Chris Minns exploits Bondi to attack democratic rights
Did you know that climate protests cause terrorism? That the Knitting Nannas are a potential gateway to ISIS recruitment? That demonstrating to stop cuts to workers’ compensation is a threat to public safety? That rallying against Nazis is antisemitic? That protesting against record levels of Aboriginal deaths in custody would “rip apart our social cohesion”? Or, the real kicker, that 300,000 people (including several NSW government MPs and ministers) marching over the Sydney Harbour bridge against a genocide caused the Bondi attack?
This is the insane rationale put forward by NSW Premier Chris Minns and virtually the entire media establishment to justify a new regime banning all protests in NSW for up to three months following a terror attack.
The new laws were rushed through by Minns on Christmas eve, in a textbook case of an authoritarian government not letting a crisis go to waste, as he sought to exploit the horrific Bondi attack for his and the establishment’s own ends. For years, NSW governments have been imposing more and more anti-protest laws, often targeting the climate movement and lately focused on trying to silence the mass movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Minns even received a letter of praise from Israeli President Isaac Herzog last year—himself indicted for incitement to genocide by the United Nations—for his service to the apartheid regime.
While Minns often accuses protesters of wanting to bring foreign conflicts to Australia, it is his government that just two months ago sponsored a weapons expo in Sydney with Israel’s biggest weapons companies. On that day, “social cohesion” was ensured the way Minns likes, through police repeatedly charging, punching, pepper-spraying and arresting people—and breaking the bones of two peaceful protesters.
The new laws enable the NSW police commissioner, with approval from the attorney general, to issue a “public assembly restriction declaration” for up to fourteen days following a terrorist attack, which can be repeatedly extended for up to three months. The declaration enables the designation of any area in the entire state, within which protesters cannot have a “form one” accepted by police, and no court can overturn this opposition. A form one is the usual way protesters in NSW obtain the legal right to march on our streets. Without it, police can arrest protesters for things like obstructing traffic. So the laws effectively ban all street marches.
In addition, police have been given extra powers to issue “move on” notices even to static assemblies where no march takes place. All the police have to say is that the protest is obstructing pedestrians. The combined effect of all this is that the people of NSW now have no right to protest at all, about anything, in the entire state, on penalty of arrest. Any protests allowed to go ahead will be entirely at the police’s discretion. This is an extreme and outrageous attack on our fundamental democratic rights.
Already, a protest to commemorate the killing of Indigenous man David Dungay Jnr, who was suffocated to death by six prison guards and who has still received no justice, has had its form one revoked. Protest organisers are vowing to defy the ban and march anyway on 18 January, which they had planned to do long before the Bondi attack. The ban is predicted to be extended to cover the annual Invasion Day March on 26 January, and an upcoming protest against the Israeli president.
It is utterly obscene that a protest ban, ostensibly in place to combat antisemitism, a form of racism, will be used to threaten and prevent demonstrations against the racism faced by Aboriginal people. Even more so when we face a growing street movement of extreme racists and fascists, the so-called March for Australia, which is also planning to mobilise again on 26 January. Well before Bondi, NSW police were notorious for opposing Palestine and other anti-racist protests while allowing neo-Nazis to demonstrate freely.
Logic, consistency and anti-racism have nothing to do with the current agenda. Many of the media outlets now spewing the preposterous lie that opposing genocide is antisemitic and laid the basis for Bondi, are the same that built and promoted the Nazi-led March for Australia. Israel lobbyist and antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s partner is a financial contributor to the far-right, racist outfit Advance Australia. She says that watermelons are an antisemitic symbol, but failed to make any statement condemning the recent Nazi rally outside the NSW parliament. They all support the biggest racist atrocity of our time—the genocide being carried out by the Israeli regime in Gaza.
The Palestine Action Group Sydney, Blak Caucus and Jews Against the Occupation ’48 have launched a constitutional challenge to these anti-protest laws. Minns has already lost two constitutional challenges to anti-protest laws. This will be the biggest fight yet, as it occurs in the context of a full-blown McCarthyite witch hunt being waged by the entire ruling establishment against the Palestine movement and the left, culminating in a royal commission that they intend to use as a year-long show trial of anyone who has dared to oppose the genocide. We will not win the courtroom battle unless we win the political argument in society.
We must resist this tide of irrationalism and hypocrisy now coming from every institution. There are millions upon millions of us who can see through all this bullshit and know that the biggest racists in society are accusing us of racism, the biggest supporters of violent atrocities and racist terrorism are accusing us of such things, precisely because we have opposed them. They will not silence us.
