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it was just a protest that got out of hand. a similar thing happened in Australia except it was the left protesting against a right wing government, i'm sure the right tried to make it out like it was the end of the world but i don't think anyone ended up serving 20 year prison sentences because of what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Parliament_House_riot
Yeah, say what you like about Howard but he was a savvy politician. He chose not to demonise the actual rioters or to really ascribe them agency for their own actions. Instead he made it all about the union leadership that organised the rally and blamed them for riling up their members and letting it get out of hand. He used the event to tar and discredit the unions and justify his aggressive anti-union moves - the most dramatic of which was supporting Patrick Stevedores to fire their entire union workforce.
The unions today have a fraction of the membership they did then, many of their formerly routine activities have been criminalised, and their officials have been hit with criminal convictions and massive fines. The long term damage done to the organisational left as a result was very substantial.
I do think there's a meaningful difference between the events, in that neither the union leadership nor any organised group involved in the '96 riot was trying to prevent an elected government from taking power. But it was still a disgusting event, and the actual participants should have been treated much more harshly.
Is this some form of nominative determinism? The Wire Season 3 (?) revolved around the Stevedores Union, dockside in Bawlmer.
No? Patrick Stevedores is a stevedore company, presumably named after some bloke called Patrick. "Stevedore" is just another word for a dockworker, so the connection is just that the political event and the TV season were both about dockworkers' unions.
Ah, I see now.
I was confused as hell the first time I saw the word too. I was a teen and there was a dock strike, and there was all this talk of "corralling the stevedores", so I figured they were some kind of livestock running around the docks getting into mischief. I did a great job embarrassing myself the next day bitching about how third world we must look with all these animals wreaking havoc on our docks.
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