Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council | Second Reading
10 September, 2025
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan):
[Speech incorporated into Hansard]
I rise to make a contribution on the bill before the chamber.
The pithily titled Safer Protest with a Registration System and a Ban on Face Coverings Bill 2025 is, according to Mr Davis, about ‘balance’, about ‘protecting the right to peaceful protest’ as a ‘cornerstone of our democracy’. It all sounds pretty reasonable.
As Mr Davis noted in his second-reading speech:
… this bill is about drawing a clear line between the right to protest peacefully and the right of every Victorian to live free from intimidation, disruption, and violence.
The bill itself looks a bit more like creeping fascism to me, but I’ll talk more about that in a moment.
In Australia the right to protest and assemble is protected under international law and is an integral part of a functioning democracy. This right comes from the implied freedom of political communication found in our constitution.
Mr Davis mentioned that 500 protests had occurred in Melbourne since October 2023, so I’m assuming he is specifically targeting the pro-Palestinian rallies, which I would suggest many people have attended because they want to see an end to what both the UN and the International Criminal Court have denounced as the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and, I would say, not unreasonably, they want to see the Victorian government sever ties with the weapons manufacturers who are enabling that genocide.
I myself have attended a number of these rallies.
No doubt the recent protests have been disruptive, but sometimes democracy is disruptive and messy and inconvenient. It’s what separates democracy from authoritarianism.
I wasn’t around in Parliament to see how those opposite responded to the anti-government, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination protests that took place in Melbourne a few years back, but I do wonder if they spoke as passionately about the right of Victorians to live free from intimidation, disruption, and violence during the protests of that era.
Regardless, this bill and some of the recent laws introduced by the government are quite chilling and put me in mind of how government abjectly failed to respond to the rise of fascism in Britain. It’s quite a fascinating example.
As we know, fascism started to take root in Europe in between the two world wars, but one wouldn’t have thought Britain was a natural home for fascism. Britain didn’t lose the war, for starters, and the impacts of the Great Depression were not as severe as in other parts of the world. But nonetheless a small group of fascists were able to tap into the genuine concerns of working people, sowing fear, propagating images of chaos and destruction.
What does that have to do with the bill before us?
Well, we’ve seen neo-Nazis doing the same thing here. We heard Thomas Sewell on the steps of Parliament addressing his fellow protesters and promising that his men would fight for ‘our survival’ against the ‘ginormous empires of the Third World’.
If the bill’s aim is to free us from intimidation, disruption, and violence, and we take last week’s anti-immigration protests as an example, how would providing for the authorisation and prohibition of certain public protests work? Would it permit everyone bar the Nazis to protest in that case? This bill does not provide guidance on how we might respond to groups like the fascists, merely a means to stop any protest – and there’s the rub.
And by the way, can we please stop calling them neo-Nazis? There is nothing neo or novel about these people or their hateful ideology and love of Adolf Hitler. They are the same excrement on the sole of your shoes that they have always been; the only thing is, it’s easier to clean your shoes.
Anyway, this bill will empower police to ‘move on’ protesters, but this is unnecessary, as police already have sufficient move-on powers under the Summary Offences Act, so why do they need further powers?
The provision enabling a court to exclude a protester from certain places is similarly redundant.
Our position on the introduction of a permit system was informed by the comments of police commissioner Mike Bush. On 28 July he was asked in an ABC interview about introducing a permit system and said, and I quote:
We’ve had a look at that. It exists in other jurisdictions like New South Wales. We’ve had a look to see if it would be effective. Where we’ve landed is that it’s not worth bringing in.
Now there is a valid argument that the commissioner is not the lawmaker, that that responsibility is vested in the Parliament. But could I respectfully suggest to you, my colleagues, that to simply ignore that expert assessment is folly.
As for prohibiting protesters from wearing face coverings, it is not a crime to wear face coverings in public. The proposed change in this bill would hand Victoria Police extraordinary powers to arrest peaceful protesters where there is no danger to the public.
People wear face coverings for a variety of reasons. The banning of face coverings at protests will prevent people with a disability, elderly people and people with health conditions from participating in their democratic right to protest.
It will have a similar chilling effect on people who want to protect their anonymity and privacy. Who are we to say that someone who has been subject to gender-based violence, stalking, doxxing or retaliatory violence does not have the right to protect themselves or their families, for that matter, by preserving their anonymity while exercising their democratic right to protest?
And of course, there are people who wear face coverings for religious or cultural reasons.
How are we protecting these people from intimidation, disruption, and violence?
Are people not allowed to protect themselves from the unlawful and indiscriminate use of OC spray and tear gas by police – which we’ve seen a bit of lately – or from racial profiling, which we also know still takes place in this state?
It’s already a crime in Victoria to wear a disguise with ‘unlawful intent’ and police have powers to remove face coverings if a crime is reasonably suspected. So why do they need more than that?
So are these new laws only there to protect certain Victorians from intimidation, disruption, and violence?
As I’ve mentioned before in this place, I cut my political teeth in Queensland, protesting Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s anti-protest laws, which handed power to the police to approve or reject protest applications and to declare that a gathering of two or more people without a permit was illegal. I was one of thousands of Queenslanders not willing to stand idly by while our democratic right to protest was violated.
So I went along to those protest marches to fight for our democratic right to assemble and march, was duly arrested and charged a dozen or so times, copped a couple of very professional beatings at the hands of the Queensland police and have never looked back or regretted taking that stand.
For the second time in as many sitting weeks, I get to use my favourite philosophical baseballer’s quote: ‘Oh no, it’s deja vu all over again.’
Because the bill before us is not the ‘strong, fair, and necessary reform’ that is argued by the opposition. It is yet another attempt to weaken our democratic right to protest and to restrict people’s civil liberties. It hands more power to the police, enabling them to criminalise ordinary people for protesting.
We are aware that the government is in the process of formulating its own protest bill. It is my sincere hope that they have done the necessary work of consultation and engagement with the community and have developed specific measures that uphold our rights and liberties rather than impose these sorts of lazy blanket bans.
It’s worth noting that, at the end of the day, extremists love these sorts of restrictive laws. It enables them to paint themselves as martyrs, while drawing ever more attention to their cause and allowing them to recruit more easily.
The laws we have in place already afford police the tools they need to deal with violent and intimidatory individuals on our streets. We do not need more.
Spoiler alert: we will not be supporting this bill.
