OCTOBER 22, 2020
C I T Y H U B SY D N E Y. C O M . AU @CityHubSydney
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SAVE DEMOCRACY Heavy-handed police enforcement of public health orders erodes the right to protest
BY ALLISON HORE ctivists, politicians, union officials and legal experts are calling for “democracy to be restored” in NSW in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite not a single documented case of Coronavirus transmission occurring at a protest in Australia, COVID-19 health and safety orders have been used to shut down a number of protests in Sydney over the past couple of months. And the increasingly heavy-handed police response has activists worried. But behind the scenes, a campaign to protect the right to protest has been building traction. The campaign, “Democracy is Essential”, calls for protest gatherings to be allowed an
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exemption under the NSW Public Health orders and has been backed by public figures, academics and politicians including Jenny Leong and Jamie Parker from the Greens. Eleanor Morely, one of the campaign’s founders, told City Hub the campaign came about in response to “escalating police and state repression” towards organised protests during the pandemic. But she said the pattern of police shutting down protests is not new and worries it will continue long after the pandemic. “I think this is something that has been building for some time, and now the pandemic is being used as an excuse to escalate the level of repression,” she said.
“There’s nothing that suggests it will be just protest as normal when the pandemic is under control. Unless we fight and challenge, what is an effective ban on protests right now, we could expect to see this repression maintained.” In June police successfully moved to have a Black Lives Matter protest blocked by the supreme court the night before the event was planned. Thousands of protesters defied the Supreme Court’s Order to gather at Town Hall for the rally in solidarity with the protest movement across the USA and to call for justice for aboriginal deaths in custody. Only a few minutes before the rally was about to begin did the court backtrack on their decision.
But a second Black Lives Matter rally in July was shut down by police before it even began. “On the night of the protest about 200 police officers blocked off the venue that we were going to congregate and arrested and fined a whole lot of the organisers,” Eleanor explained. Protests at the University of Sydney against the government’s “job ready education” package and cuts to funding and staff wages have also been subject to heavy policing. A number of campus protesters have been arrested and Sydney Uni’s Student Representative Council president Liam Donohoe estimates over $43,000 in fines have been dished out to campus protesters. Continued on page 2