Will Saunders and Dave Burgess are serving nine months of periodic detention for painting the words "No war" on the sails of the Sydney Opera House. Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly's Niko Leka and Kerry Vernon spoke to Burgess after his first two months of weekend detention.
Why did you target the Opera House?
The Opera House is a building that instantly speaks the word "Australia" to the rest of the world. We felt that if John Howard was going to get away — as we believed he was attempting to — with illegally and immorally sending our troops to war in all of our names, that message deserved to be seen there to reflect what was at the time, and is now, the majority of Australians' views on the issue.
Why did you use that particular type of paint?
There were two problems with a banner. The first problem was that a month before, two activists had climbed the Opera House and had placed a banner against the war over the side, and the issue hardly impacted. It wasn't covered by the media, and in a sense it was not seen as worthwhile. Secondly, the banner they took up was very small. To make something readable on the Opera House you have to make something quite large, and then you have the logistical problem of carrying up something heavy enough. I made a decision that I wasn't carrying any more than eight kilos up on a slope like that without being attached. So we ruled the banner out fairly early, and then it was a case of what type of paint. We did test some acrylic paint on tiles and it was just totally unsatisfactory so we chose what, I guess, was the appropriate paint for the surface.
What about the clean-up?
The clean-up is still being contested in court and will form part of the appeal against our sentence. We've been convicted of malicious damage for which we got nine months in the weekend detention centres and we've also had $151,000 awarded against us in compensation, and that was the clean-up bill. It was initially $166,000 until it was revealed that the Opera House isn't required to pay GST — but they were charging us GST on the compensation bill.
That was the beginning of what we feel was a very rorted process of removing the paint, in which all sorts of sub-contracting and marking up [took place]. All the inquiries we've had done by a paint chemist and a quantity surveyor suggest that the clean-up operation should have cost about $60,000.
How do you feel about it now — would you do it again?
I did what I felt was right at the time, and I still feel it was the right thing to do at the time. Going to weekend detention every week, and only really having four-and-a-half days a week to do the things most people normally do in seven, puts a huge stress on your life and your state of mind, and in many senses this has been a very stressful and tough year. Of course I wouldn't do it again — I think it's the sort of thing I only want to go through once in a lifetime. But I've got no regrets about doing it at all. I feel like when I'm old and look back on what happened, I'll be glad I stood up at the time and did something other than sat back and watched something horrible go down.
Would you say that part of your defence was similar to that used by the Ploughshares women in England?
I was in England at the time when that happened, and actually attended some protests at that very airbase. It was an airbase where British Aerospace was manufacturing Hawk jets to be sold to Indonesia. At the time they were being used in East Timor and probably Aceh, and these four women went into the base and smashed up the cockpit of the jet with hammers, and then rang the police and said "this is what we've done".
They were charged with the vandalism of the plane and they won their case and were acquitted. This is because in England they have a prevention of genocide act, in which genocide is deemed illegal (and in Australia there's no such act).
And the women proved that ... they were preventing genocide [by the Indonesian government in East Timor] by attacking one of the planes that was going to be used in committing the crime. That shows that even though you do something that appears blatantly illegal, in very special cases and times it's possible that you are doing something to prevent the greater crime.
In NSW we have a self-defence act, which is not limited within the boundaries of NSW. It says that you're not guilty of a crime if you're trying to prevent injury or death to yourself or other people, damage to property of your own or other people's, deprivation of yours or other people's liberty, or criminal trespass on your or anybody else's land.
So we feel that even though we were trying to stop a war with a bucket of paint and a roller, we were still doing our bit. If you separate those millions of individuals who all marched on February 16 last year, each one was trying to stop a war with their own two feet and their voices and whatever banners they made. There was still a perception in all of us who did anything at that time that we were trying to stop what we all thought was, at best, an awful decision by our government, and at worst, an act of murder.
Do you think there is a slow and steady attack on free speech?
There's definitely an element of that. I've noticed in about three or four cases that have occurred in the local courts since our trial, that our sentence has been mentioned by the magistrate when he's passed down harsher sentences than usual for whatever the issue might be about. I think there was one about protesting in regards to Tasmanian forests in Darling Harbour. A person with no previous convictions applied for a section 10, which is "guilty but no recorded conviction" and the judge made specific reference to our case and said "no".
What about the level of general public support?
That's been nearly all positive. You get the odd instance where someone comes up and tells you what you did was so wrong. In one case there was a lot of hate mail coming to our email address — nearly all of it was just so abusive and obnoxious that you just didn't bother replying. For those letters that were condemning us, but were at least coherent and were presenting a reasonable case, I did reply and try to explain where we were coming from. One of those letters was from a British soldier in Iraq who'd lost a number of his friends or mates who were blown up there, and I just wrote and spilt my guts about why we did it and what I thought was going on, and he then wrote back and said "Well that's OK then — where do I donate?".
[Niko Leka and Kerry Vernon are members of the Newcastle branch of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 5, 2004.
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