Join the Climate Camp action: community rally and walk-on at Australia's oldest coal mine.

Don't miss this important opportunity to wear blue and be part of the flood for climate justice.  When it comes to water, climate and jobs, actions speak louder than words.

Legals

Hello from the Climate Camp legals team, also known as the Justice Tracks Collective (JTC). 

We will be offering support at and after Climate Camp by:

• providing legal information, such as our Climate Camp legals zine
• facilitating lawyers to answer specific legal questions during the camp
• running workshops on activists' legal rights and strategies
• collating updates on any arrests that occur during Climate Camp
• facilitating continuing support for arrestees after Climate Camp, including linking people up with pro-bono lawyers.

During Climate Camp, you can call us on 0415 802 325. You can call for legals info, if you need a lawyer or if someone has been arrested. You can also email us at info[at]justicetracks.org.au

We are running workshops on activists' legal rights on: Friday 4 - 5 pm and Saturday 9 - 10:30am.

We will have a stall where you can drop by on: Friday 2 - 4 pm and Saturday 10:30am - 12pm and 7:30 - 8:30pm.

Many folks will not need advice about police and the law, but some may be keen for a chat.  You can come talk with us during stall times or pick up a zine to get more info on topics like:

• why direct action?
• preparing for direct action
• police searches
• whether you have to give your details to the police
• getting arrested - what happens?
• what happens at the police station and in custody?
• any possible offences you could be charged with
• offences that can easily be avoided
• police 'emergency' powers
• bail
• going to court

Also, if you are doing direct action, we reckon it's good to think about possible legal consequences before you do anything, and think about legal roles before and during the action. Maybe you can think about legal related roles in your affinity group, such as having a Legal Support Person or a Police Liaison Person.

Direct Action can be amazing and necessary. Actions can involve a risk of breaching the law, but laws can be unjust or uphold unjust policies. Climate change, fuelled by coal, is threatening our water, our health and the homes of millions of people worldwide. Yet governments and other power holders continue to do as little as they can to get away with it. This is criminal behaviour.

Come chat to us at a stall to talk more about engaging with the law critically, or to get involved in Justice Tracks for Climate Camp 2010!

Forming an action team!

We are encouraging people to form an 'affinity group' or 'action team' for the Sunday action of Climate Camp.

What is an ‘affinity group’ or ‘action team’?

An affinity group is a small group of people (as small as 3, we recommend not larger than 15) who work together independently on direct actions or other projects. You can form an affinity group with your friends, people from your community, workplace, organisation; you come together on whatever basis you would like for your participation in the Sunday action.

Forming a team before the camp may help with these purposes:

- Strategy - you can share analysis and discuss action strategy within your team even before the camp begins.

- Support - you’ll likely be more supported in taking action by being able to discuss your ideas and any needs in a smaller team of people.

- Safety - your team of people can look out for each other during and after the action.

NO. If you would like to be in one but aren’t before the camp, 2-4pm on the Saturday afternoon of the camp (10 Oct) has been set aside to facilitate the formation of action teams and for action planning - bring along your action ideas! You also don’t have to be in a team in order to participate in discussion about the Sunday action, though we recommend it.

We’re suggesting we employ a ‘spokescouncil’ model of delegates from action teams in order to make a collective decision about the Sunday action during the camp (please see the information about 'How we will make decisions at Climate Camp'). We’re recommending people form an action team prior to or at the camp in order to help all of us to make decisions about the action as quickly and democratically as possible.

The Actions Working Group is developing a rough action proposal for the camp so we don’t have to start from scratch at the camp. The proposal entails a rally beginning at 11am on Sunday 11 Oct, meeting at Charles Harper Park in Helensburgh, moving to a walk to the Metropolitan mine in Parkes St, Helensburgh.

- Get together a bunch of your mates with similar interests in issues and actions.

- Start hanging out, doing actions and building trust. We reckon trust is a key element for affinity groups to function. You could do a direct action training together, a banner drop in preparation for a protest, talk through where y’all stand on big questions and have good idea of how you will work together, brainstorm possible protest situations and talk through responses. Knowing people’s fears, weaknesses and strengths helps us support each other in our actions. In our crew, we try to do something every month – a graffiti run, a dumpster café, film screening in a spunky squat, an occupation… just to keep meeting up!

- Have a think about what sort of decisions your affinity group need to make before a protest. Where you stand on big issues, what your aims are, how you wanna interact with police, debriefing processes after actions and other organising, how you want to communicate during actions, how you are going to make decisions (consensus, voting, appoint decision makers, and chatting about quick decision making).

- Chat with other crews on their aims and tactics, how you might want to work together, what support you need, what methods of communication between affinity groups could be used before and during a protest (spokescouncil, blocking up, phone number swap for communication people, fist raised huddles, cycle communication crews, walkie talkies)

- Your affinity group might even wanna take on a specialised role in the way it interacts with other crews, or operates within the breadth of the protest or campaign. You could *specialise* in cop-watchin’, legal observation, food, communication, medical, or good old common garden variety blockading. With a role focus, each affinity group can do their jobs and support the work of other affinity group. In this way, many affinity groups form an interdependent network that achieves so much more than a large group of individual activists.

Anything!! We can use affinity groups for mass or smaller scale actions - to drop a banner, blockade a road, provide back-up for other crews, do street theatre, block traffic riding bikes, organise a tree sit, or play glockenspiels in a radical marching band.

What makes affinity groups so awesome for actions is that they can remain creative and independent and plan out their own action without an organisation or person dictating to them what can and can't be done. There are endless possibilities for what our affinity groups can do. Let’s be creative and remember: direct action gets the goods!

How we will make decisions at Climate Camp?

Decisions made prior to the camp

The camp is committed to non-violence and we will be asking people to agree to ‘participant agreements’ when you register for the camp. (These agreements will outline behaviour for a respectful, safer and inclusive environment at Climate Camp e.g. no drugs at the camp.)

There will be three types of meetings at the camp.

Anyone can participate but these meetings will likely require only one or two people from each ‘neighbourhood’ at the camp, plus people coordinating camp logistics. The purpose of the meeting is to raise and resolve any issues at the camp (e.g. a problem with the toilets). The meetings will be on the Saturday and Sunday morning of the camp, but people may also decide to organise more meetings, or meetings of the whole camp if there are any major issues.

The second type of meeting is to discuss and decide upon the plan for the action on the Sunday of the camp. It is proposed to be in the form of a ‘spokecouncil’.

Spokescouncils are designed to facilitate real and efficient grassroots democracy on a mass scale. People participate in the meeting via a ‘spokesperson’ (delegate) from their ‘affinity group’ (a group of people that come together for one or more shared intentions). The spokesperson acts on behalf of the group in a ‘council’ (meeting) with spokespeople from other affinity groups (hence the term ‘spokescouncil’). The group may decide to rotate their spokesperson but there is only ever one spokesperson for each group. This streamlines the number of people speaking in a meeting and increases the chance that the group’s time is shared equally amongst all the groups. Usually the rest of the group will also participate in the meeting by sitting behind their spokes in the council - they can hold their spokes accountable to the rest of the group and the group is also able to have on-the-spot discussion if it is necessary to provide further direction to the spokes as the council progresses. The spokescouncil itself is facilitated like an ordinary meeting and usually operates via a consensus decision-making process.

This proposal is for a spokescouncil along these lines to discuss and decide upon the strategy of the collective action on Sunday. The spokescouncil will use consensus decision-making. (Please see here - ‘The Consensus Process’ - for a description of consensus.)

The camp will encourage and facilitate non-aligned individuals to form affinity groups through the course of the camp to realise their action vision within the overall action plan (e.g. two hours on Saturday afternoon [2-4pm] has been set side for affinity group formation and action planning). An idea for individuals that are not in or choose not to form an affinity group (or want to clarify questions at meetings before they do so) is that there’s a group (or a few groups as necessary) for the ungrouped – people who would like to speak can take turns amongst themselves to be the spokesperson for that group, though of course they would only be speaking for themselves.

For the purpose of explaining anything decided by the camp organising collective (e.g. reports from the police liaisons), there could be an ‘organisers’ spokes, who rotates depending on the point needing to be explained.

3. Action Tactics Collective

Once the camp has decided on the general action plan via the spokescouncil meetings above, more logistical/tactical questions will be deferred to a smaller meeting of affinity groups interested in carrying out any particular tactics within the action plan. This means that there will be a collective decision and ownership of the action whilst also ensuring that specific tactical discussions are held by those groups who offer to carry out particular tactics within the action, and who may need to coordinate logistics with other groups. These meetings could be held via the spokescouncil model as well. Any decisions that emerge that impact the broader action plan will be communicated to the rest of the camp.

We may also like to come up with a process to convene a meeting during the action itself should we need one (e.g. any spokes can raise a certain coloured flag during the action to signal to other spokes that they would like to call a spokescouncil meeting.)

If you have any questions, please contact program@climatecamp.org.au.