The Palestine Action Group will fight the New South Wales police in court after their proposed plan to march on the Sydney Opera House was knocked back.
On Wednesday, the group announced its plan to diverge from the normal route of its near weekly rallies over the past two years, and march from Hyde Park to the Sydney Opera House on 12 October to mark two years since 7 October and call for “an end to genocide in Gaza”.
But on Friday the NSW police announced it would knock back the group’s application to march to the Opera House, citing safety concerns such as crowd crush over limited exit points from the forecourt.
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“We understand that this is a significant anniversary for probably both sides,” assistant commissioner Peter McKenna told reporters.
“We’re not anti-protest. We facilitate thousands of protests, and in fact, in this particular group, we’ve been facilitating protests and public assemblies for the last two years. So it’s not a matter of us not wanting them to have a public assembly. It’s not even a matter about it being at the Opera House itself. It’s about public safety.”
The group submitted what is known as a “form one” to police. The form is a notification to hold a public assembly that, if accepted by police, protects those attending from being potentially charged under anti-protest laws.
Now that organisers have vowed to challenge the police decision to deny the application, the NSW supreme court will have the final say over whether protesters will be afforded legal protection or not.
On Friday afternoon, Justice Desmond Fagan heard the matter in court before setting it down for hearing on Tuesday. He asked the parties to configure a plan that could see the police support the protest.
Fagan questioned the practicalities of the protest and said the safety concerns were legitimate. But he also urged police to consider the “strengths of feelings” about the issue in the community and also to consider what sentiment was being fostered towards police by “resistance to people expressing views about this”.
The Palestine Action Group had anticipated in their application that 10,000 people would attend. But Fagan said he thought the crowd could exceed 100,000 because the “community is highly inflamed about what they’ve learned is taking place in Gaza”.
Earlier, the Palestine Action Group said police had warned during their negotiations that, due to the increased terror level threat in Australia, the Opera House may seek to implement security measures such as stopping and searching people and their bags. NSW police did not wish to comment.
Under the Opera House bylaws, an “authorised officer may, for the purposes of promoting safety and security on the Opera House premises” search articles in a person’s possession.
They may also request a person remove outer clothes such as a jacket or gloves to inspect them.
Amal Naser, a spokesperson for the Palestine Action Group, said: “Our rights to protest and to assemble are protected under international and domestic law. We have the right to march, and we will keep on fighting for Palestine,” she said.
Just over two months ago, the Palestine Action Group faced the supreme court in their bid to march over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The protesters won, with an estimated 90,000 to 300,000 people attending.
The NSW Council for Civil Liberties has been urging the Minns government to scrap the form one system, which doesn’t exist in Victoria.
Asked on Friday if he thought the system was working, McKenna said it was. He noted that a police decision to knock back a protest had only gone before the supreme court two or three times this year.
“It allows us to sit down with the applicants, whoever they might be, and negotiate, discuss how we do things safely, and by and large, that works,” he said.
McKenna said the decision to oppose the protest was not “about what happened two years ago”.
On 9 October 2023, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters rallied in the Opera House forecourt after the sails were lit in blue and white to commemorate the victims of the Hamas attacks on Israel that killed more than 1,000. Those attacks sparked retaliations that have killed more than 60,000 Palestinians over the past two years.
The protests became global news after footage of people allegedly chanting “gas the Jews” was widely spread. However, a police report later debunked this, saying an expert “concluded with overwhelming certainty” that people were saying “where’s the Jews”. There were other antisemitic chants, including “fuck the Jews”.
The deputy police commissioner, David Hudson, was asked about this during a NSW upper house inquiry into antisemitism in July.
“Some of the behaviour that took place we don’t think was actually at the town hall with the Palestinian Action Group. We think they came later after the social media announcement and call for people to attend the Opera House, which happened on the run,” he said.
Hudson told the inquiry if “we’d known what we’d known and they were insistent on attending the Opera House … we would have prevented them getting to the steps, but we can’t prevent the free movement of people throughout the city just because you’re in a protest.”
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