Over 100K Australians Marched Against Their PM – But What’s the Point?

When peeved retirees turn up to protests alongside anarchists, young mothers, church-groups, indigenous-rights campaigners, hippies, LGBT-activists, and animal-rights diehards, you would think there’s got to be something in the offing. Such was the miscellany of more than 100,000 demonstrators who gathered in capital cities and regional centers across Australia on Sunday to express their discontent with the conservative coalition government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

The rallies – which reached as many as an estimated 30,000 attendees in Melbourne – were convened under the banner of ‘March in March’ - a low-key, country-wide band of organizers who called on ordinary Australians to demonstrate their “dissatisfaction” with Abbott’s leadership.

“The criterion for this march is a lack of confidence in the Abbott government – simple as that,” explained their manifesto.

However, the ever-growing inventory of efforts by the Liberal PM to decimate the country - economically, environmentally and socially - since taking office in 2013 meant that Australians’ grievances amounted to almost as many as the 100,000-plus protestors. Displays of public hostility to Abbott’s government have been mounting in recent months over its antediluvian treatment of asylum seekers. In particular, since the bipartisan policy of mandatory detention was linked to the death of a young Iranian detainee during riots in an offshore processing center on Manus Island in February.

But Sunday’s rallies reflected a broader catalogue of complaints against the PM, from his everyday sexism (tragi-comically, Abbott is also the Minister for Women) to his stance on welfare cuts, workplace rights and the recent licensed destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

While many protestors called out-right for Abbott’s resignation, guest speakers at the rallies focused on federal policies towards indigenous rights, education funding, and university cuts. In Sydney, folk icon Billy Bragg lead the masses in song and lamented recent comments by the mining magnate and Abbott-ally Gina Rinehart in praise of Margaret Thatcher. One placard among the many vivid protest slogans seemed to capture the mood of the demonstrations: “I am having trouble condensing my displeasure at the Abbott government into a single placard-sized statement.”

Abbot, by contrast, was his usual unfazed and jocular self on Sunday. Speaking from Sydney, he brushed off the protests with a nonchalance reminiscent of President Bashar al-Assad’s seamless denial of the tens of thousands of anti-regime demonstrators on Syria’s streets.

“My understanding is that the only big rally today in Sydney is the St. Patrick’s Day one,” he told reporters. “That’s the big event to be sure… I wish all the St Patrick’s Day revelers well, and if their parade is rained on, there is always some Guinness available somewhere around the city.”

The mainstream media quickly got in on the PM’s orgy of discredit by disparaging the rallies as “pointless,” and trumping-up the unwholesome use of expletives by some protestors.

However, criticisms of the goal and execution of March in March were not limited to the reliable standard-bearers of the right. While some hailed the campaign as a new breed of activism, some in the anti-Abbott left questioned the utility of a movement with such a broad and nebulous agenda. Others criticized protestors for adopting tactics that emulated the low-brow sloganeering of Abbott’s own ‘‘Convoy of No Confidence’’ campaign against former PM Julia Gillard in 2011.

Although supportive of the mass, grass-roots and free-form nature of the movements, many participants acknowledged the need for a more credible and focused campaign against the Abbott government.

“The protest march empowered people to feel like they had a genuine say in their country,” says James Muldoon, a Melbourne-based activist and politics lecturer who attended the rally. “But general discontent among sections of the population is generally not enough to bring down governments.”

A participant of the Occupy Melbourne campaign in 2011, Muldoon recently lost a Federal Court challenge over the shutdown of the protests, and says that demonstrations can only work when used as a tool as part of a broader, long-term campaign.

“A protest march is a bit like a scattergun: the message and political target are diffused. It needs to be combined with more concentrated tactics and methods,” he says. “Opponents must target key sources of legitimacy and power.”

Anti-government protesters gathered in Canberra, Melbourne and Hobart.

For now, the anti-Abbott campaign is unlikely to find any vestiges of that legitimacy and power in the federal opposition Labour party. Since losing office to Abbott after the playground theatrics of its former leaders, it has failed to regain credibility among the majority of Abbott’s opponents, or to provide any vehicle for genuine opposition policies. As the pioneers and continued supporters of Australia’s hardline stance on asylum-seeking, Labour politicians have typically offered a watered-down version of the coalition government’s most reviled policies, alongside fractious and clunky internal policy-making. When confronted with Sunday’s swell of anti-Abbott sentiment, all that the opposition leader Bill Shorten could do was distance himself from the events with a shrug, mumbling “it's a free country.”

Western Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlham became a glimmer of hope following his scathing address to the Prime Minister this month, and he quickly rose to left-wing stardom. However, the Greens remain poorly represented in Australia’s state and federal parliaments and this week’s gains for the Liberal Party in elections in Tasmania and South Australia have underscored the minor party’s weakness.

So is Tony right to poo-poo at his detractors and kick back carefree with a Guinness this March? After all, unlike Assad, he is no embattled authoritarian, but a democratically-elected Prime Minister who enjoys political legitimacy and overwhelming popular support. And as recent polls indicate, some 60 percent of Australians continue to endorse the government’s harsh asylum policies, so reviled by the left.

“It’s great that Australians are engaging with politics between elections,” says Dr. Jackie Dickenson, a political historian at the University of Melbourne and author of Trust Me: Australians and their Politicians. “But the problem is that Abbot doesn’t care about these people. We didn’t vote for him, so he has no relationship with us. In sheer poll terms, the only ones who count are the swinging voters.”

Dickenson supports the March protests, but says that the left-wing consensus on core policies, like asylum-seeking, needs to find expression in smarter and more strategic opposition tactics.

“It’s the whole doctors’ wives principle. Social issues often bring people on side who would vote economically liberal, so there can be a cross-over,” she says. “But it’s a big mistake to use cheap swearing and crass tactics [like Abbott’s] that undermine our cause. If we’re going to claim the high moral ground, we’ve got to stick to that.”

While Abbott’s Liberal Party continues to dominate both houses of federal parliament and state governments, and to reap favor among the majority of Australians, is there any use then in detractors turning-out en masse to stick it to the PM?

The surprised and jubilant organizers of March in March seem to think so, suggesting hopefully that this week’s protests were “just the beginning” of a longer-term opposition campaign. For the more pessimistic of dissidents, Australia’s “not-in-my-name” style demonstrations at least appear more gratifying than suffering in silence - and more fun than a shamrock and a murky pint.

Photos by Zoe Holman and Martin Bennet