They're All Here Now

As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.
Les Murray

Free Love Not Free Trade
APEC Protester placard


They're all here now; and that's an amazing thing in itself. Russian leader Vladimir Putin arrived yesterday morning, George Bush earlier in the week, three planes and an entourage of 700, Chinese leader Hu Jintao. I find myself transfixed, watching these people on screens. They really are very powerful people; which sounds corny; but all we see now are motorcades cutting through the city and helicopters overhead. The streets are almost deserted. There is little traffic. The words they utter are for the consumption of millions.

The biggest news has been the Chasers team from their War On Everything ABC program getting through security; one of them dressed as Bin Laden. Everyone said it had gone too far; the police and others saying they were lucky not to be shot by snipers. But they can't help smiling at the same time.

Here they are; the most powerful men on earth. I try to imagine what it is like to be them and can't. The surface drama continues. Climate Change is expected to dominate the agenda; the news just declared. But didn't the scientists acknowledge last month that we had just been through one of the coolest decades for a century. It just doesn't connect. The experts can't agree so how can the layman possibly know. It turned into a cult, but why don't the figures stack up? You can only agree with the last person you spoke to; well sometimes it is like that. Who knows the truth in this welter: in a Godless age we have to believe in something.

Silence encroached on everything; nothing but the thrombing of helicopters overhead; as the powerful cut their swathes of influence through the day. We were tiny voices, tiny consciousness, laid out on snail trails imposed on the city's multitude of stories, through chaotic days. "They're the world's biggest criminals," said one taxi-driver. "Howard invited them here, what can we do?" asked another; suggesting that APEC would be over soon enough. The empty streets would come back to their crowded, jangling life, and greed in all it's primary colours would return to dominate a hedonistic extravagance on the edge of a great ocean.


THE BIGGER STORY:

APEC leaders meet to consider climate change; protesters march in Sydney
The Associated Press
Published: September 7, 2007
SYDNEY, Australia: Pacific Rim leaders gathered Saturday to consider a proposal to set nonbinding goals on fighting global warming, as thousands of demonstrators rallied to demand the governments act faster.

The presidents of the United States, China, Russia and leaders of other Asia-Pacific economies entered the Sydney Opera House for the first session of their annual summit, after officials late Friday struck a compromise on a draft statement on climate change — the top agenda item.

A dozen blocks away — on the other side of a 3-meter (10-ft.) metal fence fortified by concrete barriers and a police cordon — thousands gathered outside Sydney's Town Hall for a protest rally on a grab-bag of issues from the stopping the Iraq war to reducing poverty and ending global warming.

AFP

Bush, Putin focus on missile defence in talks

12 hours ago

SYDNEY (AFP) — US proposals to site an anti-missile defence shield in Europe dominated face-to-face talks here Friday between US President George W. Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Putin said their meeting of around an hour at a Sydney hotel "above all was related to missile defence," but neither men gave details...

Putin also told reporters in a brief joint appearance afterwards that he and Bush had agreed to go fishing together in Siberia.

Bush described their talks as "both cordial and constructive".