Supreme Court prohibits Sydney’s Black Lives matter protest
NSW Supreme Court rules in favour of police, prohibiting Tuesday’s planned Black Lives Matter march. Organisers plan to go ahead.
NSW Police have won their Supreme Court bid to prohibit a Black Lives Rally in Sydney on Tuesday afternoon, but organisers say they will go ahead even if their appeal is quashed.
The NSW Supreme Court has ruled the scheduled protest will not go ahead, refusing the defendants claim that it is unlawful to stop the freedom of public expression.
Padraic Gibson, who is acting on behalf of David Dungay Jr’s family – an Aboriginal man who died in custody in 2015 – said they will be lodging an appeal later on Sunday afternoon.
They plan on changing the location of the protest from Sydney’s Town Hall to the Domain parklands to ensure there is more space for people to remain socially distanced.
Mr Gibson said outside the court on Sunday the protest would go ahead in any case but “we will be running into the Court of Appeal to try and maintain the legitimacy of our initial protest application”.
“We certainly will not be stopping regardless of whatever orders have been handed down by the Supreme Court today,” Mr Gibson said.
He said police had turned the protest “into this massive media controversy where we’re being demonised” and “there is nothing for people in this city to fear from these rallies”.
“The only people that have anything to worry about these rallies [are] the people who have an interest perpetuating racism and injustice against First Nations people,” Mr Gibson said.
He said organisers understood that there was “an enormous amount of fear and anxiety across Sydney about the renewal of community transmission of coronavirus”.
“Very, very unfairly the government, political leaders … and the Police Commissioner have channelled that anxiety towards us,” Mr Gibson said.
“Towards people organising a protest of a few hundred people who are going to be spaced out as much as you can. We are not responsible for the transmission of the coronavirus.”
On Sunday morning, protest organisers said while they were”very concerned” about COVID-19, “racism is also a massive pandemic”.
“You cannot self-isolate and stop racism,” a post on the event Facebook page read.
“You need to stand together and fight for change. We believe we can do that as safely as possible and be safer than many commercial gatherings happening Australia wide.”
Earlier this week, BLM activists accused police of treating them unfairly by moving to block the rally before the movement’s leaders had even submitted a formal application.
In the hearing before the Supreme Court, lawyers for the protest organisers accused the state’s police commissioner, Mick Fuller, of failing to “engage meaningfully” with protesters and making a pre-emptive decision to try to ban the demonstration.
Mr Fuller told a number of media outlets — including The Australian — that he had serious concerns about any mass gatherings being allowed to go ahead in the city, given the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly after an earlier demonstration in Melbourne was linked to a coronavirus outbreak in the city’s public housing towers.
He said he would fight to have all protests and mass gatherings banned in the courts in a bid to safeguard the health of the state’s residents as well as its economy.
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