Lessons from SAFE It was great fun reading James Langley's chronology of the SAFE Action Group, and remembering some of the high points and challenging bits of our experiment with NvA in October. We all learned lots. I kept going for another two weeks after James left. We had a change of personnel, an even greater loosening of group bonding and discipline, and some loss of focus. People tired. The repression James writes of got worse. Two of our group members were arrested on warrants and/or given additional summonses when they went to lodge complaints about excessive use of force during actions. The police went back through months old video footage to issue new summonses on anyone they could - to help move them on. I was taken to the supreme court by the company which sought an order restraining me from continuing on with NvA. They obtained a temporary order, and I am presently preparing for a full trial and appropriate action about it on my return to Cairns. Skyrail has recently taken the same action against another SAFE activist, and is threatening other actions to recover 'damages'. All of these tactics are making it difficult for activists to continue in the campaign of NvA. For me and others there has been a high personal cost involved in this set of actions. In part, this reflects the effect our campaign was having - which is the first part of this story. Success brought repression. That is something I have thought about dealing with/preparing for in future actions, and also how to improve ANN outreach into environmental defence campaigns. SAFE Success Stories For me the main purpose behind SAFE was to demonstrate the effectiveness of Nonviolent Direct Action based on affinity groups and self discipline. There were a number of audiences I wanted to demonstrate this to - the ferals and other participants of the undisciplined existing blockade, the management committee and members of CAFNEC with whom I had worked for two years, and the interested general public of Cairns. We certainly did well in demonstrating nonviolence. I wanted a strong media focus on all our actions, and I wanted messages about Skyrail and nonviolence to go out as widely and as well as possible. This led to some awkward personal re-evaluations as I worked to fit actions in with media needs and time lines, but everyone stayed happy with the messages that did go out. Generally, the media became more sympathetic as time went by, and the action campaign developed. Many journalists had their feelings stirred when they saw police repression of a kind they hadn't personally witnessed before, and when we caught Skyrail polluting a creek. Exceptions to this rule are the Cairns Post (which we like to call the Developers' Advocate), and QTV Channel Ten (on which Board sits the Skyrail developer's father). By the time SAFE finished, we were the most intensively covered issue in our region. We headlined TV local news bulletins two or three times a week, we'd worked our way through the pages of the Cairns Post from page seven to page one. Lots of radio, often leading the week's agenda on the largest commercial radio station. The images and stories broadcast by the media also stirred feelings among the general public. I particularly noticed a change in the attitude of working class people. Shop keepers, taxi drivers, and office workers would recognise me and say something to the effect of "I don't have an opinion one way or the other about Skyrail, but you keep doing what you're doing because someone has to". I would acknowledge that, and tell them why Skyrail was such a bad idea for the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. They were open to it. The other good success we had was with the ferals and other new activists. I was busy with other commitments when Skyrail construction first began, and got most of my information about the Blockade camp from Margaret Pestorius. The Urgent Despairing Narrowness syndrome drove Margaret and other organisers away from the blockade camp within a fortnight, and sounded to me like a repeat of Fraser Island. At times I was itching to get involved, but I kept to my other commitments, and slowly the feral activists burned out or got frustrated with their own ineffectiveness, and either went away, or were looking for something new to do. Before we made an approach to establish and operate the affinity group, we got together James and me from ANN, and Bronwyn and Graham from PAKS who had done a fair bit of earlier nonviolence training, and had played leadership roles at various times in the campaign. This gave us a "critical mass" of credibility with the ferals and other blockade supporters, and ensured we got some serious attention. The first evening we met with potential members from the camp they nearly all expressed reluctance to use a closed affinity group structure - but it was the only thing we were willing to offer, and they were desperate to try anything new, 'cos the old stuff wasn't working. Three days down the track, these very same people were defending the structure, and observing how much "going over old ground all the time" had been needed when new people were coming into an open structure. Even so, because we were the only effective game in town, and because we needed support for some of our actions to make them effective, we had to find ways to incorporate non-members in parts of the action. This was usually creating a space where people could run on to the construction site, simple and obvious. We made sure everyone was acquainted with, and promised to abide by, the SAFE Code of Ethics as part of opening this space. The Code of Ethics proved invaluable as an organising aid, and it sure helped us claim the moral high ground. Prior to the SAFE actions and since, Skyrail Pty. Ltd. has consistently labelled protesters as violent and threatening. They tried it with us, but it just didn't work. Onlookers saw our behaviour clearly, and started to question police behaviour and company behaviour. We went from being called "terrorists" to being called "childish" by the company within a week. What we needed more of or different James identified some of the limits and lacks of the SAFE actions in his article. There was a lack of personal punctuality, discipline, and bonding/cohesion amongst members of the group, and big helpings of the me, me, me culture throughout the SAFE actions. There was no real revolutionary behaviour. Basically, the SAFE experiment was an attempt to kick a few quick goals in an existing campaign as a kind of nonviolence aid and sales technique. We had a vague hope the "culture of nonviolence" would graft onto something longer term for Skyrail and other campaigns. In the end that grafting happened only a little bit, and not particularly well. We didn't pay it enough good gardening attention. We failed to get much happening in the way of deliberate education and skills-building workshops. The actions inspired a lot, and got people thinking, but didn't develop any explicit commitment among new people to learning and practising nonviolence as such, at least among the majority of ferals, and members of the CAFNEC constituency. The conspicuous successes of SAFE did "bring back" a fair few of the earlier committed activists who had done nonviolence training but then been burned by the Urgent Despairing Narrowness syndrome. Nonviolent actions are continuing under the leadership of these people, but Skyrail Pty. Ltd. is doing its best to demoralise them and energy reserves are not high. On reflection, there is a knot of issues here which can be simultaneously and flexibly addressed. In the long run what we need in the Cairns region is a well established base of local Nonviolence activists along with networks of support. In Cairns and surrounds there are severe threats and problems associated with mass tourism developments. There is a lot of concern, but it exists alongside a lot of confusion and disempowerment. For campaigns like Skyrail to work, there needs to be a large skilled base capable of mobilising both direct actions and public opinion. At Commonground (the beating heart of workshopping and facilitation in the Australian Nonviolence Network) it is easy to see how such a thing will be achieved in the long-term. In Cairns, we are seeing only the beginnings of such a base, with virtually no organised systems of support. PAKS is only the second issue around which ANN members have offered education and assistance. There is no doubt we have convinced a significant minority of concerned activists on each issue that nonviolence offers effective tools and understanding for success. We need to continue this outreach work and continue to build. NvA around Skyrail has inspired three other groups to adopt some degree of Nonviolent resistance to other development projects in the region, but we haven't had the resources to respond with the necessary workshops and education to properly equip these groups. Likewise we have had no time or resources to develop networks of support for debriefing, re-evaluation, or facilitation and consulting support for those activists and groups which have taken the first step into action. I guess I'm learning the lessons of Commonground and the Melbourne Network, and am discussing possibilities with Margaret and the Facilitation Collective for establishing a "nonviolence node" in Cairns in the second half of next year. We need to develop more and better leadership. There are many people with the talent and potential to develop good leadership skills. There are far fewer who take on explicit and acknowledged leadership roles. There are many reasons for this - low self-esteem (particularly among women), the personal cost of commitments, and a pervasive so-called anarchist culture that promotes the myth we are all equal at everything all the time - and therefore don't want or need leadership. Over the Skyrail campaign, I have noticed how things flounder in the absence of leadership. Leadership might best be defined as an ability to listen deeply and summarise the issues that are coming up for people, an ability to see and communicate "big picture" perspectives in relation to those issues, and a willingness to show by example how decisive consensual action is a force for change in the world. We all experience our failures in holding to these things from time to time, but minimising lapses and maximising success appears to have been the focus of most of my nonviolence education in the last few years. Like any other skill which requires persistence and hard work to develop, leadership needs to be valued and acknowledged. During all the facets of Skyrail, I have played open leadership roles, and tried to encourage others to do the same. The very best feeling in the world is when those others rise to the occasion (onya Dawn, Bronwyn, Graham, Kylie, Robyn et. al.). I was sad to notice both times I left Cairns for other commitments how little confidence many people had in their own abilities to lead (they had a lot less confidence in themselves than I and others had in them). Granted it was and is a tough campaign, and the media manipulation in June-September was pretty frightening. Nevertheless, the main lesson I drew is that "new leaders need nurturing" and "leadership needs to be explicitly acknowledged". On a purely mundane level, members of ANN (Kevin Thomasson, Margaret Pestorius, James Langley, and I) have provided some exemplary leadership in some appropriate ways and places, but this has been mostly pretty short-term and not always appreciated. James and I had the best run with SAFE. In some ways it's not appropriate for ANN to try and do more than that from any distance. For the dynamics of the NvA it would have been nice to run the SAFE experiment for three months instead of two weeks but neither James nor I could have sustained that intensity of activity away from our supports for such a long period. To put through a rota of experienced activists would have cost thousands of dollars in travel, and lots of activist energy we just don't have. Onwards education and cultural development! Role of/experience with CAFNEC and NvA It's been an interest of mine since Fraser Island to find out how to make better relationships and forge better understanding between nonviolence activists and mainstream conservation groups. I've been negotiating with CAFNEC (Cairns and Far North Environment Centre) for somewhere over three years now, and worked for them as a waged employee for most of the last two years. Overwhelmingly during my employment I tried to show and teach nonviolence as both a political theory and an activist lifestyle. There have been a number of dynamic tensions in our relationship, which have tended to flare up according to how "radical" my activities were at any given time. The SAFE experiment was to have been a peak demonstration of how effective NvA could be. The actions worked fine, but there were mixed results in CAFNEC's responses to them. I came away from CAFNEC generally unhappy and discouraged. A key thing I learned during my employment is that CAFNEC (and by extension ACF, TWS, and all the state Conservation Councils) is NOT a social change organisation. Even though a significant proportion of its workers and volunteer base are social change activists to some degree, the organisations are not. People's personal commitments tend to get exploited, not adopted. CAFNEC has a membership composed mainly of professional people who gain many rewards from the social system as it is now. Their preferred strategy is to seek to influence that system through correct channels, or even to aspire to taking over leadership of the system. These were the people who felt most threatened by the appearances of NvA - mainly by the unkempt appearance of feral activists. Of course, Skyrail Pty. Ltd. and its supporters (particularly the Cairns Post) do everything they can to stimulate the fears of the conservative membership of CAFNEC. They deliberately confused the roles of different groups in their media statements, and everyone from the Mayor of Cairns to the Treasurer of Queensland tries to blame CAFNEC for any action by anyone who opposes Skyrail. CAFNEC is often called on to repudiate its position on the issue, as well as the use of direct action. During the SAFE actions, the Mayor announced that Cairns City Council would try to have CAFNEC evicted from its premises in a Council building. CAFNEC resisted this threat (in part because the Mayor hates them anyway and would use any pretext for attack) but there is no doubt it caused some angst in the membership and management committee. Part of my intention was to build a relationship of trust with CAFNEC, and then ask permission to try new things with their support. I achieved this nominally, but what I found was that it took a whole lot of effort to get permission, and when the experiment worked, a lot of people put it all down to "luck", and dived straight back into their fears and conservatism. This was not universal. Some members and management people were very interested in what was happening, and pretty pleased by what we'd achieved. This was particularly true of some of the older members who are perhaps a bit more relaxed about image and experiment. The younger more go-getting political types were the hardest to deal with. The best arrangement we could come up with over a year of sometimes painful searching was for CAFNEC to organise a straight political campaign, and provide the regional context in which the community-based Skyrail campaign could be seen to operate. Even so, this campaign has been slow to materialise. I intend to persevere with my contacts with CAFNEC, but not as an employee any more. I think next year I will try to sit on the management committee, and demonstrate nonviolence through a separately organised, explicit base in Cairns. Outreach will be direct into campaigns, and CAFNEC can find its own happy course to navigate. I expect movement to be slow. Bryan Law Note: The author is temporarily resident at Commonground where he is recovering from three years' activism in far north Queensland, and planning for the future. He is presently working with the Facilitation Collective of the Australian Nonviolence Network and is available for consultation and workshopping.