Boycott Rod Laver Arena

Up to 20 security staff were apparently required to manhandle a 16 year old boy out of Sunday night’s P!nk concert at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena. What did he do?

Sent this tweet, just prior to Pink coming on stage:

@Pink I'm ready with my Bomb. Time to blow up #RodLaverArena. Bitch.

A bit stupid and naïve, but he is a 16 old boy and probably not the hardest one around if he’s going to a Pink concert. He said it was a reference to Pink’s song Timebomb. There’s no reason not to believe him.

Arena staff read the tweet and had a platoon of security search out the boy in the crowd from his picture on his Twitter profile (another reason why people should not unnecessarily broadcast their private information).

It is reasonable that arena staff should investigate such a message. However, one look at the Twitter profile picture should have been sufficient to understand there was little likelihood of any real threat, for anyone with a grain of intelligence, that is.

A sensible response would have been to ask him what he thought he was doing sending out a tweet like that. On hearing the explanation, anyone who is not a complete moron would have realised he is just a stupid kid, explained why it was the wrong thing to do, told him they were keeping an eye on him and that he’d be kicked out if he didn’t behave.

Instead, these fuckwit thugs pulled his hands behind his back and frogmarched him out of the arena. Not content with that, they called police and demanded he be charged, which the police were reluctant to do.

Demanded? Who the fuck are any of you to demand that taxpayers’ money and police time be wasted on a pointless prosecution for public nuisance stemming from your own overreaction to a trivial act? Worse, since it’s only a summary offence, the boy will probably plead guilty and be let off with a warning, rather than risk money fighting a charge a competent lawyer would expect to beat.

The police should have stood up to the arena staff and told them that in their opinion, the most likely crime which had been committed was assault by their employees on a 16 year old boy, who was simply grabbed and dragged out, without even being asked to leave voluntarily. I’d like to see the boy’s family press for such assault charges to be laid, plus possibly unlawful detention.

A large proportion, probably the majority of security staff at entertainment venues are manual labourers with double digit IQs, who have been given a t-shirt or jacket with “Security” written on it. The security licencing system is systematically rorted. Too many are cretinous thugs with chips on their shoulders, who join together to abuse their authority by harassing and assaulting patrons. The main thing they learn from their security licence course (if they even attend) is how to circumvent assault and unlawful detention laws. Some are petty criminals themselves, involved in petty theft, standover and low level drug dealing. They are also cowards, picking on easy targets as a group, such as 20 Rod Laver Arena staff descending on and roughing up an immature, 16 year old boy.

This is exactly the kind of incident that seems trivial, but isn’t. The tweet was trivial. Non trivial is the prevalent attitude of security staff that some quasi “official” capacity gives them automatic licence to concoct ridiculous rules and procedures, use them as a pretext for roughing people up, then hide behind corporate bullshit from venue management when the victims of their actions quite reasonably seek redress.

Since such redress cannot be obtained from the venue management, who are themselves complicit, the only way to gain it is via a campaign of public exposure of the people involved and a boycott of the business.

Venues like the Rod Laver Arena don’t place the enjoyment of patrons at the top of their priorities. They specialize in soulless, commercialised “entertainment”. All they want to do is gouge as much money from an ovine public as they possibly can, herding them into glorified holding pens to watch some overly choreographed pop show, usually from a considerable distance. An exaggerated security presence (ultimately paid for by ticket holders) decides what constitutes “unacceptable behaviour”. And all of this will set you back around $150 – that’s the price of floor tickets to Pink at Rod Laver Arena.

Some oily cunt from the venue’s PR or “communications” department will be getting on all the social media sites, making announcements like:

We're under an hour from the start of @Pink's record breaking run at #rodlaverarena. Thanks Melbourne & Oz for showing such amazing support!

Yeah, thanks for all the money we’ve made out of you, you dupes! Now stand in this roped area and don’t make any recordings, or even jump around too much or our security will beat you up and throw you out.

No matter how much you liked the artist, why would you pay $150 to see a corporate pop show, corralled by a dispiriting list of regulations, written by insurance company lawyers and soulless venue management and enforced by moronic thugs waiting for an excuse to bash people they have never met?

And why pay for the music of any artist who buys into this, especially if they pretend to be all “occupy” and not actually one of the 1%? Don’t feel bad about downloading these artists’ music free on Bittorrent. They are making far more money than they deserve, as are the coke snorting record company execs.

If people want to return to a more relaxed attitude, where spectators come first, we need to start boycotting the corporate entertainment business model.

The days when people dressed up as weirdly as they could and casually passed joints around the audience at concerts and stage diving was normal really were more fun¹. Now it’s all OH&S everywhere you go.

I’m not suggesting it’s OK to do things like throw fruit onto the court at the tennis, but where’s the harm in the occasional streaker in the late afternoon at the cricket? Or a bloke running onto the field to offer Doug Walters a sip of his beer when he reached 100?

Watch any of the mountain stages at the Tour de France, with the crowds jumping in front of the riders and running along the road beside them. Some of the spectators are idiots, but the French don’t feel the need for heavy handed security. Imagine the same event in the UK: both sides of the road would be all cordoned off, with security marshals everywhere, constantly feeling the need to justify their existence by issuing “warnings”.

Let’s boycott places like Rod Laver Arena and large nightclubs with aggressive security until they get the message: we don’t want the soulless rip-off you’re selling.

¹ Fingo once jumped on stage and chucked a brown eye at a TISM show at Paddington RSL, before diving back onto a sea of hands.