Wednesday was a bad day for Indigenous rights in Queensland. In the early morning the Queensland police were sent in to evict the Aboriginal Tent Embassy that had set up in Musgrave Park. In doing so they arrested over 30 people.
Watching the news I really had to ask, since when was this the prerogative of our police? What happened to our freedom of assembly?
The freedom to protest, or freedom of assembly, has generally been considered one of the key tenets of modern democracy. Whilst there is not legislation enshrining freedom of assembly in Australian national law it is covered or assumed as parts of all state legislation. It is also part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which Australia is a signatory.
More important than these legal frameworks however, freedom of assembly is enshrined in our ideas of what makes up a democracy. For example, the freedom of assembly is outlined as one of the five ‘fundamental freedoms’ provided to Australians from the Department of Immigration. As their site says:
We are free to meet with other people in public or private places. We can meet in small or large groups for legal social or political purposes. Being able to protest and to demonstrate is an accepted form of free expression. Protestors must not be violent or break laws such as assaulting others or trespassing on private or public property. People can change governments in a peaceful way by elections and not by violence.
Despite this however, it is very rare that this freedom can be exercised in any meaningful way.
In the first place, the freedom of assembly is heavily restricted. For example, in Queensland, where the protests were broken up yesterday, it is heavily regulated by the Peaceful Assembly Act 1992. Under this act protestors must set times and places where they will assemble and must have this approved by a Police Commissioner. Often these rules are confusing and can be misinterpreted and if they are broken the full force of the law comes down on a protest.
Politicians are often more than happy to use these sorts of legislation as way to question the right of groups to actively participate in ongoing peaceful protest. As Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said in regards to the tent embassy:
I believe that the individuals who are protesting have had their, if you like, their day in the sun. It’s now time for them to do the right thing by people who enjoy those parks as well and move on.
In other words, the embassy has had their go and it is time for them to go away. This was similar to the reaction of Melbourne mayor Robert Doyle in relation to the Occupy Movement. What both Campbell and Doyle were saying was ‘we will give these protestors their freedom for a short period and only as long as they don’t annoy us too much’.
This treatment in law has translated to the way we react to protests in our community. As someone who has been to a few protests in my life I have seen the negative reactions people have to those who decide to get on to the streets. Even though we may support protest movements around the world such as those in the Arab Spring or Occupy Movement, once they begin to challenge the privilege many of us hold in Australia, we are quick to condemn them and tell people that they need to ‘get a job’. In some cases we are quick to take scenes of protests and call them ‘riots’, even if there is very little evidence of such an event happening.
Most disturbing however, is the amount of resources we put in to crush protest movements. During the break up of the tent embassy it was reported that there were at least 200 police stationed around Musgrave Park. A quick search of police data in Queensland found that the Brisbane Central district has approximately 400 hired police officers. If we assume that a proportion of these police were not at work on Wednesday, we can quickly see that this number made up a significant proportion of the police force available in Brisbane that day (noting of course that police may have easily been deployed from other areas).
This is a pretty common trend. For example, at a protest I attended earlier this week against the proposed cuts to the ANU School of Music, police were stationed throughout the march (as if ANU Music students were going to start a riot). In other experiences I’ve had, I’ve seen police make mass arrests at the COP 15 protests in Denmark 2009 where there was very little to no violence to report. In 2007, police spent weeks predicting a riot at a planned protest during APEC in a clear tactic to discourage people from attending. And of course last year, the Melbourne Occupy movement was brutally broken up by police for their ‘crime’ of camping in a public place.
In each of these occasions it was clear where the police priorities lie. They weren’t there to protect the democratic right to peaceful assembly. In fact very few people with power have are there to do that. Instead their interests lied in either protecting the wealthy few and their property or the power of the political elite.
When we talk about the freedom of assembly, it should really read ‘a right to free assembly, as long as this assembly is undertaken under strict regulation and does not actually challenge the power and wealth of the upper classes or political elite in any meaningful way’.
We do not actually have a freedom of assembly. Instead we have the idea that we can assemble, with the reality being that this assembly is designed, regulated and enforced to ensure that there are not real challenges to our political or economic systems.