Brad Homewood has two jobs. His paid gig requires the 50-year-old to drive a mini-mix concrete truck around suburban Melbourne. His volunteer work has resulted in him being arrested 13 times for taking part in protests meant to disrupt an economic system driving a climate and ecological emergency.
Last week Homewood glued himself to a nine-metre metal pole erected in the middle of a road at the entrance of the Port of Melbourne’s Appleton Dock. Traffic was stopped for two hours before emergency service workers could separate him from the pole and remove him from the site.
He was not acting alone. Homewood was one of 21 activists connected to the group Blockade Australia arrested across five mornings last week for shutting down major ports in Melbourne, Brisbane and Newcastle. Some protesters livestreamed their actions on Facebook.
Several activists from the group told Guardian Australia the actions were part of a coordinated escalation to force attention on an issue that hardly anyone takes seriously enough.
“We know that 19 key ecosystems … are showing early signs of collapse,” Homewood says. “How that is not mainstream news is beyond people in the climate movement because if those ecosystems collapse we know what follows, and that’s societal collapse.
“If you listen to what some of the world’s best climate scientists are telling us, that’s the trajectory we’re already deep into.
“We’re deliberately targeting the ports around the nation because we know 98% of the trade of Australia goes out through the ports. This is the economic lifeblood of this system, and Blockade Australia very much focuses on the system, because the system is the core of the problem.”
Governments clamp down
Blockade Australia is one of several organisations, including Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, using direct action techniques to try to shake people from what they see as climate complacency. Activists have stopped traffic, smashed windows, superficially defaced major artworks, blocked coal trains and interfered with fossil fuel conferences.
The jury is out on how effective these protests have been in changing minds. This year the UK branch of the Extinction Rebellion said this concern played a part in its decision to abandon disruptive protests and instead “prioritise attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks”.
What is clear is that direct action protests are being met with an increasingly forceful response, here and overseas. Australian state governments have ramped up anti-protest laws over the past two years, introducing new offences and extending prison sentences and fines for activists who disrupt traffic and the native forest logging industry.
The New South Wales parliament passed laws that included fines of up to $22,000 and jail terms of up to two years for protests on roads, rail lines, tunnels and bridges. Last month the South Australian parliament responded to a three-day XR protest by rushing through changes that introduced jail time and a maximum fine of $50,000 for anyone who “intentionally or recklessly obstructs the free passage of a public place”. Both laws had bipartisan support.
Labor governments have had some internal pushback to the changes. The SA Unions secretary, Dale Beasley, said the speed with which that state’s changes were rammed through – it took 22 minutes for them to pass the lower house – despite significant public concern was “a reminder that the rights of workers and the community, while hard won, can be easily lost”.
The protests have continued. Claudia Hannigan, a 22-year-old psychology student who has taken time off her studies to focus on activism, was arrested last week for blocking coal trains into Newcastle port. She says she was “tired by the idea of rallying to get some law changed when there’s this system governing us that is so fundamentally exploitative and people weren’t even paying attention to that”.
Hannigan says like many of her generation she is “plagued by debilitating fear and grief and hopelessness of the state of the world”.
“People cope with that in a number of different ways,” she says. “For some people it’s distraction, and for other people it’s depression, and for other people it’s: fuck it, I’m going to do something about it.”
Homewood, who uses his time on the road driving a concrete mixer thinking about plans for the group, says the clear and worsening evidence of an environmental emergency demands that people do “whatever it takes to raise the alarm”.
“Unfortunately, that takes disruption and we’re targeting the economic system because not enough of the climate movement is talking about the system as the core of the problem,” he says. “There’s too much talk about, ‘Oh yeah, we will just transition to renewables and all this nonsense about net zero and everything will be OK and we can just go on with our lives,’ but the reality is that’s not going to cut it.”
Protesters refused bail and claim rights denied
A Sydney woman, Violet CoCo, made headlines last year when she was sentenced to 15 months’ jail and denied bail after blocking a lane of traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge at peak hour. Her jail sentence was later dropped on appeal.
There was little public outrage when three of the activists arrested last week were remanded in custody until next month. Others were quickly bailed and released. Homewood says he spent a few hours in the Melbourne watch house before agreeing to a deal in which he received a conviction and was fined $200 in return for pleading guilty to four charges.
But some had a more harrowing experience in custody. Naomi Shine, a 49-year-old flood recovery worker from Lismore, spent nearly 24 hours under police guard in hospital waiting for emergency surgery for an injury sustained while locked on to a car at Brisbane port.
Shine’s protest involved placing each of her arms inside metal pipes, and handcuffing her wrists to a crossbar inside each pipe – a common set-up used by protesters known as a sleeping dragon. The pipes were then concreted into the boot of a car parked across a major road into Brisbane port. Police needed a jackhammer and grinder to remove her.
At some point the ring finger on her left hand was sliced open up one side. It was serious enough for the police to take her to the Princess Alexandra hospital at 3am the next morning when it would not stop bleeding heavily. The injury required plastic surgery to replace the skin but Shine says Queensland police refused her requests to call a loved one before she had an emergency operation under their guard.
“I couldn’t let anyone know,” she says. “I asked every pair of police who guarded me: can I have a call, am I allowed a phone call, can I make a call? And they all just said, ‘No, not til you get back to the watch house.’ And then when I got back to the watch house they wouldn’t give it to me either because it was midnight.”
Shine was later bailed. A spokesperson for Queensland police told Guardian Australia: “People who are under guard at a hospital and being provided treatment are not prohibited from contacting a legal representative or making contact with next of kin.”
Cases will ‘clog up the courts’
Civil liberty groups have raised concerns about the effect on democracy of further criminalising the right to protest. Three of the protesters in Queensland are charged with endangering the safety of vehicles and related transport infrastructure, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
Julia Grix, a lawyer with the Environmental Defenders Office, which is representing some of those charged, says the penalties are “completely disproportionate”. “This is not, in my view, a crime that is in any way deserving of a penalty that requires jail time, let alone a lifetime of imprisonment.”
In NSW, Mark Davis, a lawyer who has represented some Blockade Australia members on earlier charges, says the initial evidence suggests increased penalties in that state are failing to dissuade protesters and instead are leading to a more drawn-out court process.
He represented 18 people charged with offences relating to blocking traffic in Sydney last year. All of them were facing the prospect of two years jail under the new legislation.
Davis says all pleaded not guilty due to the “insane” new maximum penalties but might have immediately pleaded guilty if there was less risk of a lengthy jail term. “What would have been dealt with in a few days stretched up to a year of court tactics and proceedings until police finally dropped the most serious charge,” he says.
“The courts are groaning under the weight of these minor matters turning into defended hearings. If this continues it will clog up the courts. It’s absolute theatre [from politicians] and it’s not sustainable.”
Zelda Grimshaw, a media spokesperson for Blockade Australia, says the group will not be swayed. She says the NSW police had tried to “smash our network” last year by infiltrating a training camp in NSW’s Colo Valley but the port mobilisation showed the group had “come back like the hydra, threefold”.
The message to governments, she says, is that they “cannot solve climate breakdown with jail sentences and anti-protest legislation”.
“They are shooting at the fire alarms rather than putting out the fire.”
