‘Professional protester’: Chris Minns hits out at serial activist as costs pass $5m
Police must have the power to reject repeated protests, NSW Premier Chris Minns says, attacking the leader of the weekly pro-Palestine rallies as a ‘professional demonstrator’.
Police could soon have the power to reject protests that stretch over months, as a clearly frustrated NSW Premier Chris Minns decried the more than $5m spent on controlling pro-Palestine rallies and attacked the leader of the protest movement as a “professional demonstrator”.
The move came after hundreds of police were deployed at rallies and vigils in Sydney on Sunday and Monday on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel.
The protests were largely peaceful after police issued strong warnings not to bring the flag of the Hezbollah terrorist group, but two men were arrested for displaying swastikas superimposed on the Israeli flag.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is considering cancelling the visa of US-based academic Khaled Beydoun in the aftermath of the protests, after the Arizona State University law professor declared at Monday’s Hizb ut-Tahrir-associated rally in Sydney’s southwest that the October 7 terrorist attacks were “a good day” for Palestinian people.
“Today is not a day that is full of mourning, today is a day that marks celebration,” Mr Beydoun said.
Late on Monday evening, Mr Burke announced that “as soon as I heard about these comments I asked my department to conduct a visa check”.
Mr Minns backed the visa review as “completely appropriate”, while contemplating changes to the way such events are approved and revealing the $5.4m bill for policing the protests to date.
“The cost is huge … so I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing,” he said.
Police were burnt out and tired, he added, and other important work had had to be sidelined.
“I think taxpayers should be in a position to say we would prefer that money spent on roadside breath testing, domestic violence investigations, knife crimes, rather than the huge resources that’s going into the city and the community.”
“Our resources are being stretched; it costs millions of dollars to police and marshal these protests and it’s completely reasonable for the police to take that into consideration when Form 1 applications are lodged with the courts,” Mr Minns said.
“Ultimately, this is a huge drain on the public purse”.
The Premier hit out at Josh Lees, a leading member of the Palestine Action Group who has lodged weekly applications for the past year to march in Sydney since the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel, agreeing with the description of the activist as a “professional protester”.
Mr Lees writes for Red Flag, the outlet of Socialist Alternative, which declares itself “Australia’s largest Marxist group”, and regularly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.
He was also a leader of the Lockdown to Zero movement, demanding that the then- Berejiklian government maintain strict Covid-19 lockdowns and branding the loosening of restrictions as “an offensive against the working class” by “the rich and powerful”.
Mr Lees has also been spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition, organising protests at the 2011 ALP National Conference against then-prime minister Julia Gillard’s asylum-seeker policies.
The former University of Sydney tutor was arrested during the “Occupy Sydney” movement that camped outside the Reserve Bank in Martin Place in 2011, clashing with police during a Hyde Park rally and at the Martin Place encampment.
After police broke up the protest, Mr Lees claimed police brutality. “I woke to see about 200 riot police surrounding our protest camp … physically removing people, using painful wrist-locks, and occasionally throwing punches, one of which left a protester in front of me bleeding”, he said. Charges against Mr Lees and other protesters were later dropped.
Mr Minns emphasised he was not seeking changes that would affect union protests or industrial disputes, but police should be in a position to deny repeat applications for marches through Sydney if they didn’t have the resources to deal with it.
“If you were putting on a rock concert on the weekend, you would have to pay NSW police to keep the public safe – this all comes from NSW taxpayers’ back pockets.”
NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman called on Mr Minns to immediately implement a user-pays system for serial protesters, with a general rule against authorisation if organisers of repeat protests failed to meet the costs.
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