The arrest of more than 20 activists in Brisbane on 18 April for saying six words calling for Palestinian liberation was shocking, but it was not unusual in Queensland’s history.
The pretext for repressing social movements has shifted—whether public order, patriotism or, more recently, “social cohesion”—but repression remains a recurring theme in Queensland politics. Under capitalism, free speech and civil liberties are never secure: governments can strip them away, but movements can also win them back through defiance and mobilisation.
One of the earliest free speech fights took place in Brisbane in 1913, when socialists, Russian revolutionary exiles and members of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies, waged a prolonged 12-month struggle for free speech.
Since federation, formal political rights had advanced, but civil liberties had not. The Brisbane Traffic Act 1905 restricted the holding of meetings and processions. To hold a meeting or a procession, organisers needed a permit, which cost 20 shillings—around half the weekly basic wage—and took three days to obtain. Permits could be denied for any reason and were almost always denied for Sundays.
Seeing the injustice in this, radicals would begin public speeches, denouncing the evils of capitalism. Due to Sunday observance restrictions, which banned almost everything in public apart from church, there was not much else to do, and crowds would start to gather. Police would then arrest the speaker, only for another speaker to step forward and replace them. And then another, and then another.
The speakers were hauled off to jail and brought before the magistrate. More than 30 activists were arrested in total, and collectively they spent more than five and a half years in prison.
As the campaign escalated, the radicals became cheekier in their actions. Some locked themselves to posts so they could speak for longer and denounce the police, while the police rushed around trying to find saws to cut them out of the railings.
Bob Besant, a 23-year-old labourer, captured the cheekiness of this defiance. He rode a horse up and down Queen Street, followed by 2,000 to 3,000 people, with placards hanging on either side of the horse that read: “Sorry to say I must be quiet—for if I speak I will cause a riot.” Eventually police arrested him, but the stunt exposed the absurdity of the law: he was neither holding a public forum nor conducting a meeting. In the end, he was fined and jailed for a week.
One of the sentencing magistrates later exclaimed in irritation that a special plot of land should be set aside for the radicals to speak, because he considered it a waste of time having to sentence these agitators Monday after Monday.
However, while radicals of all kinds were involved, the wider trade union movement did not take up the issue. After the defeat of the 1912 Brisbane general strike, leaders of the trade union movement thought it better to focus on getting the Labor Party elected than to put time and energy into a street campaign for free speech. The campaign therefore petered out without the backing of the wider trade union movement, showing that civil liberties campaigns cannot win through the actions of a radical minority alone.
However, the First World War soon thrust new battles over civil liberties on to the working class in Queensland.
In the early months of the war, there was a wave of patriotism and support for the British Empire. But as casualties mounted, living standards fell and wages were frozen, support for the war declined. At the same time, the need for more workers to go and die for the ruling class increased, and so the Australian government, led by Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes, tried to introduce conscription not once but twice. Both attempts were defeated by working-class defiance, despite repression, censorship and the curtailment of civil liberties.
The second referendum campaign of November–December 1917 became a fight over free speech as well as over conscription. Hughes had expanded censorship and repression through the War Precautions Act, which was used in a pervasive and ad hoc manner to suppress views critical of the war effort and conscription. Anti-conscription publications were censored, mail was opened, meetings were monitored, and migrants were threatened with arrest, deportation or imprisonment.
But repression did not stop the anti-conscription movement. Across Australia, massive demonstrations drew in thousands of workers, and violent strikes erupted outside the control of union officialdom. Under intense pressure from their radicalised rank and file, the union leaders who controlled the party machine were forced to take a stand. They expelled Hughes from the ALP, the only time a Labor prime minister has been booted from the party.
The Ryan Labor government in Queensland also felt this pressure intensely and became the only state government opposed to conscription (even if it still supported the war). This was not because Ryan was concerned for the sanctity of human life. Rather, his government feared the radicals and the possibility that they could disrupt the whole social and industrial life of Australia.
As the campaign unfolded, both the trade union movement and the Ryan government became increasingly frustrated by Hughes’ censorship. The Ryan government tried to circumvent the censor by having suppressed anti-conscription material read into parliament under privilege. The Brisbane Industrial Council, which linked militant unions (waterside workers, railway workers and the building trades) then moved to distribute it across the state, accompanied by denunciations of the government’s tyranny.
Hughes responded by ordering the seizure of the material and sending troops to raid the Government Printing Office in Brisbane. Ryan instructed the Queensland police not to comply. For a moment, the issue of free speech escalated into a political crisis, with the possibility of open confrontation between the commonwealth and the Queensland government and the organised labour movement.
The Brisbane Industrial Council even discussed plans to arm trade unionists if the army were used against the labour movement. In the end, both sides backed down. But the episode revealed how quickly the suppression of dissent could push Queensland toward a much wider political rupture.
Hughes and the ruling class were defeated in their attempt to introduce conscription, which was rejected in two successive referendums in 1916 and 1917. The anti-conscription movement was too broad and too deeply rooted in the working class to be silenced. Unlike the 1913 free speech campaign, which remained relatively isolated, the anti-conscription struggle drew in far wider layers of the labour movement and was able to win.
By the 1960s, a new generation of students and young workers, having grown up during sustained economic growth without sharing much in its benefits, began to mobilise against the White Australia policy and then quickly moved into full-scale opposition to the Vietnam War. In Queensland, these anti-war protests soon became entangled with a broader fight for civil liberties. Marches, sit-down protests and draft-card burnings brought activists into direct conflict with the Traffic Act regulations that required police permission for political processions and street meetings.
In October 1966, in a Brisbane demonstration against the war and conscription—in what would become the beginning of the “Right to March” campaign—police arrested 26 activists. This fused the issue of the war with the right to protest. The following year, four students went to prison for refusing to pay fines arising from earlier protests, which in turn led to more agitation at the University of Queensland. Forums, meetings and marches drew thousands into debate not only about Vietnam, but also about state power, civil liberties, censorship and capitalism.
In September 1967, thousands of students and staff defied the authorities by marching beyond the points authorised by police. After marching eight kilometres into town, the protesters were ordered by police to disperse. Around 1,500 students then sat down in the street and linked arms. Police moved in with 250 officers to remove them, and in the subsequent melee, more than 100 people were arrested.
However, with the National Party’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen becoming premier in 1968, the street march issue was to become one of Queensland’s major ongoing civil liberties fights. In 1977, Joh declared that “the day of the street march is over” and banned political processions by removing the practical right of appeal against police refusals of permits.
The ban was aimed above all at the growing anti-uranium movement. The uranium industry was a potential bonanza for local capitalists, and the government was determined to stop the movement from gathering momentum. But once the ban was imposed, the issue rapidly expanded beyond uranium. It became a general fight over civil liberties and state power. Students, unionists, church people, environmentalists, liberals, socialists, communists and many previously uncommitted people were drawn into a broad campaign of defiance.
What followed was the biggest and most sustained civil liberties struggle in Queensland’s history. Over the next two years, there were hundreds of protests, thousands of arrests and thousands more charges laid. Demonstrators were beaten, harassed and repeatedly dragged through the courts. Permits were refused, marches were declared illegal, and the police force was used as a weapon to enforce Joh’s rule.
Yet this is also one of the clearest examples in Queensland history of repression being beaten back. The campaign was not won through appeals to the government’s conscience. It was won because people kept marching, kept defying bans, and made the cost of enforcement too high. Large demonstrations, small stunts, repeated arrests, jailings and organised persistence gradually undermined the government’s position. By 1979, permits were again being granted more readily. The permit system remained, but the attempt to crush protest outright had been pushed back.
This history matters because it shows that the Crisafulli government’s attack on the Palestine campaign is not some shocking break with Queensland’s past. It fits an old and familiar pattern. Protest is tolerated only while it remains manageable, containable and politically harmless. When it does not, it must be crushed. For months, the authorities have slandered the movement as extremist, disorderly or antisemitic. Now slogans are being criminalised, arrests are being made, and the government is trying to send a message: dissent will carry a cost. The aim is not simply to punish a few activists. It is to frighten a broader movement, to make people hesitate before attending a rally, picking up a placard or speaking publicly in solidarity with Palestine.
Democratic rights under capitalism are always contested. Free speech and freedom of assembly are not gifts from above. They are the products of past struggle, and they survive only so long as people are willing to defend them. Rights that exist on paper can still be undermined in practice. Rights that have been won can be narrowed, suspended or stripped away when the ruling class feels threatened.
Repression is defeated through collective struggle. Queensland’s history does not show that governments are persuaded by eloquent pleas for tolerance. It shows that rights are defended through collective resistance, mass defiance and the building of movements strong enough to make repression difficult to sustain. The right to march was not defended because Joh was reasoned out of his authoritarianism. It was defended because thousands of people refused to back down.
The activists arrested in Brisbane last month belong to a long tradition. From the 1913 free speech fighters to anti-conscription militants, to civil liberties marchers, to anti-uranium protesters, Queensland governments have repeatedly faced opposition to their attempts to criminalise dissent. The way our side has won is when we have defied en masse.
