BY SEAN HEALY
Steel fences which barricade off city blocks, police baton charges, the use of tear gas and even live ammunition against protesters may be the most obvious signs of the authorities' attempts to repress, or at least contain, the rising movement against corporate globalisation, but they are not the only ones.
With little fanfare, governments around the world are expanding the powers of police forces to monitor, spy on, harass, intimidate and, if necessary, physically attack anti-globalisation protesters.
The next likely flashpoint in Australia will come in early October. On October 6, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of people are expected to take to Brisbane's streets on the first day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).
In the three days before, thousands of protesters in Melbourne will blockade the Hilton Hotel, where corporate executives and senior politicians will be holding a meeting of the Commonwealth Business Forum.
Already, governments and police forces in Queensland and Victoria have launched their counter-strategies.
"The authorities' strategy in Brisbane is very clearly to make it seem like it will be too dangerous to join the protests", says Karen Fletcher, the spokesperson for the CHOGM Action Network.
Queensland Labor Premier Peter Beattie has sought to present his government as being tolerant of, even sympathetic to, the protest groups, claiming that the Commonwealth shares many of their concerns. He says he is keen to help organisers ensure protests run peacefully.
Beattie has announced a high-profile independent mediation team to liaise between protest groups and the police. He has even rejected the powerful police union's calls for expanded powers and resources.
But, says Fletcher, the mediation team is "just for public consumption. The mediators themselves don't know what their role is, they keep asking us."
As for police powers, Fletcher adds, "the fear of protest has made it easier for police to get the powers that they've long wanted".
Intimidation
Merran Lawlor is the director of Brisbane's Caxton Legal Centre and is coordinating the protest groups' legal support team. She believes police preparations for CHOGM have been "highly politicised".
"Police are proceeding from an expectation of violence", she told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly. "They're determined to stomp on anything anti-CHOGM."
Part of the police strategy, Lawlor says, has been to ensure the media plays on public fears of violence. "The police are building up the planned protests into more than what the protesters are intending. That then creates a climate in which police can realise their expectations; they're creating that sort of environment."
Lawlor says that the other part of the police strategy is aimed at directly intimidating activists.
What happened to Leigha Coonan is a case in point. A student at the University of Queensland, Coonan was stopped by security guards while putting up anti-CHOGM posters on campus and then handed over to police. She was held at a local police station for four hours, had her fingerprints and DNA samples taken and was threatened with charges that carry a maximum seven years in jail.
Lawlor says Coonan's case is not an isolated one; she knows of something almost identical happening to another student.
People putting up stickers or posters have been similarly targeted, some handed $350 fines by council officers. The Brisbane city council is putting considerable resources into ensuring that all anti-CHOGM publicity comes down within hours of going up on the city's walls.
Fletcher believes that undercover police officers have even sought to infiltrate both demonstrations and organising group meetings in recent months and says that all activists in the city are aware that police are monitoring email discussion lists.
"The clear message to protesters, both potential and actual, is that any level of participation in anti-CHOGM activities won't be tolerated", Lawlor says.
New powers
Both Lawlor and Fletcher believe that police officers' capacity to intimidate protesters has been greatly enhanced by new powers that they've been given in recent weeks.
Under an act of parliament introduced before the Sydney Olympic Games, the Queensland government has the power to declare a "special event", giving police and "authorised persons", typically private guards, significantly enhanced powers. These include the right to stop and search any person in a designated area, prevent them from entering or force them to leave.
The Beattie government has declared CHOGM a "special event". The zone in which the special powers will be in effect does not just cover the immediate vicinity of the Convention Centre, where CHOGM and the attached Commonwealth People's Festival will be held. It extends for blocks around the venue and around certain hotels in the city where delegates will be staying. Many public places are within this zone.
The "special event" regulations are in force not just for October 6, the day of CHOGM meets in Brisbane, but from October 1 to midnight on October 9.
Under the regulations, police have also declared a wide range of things banned. The most notable of these are deliberately aimed at protesters: walkie-talkies, megaphones, placards or banners with wooden poles, gas masks, balaclavas, spray-cans, bicycle helmets.
Lawlor believes that the list of banned items is so wide that police will have free rein to intimidate and harass protesters.
"One thing which is banned is anything which might be used to conceal something, like a bag", she says. "Without some clarification, we're concerned that that means that anyone walking near the site with a backpack can be stopped and detained."
Some powers go considerably further. The Police Powers and Responsibilities Act, passed with little public consultation during a late-night session in July 2000, allows for the detention of anyone who "may cause a breach of the peace".
Fletcher, for one, believes this could allow the pre-emptive arrest of protest organisers, as has happened in other cities during similar anti-globalisation protests.
Already, Peter Hore, a diagnosed schizophrenic described by the media and police as a "serial pest", has been detained and will likely be held until after CHOGM is over.
Victoria
In Victoria, the yet-to-be passed Commonwealth Games Arrangements Bill will give the government the power to override many existing laws to allow the smooth running of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, including the Heritage Act and the Land Act.
As with Queensland's "special events" law, it allows the government to designate areas in which police have wide powers to stop, search and remove anyone suspected of being likely to cause a disturbance.
"Governments use these kinds of big events, like the Olympics and CHOGM, as the political cover to increase police powers", says the Western Suburbs Legal Service's Damien Lawson. He points also to the federal act of parliament introduced before the Olympics which allows the military to be deployed within Australia to contain "civil disturbances".
The Australian Defence Force has already stated that 1600 of its personnel will be on duty in Brisbane, albeit with unstated responsibilities.
'Paramilitary' policing
Also in the wings is the new Public Assemblies Bill, which would replace the antiquated Unlawful Assemblies Act. The new bill has just passed through a public comment stage and Victorian Premier Steve Bracks' Labor government is considering whether to put it before parliament.
The bill "will allow police to do what they did at S11 more easily and legitimise it" by making it easier for police to use force to disperse crowds, says Lawson, who coordinated legal support during last September's S11 protests against the World Economic Forum, during which police injured hundreds of protesters.
"These legislative regimes are basically mirroring actual policing practice", says Lawson. "The traditional approach is, if someone is breaking the law, they are arrested and then taken before a court to have their case heard. Now, with this trend to paramilitary policing, whole crowds are being found guilty but aren't being arrested; rather force is being used to disperse them. Governments worldwide are legislating for that type of practice."
The evidence that it is a worldwide trend is certainly mounting.
Since the massive protests during the G8 summit of world leaders in Genoa in July, during which Italian police shot dead one protester, European authorities have announced new measures which will subject protesters to unprecedented levels of surveillance.
Using the secretive Article 36 committee and the Schengen Information System, both of which allow for extensive contact and data sharing between police forces, police forces will set up permanent contact points in every EU country to collect, analyse and share information on protesters, will use police or intelligence operatives to identify groups perceived to be threats, and will extend cross-border police collaboration in dealing with major protests.
The information systems will allow pictures, fingerprints and other information to be sent to police once a suspect enters a country.
In Canada, where authorities are already gearing up for next July's G8 summit, scheduled for Kananaskis high in the Rocky Mountains, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have formed a new unit, the Public Order Program, with the task of gathering and sharing information on protesters and protest groups.
According to briefing documents leaked to the Canadian media, the program will be a "centre for excellence" for dealing with large, militant demonstrations, allowing police to keep up with the very latest in crowd-control and crowd-suppression techniques.
Meanwhile, in Washington DC, police have announced plans to erect a steel barrier around a 70-square-block section of the city in an effort to deter protests at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The three-metre-high fence will seal off the offices of the two institutions, the White House and the State Department from September 27 to October 1.
Police say they are expecting up to 100,000 protesters to descend on the city on those days. Representatives of the protest coalition Mobilization for Global Justice have condemned the fence, calling it a "wall of shame".