TRANSCRIPT
“We need to be very, very, very critical about this. Protest is the purest expression of democracy in many ways with voting because protest is democracy in action. And any politician who does not like democracy in action, as long as it is peaceful, maybe we should really question their motivations.”
That's David Mejia-Canales, Senior Lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre.
The right to protest has been a fundamental pillar of Australia's democracy since the country's modern inception.
It's delivered us the eight-hour work day, a woman's right to vote, native title rights and marriage equality just to name a handful of achievements.
But, year-on-year, Australian governments - both state and federal - have introduced laws to clamp down on protester rights.
And now, as rallies like these have become a regular fixture in Australian society over the last year, legal experts say a new crackdown has been underway.
Since a Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7 2023 killed almost 1,200 people, a devastating Israeli assault on Gaza has killed over 45,000 Palestinians and reduced much of the territory to rubble.
The series of weekly rallies held across the country in solidarity with the Palestinian people has become the biggest anti-war movement in Australia since the Iraq war and a significant thorn in the side of politicians.
“It makes me feel helpless. Because I really want to do something but this is the only thing we can do. And donations, raising our voice, trying to deliver our voice. We're hoping we can make a change.”
But, alongside this movement and the debate in parliament, a ratcheting up of vandalism, violence and bigotry directed at Jewish and Muslim Australians has also been seen across the country.
One of the most shocking examples came just weeks ago with the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne which is now being investigated as a likely terrorist incident.
Off the back of the attack, Victoria's Premier Jacinta Allan has proposed a number of anti-protest measures, claiming that antisemitism and hate is thriving within the pro-Palestinian movement.
“Antisemitism is a cancer and we must leave no stone unturned to fight the evil of antisemitism, to fight the evil of this racism. It would be wrong for me to say that everyone who's attending these protests is antisemitic. There's no one saying that. But we know that some are and they are showing that. We also know that hate and antisemitism are thriving in these environments.”
The new proposals from the Victorian government include banning the use of face masks at protests, banning flags of groups listed as terrorist organisations by the Australian government and banning the use of glue and lock-on devices at protests.
Ohad Kozminsky, Executive Member of the Jewish Council of Australia, says he doesn't believe measures like these would do anything to stop antisemitic incidents like the firebombing attack.
“So the striking move from the state government is to respond to a really disgusting, really scary attack on the shoul on the synagogue to look at that event and to respond with laws curtailing the democratic right to protest. So there's clearly a bit of sleight of hand, it seems to me, whereby something that should be condemned, that we have laws to laws to fight against. There are laws against hate speech. There are laws against fire bombing and the destruction of property. We don't need additional laws to fight that.”
And Amal Naser, an organiser with the Palestine Action Group, says the attack on the Melbourne synagogue was a terrible, racist action, but it had nothing to do with her protest movement.
“The attack of a synagogue is an abhorrent and a racist act that should be condemned and has been widely condemned. However, there has been no police investigation or conclusion which suggests that it has anything to do with the protest movement. So what I see is this is a very disproportionate, it's a law and order response which seeks to curtail on civil liberties so the government can seem like they're doing something, but the reality is if we really want to be stopping these racist attacks, we need to be taking anti-racist action.”
Many in the Jewish community are also concerned that the Victorian government is associating all Jewish people with the state of Israel which has been accused of numerous war crimes in its recent assaults on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
“One of the problems with it is that it conflates Jewish identity, Jewish religion, Jewish ethnicity with the state of Israel. That conflation is extremely dangerous and laws such as this applied to the Palestinian solidarity protests would entrench that conflation again in a really dangerous way. And I would say that these protests that I have attended, do not make that conflation.”
The proposed measures also include banning protests outside of places of worship.
But Mr Kozminsky says religious institutions cannot be made immune to public protest.
“Religious institutions, irrespective of their denomination or their faith are legitimate sites of protest. We saw that perhaps most strikingly in the protests that took place in response to revelations about institutional, historic and contemporary sexual abuse of young people of children.”
David Mejia-Canales from the Human Rights Law Centre says this heavy-handed approach from Victoria fits into a broader context of governments across Australia cracking down on protester rights.
“In the last 20 years there have been over 45 different anti-protest laws that have been introduced around Australia. Victoria actually used to have quite a good record because of the Victorian Charter for human rights. However, with the Premier's announcements, we are now seeing that Victoria is following the example of New South Wales and South Australia and Queensland in some respects, trying to rush to implement these really severe anti-protest laws. If the premier thinks that these measures criminalizing peaceful protest is going to fix antisemitism and other forms of racism, then she's deluded, this will not do that.”
New South Wales has introduced the most anti-protest laws in the country while South Australia currently has the toughest financial penalties with fines of up to $50,000 for common protests.
Mr Mejia-Canalese says there's nothing new about the government trying to make it difficult for citizens to demonstrate publicly.
“It's been happening anytime that someone seeks to challenge power. Queensland banned all protests in the streets in the '70s. The suffragists, the women, the very brave women who were traversing the country, seeking petitions to give women the vote, they faced some severe repression in the same way that climate and environment protestors are being repressed today.”
These climate activists have been the primary target of anti-protest laws in recent years - up until the crisis in the Middle East.
A recent study from researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom has found that Australia is the world leader when it comes to arresting these environmental protesters.
Their findings show Australia's arrest rate was higher than all other countries measured, with more than 20 per cent of protests involving arrests, more than three times the global average of 6.3 per cent.
One of those activists who has found herself arrested on a number of occasions is 58-year-old Liz Conor, a climate activist and Associate Professor of History at La Trobe University.
“Climate activism for me started around the very personal rupture of my sister's house being lost in the black Saturday fires. And that lent an urgency to something that I've been watching pretty closely anyway. And when the talks at Doha collapsed, I D-bolted myself to the members' gate outside Victorian parliament, a sort of single person protest which was completely ignored and I got cut off the gate by search and rescue. That triggered me looking for a more effective way of using spectacle.”
After that event she joined forces with other climate activists to found The Climate Guardian Angels in 2013, a group of about 100 activists who sought to bring more media attention to the climate crisis.
Her group was known for some pretty high-profile protests including an attempt to block delegates from entering a G-20 conference in Brisbane in 2014 as well as leading a protest march on COP-21 in Paris in 2015.
She recalls one other moment in 2016 when she was arrested for protesting a coal port in Newcastle.
“So I was carried off the rail lines that carry the coal trains to the Port of Newcastle. I took a troop of Angels and we lay across the railway tracks with 66 other people actually. So we were part of what became the Newy 66. And so I was arrested, we all were. I was carried off and my wrist bent backwards. It took a couple of years to regain strength in my wrist. It was completely unnecessary too, because I was hardly resisting. I was limp, I was hardly resisting arrest.”
Ms Conor says she finds it odd that the Victorian government is now seeking to ban materials like glue and lock-on devices in an attempt to combat antisemitism as they are well-known for being used primarily by climate activists to target the infrastructure of fossil fuel companies.
“I see them as more associated with protests that goes directly for that corporate infrastructure. So I think that's pretty interesting that we have a Labor state government bringing in laws that targets the very kind of protest techniques that are much more about targeting corporate infrastructure than about public disruption.”
Professor Luke McNamara, a member of the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales says each of these 50 odd protest-restricting laws such as the measures proposed in Victoria may seem acceptable but over time they accumulate.
“Individual instances of restrictions on protests might in and of themselves seem from one particular point of view, acceptable, necessary, tolerable. But when you put them all together and ask the question, 'what is happening to the shape and resilience of the right to protest in Australia?' And I do think it's being chipped away.”
He says this means it's becoming more and more risky for Australians to engage in the age-old democratic tradition of public protest.
“It's becoming increasingly difficult to be a law abiding, peaceful protestor. What I mean by that is the rules keep shifting and governments continue to redraw the lines in such a way that places protest activity of the past recognized as maybe disruptive, but lawful and acceptable and to be tolerated. Increasingly, those sorts of behaviours are being put on the unlawful side of the line. “
While the future of the right to protest may seem bleak, lawyer David Mejia-Canales says there are changes that could be made to secure that right into the future.
One of these solutions is establishing a national human rights act that enshrines the right to protest in law.
But above all, he highlights the need for a human rights culture where everyday Australians understand they have the power to stand up and hold political institutions to account when they infringe upon these rights.
“Your ability to maintain, affirm and have your human rights protected should not depend on what postcode you live in. And at the moment, only people in Victoria, Queensland and the A-C-T can lay claim to having a human rights act. So we do need a human rights act. But above that we also need to make sure that we hold our politicians and our parliaments to account when they do not protect our human rights, whether it's for their own political expediency or because they want to appear to be solving a problem that maybe requires a very different solution.”
SBS News reached out to the Victorian government for a statement on their proposed measures regarding protests but they were unable to respond before deadline.
