The criminalisation of protest in NSW

There needs to be protections for peaceful protest in a democracy, otherwise, it’s not a democracy.

SEC Plating in Belmore. Photo: Weapons Out of The West.

The rain had barely cleared from Lakemba Street in Belmore when police descended on a peaceful protest outside SEC Plating, a modest factory that turns raw aluminium into the shiny finishes that are bolted on to Israeli F-35 fighter jets – which are then used to drop bombs over Gaza, killing innocent civilians, including children. This was meant to be a routine mid-week protest organised by Weapons Out of The West – a loose collective of teachers, students and shift workers who are furious that a secretive arms manufacturing network in the western Sydney region is exporting military parts to Israel and wanted to raise public awareness of this. Instead, it ended with Hannah Thomas, an activist and candidate for the Australian Greens at the 2025 federal election, beaten up by police, her face smashed into the bitumen, with her left eye bloodied and possibly beyond saving.

On this night in late June, scores of aggressive and angry police officers arrived, radios crackling with a response that seemed out of proportion to the handful of protesters holding a peaceful protest at a small suburban location. Thomas stepped forward as the police announced a “move-on” order – and when asked under what laws the police were acting on, officers dragged her to the kerb, struck her repeatedly, while dazed onlookers screamed out to “let her go!” – pleas that were ignored and quickly followed by more thumping of boots, arrests and the clatter of riot gear.

The charge sheet cited the newly amended anti-protest laws in New South Wales, the Minns Government’s hasty response to Israel lobbyists who earlier this year claimed that anti-war action in Sydney and a “bomb scare” in Dural – that turned out to be a hoax – could result into attacks on synagogues. SEC Plating is located across the road from a youth-oriented church hall: there’s no stained-glass windows, there’s no sermons – it’s just an old brick shell which is an annexe of the main church site in Punchbowl several suburbs away, and it’s a hall that hosts workshops on Saturdays, with little indication that it might be a “place of worship”. Yet the Act’s wide definition of “religious precinct” gives the police a broad enough scope to criminalise a protest if someone, somewhere, might one day surreptitiously murmur a prayer nearby.

In the aftermath of this incident, NSW Premier Chris Minns regurgitated those same old talking points about “operational independence” and the “paramount importance of community harmony”, but we all know what this is: it’s the incremental drift towards state authoritarianism, one that the old NSW Liberal Party curmudgeon and former NSW Premier, Robert Askin, would have been proud of.

This law was always going to be political theatre – a concession to the Israel lobby rattled by large pro-Palestine crowds and a coalition of conservative clerics warning of sectarian spill-over – but it is a law. The Dural “caravan bomb” scare earlier this year provided convenient ammunition: outrage headlines about homemade explosives, later shown to be false when forensics found nothing but fertiliser and rust. But the truth didn’t seem to matter to Premier Minns; by then the narrative of imminent terror had been lodged into the public consciousness: laws were enacted quickly, even when it became known to the government the Dural incident was a fabrication.

How the Dural hoax became law

It took just six weeks for a bomb scare hoax in the outskirts of Sydney to evolve into a legal assault on civil liberties. In January, NSW police were tipped off about a caravan parked behind a weatherboard cottage in Dural, and the vehicle supposedly contained mining gel detonators, a tangle of wires and a note naming the Great Synagogue as a target. Premier Minns called it “a terror plot against the Jewish community” and News Corporation tabloids splashed the headlines “Caravan of hate” across their front pages. Yet seasoned counter-terror detectives were sceptical from day one and, by March, the Australian Federal Police confirmed the whole thing was a criminal confidence trick designed to frighten Sydney – or to use the words of the AFP, a “fake terrorism” plot.

However, the official debunking came too late. On 11 February the Minns Government had already introduced the Places of Worship Bill, pitching it as a shield for synagogues, mosques and churches “under siege”. The legislation sailed through both houses in nine days, granting police power to issue move-on orders, arrests without warrant and impose $22,000 fines on anyone protesting “in or near” a place of worship – a phrase so loose that it could cover half a suburb.

Civil-liberties lawyers did warn at that time that a prayer room above a convenience store, or even an ad-hoc Buddhist shrine in someone’s loungeroom, now created an invisible and undefined zone where dissent could be criminalised. When the Human Rights Law Centre tallied the potential reach, they found virtually every major shopping strip in metropolitan Sydney contained at least one designated sacred site.

The political calculation behind this rush was pretty obvious. Although this legislation was developed within the jurisdiction of New South Wales, polling for the upcoming federal election suggested that Labor was losing votes in sections of Sydney amid a moral panic over anti-Semitic vandalism; these laws were drafted as much for optics as for public safety. Tony Burke, the federal Minister for Home Affairs – and member for the neighbouring seat of Watson – weighed in on breakfast television, applauding “urgent action to reassure faith communities,” even though he had not read the final bill before endorsing it.

What the bill actually did was create a legal pretext ready-made for selective enforcement. Police command quickly circulated briefing notes describing pro-Palestine rallies as “events of heightened sensitivity”, a euphemism that paved the way for heavy-handed police tactics. The government was quick to act: climate activists leafleting outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney were “moved-on” by police, while Palestine Action Group members holding candles across the road from a Lakemba mosque were monitored and threatened with arrest.

The biggest question is: who is all of this police power supposed to serve? In practice it insulates three constituencies: the property class, whose factories and showrooms are rebranded as “critical infrastructure”; the well-connected lobbyists who frame Palestine solidarity as a threat to Jewish safety; and a government anxious to look decisive every time a right-wing commentator on talk-back radio or Sky News claims that national security is “out of control”. For everyone else, the message is unambiguous: speak against the war on Gaza in the wrong postcode – or any postcode, according to these laws – and the state will meet you with cuffs, fines and, just like an Orwellian dystopia, provide you with a future of “a boot stamping on a human face – forever”.

How NSW’s vague worship laws enable police abuse

The protest in Belmore was more than one of the first test cases for the places of worship legislation – it was a warning about how a vague, discretionary law can morph into a blunt instrument of oppression when the government disagrees with certain political opinions. On the surface, the premise might seem reasonable enough: people of faith should be able to gather and worship in peace. But the legislation passed by the NSW Government offers no clarity on what constitutes a “place of worship,” nor how “near” such a place is. And that ambiguity is the main reason that makes the law so dangerous.

There are over 4,000 officially recognised churches in New South Wales but that doesn’t include the many other prayer spaces, meditation rooms, informal temples, suburban mosques, and ad-hoc faith centres that exist across the state. Under the law, any one of these can effectively create a protest exclusion zone with a radius known only to the officer enforcing it. “Near” can be interpreted as a few metres, a few blocks away or even in the next suburb.

This is the absurdity: the state can now declare your presence illegal if you’re standing within earshot of a room that once might have held a Bible study session. If tomorrow someone holds a silent vigil on the footpath outside a warehouse used last month by a faith-based charity, police could conceivably declare the space sacred and the protest unlawful. That’s not law enforcement; that’s theocratic authoritarianism dressed up in legal niceties.

If this much force can be exercised at a protest near an empty workshop in a church annexe, what happens when the protest is actually about the religious institution itself? What happens when the issue is child sexual abuse perpetrated by the church, synagogues hiding paedophile teachers like Malka Leifer, or bigotry preached under the guise of doctrine? Are those forms of public criticism now to be silenced under the pretence of “protecting worship”? At what point do we acknowledge that the real aim isn’t to protect faith communities from harassment – but to shield specific political, economic, and ideological interests from scrutiny?

The fallout from the Belmore protest shows just how quickly the public discourse can be manipulated. In the hours after the assault on Hannah Thomas, social media churned out the predictable accusations – she was anti-Semitic, she provoked the police, she somehow faked the injury, even though the bruising, swelling, torn skin and the real risk of permanent damage or the loss of the eye was obvious.

There needs to be protections for peaceful protest in a democracy, otherwise, it’s not a democracy. A pluralist society can’t be maintained if the right to dissent is confined only to “safe” targets approved by the state. Religious organisations, like governments and other corporations, operate in the public domain, benefit from public funding and rely on public trust and legal protections. Like everyone else, they must be subject to public criticism and scrutiny. Afterall, as Burke said when he criticised the protest actions of Hannah Thomas, rather than the police officer who inflicted the damage to her, “no one is above the law”.

Yet the current New South Wales framework allows any officer to end a protest with force, without a warrant, based on nothing more than proximity to a poorly defined “place of worship”. It’s not a law for protecting prayer or religious beliefs – it’s a law for criminalising opposition. And in that respect, it’s already succeeded. The law created the pretext, and the police delivered the violence. It’s a farce.

Australia’s complicity: The billion-dollar pipeline that leads to Israel

What unfolded in Belmore becomes clear once you start following the money – and the links between bits of aluminium, carbon-fibre clips, micro-processors and spray-cured polymers that flow from suburban Sydney factories into the F-35 fighter jets that are bombing Gaza. SEC Plating is only one link in this extensive network: there are nearly 20 contractors in Sydney alone, and about seventy nationwide, all feeding the Joint Strike Fighter program the Albanese Government insists has “no operational nexus” with the Israel Defense Forces. Yet Australia’s share of that program is valued at roughly $4.1 billion, under 52 export licences with Israel, underwritten by Australia’s Global Supply Chain agreements. Every time a F-35 drops bombs over Gaza, Australian labour and tax subsidies are flying onboard with the pilot.

And what a wonderful example of “double-speak”: the Labor government lectures protesters on “peaceful engagement” and claiming that “no one is above the law”, while tacitly profiting from weapons that are destroying apartment blocks and aid convoys in Gaza. Ministers such as Penny Wong rinse and repeat their slogans about an international “rules-based order” but are outraged at the moment someone asks which rules offer a justification for selling war parts to a state accused of genocide by the International Court of Justice.

A state that would rather have its citizens remain unaware of a conflict and be complicit in that conflict – rather than be critics of that state – will always force violence upon those citizens who start connecting up all the dots and try to expose immoral and possibly illegal behaviour.

The footage of Hannah Thomas being slammed to the ground has been far more effective than any government-based denial. It combined two stories into the one that reveals the problem with this legislation: a peaceful protestor bleeding on the ground and possibly losing her eye, juxtaposed against a church annexe that barely looks like a “place of worship”, yet used to justify vicious police brutality. A law ostensibly designed to protect worship has become the legal fig-leaf for protecting war profits – and the police who bashed Thomas were, effectively, the bouncers and pimps for a billion-dollar export scheme that Weapons Out of the West banner threatened to expose and embarrass political leaders with.

But the biggest question will always be: where does accountability begin? With the police officer who swung the fist and attacked Hannah Thomas? The commissioner who authorised the police attack? The NSW Government which enacted the places of worship legislation based on a lie? The Israeli lobby in Sydney that is always requesting more and more draconian laws that protect their own interests and silences dissent? Or the federal cabinet that keeps approving export licences to Israel and then denies that military parts are being supplied to F-35 fighter jets and then used to kill civilians in Gaza?

Until these links are confronted and fully exposed, there’ll be more peaceful protestors bludgeoned by the riot police, who are only too happy have laws that protect their thuggery, instead of the public interest, laws that were based on lies and should have never been enacted in the first place.