On Wednesday night, as the New South Wales parliament debated a bill that makes blocking roads in the state a jail-worthy offence, the independent MP for Sydney, Alex Greenwich, asked, rhetorically, what had prompted the government’s urgency to pass the legislation.
The bill had been introduced into the parliament late on Wednesday afternoon, with the Coalition providing a one-page brief and no forewarning to the crossbench.
While the Greens tried twice to delay the bill – first in the lower house on Wednesday, then launching an upper house filibuster until late Thursday – the government then passed a special adjournment which saw the house sit again on Friday. Just after 3pm the bill passed the upper house and went back downstairs for assent.
It means that, in NSW, anyone who “seriously disrupts or obstructs vehicles or pedestrians” on a major road or at major infrastructure facilities such as ports and railway lines could be jailed for up to two years. The definition of a major road remains unclear. It will be whatever the minister deems it to be under the regulations guiding the legislation.
So, to go back to Greenwich’s question, why the urgency? Well, he had a theory.
Last week the acting premier, Paul Toole, held two chest-thumping press conferences on the same day to announce crackdowns on climate activists who had disrupted operations at Port Botany.
They followed a series of other protests which had seen peak-hour traffic stopped on Manly’s busy Spit Bridge by demonstrators.
Toole announced increased punishment for people who blocked bridges or tunnels, which he was able to do by extending a regulation which already applied to Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. The legislation announced this week was an extension of those punishments to apply more broadly to road, port and rail infrastructure.
The announcements happened to come on the same day that 2GB host Ben Fordham had slammed the government for failing to “act” on the “morons” and “idiots” blockading the port. And on the same day that Sydney tabloid the Daily Telegraph ran a story under the headline: “Throw the book at these blockheads”.
Greenwich called the bill a response to “shock jocks and tabloid newspapers”.
“We are dealing with this bill because political leaders gave quick grabs at press conferences that they are trying to back up,” he said.
“Tonight is NSW parliament at its worst. It is when the Daily Telegraph and 2GB form our policy, policy that we will regret down the track.”
Which is, in many ways, no great revelation. Someone once described political media in NSW to me as a sort of reactionary momentum machine, where an issue that irks a 2GB host becomes grist for the Telegraph which is then picked up on by commercial television and hey presto greyhound racing is legal again.
But it does help put the rapid-fire way this bill moved through parliament into context.
Which brings us to Labor. The opposition leader, Chris Minns, had made it known that Labor supported a crackdown on climate activists on the same day Toole held his press conference double feature last week, calling protesters’ actions “damaging” to the cause for action on the climate crisis.
“They’re not disrupting billionaire coal barons, they’re actually hitting ordinary Australians who are just going about their work,” he said at the time.
Which is not a completely outrageous thing to say.
But when Labor indicated it would support not just the extension of the regulation, but also the legislation to broaden the offence, it prompted an angry response from the unions, who have been known to blockade a thing or two in their time. The head of Unions NSW, Mark Morey, called the bill “unacceptable”, and urged the parliament to “pause and reconsider”.
Labor’s decision to support the bill has also angered some of its MPs on the backbench. Labor’s shadow attorney general, Michael Daley, had only been told the bill was coming on Tuesday night, and it was not taken to the party room before the announcment it would support the bill.
It was, of course, the dreaded wedge, in which Labor finds itself caught between appealing to self-appointed representatives of the common-sense brigade such as Fordham or taking a stand on a matter of principle, even if it’s unpopular.
As Labor’s upper house MP Rose Jackson said during the debate on the bill, “I sometimes think, ‘this is why the left cannot have nice things’.”
A year out from the election, the opposition has decided a fight on protest laws is not in its best interests.
But the government – and its allies in the media – know Labor does not want to be talking about these issues. It’s unlikely to be the last time before next March we see a bill that seeks to put the opposition in the same uncomfortable position. It will be interesting to watch how Minns handles it.
