A climate activist sentenced to 15 months in jail for a protest on the Sydney Harbour Bridge is the niece of a senior minister in the New South Wales Coalition government.
Deanna “Violet” Coco, who faces a minimum eight months in prison over the April protest in which the now 32-year-old parked a truck and stood holding a lit flare on the bridge, is the niece of Alister Henskens, the minister for skills and training and a factional ally of the premier, Dominic Perrottet.
Earlier this year Henskens voted in favour of legislation which dramatically increased the penalty for protests which blocked roads, bridges or tunnels, after a spate of climate protests which blocked traffic across Sydney.
The laws – widely criticised by human rights groups, unions, environmental activists and legal groups at the time – introduced larger fines and up to two years in jail for convicted protesters.
But despite the family connection, Henskens on Tuesday defended his role in passing the controversial laws, saying that “nobody is above the law”.
“We are all equal before the law and individuals must take responsibility for their actions. It’s up to our independent judicial system to determine the appropriate course of action in any individual case,” Henskens said
“I strongly believe in the right to freedom of speech, including in the form of lawful, peaceful protests.
“NSW is one of the freest places in the world to express a point of view with a very clear set of laws which I fully support.”
Despite the government – and Labor opposition – standing by the laws, Coco’s arrest and prison sentence has sparked a new outcry over the legislation. After her sentencing on Friday a senior UN official said he was “alarmed” by the sentence.
In a statement published on Tuesday and written prior to her sentencing – Coco said she began engaging in protests to “avoid [the] disastrous future” from climate change.
“In light of the urgency of the situation, I feel I have to do the most effective thing in bringing about political change,” she wrote.
“History has shown that at times of great crisis, when regular political procedure has proven incapable of enacting justice, it falls to ordinary people taking a stand to bring about change through civil disobedience.”
She wrote that she did “not want to be protesting”.
“Protest work is not fun – it’s stressful, resource-intensive, [and] scary … I do not enjoy breaking the law. I wish that there was another way to address this issue with the gravitas that it deserves.”
Trade union protests were carved out of the bill after amendments were moved by the opposition earlier this year, but that has failed to appease the movement. The head of Unions NSW, Mark Morey, told the Guardian the sentence was “wildly excessive”.
“You don’t have to agree with someone’s politics to know that this is a wildly excessive sentence,” he said.
“The justice system has enough to deal with and we really don’t need to add protesters such as this one to the workload of our overstretched system.
“There are surely better ways to deter people from protests such as this than throwing them in jail. There are people who have committed serious crimes getting less than this.”
It comes after the Guardian revealed on Tuesday that NSW governor Margaret Beazley agreed to return to her office about 11pm after a function in April to sign off on the laws, capping off a mad scramble to have the bill assented to.
