrook (we bought tickets, they couldn't get enough punters and tickets were going cheap - paying $20 was much easier than breaking in through the barbed wire) and smuggled in banners - we all got arrested on the old "breach of the peace" pretext which allowed the cops to drop us in the cells until everything was over without bothering to charge us - they rang our parents (my Mum came out protesting every week after that).
The next week someone broke into Carisbrook and cut down the goal posts, later that day the march arrived at the gates (seems that same someone had also cut the padlocks) and entered the ground to 'purify it' by burning a rugby ball ....
We rented moving trucks, filled then full of people and mattresses and left at 2am to drive to Invercargill - we were all a bit scared of the locals and carefully timed our arrival to just after the time they had to be at the game ... we marched without incident and to me it was probably one of the most moving marches I went to - we were joined but a whole bunch of local Maori kids who'd never really had an opportunity to stand up in their community before - we left before the game got out and were followed by the cops all the way back to Dunedin - we weren't allowed to stop, even to pee until we were out of Southland
On the last day we pulled off probably our biggest operation - by then we'd purged all the undercover cops - and most of the local cops were off to Auckland anyway - people were really angry and wanted to do something - the Dunedin Group split in 3 - one third headed for the airport, followed by the cops, another third headed for Carisbrook again and the final group headed for down town - this had the desired effect and the cop stationed at the Mt Cargill TV transmitter headed off down town - as soon as he was gone a group with a car staged a break down on the cattle stop you had to pass through to get there, jacked their car up and started to change tires ... meanwhile a group who'd hiked up the back from Bethune's Gully broke in and at exactly 2pm turned off the TV transmitter .... oops no rugby on TV .... (and no Sky remember) ... there were angry fans in the streets outside the pubs where they'd gone to watch the game.
Meanwhile an even braver group drove inland from Timaru to the TV transmitter/microwave relay there and, having synchronised their watches, turned that off at 2pm too .... they hopped back in their car and drove for the cost ... a while later they saw the cops coming in the distance, they turned around and drove the other way so that when the cops passed them they were driving towards the transmitter ....
(no real damage was done - TV was back on in time to watch what had happened in Auckland on the news - it was also the only day I ever made a 111 call (it was a genuine one))
At the end of the year there was the election - Dunedin had a history of full political meetings- this was the first time ever that a political leader held a election meeting in the Town Hall that wasn't public - the National Party printed tickets to see Muldoon and handed them out to the faithful - by today's standards they were very simple - simple a piece of yellow cardboard with a unique number on it- remember no laser printers in those days - no desktop publishing - someone realised that you could simply xerox the real tickets and pretty soon bootleg tickets were being handed out at the Cook by the hundreds - with just 12 unique numbers on them - the town hall was overflowing, by the time they realised what was going on it was too late, because the cops new everyone from the tour some of us had to go in in disguise (some went as nuns) - the SIS agent sitting beside me pretending to be one of us was so silly (it was the bomber command mustache that gave him away ...) ... lots of screaming ensued, people were still very angry - and then half way through more than half of the crowd turned their backs on Muldoon and walked out
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we used to have rites-of-passage, more practical than symbolic - my Dad went out to work at 15 to support his family (despite being dux of his primary/intermediate school) - not much social welfare in those days to support his blind father and mother - if you grew up in a poor neighbourhood it was hard to get out - he did eventually get a degree (first in his family ever) on the NZ equivalent of the GI bill after coming back from North Africa/Italy
we truly have it easy ....
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Public discourse about suicide is a strange beast in NZ .... here in Dunedin there's a stretch of road along the crest of the sandhills along a public beach - it ends on a hill with some steep cliffs - for as long as anyone can remember people have been going up there and jumping off - it's an 'attractive nuisance' - a few years back the city closed the road ....
There's been a long drawn out political discussion about whether the road should be open - it's sort of portrayed as a cars vs. walking/biking fight - but largely because the local paper wont print anything (especially not letters to the editor) about the suicide risk - a years or so ago the council was bullied into opening the road, someone jumped the next day, they closed it again - there are petitions, facebook pages, people with placards etc etc all in favour of opening the road - but the public discourse here is IMHO deeply flawed because no one can talk about the elephant in the room - the local politicians can't win - and there's going to be no resolution of this issue
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but you don't just let him spew his evil - you go down there with your soap boxes and call him out on it .... make sure he and the rest of society know that what he's saying IS vile and evil
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yeah I was about to post Giovanni's link too
I'm a big believer in countering hate speech with more speech - calling Beck and the whaleblubbersrs/kb denziens of the world on their crap is more important than ignoring them and hoping they'll go away - as we've seen in Norway that doesn't work
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I like "sno-dalek" of course you need a toilet plunger and an egg-beater rather than a carrot