Police have dropped charges against more than 100 protesters two years after they blockaded the port of Newcastle as part of one of Australia’s largest climate protests.
In the Newcastle local court on Friday, the police prosecutor withdrew charges against 125 protesters. Legal group Climate Defenders Australia, which is representing the bulk of the protesters, said it had petitioned police to do so.
“Police should have withdrawn these charges long ago, once it was clear they could not make out the cases against them,” said Julia Grix, the founder and executive director of the group which represented 110 of the protesters.
“Australia leads the world for arresting climate protestors. That statistic alone is alarming – but it captures nothing of the long, anxious road that follows for those who then have to navigate the criminal justice system.
“Here, more than one hundred people have spent almost two years waiting for justice.”
The 125 protesters were facing two charges, one under the Marine Safety Act which can carry a $5,500 fine, and another under the 2022 Coalition government’s anti-protest laws which can carry a maximum penalty of two years in prison or a $22,000 fine.
They were charged after they attended Rising Tide’s blockade of the port of Newcastle – the largest coal port in the world – in November 2024. Thousands of protesters waded into the port with kayaks and rafts over the course of the six-day protest.
Dr Elizabeth Manning, a neuroscientist from Newcastle who was threatened with the maximum penalty before her charges were withdrawn on Friday, said the actions against the protesters were “undemocratic”.
“I understood that getting arrested that day has consequences, but a criminal charge is absolutely disproportionate to the offence, and has real outcomes for people’s lives,” she said.
She said the charge prevented her from travelling to a neuroscience conference for work to present her research and that she knows of others who also faced issues at work.
“All for standing up for the earth and for climate justice,” she said.
Rising Tide runs the protest annually, drawing attention its demands for the immediate cancellation of all new fossil fuel projects, the end of coal exports from Newcastle by 2030 and taxing fossil fuel profits at 78% to fund community and industrial transitions and pay for climate loss and damage.
During the 2024 protest, the Minns government attempted to stop the event from going ahead after it put in place around the port a four-day maritime exclusion zone which criminalised entering the water.
But just as the protest was kicking off, the supreme court found the government had acted improperly and ruled the exclusion zone invalid after Rising Tide challenged it.
For last year’s blockade, the government did not make an attempt to stop the protest from going ahead. Police arrested and charged 129 protesters at the 2025 event, which stopped three coal ships from entering the port. They remain before the court.
In 2024, a total of 173 protesters were charged. Forty-five of those have already had their matters finalised. The police force was ordered to pay $73,000 in costs for eight of the protesters after they had their charges dismissed last October.
Four protesters facing a separate charge of failing to comply with a direction by an authorised officer under the Marine Safety Act remain before the court.
A 2025 study, Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests, found Australian police arrested the most climate protesters out of the 13 countries analysed, including the UK and the US.
