00:00My Greens colleagues, Sue Higginson and I, attempted to speak to police, saying to them that people were intending on marching.
00:07There were so many people crowded outside of the police riot squad lines surrounding the square that we said that it would not be safe
00:16and it was impossible for people of that number to leave the premises without walking onto the road and we needed assistance to do so.
00:25I walked up with some of the First Nations activists to the front of the steps of Town Hall where there were two lines of riot police with horses behind them.
00:37We said to them, we need to get through, people cannot get up this way.
00:42We were then told by police that we needed to turn around and go out the other exit towards Haymarket.
00:50At the point where we spoke on the megaphone and announced that we were going to do that, we turned our back to the riot squad and the horses and they grabbed a First Nations leader and pulled her into the police line-up behind us.
01:07At that point, at that point, the police had escalated the situation.
01:12We then moved through that crowd to check that she was not going to be taken away in custody and we were waiting on Bathurst Street on a quiet, deserted road.
01:24We heard that people were being kettled by KFC and we went to that area.
01:31We brought people back safely to the area on Bathurst Street where there were no cars, there were no people, we were away from the protest.
01:40The next thing we knew, we started coughing and spluttering.
01:45We holed ourselves up and went inside one of the nearby shops.
01:50We pulled into the shops people who were red in the face and crying, having been sprayed this far away with tear gas, with pepper spray.
01:59And we saw two or three lines of police running, chasing terrified community members as they bolted down Bathurst Street, coughing and spluttering, being sprayed by police.
02:13I asked the Premier and the Greens asked the Premier, what more context do you need to see that this was excessive police force and extreme police brutality?
02:26There is no context that ever excuses state police chasing terrified individuals, children, young people, prams, mothers, grandmothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, chasing students down the street, terrified, trying to escape the police.
02:50This must be independently investigated and we need to know where the powers and the instructions sat for having seen three decades of peaceful protest in this city, including during APEC when George W. Bush visited and 20,000 people gathering in Town Hall Square for marriage equality.
03:10The police were able to facilitate those actions and instead last night because of the political pressure by the Prime Minister and the Premier, we saw that those police were unable to facilitate that protest and they were emboldened instead to turn their violence and their aggression on members of the community.
03:29That is an unacceptable reality and we need independent investigation and oversight of the police now.
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