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February 15th, 2003 
"We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!" by Mike Paterson
– Mike Paterson
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February 15th, 2003
"We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!" by Mike Paterson
– Mike Paterson
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Friday the 14th February 2003. As the global weekend of dissent began, Melbourne, Australia was the first to stand up and be counted.
It was a heartening sight. The organisers were expecting 20,000. By 6pm the estimates were 200,000 and rising. People just kept pouring out of Flinders Street station and the surrounding streets until three city blocks and two public squares became clogged in a human mass. One commercial news broadcast that evening (not usually the most reliable or simpatico of sources) reported that a quarter of a million people out of a population of three million had attended. It was an undeniably overwhelming endorsement of the Australian people's rejection of Prime Minister John Howard's servile position to Washington that even the reactionary TV news media couldn't ignore. Organising the rally for 5pm on a warm and sunny Friday afternoon was an unwitting masterstroke. Office workers, brief-cased and suited, were joining the throng. Schoolkids still in uniform swelled the crowd. People climbed scaffolding for vantage points, apartment balconies filled with banners and trams in the city grid ground to a halt. This was the largest public protest in Melbourne’s history.
Looking at the crowd’s large multi-ethnic mix (Melbourne’s Turkish and Lebanese communities were particularly well represented), age range and gender balance and judging from the home-made banners it was obvious that this was a spontaneous popular movement of people rather than the usual hardcore of agitators. Swanston Street’s Starbucks was never in danger. The feeling here, like everywhere, is that people are disillusioned with politicians. They refuse to accept that the government has a mandate to speak and act for them in offering support to the US where the threat of war and the bombing of civilians is concerned. They reject the spurious rationale of this war and are sick of being patronised. The rhetoric of military-speak has reached critical mass and the people are in revolt. A momentum of events in Australia from the demonising, incarceration and manslaughter of refugees, the refusal of the government to participate in the apologies for white Australia’s near genocide of the aborigines and the scare-mongering anti-terrorism messages broadcast to a bemused populace have caused a wave of anger amongst people not normally motivated to take action.
In the previous week the US ambassador to Australia made a public complaint against the opposition Labor Party and its speeches to Parliament. The object of their grievance was front-bencher Mark Latham who had called Bush “the most incompetent and dangerous US President in living memory” and described those joining in support of him as “a conga line of suck-holes”. The US talks about "installing democracy" in Iraq yet they seem to object to its use in Australia. In attempting to divert attention from their desperate justifications for war they failed to grasp the innate Australian dislike for whingers. TV viewers have been cringing at images of a whining John Howard (a Captain Mainwairing without the charisma) on a self-proclaimed “peace mission” to the US, UK and Indonesia attempting a global statesmen act and puzzling locals with his speeches (“Iraq is not being fair-dinkum”).