David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

A few short weeks ago I and, I think, all of my Greens colleagues across the country joined thousands of people—300,000 of whom walked across the Harbour Bridge—in an historic march for a free Palestine and an end to genocide. In that moment, I saw solidarity and the possibility for a better world. I saw people of all ages, all abilities, all backgrounds uniting in the driving rain to stand up for conscience and to end the suffering of the people of Gaza.

But where I saw solidarity and possibility, where I saw hope, where I saw my beautiful hometown of Sydney come together for peace and for humanity, the New South Wales Labor Party just saw a problem. Like too many state and territory governments, New South Wales Labor sees protest not as a fundamental part of our democracy, not as a human right, not as the most powerful tool for driving progress in societies; they saw the protest as an irritant—as a political problem. They would far rather we had not marched. They would have liked Sydneysiders to stay at home, watch their Netflix and passively let governments fail to oppose a genocide. They would rather our voices had not been heard. They want to keep power in the walls of parliament and in the offices of police commissioners they appoint, and they desperately want to stop power being exercised in our streets and in our workplaces, as we come together as people with good conscience who care about the future.

The right to protest is under assault in states and territories across the country. That is having real impacts our democracy and our collective ability to come together to demand changes, to end unjust laws, to protect nature, to stand up for decency. The environment and justice movements are increasingly under threat of legal sanctions and arrests for acts of nonviolent resistance to the extractive industries, especially logging and fossil fuels.

Here, I want to say, to place on record, my party's gratitude to those forest defenders who are in tripods protecting old-growth forests as the bulldozers are coming. I want to express our solidarity and gratitude to those First Nations elders whom we know, when they step out on the streets with us, face the real threat of police violence and arrest in a way that many of us don't, because we have a different privilege when we walk and exercise our rights to protest. I thank those hundreds of thousands of my fellow Sydneysiders who walked beside Australian Palestinians and Australians from across society to cross that bridge for justice. I want to make sure that they are not arrested for the act of showing their dissent and standing up for a better world.

So today we push back on this and we say, clearly: we will protect protest and we will keep marching and striking and sitting in and locking on, and we will defend those who take actions on behalf of our environment, to defend human rights, to protect nature, and to hold onto what they believe in. We do this because now more than ever the future demands bravery right now, from all of us. Protesters must not be met with repression, with batons, with capsicum spray, with horses, with police violence or with long prison sentences for the act of peaceful dissent. And Australian politicians, including in this place, where you can just smell the hypocrisy rise, time after time, are quick to condemn other nations who criminalise and attack peaceful protests. I've heard it. Within 24 hours, we will get a member of the Labor Party or the coalition attacking some other country because of their laws criminalising protests or their police brutality, then at the next moment, back in their own state and territory governments, they are passing new laws to police protests and prevent people coming out and exercising their right to dissent. While politicians in this place are quick to condemn those other nations, under our very noses, state and territory governments across Australia have been chipping away at—not just chipping away at but axing away at—this fundamental right.

I have been arrested under unfair protest laws when I stood between row upon row of riot police—puffed up like highly armed turkeys, puffing their chests out—and school students who were protesting against a climate disaster. At that time, Sydney was surrounded by fire, ash was falling from the skies across our city, and those students were outside the then prime minister's Kirribilli place while he was off holidaying in Hawaii. Our country was burning, ash was falling from the sky. Students were in a cul-de-sac in front of an empty house, because the prime minister was on a holiday in Hawaii, and the police sent the riot officers in to move them and clear them from the roadway because, they said, they were blocking the cul-de-sac in front of an empty house with an absent prime minister. And what were the students doing? They were school kids, mainly. They were calling for action on climate. And the New South Wales police used anti-protest laws and move-on orders to stop the students from blocking the cul-de-sac in front of the PM's empty home. They arrested people, one after the other, including myself. And as that expensive and failed police farce played out—and they took it to court and were hosed out—I saw the system close up. It's nothing to do with public safety, nothing to do with national security. It wasn't to open an empty cul-de-sac to an empty house. It was being used by the rich and powerful to avoid accountability.

We know that these laws are mostly used against young people and, especially, First Nations communities who are resisting damage to their land, their water and our collective future.

Young protestors who stand up for the right to a liveable planet are being hit with criminal penalties, while the owners of the corporations that pollute our water, destroy our land, damage sacred sites and mortgage those young people's futures are being green lighted by this place and by state and territory governments, and even subsidised by governments, for the damage they cause.

This bill is an attempt to rebalance the scales towards justice. This bill operates by clearly defining the right to peaceful protest as a federally protected right, drawing on long-standing international precedent from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This bill establishes that a person, a human being, has the right to engage in peaceful protest in a public place and that any restrictions on that right must be justified in accordance with principles necessary in a democratic society. We're finally legislating for the right to protest as enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The Right to Protest Bill affirms that all Australians have the right to engage in peaceful protest in public spaces and that any restrictions on that right must be strictly limited to those necessary for national security, public safety, public order, public health or the rights of others, and they must be proportionate, and that includes the excessive penalties that have been passed by the New South Wales government, the Victorian government and the Tasmanian government. There are no exemptions for the feelings of state premiers, who would rather you don't speak up and would rather you stay behind.

The bill ensures that excessive penalties, such as lengthy prison sentences and exorbitant fines, are considered unnecessary and disproportionate limitations on the right to protest. It reads them down. The bill provides that, where state or territory laws conflict with this federal protection, those laws will be invalid, and they'll be invalid to the extent of the inconsistency. This bill is an essential reset. Some might criticise it as being too reasonable and to proportionate a protection of the fundamental right to protest. I'll face those criticisms. What we're doing here today is placing the protections that the federal government agreed to when it entered into these international agreements into domestic law.

I want to place on the record one person who was critical for me, my office and my team. I want to give a shout-out to my chief of staff, Kym Chapple, for the enormous work she's done on this. I want to point out one person who was critical for getting this work done, former Greens leader Bob Brown. Some 18 months ago I caught up with Bob in Hobart. Bob, the Tasmanian Greens and countless forest protectors in Tasmania have been putting themselves on the line to protect that old growth forest. They have seen firsthand how those state laws in Tasmania were designed to criminalise the very act of protecting a forest and standing up for those beautiful natural assets, arresting protesters and grabbing them, even before they get to the forest, on public land. I want to thank him for his courage, his support and his pressure in bringing this bill to the chamber today. We call on all parties in this place, who live and breathe only because we have a functioning democracy, to join us today to legislate for the right to peaceful and essential protest.

I commend the bill to the Senate.