Rather than risk rallies, let's show black lives matter with an eight-minute blackout

NSW again faces a dilemma over the balance between racial justice and public health – and whether to allow a second planned Black Lives Matter protest to go ahead on Saturday. The NSW Police Commissioner is asking the courts to stop it; the Prime Minister has warned it could jeopardise our success in containing COVID-19.

The Black Lives Matter protest in Sydney last weekend.Credit: AAP

Just on Thursday, a Melbourne protester from last weekend's rallies was reported to have tested positive to COVID, and it is not clear that protesters have been effectively self-isolating since.

The public health threat is therefore clear: large protests, involving thousands of people in close contact, go against key protocols we have observed for several months surrounding social distancing. And they do so in ways that make contact-tracing and self-isolation especially challenging.

Yet the case for allowing the protest to go ahead is equally powerful: hundreds of thousands of people around the world have come out to protest against the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. And their message is clear and persuasive: black Americans have faced a long history of economic and political injustice, and far too little in the way of response and redress.

Australian Black Lives Matter protesters are also making this argument. Indigenous Australians continue to be incarcerated at much higher rates, are more likely to die in police custody and have a shorter average life-expectancy than non-indigenous Australians. And protesters are calling for urgent action to address this.

How, then, can we resolve this dilemma? How to balance two such compelling concerns? The solution, we suggest, lies in applying the same creativity we have shown in managing our daily lives during COVID to the challenges of protest. Birthdays, deaths and marriages have all been celebrated online, and via drive-by celebrations. So how do we do that for a large-scale second set of social protests?

One good place to start would be a voluntary eight-minute blackout – this Saturday at 8pm – to show that all Sydneysiders believe that black lives matter. Turning our lights out for this brief time, representing the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that it took George Floyd to die under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin, would show our support for the Black Lives Matter movement while maintaining strict social-distancing.

For those minutes, we might reflect on how we can truly move forward from both the pandemic and our own historical failing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. One obvious answer is that we should listen the voices of First Nations – and engage in a process of constitutional change to enshrine a First Nations "Voice" to Parliament and a process of "truth telling" or Makarrata.

These were both key demands by First Nation representatives at Uluru in their Statement from the Heart. As we sit in the dark together, we might reflect on whether it is time to lend our voices to that statement – and make it a truly national roadmap for how we move forward together as a nation.

Rosalind Dixon is a professor of law and director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at UNSW. Richard Holden is professor of Economics at UNSW Business School.

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