After weeks of battling comparisons to Australia’s “hillbilly dictator” Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland Labor last week passed its expedited anti-protest legislation.
The package, explicitly aimed at Extinction Rebellion and cobbled together in late August, expands police search powers and criminalises “dangerous” locking devices.
No one familiar with Queensland politics will be shocked to discover the ALP had the full support of the LNP and the Katter Party — or that Greens MP Michael Berkman voiced the one dissenting vote.
That an ostensibly centre-left party would choose reactive legislation driven by Courier-Mail fear-mongering over the demands of human rights groups has inevitably empowered conservatives.
Ahead of a state election next year, the LNP took the opportunity to float a number of certifiable amendments, including an expansion of “unlawful assembly” to include any three people a cop suspects might want to block traffic.
Brisbane’s LNP council has already followed suit, proposing to ban Extinction Rebellion activists from using city libraries — something the Queensland human rights commissioner has already flagged as unlawful discrimination.
All of this has allowed Labor the pretense of picking, in Premier Palaszczuk’s words, the “sensible middle of this debate”, despite enacting laws that critics say are turning Queensland into a police state.
With the party’s obvious post-federal election anxieties extending to both protest and native title rights (Adani can now call on police to expel Indigenous people from their lands), who knows how many of the LNP’s enemies Labor can crush before the October 2020 state election?
What we do know is that all Queensland’s “vegan extremists” should be very worried.
It would seem unlikely they would be clever enough to be ahead of the global tsunami Rundle writes about today, but you never know.
Thanks Chris for pointing out another example of the trashing of our sovereignty, in this case by Queensland and the ramifications !
The ability now for Adani to use police to eject our long suffering indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands is not only a dagger in the heart of their rights under native title but also their human rights !
What is it going to take for us to wake up to the bleeding obvious that power has shifted from our elected representatives, both state and federal, to the wealthy multi national corporations & powerful vested interests?
They are clearly calling the shots by keeping our governments on a financial drip feed.
Thanks Hawke & Keating for starting this neoliberal crap that is infecting us all in all jurisdictions !
‘The package, explicitly aimed at Extinction Rebellion and cobbled together in late August, expands police search powers and criminalises “dangerous” locking devices.’
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable response from a Government in the face of tactics that can produce dangerous unintended consequences. The quickest way for a centre-left government to end up in opposition is to behave like one.
To Chris and Johnny Rotten.
Just what pray tell constitutes an “ostensibly centre-left party” , using the Queensland example?
More in keeping with my post above, the following may be more appropriate – ” He who pays the piper plays the tune”!
Great take on QLD politics. Yes, we’ll all vote in the mafia party to run all the drug rings again, over some protesters.
The LNP won in 2012 after 2 decades of Labor government, they lasted a single term. People really got the shits with the Bligh administration, reduced QLD Labor to a tiny joke opposition, then promptly voted them back in after seeing the mafia party at work again.
Watch the Four Corners episode ‘The Moonlight State’ to see what puts you in opposition in Queensland.
People sledging Labor are doing the LNP’s dirty work is my point. The disengaged are the block vote that determines elections and they are easily swayed. Dissension in the ranks ya electoral poison. Sometimes in a democracy the least worst option is what you have to deal with
Tell me one dangerous unintended consequence that has happened. Remember, motorists being mildly inconvenienced is not dangerous.
Things got out of hand in Melbourne a protesters and Police were hurt. Is that enough?
QLD Labor, despite being government by default for nearly 30 years, are extremely scared of conservatives. Complete invertebrates. Us Queenslanders would probably have the worst branch of Labor if not for NSW.
Adani’s lobbyists …. Adani lobbyist and Bill Shorten’s former chief of staff Cameron Milner helped run the re-election campaign of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, “free of charge” while keeping his day job as director and registered lobbyist at Next Level Strategic Services, of which one client is Indian miner Adani. The former ALP state secretary held meetings in April and May ’18 with Ms Palaszczuk and her chief of staff David Barbagallo to negotiate a government royalties deal for Adani, after a cabinet factional revolt threatened the state’s largest mining project.
Next Level Strategic Services co-director David Moore – Adani lobbyist and Newman’s chief of staff during his successful 2012 election campaign — is also expected to “volunteer” with the LNP campaign.