Posts Tagged ‘Protest’

Today's final blackout protest - and we won, for now.

UPDATE: It worked. About 4pm today the government has announced that it will delay the implementation of s92a til end of march. If there's still no agreement at that time then the act will be suspended.

Today many New Zealand sites, mostly blogs, but also some well known NZ sites like throng and scoop, have voluntarily blacked out their sites, cut access to all content on their sites to protest the to be effective Section 92A of the copyright act.

This kind of Internet protest is quite rare in NZ, especially when you consider the fact that political blogs from across the political specturm, from Act supporter to Green supporter have all joined this protest. Those people usually disagree with each other on everything, but in this instance, they had come together. It just shows you how deeply unpopular this S92A thing is among the people who really understand the Internet.

And no, those people are not youngsters who are just protesting because they will soon unable to illegally download pirated materials.  I think it's bit sad that in some people's mind Internet is merely a place for email and news. Internet in my opinion, it is fast becoming another life necessity, part of people's basic right. It's like road, we, including criminals, all have the right to use public road, but you don't expect Ministry of Transport to police road users to see who's using the road network for illegal activities?

And National cannot get away with this. Yes it was passed under the previous government back in 2008, however, both Labour and National supported this law, and I quote from parliamentary record, Christopher Finlayson(National):

The Minister [Judith Tizard] knows, and I certainly know, that we have all had approaches from various commercial entities ...

I didn't  fake anything nor took it out of context, this is not kidding. See what our politicians have become.

Well, one week to go, try to enjoy the freedom while it lasts.

Truck blockade

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the chance to catch up the news.

People are expecting total chaos in tomorrow morning's commute hours, and starting to blame the truckies.

I agree that we are a democratic society and people do have the right to protest and I totally respect truckies' right to protest.

However, those truckies should also keep the purposes of a protest in mind:1) to threat somebody(or an organisation), 2) to win more support.

Clearly, the blockade tomorrow is more like a threat to government, with little or no consideration to the people who want to support them.

Yes, every protest will inevitably create some inconvenience  to other people, it should be minimised for the sake of those people.

I supported bus driver strike. One of the reasons for that is because they didn't drive the buses on the road to protest, instead, they stopped driving and protesting at bus stops and depots.

Sure that made some of us unable to go to work, but that is quite understandable - you can't expect them to drive buses while on a strike?

Life is hard for every one of us already, so next time when you want to do something, please, minimise the impact on others. Why not just park all the trucks in an open ground and have a all day loud shouts + BBQ?

About ... the Craccum incident

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's news: a group of organised Chinese student stole hundreds of University of Auckland's Craccum magazine yesterday morning, because there was a tiny (about 1/4 of an A4 Page) "Fa Lun Gong related" ad in the magazine.

They plan to tear down that page and return the rest of the magazine. Read more