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"There is no situation so bad that the arrival of a policeman cannot make it worse."- Brendan Behan

What better way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of a liberal society than to arrest people handing out leaflets on a street?

Two protesters were arrested outside the Bourke Street Nike store on Friday, May 4, by Melbourne City Council officers, acting in consultation with the Victoria Police. The protesters were distributing leaflets that criticised the shoe retailer's record on labor practices in the Third World, among other things, and were charged under bylaw 5.4, which was allegedly introduced to put a stop to the distribution of race-hate material.

Simultaneously, a number of protesters were blockading the entrance of the Nike store. The blockaders weren't arrested, the leaflet distributors were. Why?

Deliberately or otherwise, the move was a political one. Both leaflet distributors were visible presences at the S11 and M1 protests, and it has been suggested the police were targeting the leaders of the protest. Which, if nothing else, is a measure of how little the police know about protest groups. Leafleting is the activist equivalent of playing bass guitar in a garage band - the job goes to the last person to get to the meeting. It is, however, one of the most politically explicit parts of a protest - the point of contact where people can actually get a lucid argument across to the general public, rather than an atonal rendition of "we shall overcome".

The only assumption one can draw is that the police were concerned to neutralise the demonstration and were focused as much on the political aspect as on the public-order aspect of the task.

Many people would see that as a legitimate policing task. In fact it isn't. The role of the police is to uphold the law and to keep the peace, and to use reasonable force to do so. Strategic thinking about how to make a demonstration less politically effective shouldn't be part of it.

It might be argued that by peacefully arresting the blockaders one by one the police would be creating a political stunt and playing into the protesters' hands. So what, if that's the most effective way of clearing the thoroughfare? It's not up to the police to consider whether the enactment of their duties helps or hinders the publicity goals of the people they're arresting.

The police are not there to help Nike gloss over opposition to its business practices, or help it avoid the negative "McLibel"-style publicity of a protracted civil suit.

Nor are they there to make sure shopping continues at all costs. There is an assumption that has arisen in the wake of the M1 protests that suggests the city is nothing more than a giant shopping mall with trams, and that any activity that interferes with that should have its neck stamped on. It's an assumption that forgets what a city is at its best: a metropolis, a place where the people meet. If other people want to sell them stuff once they're there, well and good, but that is not its principal function.

Bylaw 5.4 was brought in to stop neo-Nazis distributing leaflets outside synagogues, among other things. There's a need for some law that protects groups from intimidation and harassment - but a ban on leafleting per se isn't the way to do it.

Given the degree to which the labor movement has been harassed by such laws throughout most of its existence, you would hope the Bracks Government would nip this municipal censorship in the bud.

Without the sort of political conversation that leafleting and open-air meetings make possible, we don't really have any sort of polity worth celebrating.

Guy Rundle is co-editor of Arena Magazine

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