We’ve come a long way from applauding Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, from recognising the world-changing value of Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington or the Vietnam War protests. If a suffragette disrupted a horse race today, we’d give her a custodial sentence.
The only successful march now is the long, endless procession of repression, as one of our few residual freedoms — to protest — is whittled down to the point of non-existence.
The Human Rights Law Centre produced a report in July noting that in the past two decades, Australian parliaments (federal, state and territory) have passed 49 laws that remove, reduce or restrict our freedom to conduct protest action in public.
Over the past 12 months, there has been a proliferation of pro-Palestine marches and rallies across the country, sharpening a long-developing trend of governmental desire to crack down on political/nationalistic/religious protests. These have at times raised genuine threats to the much-vaunted myth of “social cohesion”, limited in reality to bunches of random neo-Nazis but overblown by media-driven moral panic.
However, the major catalyst for the re-emergence of colonial policing hasn’t been social but economic. The protests of climate and environmental activists have got up every government’s nose because they’ve been seriously annoying the sponsors: corporations, especially fossil fuel, mining and logging companies.
New South Wales led the charge with the most anti-protest laws. It is now a serious crime in the state to “disrupt” a major road or other public place, with fines up to $22,000 or two years in prison. As in all states except Victoria, you need a police permit before you can even hold a public assembly.
Victoria relies more on what it might call active policing, but which others might call police brutality. It has earned a solid reputation for abuse of the famously nebulous “move on” powers and the deployment of arbitrary and excessive violence on protesters. It is not alone in that.
Western Australia and Queensland have worked hard to protect their key stakeholders (mining companies) with laws designed to criminalise any activity that might get in the way of business as usual. In WA, it is now illegal to “prevent a lawful activity” or “possess a thing” that might be used to do that. Tasmania and Victoria have gone particularly hard to wipe out anti-logging protests and activities.
It’s never enough, because people keep turning up and exercising what they instinctively assume is their intrinsic right to speak their minds. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton wants them arrested and, on suspicion of being immigrants, deported. But he’s not the only one jerking his knees. NSW Premier Chris Minns has just this week proposed to introduce a new law that would allow police to refuse a protest permit on the grounds it would cost too much money to police. Can’t see that one being abused, hey.
None of this is surprising in a country where laws are mostly workshopped on talkback radio and in the windowless dungeon where the Murdoch tabloid editors coordinate their daily headlines. If there’s one thing Australians hate more than being told we’re racist, it’s people who disrupt traffic. Hanging is barely good enough for them.
Politicians are pushing on an ever-open door when they engage in their mindless law-and-order auctions, which used to be more confined to state election campaigns but now run perpetually since the outrage cycle became a 24/7 thing. Did someone wave a flag you don’t like or cause your bus to run late? No worries, we’ll give the cops a few more powers with which to socially cohere them.
Why should anyone care? Isn’t indolent complacency part of what makes Australia such a loveable cultural construct?
If we lived in the utopia that politicians always warn us we’re putting at risk when we get too divisive — by which they mean if we threaten the status quo of power and privilege — then maybe there’d be a case for not rocking the boat too hard.
As the Human Rights Law Centre pointed out, tell that to John Pat. He was 16 and Aboriginal, beaten to death by WA police officers in 1983. The resultant public protests were what led to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which didn’t stop them from happening but has made it impossible to hide them like we used to.
If there were no protests, women would not have the vote. First Nations peoples would not be citizens. Marriage would not be equal. Governments would not be accountable, and corporations would not worry about their social licence.
We applauded as “people power” toppled totalitarian regimes. Those authoritarians all began the same way: by stripping freedoms, shred by imperceptible shred. One day we will wake up to an outrage, inflicted or enabled by government, that is so unspeakable we will feel we must march in protest. We will be too late.
