Left dangling in a climate protest crackdown
Two days of mayhem in Adelaide had a very comic postscript involving Extinction Rebellion’s chief troublemaker, the abseiling pensioner Meme Thorne.
As far as civil disturbances go, it wasn’t the Los Angeles riots or the streets of Paris in May-June 1968. It was more like Grey Power v police power as South Australia Police pitted themselves against the retiree revolutionaries from Extinction Rebellion (XR) who caused chaos in Adelaide on consecutive mornings last week in defence of Mother Earth.
Their target was the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference, with the Adelaide Convention Centre and the Santos headquarters in Flinders Street laid siege to by a small but crafty band of elderly “rebels”, as the XR activists call themselves.
By the end of the week the protesters had paid a hefty price, not so much for their capacity to destroy but their capacity to annoy. SA now has the toughest penalties in the land governing what a new bipartisan law defines as “obstructionist and dangerous” protests.
For any city that has endured the inconvenience of these traffic-halting demos, be it XR activists staging “die-ins” in the Melbourne CBD or militant cyclists from Critical Mass closing the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the SA laws impose greater financial accountability on those causing the mayhem. Critics say they’re nothing less than an assault on freedom of speech and assembly.
The trigger for such a gung-ho response by the SA parliament was the first protest on May 17 that paralysed the city during morning peak hour. XR rebel Meme Thorne, a 69-year-old actor from the hippie haven of Willunga near McLaren Vale, abseiled down from the Morphett Street bridge and dangled above the traffic on North Terrace. Her actions brought the city to a halt for an hour, even preventing some patients from making appointments at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
Capturing the frustration of South Australians, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens spoke for many when he said dryly: “The ropes are fully extended across the street so we can’t, as much as we might like to, cut the rope and let them drop.” That job fell to the city fire brigade to use a ladder to get Thorne down.
The chaos continued next morning when another group of XR rebels turned their attention to the Santos building on Flinders Street. While the oil and gas company has become accustomed to being graffitied or finding protesters stuck outside, buttocks glued to the road, on this occasion the attacks were more indiscriminate. The innocent Blueprint Cafe adjoining the Santos building was also daubed with climate slogans, its owner losing almost half his morning trade as police and protesters went toe-to-toe at the cafe entrance.
With all this happening in real time, Opposition Leader David Speirs hit the airwaves on talkback station FiveAA announcing proposed amendments to the Summary Offences Act, increasing fines for such protests from $750 to $50,000 or three months’ imprisonment.
“These types of protests are getting out of control and we are sick and tired of seeing groups and individuals receive nothing more than a slap on the wrist,” he said.
It was a hitherto unseen moment of gut-instinct politics from the new SA Liberal leader and was lapped up by talkback listeners, many ringing in with messages of support from inside their stationary cars.
It also prompted Premier Peter Malinauskas to respond in record time. Thirty minutes later, Malinauskas was on the same radio station waiting to come on and listening in as Blueprint Cafe owner Frankie Marafiote was doing his own interview documenting the damage to his cafe.
“I heard what Frankie said now and it’s totally unacceptable,” the Premier said. “We can’t have a case of innocent people who are literally trying to service the community having their lives and incomes completely disrupted.”
Malinauskas promised he would work with the opposition constructively to see if the laws could be toughened. Six hours later they were, with the Liberal opposition and Labor government uniting in record time to back the changes as first proposed by Speirs.
The new laws were wholly in step with mainstream sentiment. Indeed, many callers to talkback radio that day were asking whether the penalties themselves were enough, with a couple of listeners asking only half-jokingly whether perhaps SAPOL could be equipped with Latin American-style water cannon to disperse the troublemakers more swiftly.
But by accident or design, Malinauskas also had picked a fight with the left of his own party, the union movement and much of the upper house crossbench by embracing legislation they regard as populist and draconian.
The state’s peak union body and the Australian Education Union immediately condemned the laws, the @salabor Twitter account was bombarded by progressives nationwide after it tweeted a glowing endorsement of the new penalties, and Amnesty International announced a rolling campaign of protests in Adelaide to demand the repeal of the amendments.
The fact Amnesty’s first protest went ahead as planned in the Adelaide CBD yesterday seems to prove Malinauskas’s point – protest itself has not been made illegal in South Australia. But while democracy itself may not be dead in SA, it certainly has become a lot more expensive – presuming, that is, that any future magistrate will ever impose the penalty to the full force of a $50,000 fine.
Greens MLC Robert Simms tells Inquirer that he and others are troubled by the vagueness of what constitutes “obstruction”, warning the laws could be used to stifle all sorts of valid protests. “These laws are an outrageous attack on our democracy by the Labor and Liberal parties,” Simms says. “In rushing these laws through the lower house with lightning speed, the major parties are treating the communities they represent with contempt. These laws aren’t just an attack on climate protesters, they are an attack on all those who rely on social movements and peaceful protest for the rights we enjoy today.”
While none on the left of politics is laughing about these changes, these two days of mayhem in Adelaide had a very comic postscript involving XR’s chief troublemaker, the abseiling pensioner Thorne. It emerged last weekend that Thorne’s acting credits include a commercial she appeared in only last year for global oil giant Ampol.
Thorne sheepishly confirmed to Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser that she was paid $4611.07 to play a starring role in a new multimedia campaign for Ampol spruiking the company’s green credentials.
She said she had researched the performance of Ampol and liked company statements about being “serious about action on climate change” and a “transition to a low carbon future”.
She was also “pleasantly surprised” about sustainable practices such as powering service stations with solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations.
Thorne conceded that “a lot” of people might think she was a hypocrite. “I figured, obviously, we still have the need for some petrol,” she said.
Indeed we do. If you’re going to abseil off a CBD bridge or glue your bum to the bitumen in the middle of a busy city intersection, you’ve got to get into town somehow.
And while none of that is now illegal in South Australia, it just may cost a bit more next time, which is something a few more acting appearances for Ampol, Exxon or maybe even Santos can hopefully take care of.
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