There’s something interesting going on with the Occupy Sydney and Occupy Melbourne protests at present, and I can’t quite get my head around it.

The first thing that struck me was that the same people who celebrated the Arab Spring, and even Occupy Wall Street to some extent, were pouring scorn on the Australian protests.

One argument against the Australian movement is that things aren’t so bad here, so Australians have no right to protest in the same way. Yeah, right, well that depends on where you sit, even in Australia.

But is it better here? Or is it just that we tend to be a more individualistic and complacent lot? If we start asking about power rather than just the state of the economy, the answers start to change.

Another objection to the Australian movement has been that the protestors are a disorganized bunch with no unified objectives and no clear idea what it is that they are protesting about. That doesn’t surprise me. You don’t have to understand how a car engine works to know when something is wrong with it. Likewise, you don’t have to understand exactly how the social and economic systems work to realise that something is amiss.

Actually, I paid little attention to any of this until the riot police were sent in to break up the protests in Melbourne and Sydney. Then the questions really started to flow. Why should Australian authorities feel threatened by a peaceful protest if things are so different here? Who is it that really feels threatened by a peaceful movement of the people? Look beyond the mayors and councils, they’re small fry trying to keep order so as not to offend the sensibilities of the people they consider to be important.

To what extent has our society seemed peaceful to date simply because no one has seriously mounted any challenge to the status quo? I don’t think the Occupy protests were a serious challenge, in that they weren’t focused or informed enough to achieve any practical outcomes. But they indicated people starting to question the basis of a system that sees growing inequality and greatly increasing wealth for 1% at the expense of millions of others.

Once people start questioning the taken-for-granted, and asking who benefits from the way things currently are—once enough ordinary, everyday people start to engage their critical thinking abilities—they start to identify and test the ideologies that hold the system in its current configuration and maintain the power structures as they are. The intellectual classes don’t count. They are expected to critique the system and their criticisms are incorporated into the mainstream discourses to demonstrate how flexible and tolerant the system is and therefore galvanise it against real challenge.

And it’s not just wealth that the protests are about; it takes real power to accumulate the sort of wealth at issue here—power that for the most part remains out of sight, protected by the order maintained by civil authorities. My suspicion is that this is why some people, somewhere, felt the need for a heavy-handed approach to what had been, up until that point as far as I can ascertain, a peaceful, popular movement. It’s not really about the difficulty of picking your way across the square to get to work, or the bill for clean up after the campers have gone.

That’s my thinking. What do you think?