laura_seabrook | Entries tagged with apec

The APEC conference, and the security and extra laws created to protect it, whether or not it wanted to be, are a joke.

Why? If you read 11 charged over Chaser APEC stunt, you'll see that members of The Chaser...

...and three hired drivers have been charged with entering a restricted area without justification.

The group was arrested after staging a fake motorcade through Sydney's CBD and were stopped near the InterContinental Hotel where US President George W Bush is staying.

One of the Chaser crew was dressed as Osama bin Laden.

Now they were released today, apparently footage of this will appear next Wednesday on the ABC. Reading Lucky it was us and not Al Qaeda, says Chaser it seems obvious to me that the security set up, really is a shambles. Such stunts annoy the authorities because she show just how incompetent their measures can be. If it had be Al Qaeda with some bombs in the cars, then that might have been an entirely different event and outcome. I find it interesting that the Socialists cancelled the Friday APEC protest - maybe the Chaser incident had something to do with that?

An APEC protest, and one I had advance warning about, was Bums for Bush, in which...

...[a] group calling themselves 'Bums for Bush' exposed themselves in Sydney's Hyde Park during a protest rally this afternoon.

Now regardless of what you think politically, I think it's a very clever way of protesting. See, the powers that be seem easily to be able to handle protests that go violent. Once they get violent, the public remembers the violence and not what the protest was about. But it's pretty hard to see how such a protest could get out of hand, even despite what the Daily Telegraph reported.