Is Pro-Palestine protester Josh Lees Australia’s worst pest?
There was little sign of that this week as masked demonstrators draped in keffiyehs tried to storm Darling Harbour’s Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition, a showcase for maritime weapons systems. Nor was a “family-friendly” spirit on display late last month in Melbourne, where an entirely peaceful March for Australia was attacked by protesters burning the Australian flag and brandishing Palestine’s.
The video footage leaves no doubt. At Darling Harbour, police were, in Superintendent Paul Dunstan’s words, “set upon by a pack of very angry protesters”, leaving several officers injured.
Victoria Police Commander Wayne Cheeseman’s account of the Melbourne clashes was starker still: “Bottles filled with shards of glass were thrown at police, bins set on fire, and police pelted with large rocks (by) issue-motivated groups on the left,” he said – before wearily concluding that “Melbourne has had a gutful”.
That policing protests by Hamas’s fellow travellers has already consumed over 24,000 police shifts in Melbourne alone, costing more than $25m, makes Cheeseman’s conclusion all the more credible.
None of that, of course, stopped Lees from blaming the violence on “police brutality meted out to peaceful protesters”. James Dean – who at least exuded existential cool – was a rebel without a cause; Lees is a protester without a pause, vowing, after this week’s riot, to “keep protesting until Palestine is free”.
That tireless outrage would be merely puerile if it wasn’t so consequential. Indignation is, for Lees, not a reaction but an occupation; yet his success in persuading the courts to weaken restrictions on demonstrations is undeniable. And while NSW had to be prodded by the judiciary into indulgence, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has done so willingly – refusing to enforce the Unlawful Assemblies and Processions Act 1958, which could have prevented Melbourne’s descent into chaos.
Underlying the limp-handed responses is a familiar confusion. In an observation the NSW Supreme Court recently cited in Lees v State of New South Wales (2025), which struck down restrictions on demonstrations near places of worship, NSW Supreme Court Justice Michael Walton said that “the common law tradition is against the idea that freedom of political communication lies in the gift of the government.” But Justice Walton’s contention simply does not apply to public assembly.
In fact, the presupposition in the common law tradition has always been the opposite. As A. V. Dicey – the great late 19th century English constitutionalist – made clear, “there is no special principle of law allowing A, B, and C to meet in the open air for discussion.” Lord Hewart reaffirmed the point in Duncan v Jones (1936), noting that the common law “does not recognise any special right of public meeting for political or other purposes”, with a slew of Australian courts following suit.
The regulation of public assembly, conceived as a condition-laden privilege rather than an untrammelled right, was viewed as a cornerstone of peaceful democracy. No one expressed that better than Leonard Hobhouse, the author of the vastly influential Liberalism (1911), who praised “the organisation of restraint in the service of freedom”. For Hobhouse, “the orderly presentation of discontent is the very breath of a free society,” yet “the state must prevent the conversion of discussion into tumult, for only in order can discussion bear fruit”.
Far from an “anything goes” philosophy, the conviction was that “the state’s management of protest through legitimate policing is not the negation of freedom but its civilising condition” – a conviction that, until recently, lay at the heart of the liberal tradition of public order. Nor did that conviction undermine representative government; on the contrary, it strengthened it.
That was apparent in the interwar years, when violence – fuelled by and fuelling ever deeper social and political divisions – engulfed Europe.
As street protests spiralled out of control, governments on the continent responded by granting themselves sweeping powers to suppress extremist movements, notably under the Weimar Republic’s Law for the Protection of the Republic (1922) and France’s Law of 10 January 1936. Yet the remedies those laws provided were so draconian that they were rarely implemented – prompting historian Detlev Peukert, in his study of the Weimar collapse, to observe that “the Republic oscillated between impotence and over-reaction: either constitutional scruples paralysed it, or emergency powers hollowed out its legitimacy”.
In contrast, Britain’s Public Order Act (1936) did not proscribe fascism as a belief system or political ideology. It targeted the form in which fascism was practised – its performative, intimidatory and violence-laden modes, epitomised by the Mosleyites’ strategy of parading through Jewish neighbourhoods and staging inflammatory rallies outside synagogues. The act strengthened police powers to restrict or prohibit marches, banned political uniforms, and authorised the suppression of flags and banners likely to incite discord or disorder.
As Sir John Simon, the Conservative home secretary, explained when introducing the bill, “The bill is directed not against opinions, however foolish or extreme, but against practices which menace the public peace: it does not touch belief; it deals only with intimidation.” Labour’s Clement Attlee agreed, insisting that “where movements, whether Fascist or Communist, seek to intimidate, it is right that the state should intervene.”
The results were far-reaching. “Without martyring the fascists”, observes historian Martin Pugh, the act “deprived Mosley’s movement of the theatrics that had been central to its appeal”, halting its spread and hastening its marginalisation.
Those effects were noted in Australia, leading Robert Menzies – then federal attorney-general – to ask his department whether similar legislation was needed here. It was not, the department replied, because “the States already possess ample powers to prevent disorderly processions.” And they were not reluctant to use them.
The result of that “restrained firmness,” Andrew Moore concludes in his study of the period, was that while Australia developed no Public Order Act, the police and political establishment achieved the same outcome: the disappearance of street militancy by the mid-1930s, without the need to outlaw beliefs. By clamping down on tumult, dissent was channelled into speech, vote, and parliamentary rivalry, replacing harassment and violence by robust political competition.
But those powers have been steadily wound back, and the will to use them has eroded still further. The result is a permissiveness that mistakes liberty for licence – though only for the chosen few, as none are more eager to silence opponents than Josh Lees and his Islamist allies. Masquerading as champions of free speech, what they seek is the freedom to prevent others from enjoying the freedoms they claim for themselves.
Yes, Lees is a clown; but as the Islamo-Fascists, emboldened by judicial indulgence, revive Mosley’s old tactics of parading near synagogues, baiting real or presumed “Zios”, and attacking Jewish targets, the crippling of legal protections is no laughing matter. It marks the point where liberty, unmoored from order, begins to demolish its own foundations – and with them, the Australia it once defended and sustained.
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Orwellsian tale provides a rich harvest of hypocrisy
Giving evidence earlier this year in the Supreme Court of NSW, John (Josh) Lees claimed that protests organised by the Palestine Action Group “have always occurred in a welcoming, inclusive and family-friendly environment”.