Page 91 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 11 February 2020
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
their desire to have their voices heard. In fact the biggest risk around the issue of peaceful protest is not marches in the street; it is that the Prime Minister might one day get what he wants, which, as he said, is a population of quiet Australians.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.40): I was a little perplexed about what Ms Le Couteur might speak about today under this somewhat unusual and possibly not in order matter of public importance. The importance of peaceful protest does not quite fit the standing orders as I would have interpreted them. But I am quite happy to speak on the subject.
Ms Le Couteur started off with issues relating to protests which were not so peaceful, possibly for good reason, in relation to the awarding of women’s suffrage in the UK, and she did go on to say that there were disruptive protests and there was the breaking of windows around Downing Street. So I am not quite sure how that relates to the notion of the importance of peaceful protest. It may relate to the importance of women’s suffrage. But more than a century on from that, I think that that debate has been put to bed once and for all. In a chamber where there are more women than men, which is an oddity, it has definitely been put to bed in the ACT.
Ms Le Couteur went on to talk about the importance of peaceful demonstrations in relation to the climate and put together a sort of grab bag of issues related to people who did not quite agree with the climate protesters. It is interesting that we had a perspective that the people who are protesting that we agree with have a whole lot of rights but the people who are protesting about things that we do not have a view about or might disagree with do not have the same rights.
Your peaceful protest is somebody else’s outrageous protest. For instance, I draw to members’ recollection the protest by anti-GM protestors who broke into the CSIRO with their whipper snippers and destroyed crops. It was interesting that today Mr Rattenbury quoted at length from CSIRO scientists but was not keen to come down and admonish those people who had ruined years of work, years of research in the CSIRO, when it did not quite suit.
The power of real protest which is peaceful is quite legendary. The work of Mahatma Gandhi and his civil disobedience protests in the face of vast amounts of cruelty, oppression and police brutality have shown how effective peaceful demonstrations can be. Wind forward 50 or 60 years and look at the half a million, sometimes a million, people who turned out in Hong Kong to protest the rules on extradition to mainland China when the Hong Kong Legislative Council proposed blanket extradition rules. That is a demonstration of how effective peaceful protests can be: when a million people turn out on the streets in support of what they see as human rights.
The response of the police in Hong Kong has been to gradually ramp up and escalate the violence against peaceful protestors. The first of those protests, a lantern demonstration on Lion Mountain, was an extraordinary manifestation of what a peaceful protest could do and what you could say to the world about your position. The Hong Kong government’s responses to that over the past six months—tens of thousands of tear gas canisters being fired into the crowd, brutality, the disappearance
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video