The Occupy Melbourne protest this morning was forcibly evicted from their camp in city square this morning after an order from the City Of Melbourne gave them until 9am to leave. Riot police descended on the site after some of the protesters attempted to knock over barricades set up by police and scuffles broke out in pockets of the square.
In an interview with the Herald Sun inspector Mick Beattie said “We are prepared to be very patient. These people have been quite well behaved, from a police point of view, all week. We would hate to see it spoiled now. Some people have arrived here this morning who are clearly intent on causing problems and we have got to try and manage that as best we can.”
Aware of the eviction order and looking to help morale, Natalie Pa’apa’a of Blue King Brown and Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys visited the protest and passed on words of encouragement for the day that lay ahead of them.
“Although the Occupy Melbourne protests are under eviction threat this morning, this is a movement that will not simply go away….now in over 900 cities around the world, people are finally standing up to the 1% of the world population that controls 99% of the world’s wealth” says Natalie. “People are ready for a democracy built on morals and ethics, and without corporate influence. Blue King Brown supports the Occupy Movement, Stand firm Melbourne, and the world! ”
Jello Biafra is in Melbourne for the Melbourne Festival and has previously spoken out in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest which has inspired similar protests around the world, including the one in Melbourne. “This is what we should have been doing starting in January 2009 to remind our hope and change Barack-star of why we put so much faith in that dude in the first place,” Biafra said when asked about the protest in New York.
“But instead people got in their cocoons and wallowed reminiscing about their youth on Facebook, ‘oh, MoveOn.org and Barack-star will do all the work, our deed is done, now we can sleep easy. When labor and civil rights leader Philip A. Randolph gave Roosevelt a list of demands, his reply was, in a nutshell, ‘this all looks good, now make me do it.’ And I know exactly what he meant by that, and that is what we have not been doing with the Barack-star.”
You can watch a video of Jello Biafra at Occupy Melbourne below.
