Page 96 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 11 February 2020
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do so anywhere in the ACT except within 100 metres of the said medical facility. That is an important distinction that we remind this chamber of. We remind it that there are a range of competing rights, often, and it is about trying to find the balance when it comes to those rights.
What we are sometimes seeing in other jurisdictions, though, is that the rights are not being balanced appropriately and the rights that we think we have, do have or did once have can be taken away by small, insidious steps if we are not paying attention. Last October former Greens Senator Scott Ludlam was hit with what civil liberties campaigners described as “absurd” bail conditions following his attendance at an Extinction Rebellion event in Sydney. Thankfully, the New South Wales Deputy Chief Magistrate, Jane Mottley, dismissed these bail conditions as unnecessary, in view of the fact that the alleged offences were fine-only, and not ones that would ordinarily attract bail conditions.
It is possible, of course, that not all judges would display this commonsense attitude. There have been some fairly extreme claims made at the moment by members of the police, members of parliament and others in certain jurisdictions regarding the supposed “endangering of safety”, claims seemingly being made in order to justify the “crackdown on protesters” that was so easy to find in a Google search. In Townsville in 2018 there was even a case that saw the safety risk claim being applied to the screening of a documentary film on climate change.
There are also significant deterrents to the right to protest being imposed in the form of high fines. In March 2018 protesters who shut down a part of the Adani company’s coal port in North Queensland were collectively fined almost $80,000, quite a stark and, I would argue, disproportionate contrast to the fine of a mere $12,000 imposed on the Adani company itself for polluting a nearby beach with over eight times the permitted level of coal sediment.
Further, instead of accepting the fine, Adani chose to use its deep pockets to fight it in court, which is something that ordinary people engaging in their democratic right to peaceful protest are not always able to do. Are we really happy to live in a society where the fear of unaffordable fines keeps people from expressing their views in a way that creates, at worst, minor and temporary inconvenience?
Last October, as I mentioned a moment ago, the Queensland parliament passed laws criminalising locking devices, with Greens MP Michael Berkman as the sole dissenting voice. I share one of his key concerns—that the new law provides the thin end of a very concerning wedge. I will quote him on this. He said:
Any moves to restrict protests would legitimatise a more extreme approach from a future conservative government. By blindly obeying the Courier-Mail, Labor has started a pointless culture war with the LNP that it can’t win. The LNP’s amendments were even worse than Labor’s bill, and this kind of slippery slope is exactly what we’ve been trying to warn them about.
That was a quote from Michael Berkman. I can assure the chamber that the LNP amendments did not pass, which was fortunate, because they included, as
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