On September 12, 2000, Australian Prime Minister John Howard referred to protests against a gathering of the World Economic Forum at Melbourne's Crown Casino complex as "UnAustralian". The response from the protesters was to challenge this in graffiti: specifically, "Proudly unaustralian", "I think, therefore I'm unaustralian", "John Howard is unaustralian" followed by "No, he's very Australian: Australia is genocide".

Howard's statement makes assumptions not only about the meaning of national identity and his ability as Prime Minister to make pronouncements about its content, but also assumptions about the nature of communication, that is, the idea that his message will be clearly received as transmitted. The responses from protesters demonstrate clearly that this model of communication is inadequate. Is the ability to reinterpret such meanings sufficient to affect the outcomes of global capitalism?

These moments of contestation over the meaning of national identity take place in a complicated historical context, at a time when the entire notion of "nation" is at stake, on one side the forces of globalisation and on the other, the counterbalance of increased localisation. As Giddens notes (1990: 65) "In circumstances of accelerating globalisation, the nation-state has become 'too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems of life.' " But while the nation-state of the past was oppressive, we should not celebrate its passing too swiftly: its replacement is no better, and is frequently criticised for labour practices and environmental apathy to mention just a few.

Given the multi-headed hydra that is increasing globalisation, it's unsurprising that response has been equally varied: forms of resistance to globalisation include theoretical approaches, journalistic responses, and street protest among others.¹ Despite increasingly visible resistance, corporate globalisation continues apace: in the last twenty years, the share of world trade for the world's 48 least wealthy nations has halved, to 0.3%. 10% of the world's population lives in these countries. Meanwhile, the net wealth of the 10 wealthiest billionaires is worth 1.5 times the combined national income of these countries. (UN, 1997). And some multi-nationals now have greater revenue than the GDP of some countries.

And there's little governments can do about this, especially when in some countries more money is paid out in servicing debt each year than is brought in. Indeed, capital is "an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States... constituting a de facto supranational power untouched by governmental decisions." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 453)

At some point, the efficacy of protest must be called into question. To put it in extremely simple terms: Is resistance futile? Is the challenge by protest underculture to capitalist post-modernity significant or is it quickly subsumed into the hegemonic discourse? Are there other cultural, social or political effects that run on from resistance?

Ang (1994) argues that the communication-as-transmission paradigm is intimately connected with capitalist expansionism. In order for capitalist consumer culture to succeed, it must privilege the Sender's position, and assume that its messages (advertising, PR, and so on) are received more or less successfully.² Any act or message which interfered in the successful transmission of that message would therefore presumably perceived as damaging to the consumer project.³ "Implicit in this social-psychological bias in communication research is an (unstated) desire for a disciplined population and therefore a belief in the possibility of an ordered and 'stable' society." (Ang, 1994: 195).

There are a number of theoretical positions from which capitalist globalisation is attacked: two of which are the rejection of the so-called McDonalds-isation of culture⁴, which effectively argues from a critique of cultural imperialism; and a socio-political argument of equity and access.

Protest based on a cultural imperialist critique is problematic, since it also appears to accept a transmission theory of communication (Ang, 1994). However, rejecting cultural imperialism doesn't mean rejecting the notion that globalisation leads to a form of monoculture. It is this key issue that Ang grapples with: "How capitalist modernity 'imposes' itself in a context of formal 'freedom' and 'independence'. In other words, how are power relations organised in a global village where everybody is free and yet bounded?" (196).

Part of the answer is that resistance is met with a refiguring. Myths are perpetuated: that it is possible to measure audience reaction, that diversity is actually undifferentiation, that protesters are not people we know, deterritorialised, but are rather nomads, itinerants, outside the system, who wander from rally to rally.