NSW assault on the right to protest
There has been a renewed attack on the right to protest in NSW, led by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, in conjunction with the NSW Liberal Party and a right-wing media campaign designed to smear the Palestine solidarity movement.
The campaign began with sections of the media hyperventilating about the presence of some Hezbollah flags at our Sydney protest on 29 September. It worked itself up into a full-blown moral panic about anyone daring to discuss the 42,000+ Palestinians killed by Israel in the past year, on the anniversary of 7 October.
Although Israel was invading Lebanon and continuing a year-long genocidal rampage in Gaza, it was us, those protesting against the slaughter, who were labelled terrorist supporters, violent, insensitive and a threat to “social cohesion”.
For the Australian establishment, only Israelis can be mourned. According to them, there is no such thing as a Palestinian victim who deserves to have their life remembered and honoured—they are only Hamas terrorists and human shields.
The campaign culminated in the NSW police, under orders from Minns, taking the Palestine Action Group Sydney to the Supreme Court to try to stop our protest on 6 October and a candlelight vigil on 7 October from going ahead. The arguments of the police and prosecutors were farcical and drew on long-established racist stereotypes, particularly about Lebanese people. They tried to concoct an image of violent, terrorist-sympathising mobs.
At one point, they claimed that flower beds in planter boxes posed a safety risk. At another, they argued that a protest route, which they themselves had proposed to protest organisers at a previous meeting, went too near a Sydney synagogue. Later, they argued that the protest should be banned because all the publicity, generated by their own court challenge, meant it would be bigger than expected! In the end, the police withdrew their application to stop us from marching.
But they mobilised an obscenely large mob of police who were itching for any excuse to make arrests to justify the hysterical anti-protest panic. Hundreds of riot police were sent to surround and intimidate a candlelight vigil. Despite this, both events were massive and successful, and the police and government were left with egg on their faces at the lack of “violent terrorists” they could invent.
Chris Minns, not one to let a good law-and-order panic go to waste, then went on 2GB radio with shock jock Ben Fordham (where Minns seemingly makes most of his policy announcements) to complain about the cost—supposedly $5.4 million this year—of policing our protests. As if it were our decision to send hundreds of cops to a candlelight vigil!
“I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to be in a position to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing”, he said. Minns has also appeared to endorse the idea of Liberal opposition leader Mark Speakman that a “user pays” system should be introduced, whereby protesters are forced to pay the costs of the police. Besides being a general attack on protests, this proposal would create a perverse situation in which the rich could protest but not the poor.
Minns also personally singled me out as a “serial protester”, prompting the baying bloodhounds of Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph to write an attempted hit piece on my history of protest, presumably based on information leaked to them by NSW Police.
At our protest on 13 October, two 19-year-old women from Students for Palestine were arrested, had their bags searched, were given move-on orders to leave the protest and were told they would receive infringement notices in the mail. Their “crime”? Putting up a poster on a pole in Hyde Park to advertise a protest.
These threats to our right to protest are just the latest in a long line of authoritarian laws adopted in recent years. The Human Rights Legal Centre reports: “Over the past two decades, 49 laws affecting protest have been introduced in federal, state and territory parliaments. New South Wales has introduced the most anti-protest laws”.
In 2022, the NSW Liberal and Labor parties teamed up to pass the Roads and Crimes Act, which introduced two years’ jail and/or a $22,000 fine for anyone found to be disrupting bridges, tunnels, major roads, train stations, ports and public and private infrastructure. The laws targeted climate protesters but can be used against anyone. Last year, they were used to charge Palestine solidarity protesters attempting to blockade Israeli shipping company Zim at Port Botany.
It has become common police practice to impose insanely strict bail conditions on protesters, even when the alleged offence is minor and would attract only a fine if proven. These conditions often include exclusion zones around the CBD or potential protest sites like universities, bans on attending future protests, and even bans on associating with other activists. The latter powers were supposedly introduced to help NSW police deal with criminal gangs. They are now routinely used against protesters.
Every movement in history has had to contend with the repressive state apparatus, which is devoted to maintaining the “cohesion” of the current, unequal, unjust and murderous social order. The best way to fight for the right to protest is to protest, in bigger numbers than ever.
Josh Lees is an organiser with the Palestine Action Group Sydney.
