Raising Hell: Issue 75: What's The Matter With Adelaide?
"Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working class people." - Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas (2004)
It was an ambush. Two days after South Australia’s Energy and Mining Minister stood before Australia’s oil and gas industry to put the state government at their disposal, Labor Premier Malinauskas went on talkback radio where he pledged to put the screws to those pesky Extinction Rebellion protesters.
The day before, having suspended themselves from the Morphett Street bridge, the group succeeded in turning Adelaide’s infrastructure against itself and blocking traffic during rush hour. Of course, The Advertiser responded in the measured and considered way you might expect from a masthead sensing red meat for its audience. Talk back radio was equally apoplectic — how dare these children, these hippies, these bums make good, honest people late for work and tie up the police resources. Climate change? Shmimate-change. Did they not think about those poor people stuck in traffic — and in the city no less? What if they were ten minutes late?
By the time Malinauskas hit the airwaves, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens had already made his views known. Seeing red, Stevens confessed to contemplating grievous bodily harm at a press conference on the Wednesday.
“We can’t, as much as we might like to, cut the rope and let them drop,” he said.
The idea to introduce a radical curb on the right to protest in South Australia began with Opposition leader David Speirs. Speirs told talkback radio on Thursday morning how he wanted to hit disruptive protesters with a $50k fine — twice the maximum penalty in New South Wales — and introduce a maximum of three years jail time. It was a classic case of the conservative grift; promise tough action on a problem that would never be addressed so he could yammer on about it for the next few months. How surprised he must have been when, in a follow up interview, the Premier called to say that yeah, he would totally support the proposal in the spirit of bipartisanship — and he would rush them through the very same day.
It was a moment that will one day be studied in political science courses as an example of radical self harm. Any way you look at it, this was a “bad look” for the state that had previously been held up as world first movers on renewable energy. Days before, that image had already been taken a beating when Tom Koutsantonis — who had already been embarrassed by XR during a separate oil and gas conference last year — opened the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Conference in Adelaide by warmly welcoming the industry in somewhat over-the-top terms:
What happened next amounted to a lightning raid on parliament. An urgent meeting of cabinet was called where, according to the North Terrace gossip, several Labor MPs privately muttered about crossing the floor in opposition to the bill. Though none have come forward to confirm the account, the story goes that in the end they were cowed by the threat of expulsion. When introduced to the normally sleepy South Australian parliament, the proposed changes to the Summary Offences Act to crackdown on protest sailed through the lower house on a unity ticket.
At this point no one outside the authors had yet to take a close look at the proposed law. There had been no consultation and no thought put into what it actually said and did. Having passed the lower house, a snap press conference was called for 12.30pm (I was given 15 minutes notice). At the press conference, the Premier and Attorney-General Kyam Maher framed the change as a simple update to existing laws — no different than an update to your phone. It wouldn’t target any specific group of protesters, they said and the language meant it would be reserved only for the most egregious offenders. Maher went so far as to explain that the change was justified because police were forced to shutdown the bridge on an main artery frequently used by ambulances.
What if there had been an emergency?
On the surface it may have seemed a reasonable question, except Maher had zero evidence for making this claim. In fact, the ambulance under lights and sirens was a myth that seemed to live like a bogeyman in the imagination of Labor policymakers nationwide. Over in Sydney, the existence of an ambulance responding to an emergency was used in the attempt to jail Violent CoCo for blocking a single lane of traffic on the Harbour Bridge during rush hour. Police claimed that an ambulance under lights had been made to wait in traffic. It later emerged at trial that this was a lie and there had been no ambulance. The court quashed the jail sentence because of this “false fact” — and yet the New South Wales anti-protest laws remains settled Labor government policy.
I asked Maher during the press conference about whether there was, in fact, an ambulance. He did not say no, but he also could not say yes. When I pressed him to confirm there had been no ambulance, Maher said the risk there might have been one was enough to justify the changes, and it was a matter of logic that day-surgeries at Royal Adelaide Hospital were delayed. Again, he did not provide evidence for this claim. He also did not acknowledge that any ambulance during the Morphett Street Bridge protest was free to use the tram tracks for access to the hospital.
It was clear then the Labor leadership was oblivious to how this looked to anyone outside the state, and even outside the country. South Australia was supposed to be the best jurisdiction in the world on climate change and in a matter of days it had snuggled up to the oil and gas sector, and were passing laws to crackdown on its greatest critics.
Within hours, the SA Labor Twitter account went into overdrive, telling those same critics to just “read the legislation”. The legislation had not been made available until late and when was, the proposed changes appeared to contradict the government’s messaging.
Here, for example, is Section 1a:
Imagine, for example, there’s a protest in a park and the gathering is larger than expected. Police then move to block off the adjoining road. It may attract liability under the changes for fines or a jail term — or it may not. Whether it does, depends entirely on police discretion. It depends on the officers on the day, the general mood of the Police Commissioner and the consensus among the agency’s media relations unit. It wasn’t even clear from the wording whether the provision specifically applies in the case of protest or just generally, to everyone, everywhere within South Australia, all the time.
Meanwhile, Section 1b gave police the power to bill protesters for their time:
If you read that and asked questions like: what are “reasonable costs and expenses”, exactly? What is a “relevant entity”? Or: What is “for the purposes of dealing with the obstruction”? — hold onto those thoughts.
Some answers can be found in Section 1C which says the cost is pretty much whatever the Police Commissioner says it is — unless you can prove otherwise. Which, let’s be honest, you probably can’t.
What this provides is wide discretion — essentially a blank check — to the Police Commissioner which then raises other questions: could this be used to bankrupt individuals the Police Commissioner doesn’t particularly like? How might financial pressure on the police budget creative incentives to use it for revenue raising? And notice those those words again — “relevant entity”. Who are they exactly?
Well, the definitions section contains some answers:
This means it’s either the Police Commissioner or any agency or person the regulations give such powers to. Which raises another question: what’s to stop future governments giving similar authority to a private body like a security contractor or a private prison?
And then there are the other questions. Ask yourself: what happens if the Police Commissioner is having a bad day? What happens if they don’t like you or your politics? There are many variables — to slap someone with a bill and throw them in jail requires a cooperative prosecutor and a successful conviction by a magistrate. But if the last few days demonstrate anything, it’s that the basic institutions of South Australian public life are weak. How much can we really rely on them to resist pressure from powerful political actors? If we’ve learned anything from the demagoguery of the Trump years, it should be that we can’t exclude the possibility of bad faith actors taking high office.
And what happens when there is effectively no oversight of these institutions? Last year a campaign by the police union succeeded — in another parliamentary vote that curiously took just 24 hours to pass — in gutting the state’s ICAC, removing South Australian police from its oversight. This is on top of the perfect legal shredder created by the Police Complaints and Discipline Act which I highlighted at length in Issue 50. The situation is so bad I have since spoken to criminal defence lawyers who say they actively tell their clients not to make official complaints about police behaviour. Against this backdrop, South Australia is now proposing a massive expansion to the powers and discretion given to police with no accountability.
What could possibly go wrong?
Taken as a whole, the proposed changes appear designed to paralyse social movements — and this is without factoring the future risks from this expansion of police powers. The current Police Commissioner is, by all accounts a “good guy” who “gets it”, but what happens if things change? It’s not hard to imagine a world where a government hostile to the union movement or contentious social issues like abortion comes to power, drops its friends and allies into crucial roles and allows this legislation to be used to attack those it perceives as political opponents. Just look at Florida.
In that world, the CFMEU is cooked long after Extinction Rebellion is gone. So is the MUA. And in case this all looks speculative, it is worth remembering there are concrete examples of effective disruptive protest from South Australia’s recent history. When Latoya Rule’s brother, Wayne Fella Morrison, died in custody at Yatala Labour Prison, the family blocked the Rundle Street-Pulteney Intersection to demand an expedited coronial process and a ban to the use of spithoods. Under the new anti-protest laws, each of those involved in sitting down on the road during that action could face jail time and could have been made to pay the cost. The spectacle of a South Australian government jailing an Indigenous person calling for justice for their dead brother and billing them for the privilege would be quite something — but there would be nothing to stop police from doing so. It would all be totally legal.
The curious thing is that nothing Extinction Rebellion has done comes close to one of the most disruptive protests in Adelaide’s history. Back in 1931, when there was no social security system, the government attempted to cut the “mutton ration” it provided to the unemployed during the Great Depression. In response, a thousand unemployed men, their families and their supports marched from Port Adelaide to the Treasury building on King William Street to meet with the Labor Premier at the time, Lionel Hill. When they arrived, the crowd was ambushed. Mounted police and those on motorcycles charged the crowd, a brawl erupted with those gathered fighting to protect the women and children in the crowd. The fight spread out over Victoria Square and lasted half an hour.
In that case, a crackdown on protesters followed but the government had to move to address the material concerns of the unemployed. The moment marks a good, working demonstration of what is known in sociology as the “radical flank effect”. Essentially: in any social movement there are militants, and there are conciliatory liberal-centrists. The fear of having to deal with the militants is generally what keeps social institutions engaged with those in the political centre. When this radical flank is crushed, change stops happening as those in the centre are easily brushed aside. The Black Panthers make another good example, or even the Australian labour movement itself. There’s a reason why the CFMEU are still kicking.
Of course, this sort of nuance is largely lost among the talkback crowd. As much as political leaders may rail against the “cesspool” that is Twitter — mostly because young, largely left-leaning people who have consistently been ignored by government policy do a great job of using the platform to bully their elected representatives online — talkback is the Boomer equivalent. To date, Malinauskas’ general political approach has been to chalk up quick wins by courting talkback media and coopting the policy of other parliamentarians. Until now, the strategy has worked.
Now the Labor party finds itself in a political dilemma; it is about to criminalise actions its own members have taken and betray its basic ideals in an effort to steal oxygen from the opposition. Despite murmuring from some unions who are afraid to be seen as sympathetic to Extinction Rebellion, the reaction within the Labor base has been raw anger. Even as leadership has committed to the bit, an internal civil war is brewing. The leadership now finds itself in a situation where it can’t really back down, but going forward is suicidal — and David Speirs knows it. Having watched Malinauskas make the silliest unenforced error a political leader has made in recent memory, he knows all he has to do is hold the line and wait. When asked over the weekend about the laws, he simply doubled down and told reporters how in some countries “your head would be cut off” for defying authorities.
What happens next depends on events over in the coming week. South Australian civil society are united in opposition to the bill and there is talk of a pact to avoid some sort of NSW-style carve out for the union movement. It is anticipated the bill will come to a vote on May 30 but its not clear what the Labor leadership will do. Both SA Best and the Greens are totally opposed to the changes and if Labor attempts to force it through to clear the air, they may pay on other legislation in the future. The unions, meanwhile, met on Monday afternoon to sort out their position and there’s talk about holding a rally. If it’s big enough, it may spook the Labor leadership into delaying a vote.
Ironically, the only way for the bill to be dropped at this point is collective action. It would take two or more Labor MP’s in the Legislative Council to cross the floor and tip the balance of power against its passing. The more that join this rebellion, the lower the risk of expulsion. In this scenario, even if Malinauskas and his leadership wanted to, the threat of expulsion would have no effect as there is no government in the world willing give up their balance of power. They can afford to lose one MP, but four or five? Not likely.
This scenario is, however, nothing but fantasy floated by those hoping something stops these changes going ahead. Unless something dramatically changes, the expectation at the time of writing is the bill will pass on a unity ticket between the two major parties. Labor MPs are reportedly resigned to their fate and willing to wear the consequences. This is what their party has done, and they’ll stand with it to the end — even if it means they’ll leave a legacy of having been better and more effective at neautralising political opposition than their counterparts in the Liberal Party. You can bet there’ll still be speeches though — of noble ideas and the value of protest. And they will all be hollow. Because when it came down to it, a choice was made: douse the light on the hill to please those deep down in the valley.
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For the Fortnight: April 26 to May 9
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
Wayne Fella Morrison died after ‘litany of failings’ by SA corrections officers, coroner finds. (Guardian Australia, 12 May 2023).
South Australia tells gas industry the state is ‘at your disposal’ (Guardian Australia, 16 May 2023).
Here is my follow up twitter thread with the full comments from Tom Koutsantonis.
South Australia rushes through anti-protest laws as activists rally outside oil and gas conference (Guardian Australia, 18 May 2023).
Here is another Twitter thread I wrote collating resources on the anti-protest laws.
You will also noticed all the fun bits at the bottom of this email have been cut. Not only has this last week been chaos, but I’ve been ill and I’m preparing to head to the Territory for almost two weeks. To say I’ve been under the gun is an understatement. I was even considering not publishing a newsletter at all, but the anti-protest stuff in South Australia merits a response and so I have devoted the bulk of this newsletter to expanding the Twitter thread I wrote so it can be easily shared.
Because of all this, there will no newsletter the next fortnight as I’ll be out of range for a considerable time. If you were hanging out for a newsletter to lance the boil of another fortnight in our shared hellscape, I’m sorry, Raising Hell subscribers. You’ll have to give it another two weeks.
Before You Go (Go)…
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