Pro-Palestine protesters will have to wait until Saturday to find out if they can legally march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge this weekend, but organisers are vowing to go ahead regardless of the court decision.
However, the court heard the protest organisers are willing to postpone the march if police agree to work with them.
The Palestine Action Group faced the New South Wales police in the supreme court on Friday after the police rejected an application to facilitate the protest.
“The most important point that I’m going to make to the court in these proceedings is that this application is not about whether the protest is occurring or not,” the group’s barrister, Felicity Graham, told the court, which will hand down its decision at 10am on Saturday.
“I have the firmest of instructions that Palestine Action Group are proceeding with this protest … it cannot be stopped.”
Graham said her argument was not to threaten the court, but to point out “the police have no choice” and there was no evidence prohibiting the protest would increase public safety.
“The intention to march, irrespective of an immunity, is grounded in a belief that the situation is one of profound moral urgency and that the time is now,” she said.
If the court sides with police and protesters proceed with a so-called “unauthorised” march, the police can exercise the full suite of their move-on powers. If the court authorises it, attendees will have immunity from being charged under the Summary Offences Act.
Outside the court, prior to the hearing, a spokesperson for the group, Josh Lees, told reporters the offer still stood to delay the protest by up to three weeks if the police were willing to work with them.
The court heard around 50,000 people were expected to attend – the same number estimated to have marched across the bridge for WorldPride in 2023.
The police’s barrister Lachlan Gyles argued that what was being asked was “unprecedented” in terms of the “risk, the lack of time to prepare, and, of course, the location, which is one of the main arteries in one of the largest cities in the world”.
He said there was not enough time to prepare a traffic management plan, and also warned of the potential for a crowd crush.
“There’s been no liaison whatsoever with any of the agencies and government authorities who would be involved, most particularly Transport for New South Wales,” he said.
He also said the court should be concerned about being seen to “condone” certain behaviours if there were “violent scenes” as the court heard of plans for a counter-protest near the bridge’s tunnel.
A Christian-led group called Never Again is Now said they had lodged an application with NSW police to hold a rally on Sunday outside the Sydney Harbour tunnel. The protest was designed to draw attention to hostages still unaccounted for after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
The acting assistant police commissioner Adam Johnson, who gave evidence, was asked by Graham what police would do if tens of thousands of people turned up on Sunday.
Johnson responded: “We would do our best in the circumstances to maintain public safety to the general public and to the people attending that location as well, and it would be difficult in either case.”
Lees, who became emotional at one point while giving his evidence, told the court the only thing he saw stopping starvation and “genocide” in Gaza was “people power”.
“We are not here to seek confrontation with police … we want to work with them to make this [a] successful event,” he said.
The hearing came after several NSW Labor MPs defied their premier, Chris Minns, by vowing to attend the march.
Labor’s Stephen Lawrence, Anthony D’Adam, Lynda Voltz, Cameron Murphy and Sarah Kaine were among 15 NSW politicians who signed an open letter on Thursday evening calling on the government to facilitate “a safe and orderly event” on Sunday.
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Lawrence said the state’s “slow and steady demonisation of protest” risked repeating the events which led to Sydney’s first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras march in 1978 being met with police violence.
In a statement posted on Facebook on Friday, Lawrence criticised “the passage of laws that allow police to be used to end protests the government doesn’t like”.
“We have seen in these respects one long, unprincipled capitulation to reactionary politics and it is dangerous,” the Labor MLC said.
“I am a member of the Labor party, not the Liberal party. Our party is founded on protest and collective action. Attending is my way of sending a message that, in my view, we need to change course.”
Lawrence said while the circumstances of the protest were “not ideal”, the event had become “absolutely inevitable”, which he said was “largely because of the way it has been mishandled”.
He said he wanted to attend Sunday’s march to express his “utter revulsion” at Israel’s actions – which he said other countries, including Australia, had provided cover for.
The other NSW parliamentarians who signed the letter calling on the government to allow the march over the Harbour Bridge were independents Alex Greenwich and Jacqui Scruby and the Greens’ Jenny Leong, Tamara Smith, Kobi Shetty, Sue Higginson, Cate Faehrmann, Abigail Boyd and Amanda Cohn. Libertarian John Ruddick was also on the list.
Greenwich, the state MP for Sydney, said he shared the “widespread community horror” over what was happening in Gaza and said marching across the bridge would send a powerful message of solidarity.
“Having successfully lobbied the previous Coalition government to allow a march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of LGBTQ equality during Sydney WorldPride, I know it can be done,” he said in a statement.
The premier on Friday morning said he expected “everybody in NSW to respect the outcome of the court’s decision”.
“I acknowledge there’s a lot of people in Sydney, in NSW, that want to be part of a protest,” Minns told reporters. “They’re very concerned about what’s happening in Gaza to Palestinians and they want to be heard.”
Minns said people who were planning to participate in the protest would still have “every opportunity to be heard”, even with an alternative route. Earlier in the week, he suggested a march over the bridge would cause the city to “descend into chaos”.
