South Australia has rushed through anti-protest laws less than a day after a rally outside the annual oil and gas conference in Adelaide briefly closed traffic.
The extraordinary move – which appears to have been hashed out on talkback radio on Thursday morning – comes after the mining and energy minister, Tom Koutsantonis, told the industry the state government was “at your service”.
On Thursday, Extinction Rebellion protesters suspended themselves from the Morphett Street Bridge near the Adelaide Convention Centre and closed traffic for a short time.
South Australian police commissioner said at the time he had been frustrated by the protesters.
“The ropes are fully extended across the street. So we can’t, as much as we might like to, cut the rope and let them drop,” Grant Stevens said.
On Thursday morning, the opposition leader, David Speirs, suggested to talkback radio that fines against protesters should be increased and courts should be given the power to jail protesters.
In a following interview, the SA premier, Peter Malinauskas, said his government would be open to passing changes to the laws but it would need “bipartisan support”.
By midday the government had introduced changes to the Summary Offences Act to South Australian parliament after an urgent meeting to discuss imposing fines up to $50,000 and possible three-month jail terms where a person “intentionally or recklessly obstructs the free passage of a public place”.
These changes apply to existing laws which previously imposed a $750 fine and no jail time.
The premier said the actions of Extinction Rebellion was doing “the cause of decarbonisation harm” but denied the changes interfered with the right to protest or that they targeted a specific group of protesters.
He instead said they were only an “update” to existing laws.
“[Extinction Rebellion] disrupt business in a way that compromises the ability for people to be able to earn a living,” Malinauskas said.
“They’ve disrupted our emergency services when it otherwise got plenty of other work to do around the standard. And the parliament is going to respond quickly.”
Anna Slynn, a spokeswoman for Extinction Rebellion South Australia, said: “These new penalties that have been introduced to parliament serve two purposes: one, as a means of curbing people’s absolute and necessary right to peaceful non-violent protest and disruption.
“Two: to distract from the fact that APPEA [Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association] have been here all week, making plans to expand oil and gas production. These plans have bipartisan support, both in SA and federally, and are completely contradictory to their very public claims to be acting on climate change.”
On Tuesday, the South Australian energy and mining minister, Tom Koutsantonis, told representatives of the Australian oil and gas industry that the state government is “at your disposal” in an extended welcome for the opening of its annual conference.
Malinauskas said the comments and the speed with which the legislation passed had no bearing on his government’s commitment to decarbonisation, saying “we are further advanced than any other jurisdiction in the world”.
“This is about addressing a suite of actions which is inconsistent with community expectations and already inconsistent with the law,” he said.
The South Australian attorney general, Kyam Maher, said the rapid passage of the bill through the lower house, with support from the Liberal opposition, was not “common practice, but it’s not unusual”.
He said the legislation would not apply to protests swept up in current demonstrations but would prevent future protesters from blocking traffic which may hypothetically be used by an ambulance.
“This sends a clear signal that if you are unreasonably impinging on other people’s freedoms, if you’re doing things that could potentially stop, for example, an ambulance getting to a hospital, then the court has a greater range of penalties they could impose on you,” he said.
Maher could not confirm whether an ambulance had actually been blocked, with ambulances still able to use the tram tracks.
The attorney general said he hoped the bill would pass the upper house “soon” with support from the South Australian Liberal party in the upper house.
