Speech on police brutality at Sydney Town Hall protest
Speech given by Dr Amanda Cohn in the NSW Legislative Council on 10th February:
We should all be utterly horrified by what took place on the streets of Sydney last night.
The last time that we saw police brutality like it in Sydney was in 1978, at the first Mardi Gras. It is not something that has taken place in my lifetime or something that I ever thought I would see take place in my own lifetime.
I was at the protest last night, and I joined the tens of thousands of people who object to the head of state of a country committing a genocide being welcomed and toured around Australia. I joined the tens of thousands of people who wanted history to record that Israel's genocide and the honouring of its president is not done in our name. I joined the tens of thousands of people protesting the injustice that the only people who seem to be punished for Israel's genocide are its victims and the people protesting it, and that there has not been any accountability for Israel's leaders.
What I saw with my own eyes last night was decision after decision by the police that made everybody less safe.
Today, their actions have been defended by the commissioner, by the Premier and by the police Minister, as if they were in the interests of public safety. I must be really clear: As somebody who was there, it was the decisions of the police that put everybody at risk. There were too many people last night to fit in Town Hall Square. There were tens of thousands of people. We did not fit in the square, and trying to corral and restrict people to the square and prevent them from spilling out onto nearby George Street increased the temperature. It put people at risk. It created a crowd crush. Police asked people to disperse by turning them back into the crowd when there was no way out the other side. Anyone trying to leave was met with a double row of police and mounted police trying to stop them from leaving. I know that people having a medical incident had difficulty leaving and could not even get out. We were put in an extraordinarily dangerous situation. The police also tried to stop people from marching. People wanted to march, and they were not going to be stopped from marching by anybody. They were not incited to march by the speakers. They were intent on marching, and they were intent on marching east to Parliament House to protest. The event where the Israeli president was present was at the International Convention Centre, which was west. This idea that allowing people to march would have put anybody at risk is just nonsense. It was the police who put everybody at risk last night by not allowing us to disperse safely, and by inflaming the temperature by holding us captive at Town Hall Square in a dangerously enclosed space.
I am sure at this point everybody has seen the horrific acts of aggression by members of the NSW Police Force against innocent people who were present. I have seen footage of an elderly man, with both hands in the air and in a position of surrender, being punched. There is video footage of a large group of police pursuing and chasing people down the street—people who had already dispersed and were trying to leave. There is video footage of police repeatedly punching someone who had already been tackled and was lying on the ground, with two police officers towering over him, punching him over and over again.
The police assaulted people who were there to provide medical attention. I had friends and colleagues who volunteered last night to provide medical support for people, and I will quote from a message one of them sent me last night. My friend said, "I was literally tucked away in a side street in an out-of-the-way corner, flushing a few people's eyes out, when cops with no warning ran full tilt down the street, came around the corner and grabbed me, threw me to the ground and kicked, all while yelling. I had my hands in the air with a water bottle in one hand against the wall, saying I am just washing people's eyes out. And they did not care."
One of my own colleagues—one of our parliamentary colleagues—was assaulted and injured by the police last night. She was taking on a role as an observer, standing to the side and trying not to get involved in any of the confrontation, and she was actually filming the encounter. Members can see in that video just how calm, how rational and how reasonable our colleague was in the face of New South Wales police, and she was assaulted. If that is how the police last night treated somebody who they knew was a member of Parliament, knowing they were being filmed, it is not hard to imagine how they were treating everybody else. The Premier has said that the police were put in an impossible situation last night. Well, the Premier put them in that situation. The Premier made law after law restricting protest and our democratic freedoms. This violent clash was the inevitable result.
Far from reducing the temperature or achieving the social cohesion that the Premier is supposedly seeking, we now have Trump-style authoritarianism on the streets of Sydney. The Premier has criticised the chanting of "globalise the intifada" at the rally last night. It was chanted explicitly because the Premier is trying to ban that phrase, and people are resisting this authoritarian approach. I have lived in other countries where people have been prosecuted for critiquing those in power. I remember in those moments feeling proud to be Australian and feeling proud of our free democracy. The Government and the police having the power to decide who gets to protest and when, where and how they get to protest will only ever protect those in power.
The Government is insisting over and over again that organisers were offered a different route. Forcing protests to take place where no-one will see or hear them is suppression of our dissent too.
What happened last night has to be independently investigated. Police investigating themselves cannot deliver justice to those who were assaulted, injured or traumatised at the hands of police last night.
The Labor caucus needs to take a good hard look at itself and the environment it has created in New South Wales by enabling Chris Minns's authoritarian agenda. The best time to reject these anti-protest laws was before they were enacted, and the next best time is now.