A “sharp-eyed hippy” spotted them first: two men dressed in camouflage from their boots to their gloves, flat on their stomachs in the Colo valley scrub.
The men had been peering down on a camp in Sydney’s north-west where about 40 activists from the Blockade Australia movement were gathered on Sunday.
According to the activists and their lawyer, the men refused to answer questions about who they were. They lay perfectly still for a time, as if playing dead, before getting up quickly and marching through the camp.
While doing so, one said, presumably into a covert radio: “We’ve been compromised.”
The pair were police, and after walking through the camp, they got into the back of an unmarked car, whose driver promptly tore down a driveway to a dead end.
When the car was forced to return the way it came, it was again confronted by activists.
Their lawyer, Mark Davis, said at this point the activists still did not know who the intruders were, as the men refused to identify themselves. So they surrounded the car, blocking them in, and letting down the tyres, in a bid to keep the trespassers from fleeing.
“They didn’t know if they were far-right vigilantes or if they were from the Daily Telegraph,” Davis would later say in court.
In the following hours, it became clear what had happened: the “sharp-eyed hippy”, as Davis described them, had foiled a significant police operation.
The officers had been in the dense bush, just near Whatleys Creek, which snakes its way through private bush blocks in the Comleroy flora reserve, to gather intelligence on Blockade Australia for the recently formed NSW police strike force Guard.
Any intelligence could then be used to charge activists under controversial anti-protest laws passed in NSW in April, cruelling Blockade Australia ahead of a rolling series of planned actions starting in Sydney from Monday.
While the police operation had been foiled, the alleged conduct of the activists after the camouflaged officers were detected at the camp still led to 10 of them being charged with various offences over the following week.
The acting assistant commissioner and commander of strike force Guard, Paul Dunstan, said the activists who surrounded the car had threatened officers, adding “those police that were attacked by that group this morning feared for their lives”.
While Davis believes police may have been on the site illegally, Dunstan said on Sunday that the officers had “lawfully” been at the camp.
He said that a search warrant was then obtained after the confrontation so that about 100 officers could search the site. Dunstan added that the operation was brought forward by a “day or two” after the officers were detected.
The Colo operation brought to a head simmering concerns about anti-protest laws in the state.
A somewhat unlikely group of organisations, including Amnesty International Australia, the Environmental Defenders Office, Maritime Union of Australia, New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, and Greenpeace Australia Pacific joined together on Thursday to raise questions about the Colo arrests, but also NSW police being used to stamp out peaceful protests.
“NSW police and politicians should commit to protecting protest for the health of our democracy,” the Human Rights Law Centre legal director, Alice Drury, said in a statement.
Similar anti-protest laws are expected to pass the Tasmanian parliament in August, and the Victorian parliament also has a bill before it that would see protesters subject to tougher measures.
On Friday, former Greens leader Bob Brown said the Tasmanian measures, should they become law, would almost certainly be subject to legal challenge.
Brown successfully challenged previous legal changes that increased police powers in relation to protests in 2017, with the high court finding the measures unconstitutional.
“They haven’t passed parliament yet but inevitably somebody will be arrested down the line, and it’s quite likely [the laws] will be challenged,” he told the ABC.
“They cut across the right of all Australians, as the high court found the first time around, in a representative democracy to peaceful protest.”
In NSW on Friday, as officers again rounded up protesters in a series of arrests, Davis was preparing supreme court bail applications for two activists who remained in custody after being arrested at Colo.
It may be weeks before the applications are heard, he said. In the meantime, even more protesters are expected to be taken into custody. Spurred by the climate crisis, Blockade Australia is planning a series of disruptions across Sydney.
Dunstan, the head of the police anti-protest strike force, says officers will be waiting. While the force has issued multiple statements regarding its arrests of activists, it has declined to answer a series of questions about the Colo raid.
“It is clear from our investigations so far that this group remains intent on causing significant disruptions next week to motorists and members of the public through reckless and dangerous activities,” Dunstan said in a statement.
“These activities are not only dangerous to themselves, but they put the lives of members of the public and those rescuing them at risk.
“We will be out in force targeting these groups and working to minimise disruptions … we will clear them as quickly as is possible, arrest those committing offences and put them before the court.”
Australian Associated Press contributed to this report.
