Speaking Of Labels
The Age
Friday July 13, 2001
ADELAIDE
YOUNG, American, antiglobalisation author Naomi Klein headed into the Australian bush this week to meet antinuclear campaigners in the remote South Australian town of Coober Pedy.
Klein, in Adelaide for the threeday Festival of Ideas, became the poster girl for the S11 antiglobal protest movement after the publication of No Logo; Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which chronicled the insidious cultural and economic impact of the big consumer brands. She became an antiglobal campaigner and a sworn enemy of labels such as Nike, which she outed for giving sports hero Michael Jordan more in 1992 for endorsing its sneakers than it paid its 30,000 Indonesian workforce.
In Adelaide to talk about ``the branding backlash", Klein says she slipped in via Coober Pedy, a farnorth opalmining town where, in summer, the residents live underground to shelter from the heat, to meet Aboriginal women opposed to uranium mining. She talked with elders, dined by campfire on the edge of Lake Eyre and met a group of young women from Melbourne involved in S11 direct action.
``They have decided they want to be involved in campaigns that are very local, very rooted, and moved out to the Coober Pedy area to make that a reality," Klein says.
Klein, 30, says the power of what she called the ``moments of convergence" behind S11 protests in Seattle, Melbourne, and at Davos in Switzerland was that they were firmly rooted in local political movements such as these.
As to the effectiveness of the protests which have disrupted recent World Trade Organisation and other global monetary meetings, Klein believes progress has been made.
``They are are certainly having an impact in many superficial ways," Klein says of the protests. ``More and more security is needed just to maintain business as usual." But on a more significant level, international negotiators were now on notice, she says. ``The actual advancement of the agenda has essentially been frozen.
``There is very much a question whether the next round of WTO negotiations in Qatar (in November) is going to be successful, not because of the protests on site but because the protests in Seattle led to more local campaigns around the world and now politicians and trained negotiators know they are being watched in a way that preSeattle was simply not the case."
Joining Klein at the launch yesterday were radical American clergyman Bishop Shelby Spong and an international authority on drugs and the involvement of the CIA, American Alfred McCoy.
• The Festival of Ideas runs from today until Sunday.
© 2001 The Age
