“I don’t want to see protests on our street at all, from anybody,” New South Wales Police Minister Yasmin Catley said in the days following Hamas’ atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. “I don’t think anybody really does.”
Her government certainly legislates as though that’s the case, and is far from alone in doing so.
On February 21 this year, NSW passed new laws aimed at restricting the right to protest. It gave police additional powers to move on protesters near places of worship and to threaten any conduct that could be construed as harassment or intimidation of worshippers with up to two years in jail. It also broadens the coverage of NSW’s protest permit system.
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Meanwhile, in December last year, Victoria proposed its own crackdown on dissent. Likely to be introduced in March, it will ban the use of face masks at protests, permit “no protest” zones — of as yet unspecified size — around places of worship, and allow police to seize “attachment devices” such as glue, locks, chains and ropes.
According to a new report from the Australian Democracy Network (ADN), the clamps on protesters are only getting tighter:
The rate at which people who protest are sentenced to imprisonment after engaging in peaceful protest is intensifying in Australia.
Over the last three years, nine activists engaged in civil disobedience have been sentenced to a combined total of 50 months imprisonment.
Two major streams have prompted this most recent flurry of legislation, Anastasia Radievska, protest rights campaigner at ADN, told Crikey.
First is the pro-Palestine protests, “probably the most consistent, longest-running social movement in terms of public assemblies in Australia”. The second major target, as we’ve long covered, is climate protesters.
“Australia leads the world in terms of arresting climate protesters,” Radievska said. “There was some research done last year on an international level that placed us number one. But this [research] gives it a more concrete kind of shape, which is that the rate at which activists are being given jail sentences has increased by about 10 times in the last five years. Since the end of 2020, there’s also more punitive bail conditions being imposed that are functioning as a kind of de facto punishment, even before somebody goes to trial for a protest-related offence.”
Alongside this, Radievska said, is more preemptive policing of protests and an increased “militarisation” of police forces.
“We’re seeing a lot more … people being visited and told that if they go to a certain protest, they’ll be convicted, they’ll be committing an offence,” she said.
An open letter to Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen from 21 civil society organisations — including Quakers Victoria, Islamic Council of Victoria, Liberty Victoria and Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service — argues:
There is no credible correlation between recent criminal acts and the exercise of the right to protest. Restricting the right to protest would not have prevented the abhorrent crimes seen in recent months.
The moves in NSW and Victoria are of a piece with the actions of several state governments in recent years.
In mid-2023, the South Australian government — around the same time energy minister Tom Koutsantonis was telling the fossil-fuel industry his party was “at your disposal” — passed harsh anti-protest laws.
In Australia’s most explicit petro-state, Western Australia, there have been a series of raids and arrests by WA’s counterterrorism police aimed at climate-related protesters.
Tasmania passed harsher penalties for protesters in 2022 — not to mention the 2017 laws that were eventually struck down by the High Court — and Tasmania-based protester Colette Harmsen recently served three months in prison.
Radievska says we are seeing the importation of the same tactics used in the US, with political leaders explicitly throwing around threats to protesters’ residencies in the past week. Going forward, she says the banner of social cohesion will almost certainly be deployed for similar ends.
“I think that one thing to note is strategies aimed at furthering that cleavage between activists and ‘mainstream society’ often attack the split between advocacy organisations and activists,” she said. “So, trying to punish organisations who support protest or who engage in advocacy themselves.”
She points to the example of Victoria’s initiative, released under the heading “Strong Action To Fight Hate And Help Victoria Heal”, which will require multicultural organisations to observe a “social cohesion pledge” if they wish to apply for government grants.
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“The conditions of that pledge haven’t yet been made public, but you can guess that there would be some element there around certain kinds of advocacy and supporting certain kinds of social movements,” she said. The pledge is explicitly attached to a desire to “stamp out extreme and radical influences in public protests”.
Of course, the suppression of protest is just one element of Australia’s ever-expanding police state. Victoria’s government recently bragged of its proposal to introduce “Australia’s toughest bail laws” while governments at the state and federal levels have introduced harsher laws on hate speech in the aftermath of the Dural caravan saga.
Premier Chris Minns has defended the rushed legislation and has ruled out repealing them despite the apparent terrorist plot being a hoax, while backbenchers have called for the federal hate crime laws, passed with bipartisan support in early February, to be repealed.
The laws, first introduced to Parliament in September 2024, were passed in February after Labor agreed to Coalition demands that the laws contain provisions for mandatory sentencing, in opposition to Labor’s platform on the practice.
More broadly, this process is part of a quarter of a century of shrinking civil rights, expanding surveillance and harsher punishments in the name of Australia’s national security. Prior to 2001, Australia had no laws specifically aimed at terrorism. By 2014, there were more than 60. By 2021, it was more than 90.
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