Crikey, 8 December 2022, reprinted in Crikey Holiday Read, 5 January 2023:
‘Short
of dictatorships, we are world leaders’: Australia’s record on
criminalising environmental protest
MAEVE
MCGREGOR
'The
jailing of peaceful protesters is chilling for anyone who cares about
our democracy — we need to restore and protect the right to protest
before it’s too late.'
“After
the High Court’s decision on the Franklin River on 1 July 1983,”
said Bob Brown to Crikey, referring to the famous Tasmanian
dam case during which he was arrested, “I stated we had entered
a new era of environmentalism and that it would never be so hard as
it was in the Franklin campaign.”
“I
was totally wrong.”
Nearly
40 years on since the historic victory — in which the Commonwealth
government succeeded in stopping the large hydroelectric Franklin Dam
being built in Tasmania — the founder and former leader of the
Greens was once again arrested, but this time under newly introduced
laws that carry $13,000 fines or two years’ imprisonment for
protests on a forestry site. The same laws also impose $45,000 fines
on organisations, such as the Bob Brown Foundation, which lend
support to such protests.
Far
from heralding a new dawn for environmental justice, Brown said, the
Franklin campaign had proved something of an aberration.
“We
now have a situation across Australia where environmentalists are
jailed and environmental exploiters are protected and subsidised,”
he said of his arrest a few weeks ago.
“Instead
of increasing environmental protection, we have laws that do the
reverse — laws which foster the self-made environmental tragedy of
this planet.”…..
Criminalising
climate activism
The
larger and more pressing dilemma, Brown said, — and one which
belongs to the current age — is the growing tendency of government
to criminalise peaceful protest, while climate breakdown and mass
extinction envelop the world, forever sealing its fate.
In
August, Victoria’s opposition united with the Andrews government to
pass
laws comparable to Tasmania’s, running roughshod over a chorus
of concerns voiced by civil liberties groups, unions and
environmentalists.
Three
years earlier, in 2019, the Queensland government rushed through
sweeping limits on the right to protest, underpinned by
unsubstantiated
claims of “extremist” conduct by environmentalists. The
resulting legislation expanded police search powers and criminalised
“dangerous locking devices” — such as superglue or anything
activists might use to secure themselves to pavement or buildings —
as a means to silence dissent.
And
in New South Wales, concerns about traffic disruption were similarly
seized upon following climate protests in Sydney and Port Botany
earlier this year to hurry
the introduction of two-year jail terms and $22,000 fines for
“illegal protests”.
The
laws, which criminalise “illegal protests” on rail lines,
bridges, tunnels and — most contentiously — public roads, were
passed within
two days with the unqualified
support of the Labor opposition mere weeks after the government
flagged a crackdown on environmentalists.
Though
seemingly aimed at “anarchist protesters”, as NSW
Attorney-General Mark Speakman put it, the breadth of the provisions
suggests otherwise.
“Because
the provisions are so loosely drafted, so imprecise, the laws can
apply to almost any situation of people being on a road,” said
Coco’s lawyer, Mark Davis.
“The
Roads Minister Natalie Ward didn’t know herself if ‘public road’
meant ‘major road’ or any and every road. It’s a disgrace. It
gives police an unlimited, utterly arbitrary discretion to arrest
anyone on a road protesting about anything, not just climate.
“Short
of some prominent dictatorships, we are world leaders with this kind
of legislation. And the courts, or at least one court, has shown us
the gun is loaded and they’re willing to fire it.”
Disruption
and democracy
Against
the backdrop of this legislation, now the subject of constitutional
challenge, environmental demonstrators across Australia have
regularly been denied
bail or otherwise forced to contend with disproportionate
bail conditions, while those residing in New South Wales have had
espionage activities undertaken against them by a new police unit,
Strike
Force Guard.
In
a statement to Crikey on Wednesday, New South Wales Deputy Premier
and Minister for Police Paul Toole defended the laws.
“Illegal
protests that disrupt everyday life, whether it’s transport
networks, freight chains, production lines or commuters trying to get
to work or school, will not be tolerated,” he said.
It
was a sentiment shared by Premier Dominic Perrottet, who days earlier
labelled Coco’s 15-month prison sentence “pleasing to see”,
adding “if protesters want to put our way of life at risk, then
they should have the book thrown at them”.
In
answer, the famous physicist and climate scientist Bill Hare said,
via Twitter, that the inconvenience occasioned by “protest is not
comparable to [the] catastrophic risk to [the] environment and
serious damage to our way of life caused by fossil fuel emissions”.
Hare
— the lead
author for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, for which the IPCC
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — added
that Perrottet’s statement was one of the “most regressive,
anti-democratic statements” he could recall in Australia “for a
long time”. [my
yellow highlighting]
It’s
a view which throws the shifting definition of what is deemed lawful
dissent into sharp relief, Ray Yoshida of the Australian Democracy
Network told Crikey.
“It’s
doublespeak for the NSW government to say they support protests as
long as they don’t break the law, and then pass new laws that
shrink the space for people to act,” he said.
“The
jailing of peaceful protesters is chilling for anyone who cares about
our democracy — we need to restore and protect the right to protest
before it’s too late.”
Had
such laws existed at the time of many of Australia’s historic
environmental wins — from the Franklin River to the Kakadu and
Jabiluka blockades — many, perhaps all, would have met with
failure.
“There’s
no doubt these laws would certainly have had an adverse impact on
bringing to the public’s attention the Franklin Dam issue and, for
that matter, a range of issues that have been brought to prominence
in the public’s mind because of protests,” Greg Barns SC of the
Australian Lawyers Alliance said.
He
added people too often overlooked the hundreds of arrests which
occurred during the Franklin River campaign, but under ordinary
trespass laws that impose lesser penalties.
“The
reason [the new laws] are unnecessary is because there are already
ample laws on the statute books, such as laws relating to trespass,
criminal damage, that deal with these types of situations if people
break the law,” he said.
“What
[Coco’s] sentence shows is that these new laws are draconian. Her
sentence is a draconian penalty allowed for by a draconian law.”
Why
now?
Given
ours is the age of looming, if not inevitable, climate disaster, all
of this poses the inevitable question: why the crackdown on
environmentalists?
In
Brown’s view, it’s no accident of history the techniques used by
campaigners in the past are being targeted by government. It’s a
phenomenon, he said, which conversely owes its existence to “state
capture” by the fossil fuel and logging industries.
“The
extractive industries, who want to convert nature into profits, can
no longer win the argument with the public on the environment, so
they have to ‘take out’ the environmentalists,” he said.
“These
laws are meant to kill environmental activism and frighten people
into silence.”
In
this connection, there’s little denying climate anxiety, and
concomitant calls for climate action pose a risk to such
corporations.
A
recent
analysis of World Bank data undertaken by Belgian energy and
environmental economist Aviel Verbruggen, a former lead author of an
IPCC report, found the oil and gas industry had delivered more than
$4 billion in profit every day for the past 50 years.
Following
the report’s release, Verbruggen said: “You can buy every
politician, every system with all this money, and I think this
happened here. It protects [polluters] from political interference
that may limit their activities.”
While
Brown doesn’t believe any Australian politicians have been bribed
or “bought”, so to speak, he said the lobbying power of the
industry was obvious, both on a domestic and global level.
“By
and large, [our politicians] are just suborned by this lobbying tour
de force, which is not being matched by the non-governmental sector,
which is the guardian of the environment,” he said.
“The
striking similarity between Australian [anti-protest] legislation and
the UK’s
legislation is a clue which indicates we’ve got a global
corporate governance.”
To
buttress this view, Brown pointed to the $700
billion in taxpayer subsidies received by oil and gas companies
globally in 2021.
Viewed
in this context, he said, the anti-protest laws were self-evidently
designed to shatter the unity underpinning the rise of collective,
society-wide pressure to move on climate action.
Environmental
Justice Australia ecosystems lawyer Natalie Hogan agreed the laws
were a “politically motivated crackdown on legitimate political
expression”, and ones that illustrated the efficacy of
environmental campaigns.
“These
protests provide very important community oversight,” she said in
reference to the illegal
logging in Victorian forests exposed by environmental
demonstrators and citizen science groups in recent years.
“It
seems very inconsistent to [tell Victorians] native logging will end
by 2030, and then introduce laws that disproportionately criminalise
or penalise people engaged in legitimate protests or citizen science
in forests.”
Others,
however, believe the anti-protest laws represent yet another skirmish
on the law-and-order politics theme.
“Banging
the law-and-order drum has been fashionable for over 20 years,”
Greg Barns said. “I think that’s the issue at play here — it
just so happens to be climate change in this instance.”
“The
irony is that it will probably have the impact of emboldening
protesters to take more extreme action because they see the laws as
unjust.”
The
future of protests
Not
everyone has cast doubt on the deterrent effect of the laws, though.
Coco’s lawyer Davis said the laws — which he defined as a
“knee-jerk response to tabloid media” — would achieve their
desired result.
“Of
course it will work — who would be insane enough to organise any
sort of free protest? You can go to jail for a long time. It’s
nuts,” he said.
Either
way, Davis added, it’s clear such laws were placing the limits of
Australia’s reputation as a liberal democracy under extraordinary
pressure.
“You
cannot be a fully functional democracy if you cannot voice dissent to
the government power,” he said. “It’s simply impossible.”
“To
be on a road, to use a road, is intrinsic to the right to protest and
the fact that’s now seen as somehow radical tells you about the
cultural shift we’re witnessing.”
Brown,
for his part, believes it would be foolish to bet on a decline in
environmental protest, notwithstanding the laws, given the climate
predicament confronting the globe.....
“But
ultimately responsibility for [change will] fall to voters.....
“These
laws will only continue to get worse if people don’t vote for the
environment.”
After
all, he said, dealing with global warming and the extinction crisis
is, and always has been, about the balance of power.
BACKGROUND
North
Coast Voices,
Monday, 2 January 2023,
Who
is undermining Australia’s climate change mitigation goals? Listing lobbyists contracted to act on behalf of fossil fuel industries.
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