Comparisons between 14 largely retired environmental protesters unfurling banners in Queensland’s parliament and the January 6 US Capitol riots are “odious”, one of the protesters has said.
On Thursday, Queensland’s parliamentary ethics committee handed down its findings, which cleared Greens MP Michael Berkman of inciting or encouraging the Extinction Rebellion protest in November 2022, but described his conduct as “disgraceful”.
Fourteen people aged between 24 and 88 face the possibility of jail, if convicted, over their brief but raucous protest in which demonstrators unfurled banners with anti-fossil fuel slogans from the public gallery of parliament, interrupting question time with chants of “end fossil fuels now” and “stop coal, stop gas” for about three minutes.
In an interview with ABC Brisbane, Berkman later expressed shock at news the activists faced charges – not laid in more than 30 years – of disturbing the legislature during a protest.
He said the charges were “a really scary indicator of where we are up to”, and later posted on social media that the protesters were “absolutely right”.
Though clearing Berkman of contempt, the ethics committee report into the incident was scathing of the Greens MP.
“The effect on democracy of celebrating such behaviour, such as that which occurred when protestors stormed the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021, is all too easy to see,” the committee wrote.
“While the Member, no doubt, would be aghast to have his behaviour compared to those Congressmen who celebrated a violent disruption in their own House of Assembly, in reality his actions were little better. Naivety is not a sufficient excuse.”
Berkman described the comparison to events in Washington as “outrageous and, frankly, disgusting” on social media on Thursday.
“The Committee has labelled the protest and my post ‘immature’, ‘disgraceful’, and an ‘affront to democracy’,” he tweeted.
“Supporting climate action and peaceful protest is none of those things. It is a moral obligation that the major parties have chosen to disregard.”
One of the protesters was Lee Coaldrake, an anaesthetist who is married to former Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake, who led a review into the integrity of the public service and Queensland government in 2022.
Lee Coaldrake told Guardian Australia the committee’s findings were another attempt to “demonise” climate protesters as “extremists”.
“There is just no parallel whatsoever between an attempt to violently overthrow a democratically elected government in the States and what we were doing,” she said.
“We were engaging in peaceful protest which is a fundamental pillar of our democracy.
“We’re not extreme, we are very rational people who are following the science – and the science is terrifying.
“And our politicians are not acting with the urgency and the speed that the scientists are begging of them”.
The 14 protesters are scheduled to face court in July.
