Protests in Australia are dangerous, hostile places. Who is there to protect us?

Hint: it's not the police

In June 2020, all eyes shifted to the United States as people across the country, despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic, gathered to protest racism and police violence following the murder of George Floyd.

Journalists from across the world, including Australia, reported on the protests - many of whom faced criticism for their own lack of knowledge of institutional racism both in America and their home countries as well.

Channel Nine’s Alexis Daish, for instance, made headlines when she said to a Black protester, “I really appreciate you giving your perspective, mate, because people in Australia don’t have the understanding of the history of police killings and things here”.

At the time, the outrage was directed not just at Ms Daish’s ignorance of history and police violence in America, or Channel Nine’s decision to employ a white reporter to cover the Black Lives Matter protests, it was also directed at the whitewashing of police brutality in Australia. Tens of thousands of protesters assembled across the country that same month to protest Aboriginal deaths in custody and colonial violence. Despite pepper spray being used against the protesters and Prime Minister Scott Morrison calling the protests “completely unacceptable”, Victorian and New South Wales police praised the protests for being "mostly peaceful".

Of course, that was four years ago. In the years since, Australia has seen massive demonstrations against COVID-19 lockdown measures, institutional violence against women, institutional violence against transgender people, anti-union laws, and the Australian government’s support of Israel, to name a few. The police’s response to this increased civil unrest has, likewise, also increased, leading Victoria Police justifying their use of militarised equipment in Melbourne as recently as last month, and as many as forty human rights groups, including Amnesty International, condemning the police’s actions as “a serious departure from their responsibility to uphold the democratic right of protest”.

These successive movements, and the police’s response to them, has forced the media to confront its own responsibility in how protests should be covered. Human rights groups, the police, and the government are all accusing each other of condoning violence, the media is scrambling to adopt a viewpoint that best protects themselves, while Australians are discovering our own right to protest is being thrown away.

Protesting in Australia is more risky than ever, even as a journalist

In March 2021, while thousands of Australian women rallied outside Parliament House in Canberra in the March4Justice, which protested a perceived culture of misogyny and sexual abuse in Australian politics, Prime Minister Scott Morrison claimed it was a “triumph” of Australian democracy that the protesters weren’t “met with bullets”. Natasha Stott Despoja, a representative of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, said she was “quite stunned” at this remark, understandably.

In doing so, he not only drew attention to the fragility of our right to protest, he also suggested that Australians should be grateful that we haven’t experienced the same democratic backsliding that has occurred in other Western countries such as the United States and France, where protests have been much more violent. Morrison left office two years ago, but as Australia’s support for Israel’s aggression continues, his words have only become more incongruous, and more chilling.

This came to a head on 11 September, when Melbourne hosted the Land Forces International Land Defence Exposition, and this supposed “triumph” of Australian democracy became more of a fantasy. Photojournalist Alex Zucco, who attended the protest as press told Nonsense:

“I remain deeply disturbed by some of the policing I witnessed at the protests against the Land Forces weapons and defence industry exhibition on 11 September. Violence was repeatedly used by officers in ways that were not a means of protecting of the public.

Random activists who posed no danger, passers-by and media were hurt in profound ways by police. There were instances that required police intervention, yes, but the majority of use-of-force instances I saw and documented were, to the best of my understanding, unwarranted.

It seemed to me as though a line had been crossed in the eyes of the department, and that line having been crossed justified any action in retaliation. Commissioner Patton ironically said it best, that officers, "showed restraint" that day. After all, nobody left in a body bag. Could have been worse, hey?”

For context, the Land Forces exposition hosted more than 800 companies and organisations showcasing their weaponry and technology, including tanks, artillery and semi-automatic weapons. This event, which was supported by the Victorian state government, was protested by grassroots activists who accused it of being a profiteering exercise off war and genocide, and in particular as a celebration of the atrocities in Gaza.

Between 4,000 and 5,000 people, largely from pro-Palestine organisations, protested the event, whilst over 1,600 police, including officers from New South Wales, were deployed to protect the exhibition. The Supreme Court of Victoria authorised police special powers to protect the exhibition under the Terrorism Act. Still, at least protesters could still count on not being met with bullets, right?

Depends what you define as “bullets”, I suppose.

Police used hard foam baton rounds (also known as “less lethal bullets”), pepper spray, tear gas and flash bangs on protesters. Several human rights and legal groups, including the Human Rights Law Centre and Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, accused police of excessive force, called for the prohibition of the use of weaponry and horses at protests, and demanded the creation of an independent body to investigate police violence. Such calls have not been honoured.

Chief Commissioner Patton called the requests for an independent inquiry “rubbish” and that the police response was “appropriate”. Police claimed that horse manure, low-level acid and eggs were thrown at them, that 27 officers were injured, and also accused protesters of animal cruelty for attacking police horses. The mainstream media largely joined in with the police in claiming that the protesters were at fault for their violent behaviour, with the Herald Sun, Sky News and The Australian accusing the protesters of “chaos”, animal cruelty, property damage and violence against police and journalists.

Anthony Kelly, from Melbourne Activist Legal Support (MALS), disputed this, saying that “in most circumstances, protester behaviour became heightened after and in response to a coercive crowd control manoeuvre by the police or the use of police weapons”. He also stated that even if protesters did perform unprovoked attacks on police, it’s remains hard to justify the retaliation with violent weaponry such as tear gas and baton rounds. Organiser Nathalie Farah said that several people spent the night in hospitals with severe injuries as a result of the police attacks, and also pointed out the irony of police citing animal cruelty as a justification for their use of weapons, when bringing horses to protests is animal cruelty in and of itself.

Despite the term “less lethal bullets”, baton rounds have resulted in fatal injuries in the past. During the Black Lives Matter protests in May 2020, freelance journalist Linda Tirado was hit in her left eye by a baton round fired by police, causing brain injury and blindness in her eye. She filed a lawsuit against Minneapolis Police Department, who agreed to a $600,000 settlement two years later. Ms Tirado is now in hospice care and her brain injury is slowly ending her life. Less lethal, but not non lethal.