Bob Brown is a hero to many people in the protest movement and some regard him as the " Father " of the Greens in Australia. Many years ago he took a leading part in the nation wide protests to prevent the damning of the Franklin river in Tasmania to enhance electricity generation.
Now retired, it seems he still maintains close links with the protest movement. He was arrested last summer for failing to obey a move-on order while filming an anti-logging video in the Lapoinya state forest. The police put him in handcuffs and took him away, but later dropped the charges. Dr Brown was sufficiently incensed to challenge that law in the High Court and this week he was victorious with justices ruling that part of the Tasmanian law cracking down on protests breached the implied freedom of political communications protected by the constitution.
That decision was arrived at with a six to one verdict in the High Court and it will have obvious ramifications for similar laws in the other states. It is causing consternation in New South Wales legal circles where protesters face a cumulative fourteen year prison sentence for their part in rendering useless a road belonging to a mine and hindering equipment belonging to that mine at the Wilpinjong Coal mine in the Hunter valley. Each charge carries a maximum seven years jail sentence.
There seems no doubt that this decision will send shivers through the management of some of Australia's biggest companies. This seems to open the door for protesters to do more than just picket and wave signs advertising their objections. By closing an entrance road and preventing the use of machinery necessary for the operation of a mine they effectively close it down and inflict financial loss. There are very wide implications for this to cause behaviour changes in not only coal mining interests, but in gas extraction and a host of other issues that are high on the protest movements hit list.
This " move-on " legislation has been a very handy weapon in keeping protests non violent. One of the aims of the protest movement is to gain publicity and the media comply by filming people being placed in handcuff restraint and packed into police wagons and taken away for questioning. In many cases, once they arrive at the local police station they are released without further charges. The protest movement has gained its free publicity. The restriction on whatever activity that sparked the protest has been removed - and everything returns to normal.
Unfortunately, some in the protest movement are zealots who believe that the " end justifies the means " and resort to what can only be called terror tactics. In the past, heavy machinery that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars has been sabotaged by engine contamination and at one stage anti-logging protesters were spiking trees with large nails driven into the timber to snap the chain of chain saws - and potentially kill the user. This High Court ruling will be interpreted in different ways by many in the protest movement.
This seems to be a situation in which the law finds it impossible to differentiate. Clearly, the public have the right t protest at what they consider to be harmful, but equally the companies that employ people and deliver a profit to their shareholders have a right to engage in what is a lawful activity. We mine coal and we sell it to the world. We will only stop doing that when the parliament passes a law that makes coal mining illegal - and that is unlikely in the near future.
It seems that the parliamentarians need to get to work and sort out new protest laws that separate the rights of both the protest movement and the industries they target to achieve a workable relationship with a clear set of rules. That will also have to survive the inevitable challenge in the High Court.
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