CONTEMPORARY POLITICS: PRIDE IN PROTEST

The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras organisation has exhibited its rightwing politics most clearly over the past decade through its relationship with the NSW Police Force, as well as the Mardi Gras Board’s continued insistence on appeasing Liberal supporters and corporate sponsors. This has often occurred at the expense of community and activist collectives.

The absence of police solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community was blatantly displayed in an act of police brutality against the then eighteen-year-old Jamie Jackson at the Mardi Gras festival in 2013.9 Instead of developing an independent investigatory body into the police, as was suggested in a subsequent forum, Mardi Gras developed a private accord with the New South Wales Police Force.10 Evan Van Zijl, an organising member of queer activist collective Pride in Protest (PiP), recalled the Mardi Gras board shirking more deep-seated issues of bigotry within the police force — to them, the problem was simply that “police outside of the local area were unfamiliar with queer people.” This position was reflected in the accords with the commitment to ‘cultural sensitivity training for police officers, especially for those from local area commands outside of Surry Hills.’ 11

The Black Lives Matter movement of 2019 and 2020, in Australia and abroad, forced the queer community to again confront the validity of the police’s place at Pride. An open letter from PiP declared that structural issues with the police and prison system were to blame for the racist targeting of minorities in Australia, black deaths in custody, and bigotry against the LGBTQI+ community.12

The first Pride in Protest Oxford Street rally was held in 2021 against several attempts by Mardi Gras to stop it. That year, Evan and one other organising member of PiP were taken to the Supreme Court for calling a rally in breach of COVID regulations at the time. As of the 1st of March 2021, there had been zero community transmissions of COVID, and the SGLMG’s Mardi Gras parade at the Sydney Cricket Ground was anticipating 10,000 attendees. This demonstration of oppression came in response to a rally expecting 900 participants at a time when the cap on protests in NSW had been lifted to 3,000. Finally, as a result of staunch resistance from Pride in Protest, the LGBTQI+ community, NGOs, the Greens, Labor, and Independent MP’s, NSW Health granted the first protest exemption to PiP’s 2021 Mardi Gras march. It was a mammoth win for the community, democracy, and the right to protest in NSW. Still, the police’s attempt to quash PiP’s Mardi Gras rally in 2021 remains a clear recent example of suppression and over-policing of queer activism in Sydney. The rally brought several thousand people to the streets in a marked display of resilience and continued commitment to the original sentiments of the 1978 Mardi Gras rally.

Of course, the struggle didn’t end there — PiP’s open letter later in the year encouraged the Board to remove the NSW Police Force and NSW Corrective Services floats from the 2022 Mardi Gras parade onward, notably from World Pride 2023. The organisation called for the Board to take a stance on the policing of the parade as an unambiguous show of solidarity with Black Lives Matter and of intolerance for police violence. To date, the letter has been signed by 39 organisations and over 1,000 individuals. The organisation came within forty votes from passing a motion to have police removed from the parade at the SGLMG AGM that year. But the push to exclude the police from Pride has grown harder without the energy harnessed during the BLM movement and with strong opposition from the right-wing caucus of the Mardi Gras Board. In 2022, the Board refused to hear PiP’s motion to remove the police from pride—along with every one of their other motions—at their AGM, with the defence that they were not ‘legally viable.’13

The determination of the SGLMG Board to appease the Liberal party became clear when in 2016 James Brechney — responsible for starting DIY Rainbow in 2013 — passed a motion at the SGLMG AGM to ban Malcolm Turnbull from attending the parade as a response to his poor handling of the marriage equality issue.14 The Board later backtracked, capitulating to pressure from Independent Alex Greenwich to reinstate Turbull’s invitation to the parade.

PiP became key players in the push-back against the rightwing caucus of the SGLMG Board when they launched their first annual SGLMG campaign in 2017, each year successfully winning at least one spot on the Board of Directors. In 2020, PiP raised a motion to have Scott Morrison and the Liberal party banned from attending the 2021 parade. 44% of members voted in favour of the motion. Although it could not pass, it came closer than it had the previous years, and this in the face of a “generally white, cis middle-aged” majority, a deliberately disabled Zoom chat function, and meeting facilitators ignoring questions.15 This instance was not the first of targeted attempts from SGLMG to silence PiP at AGMs, nor would it be the last. The refusal of the Board to hear PiP’s motions, instead regarding them as questions, was a clear breach of Mardi Gras member democracy and an attempt to quash the organisations’ more radical demands.

But it’s not only activists at AGMs who feel the effect of the changing nature of Pride. Mardi Gras has been transformed by its own corporatisation over the decades — what started as a protest now resembles a playground for corporate sponsorship deals where profit is placed before the interests of the queer community. SGLMG’s greed and irresponsibility in this regard has done nothing but escalate the degree to which Mardi Gras has been pinkwashed.

The SGLMG’s ongoing sponsorships with QANTAS and American Express are particularly problematic. American Express has done a great deal of harm to the sex worker community in Australia in the past, most notably in 2015 when they blocked payments from common sex worker platform backpage.com, hindering the ability of sex workers to be paid for their work.16 SGLMG’s monetary ties with QANTAS are problematic for the latter’s role in the deportation of refugees in this country. It is hard to imagine an organisation that purports to fight for minority groups would align itself with a company that profits off the deportation of refugees from Australia.

The activists that marched in 1978 should not only be an inspiration to us, but a reminder that queer rights will not result from an organisation whose allyship lies with big corporations and right-wing MPs, but from community action. The Mardi Gras rally organised by Pride in Protest will be happening on the 19th of February at 12pm. Together they will march down King Street and continue a proud tradition of community action and resistance.