Who is Drew Pavlou, the Brisbane student activist
He disrupted Wimbledon, organised a Kim Jong-un lookalike to storm a Scott Morrison campaign event and only this weekend was arrested in London accused of making bomb threats. So who is Drew Pavlou?
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He’s the Queenslander probably best known for disrupting the men’s singles final at Wimbledon this year, and now he’s been arrested outside the Chinese Consulate in London after a bomb threat was made on Friday.
Drew Pavlou says that he never sent the threat to the consulate, and after being released by London police after 23 hours in custody, he has not been charged, although he says he’s been warned that he faces arrest at international borders if he tries to leave the UK before the investigation is finalised.
But Mr Pavlou has been getting around for some time. So who is he?
The now 23-year-old’s name first popped up as a blip on the radar in 2019 when he organised a pro-Hong Kong protest at the University of Queensland that quickly descended into chaos when pro-China activists arrived and staged a counter-protest.
Things quickly got physical, and Mr Pavlou was allegedly assaulted twice during the scuffle. China’s Brisbane based Consul-General, Xu Jie, said that Mr Pavlou’s event constituted “anti-China separatist activities” and defended those that Mr Pavlou said assaulted him as “self-motivated, patriotic individuals.”
Mr Pavlou wound up taking the Consul-General to court, claiming that Xu Jie’s comments had incited violence against him resulting in threats against himself and his family, although the case was dismissed by the Brisbane Magistrates Court, citing international immunity laws.
The small blip on the radar was starting to get bigger.
In the time since, he has amassed a following of 23,000 people on social media, many of them supportive of his activism for marginalised ethnic groups like the Uyghurs in China.
That activism, mixed with stunts highlighting alleged links between UQ leadership and the Chinese government, won Mr Pavlou a seat on the University of Queensland’s Senate.
But he was suspended for two years after UQ produced a 186-page dossier that claimed Mr Pavlou had violated UQ student policies 11 times, including allegations of both on-campus and online bullying, discrimination, and harassment of students and staff.
Pavlou denied the claims, though did admit to using profanity in discussions with students on Facebook, and after the pro-bono intervention of well-known QC Tony Morris, the suspension was whittled down to six months.
UQ’s evidence submitted to a Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which was largely driven by Mr Pavlou’s allegations of Chinese influence at Australian universities, showed that the University spent nearly $300,000 on external lawyers and public relations advisers during the incident.
“If you include all the internal hours, the whole thing cost them at least half a million,” Mr Pavlou told The Courier-Mail in 2021.
He stood alongside Bob Katter as the veteran politician lobbied for the 2021 inquiry and, in 2022, ran (unsuccessfully) for a seat in the Australian Senate under the party banner of the Drew Pavlou Democratic Alliance.
During the election campaign, Mr Pavlou claimed responsibility for disrupting former Prime Minister Scott Morrison when a man dressed as Kim Jong-un gatecrashed a press conference.
More recently, Mr Pavlou was ejected from the Wimbledon final last month for holding up a sign reading “where is Peng Shuai?”, the female Chinese tennis player who disappeared after making allegations that she had been sexually assaulted by a senior Chinese Communist Party official, before then reappearing and retracting the claims in a series of interviews.
And then just this week, Drew Pavlou was arrested while protesting outside London’s Chinese
Consulate after a bomb threat was made, which he has denied responsibility for.
The Courier-Mail spoke with Mr Pavlou in the hours after he was released from a London cell.
He claimed he was arrested after a fake email reading “this is Drew Pavlou, you have until 12pm to stop the Uyghur genocide or I blow up the embassy with a bomb, regards Drew” was sent to London authorities.
“I was held for 23 hours. For a long part, it was incommunicado so I wasn’t able to tell anyone where I was, why I was being held or what had happened to me. I wasn’t able to access a lawyer for hours and hours,” he said.
The threat was sent from an email address that Mr Pavlou says has nothing to do with him.
At the time of his release no charges had been laid against him, but he says that his phone and passport were seized by police.
He alleged that police told him if he refused to provide them with his phone password “you might be charged with obstruction of justice.”
“They had me handcuffed for two or three hours in a stress position. Really painful. The metal was digging into my wrist, they really treated me like some kind of terrorist.”
Mr Pavlou said that police had kept his phone but returned his passport.
“But then they’re like, just letting you know that if you try to leave the country you may be stopped at the border and arrested. And then they’ve also put me on bail but I haven’t even been charged with anything, so it’s just this really weird limbo position,” he said.
He said that while the Australian Consulate had reached out to him “really quickly,” keeping in contact with them was challenging.
“It’s just so hard without a phone in London. It’s so hard for me to get around, and it’s so hard for me to make contact with these people,” Mr Pavlou said.
“The Australian Consulate has been trying to call me but I’ve just got my iPad and I‘m in and out of service. It’s really hard.”
He said that purchasing another phone was not an option because it was too expensive.
I’m a campaigner, it’s my full time job,” he said.
“I rely on crowd-funding and stuff like that, but I have no idea what I’m going to do because I can’t afford to stay in Britain.”
“I’ve been couch surfing this entire time in London but I’m getting through the end of my list of mates I can stay with. People are scared to host me now because they don’t want to get raided by the police or whatever, and it’s getting scary.”
Mr Pavlou’s mother, Vanessa, said she was considering flying to the UK in a show of support for her distressed son.
“We need to bring him home but at the moment, he can’t leave,” Ms Pavlou said.
“It’s a complete set up and he’s been an easy target being so vocal and proactive, which they don’t like.”
Mr Pavlou said that he was threatened with charges that could land him in prison for up to seven years, and believes that the bomb threat against the Chinese Consulate was a hoax designed to get him arrested.
“I was there for like 10 minutes and I tried to glue a Taiwan flag to the gate, and then the police came and arrested me and I just thought it was gonna be a small fine or something,” he said.
“Then they handcuffed me, they put me in a pressure point position and stuff like that.”
Mr Pavlou said that he was only told why he had been arrested three hours later.
“They said you’re being charged with a bomb threat.”
He told The Sunday Project the emailed threat was “a complete fabrication” by the Chinese embassy.
“It’s signed Drew Pavlou, it’s absurd, it says, ‘This is Drew Pavlou, there’s going to be bomb threat today, regards, Drew,’ I mean it’s just insane, I can’t believe the British police believed it for a second, the wording of the email is stilted,” he said.
“Why on Earth would I put myself through this terror, this stress, it’s just an absolute lie.”
He also said British Metropolitan Police were lying to the media about providing lawyers during his arrest.
The police issued a statement saying that according to Mr Pavlou’s custody record, he was offered legal advice and a duty solicitor was called.
However, Mr Pavlou claimed his legal team was refused the right to speak with him as he was being detained
“They are just simply lying to the media, because I requested multiple times to talk to my solicitors, they were saying ‘none of your solicitors are picking up’,” he said on The Sunday Project.
“When I was actually released ultimately, my solicitors told me ‘we were on the phone well past midnight, we were up all night trying to get through to you, and they on kept saying we can’t put you through’, so the met police are just straight up lying.”
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