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Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 23:22:52 +0000
To: rts@gn.apc.org
From: allsorts@gn.apc.org
Subject: -ALLSORTS-mixed news 20th March

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report on New Zealand RTS party

From: Soursoy@tradeshall.org.nz

Reclaim the Streets in New Zealand

Hi,

I just thought I would write to tell everybody about one of the first Reclaim the Streets parties in New Zealand, which that happened on the 26th February, 2002 on Kensington Street, Wellington, New Zealand.

The RTS party was organised to coincide with Transit NZ (NZ's roading building department) evictions of tennants for their proposed Wellington, NZ. This road proposes ro destroy the heart and community of the Te Aro and Central City area, let alone adding to the pollution of an already decaying atmospere through the promotion of the individual automobile. Many of the tennants did not want us to try and resist the evictions and so we decided to resist the evictions in a creative way by having an RTS party in the heart of the bypass route, with the intention of occupying the houses after the evictions. We have already occupied one of the buildings, and The Freedom Shop (run by local anarchist group CEC) are continuing to resist their eviction. We plan to move into more buildings as more people get invilved in the campaign. New Zealand is quite small, and anti-road protests are new here so it's harder to get a large number NVDA activists involved.

Anyway, the RTS party was held on the eviction day of the tenants, with everybody meeting at 5:30pm in Civic Square. Around 300 people turned up and listened to speeches for 15 minutes before marching off to the secret party location. A mobile PA was used to provide the beats on the way up to the party. The atmosphere on this march was the most amazing I've ever seen, with everybody dancing and yelling on their way up the party. It was just amazing to see everybody so ecstatic. The march ended up arriving at the party point half an hour early, with us only just having got everything setup and the first DJ having to run from a dairy to the decks as he saw them coming around up the road. We managed to get the music pumping just as the crowd was coming around the corner to the party. The vibe when everybody who arrived was fuckin cool. Everybody seemed to have a cool time, and Food Not Bombs provided soya sausages for everyone. We eventually got shut down at 11pm by noise control. We wanted to ignore them, but we had borrowed too much gear on the condition that it didn't get confiscated.

So the soundsystem got shut down just before DJ Y (Amsterdam) was to get on which was annoying because we were all really looking forward to her play. All in all considering it was our first RTS it went pretty well but we've deffinatly learnt lots and we're looking at setting up RTS Aotearoa (Maori name for New Zealand) and trying to get our own PA system for RTS and the Wellington Activist Scene. Next time I'm sure it's going to be bigger. With the first RTS being a success, more people are expected and we plan to aim for a larger area to occupy.

Pete


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