I was intimidated by anti-immigration protesters. But rules can’t depend on the cause

A few weekends ago, I caught the train into Melbourne’s CBD. As it rolled into Flinders Street, a group of about five readied themselves to board. There had been a March for Australia in the city that day, and this group must have been there. Draped in Australian flags, smelling of alcohol, and shouting as they entered, they shifted the whole mood in the carriage.

Immediately, my mind recalled the original anti-immigration marches across Australia, about a fortnight earlier, where one man told of being assaulted by a protester for wearing a Brazilian soccer shirt. I then remembered it’s common for me to be recognised in public, and in my experience, that can go one of two ways: it can exempt me from people’s prejudice because I’m familiar, or it can heighten it because I symbolise the enemy and become a prime target. I quickly moved to another seat, with my back to the group, hoping not to be recognised. What I felt in that moment is properly described as fear. When they got off not long after, I felt relief.

Was my fear justified? Honestly, who knows? Stories of assault in these protests are the rarest of exceptions, even at this febrile moment, so odds are nothing will have happened. But that didn’t make it feel less precarious at the time. I recount this story, not to seek any sympathy, but to make it clear that when people talk of feeling fear as a result of continued protest activity in our cities, I understand and sympathise. I’ve experienced it. And that experience sits atop years of very targeted anti-Islam rallies, from Reclaim Australia to Stop the Mosques. A then-government MP spoke at some of them.

A horrible feeling. But also a dangerous one. If I trusted it, I’d be calling for increased police powers to shut such protests down. I’d be asking politicians to ban or restrict them. In short, I’d be appealing to the state to curtail protest, and I’d be doing so for ultimately political reasons. And in doing so, I’d be dismantling the very ideas that underwrite democracy. Because if we believe protest is a fundamental democratic feature, we cannot erode it out of discomfort, inconvenience, or even speculative fear. We need more robust principles than that. None of which means the right to protest is absolute. It isn’t. It’s just to say we need to be extremely careful about why and how we want to limit it.

Among the very worst reasons is that we don’t like the politics of the protest. But look closely and you’ll see this is at the heart of most of our responses. In May, farmers and firefighters shut down Melbourne to protest a new levy. The coverage was overwhelmingly sympathetic. When climate activists do this, we introduce legislation making it an offence to disrupt major roads, as NSW did in 2022. NSW police tried (unsuccessfully) to use these laws to block August’s pro-Palestine protest on Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Perhaps in response to this, progressives have taken to the refrain that “the problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting”. I understand the impulse, but this simply makes the same mistake because it raises the question: what if you object to what they’re protesting? What if it’s an anti-vax protest or anti-immigration protest? Do different rules apply? No commitment to the right to protest can survive that sort of approach.

The logical extension of that is what we saw last weekend, when some hard-left counter-protesters, hoping to confront an anti-immigration rally, came armed with makeshift weapons. The result was two hospitalised police officers, while protesters allege police violence hospitalised several of their number. But counter-protest organisers also declined to condemn any violence coming from their own protesters, and accused the police of “facilitating the hateful demonstration”, thereby “exercising white sovereignty to defend a white Australia ideology”. The assumption seems to be that police should refuse to facilitate a protest when it embodies an objectionable ideology. That is asking the state to decide which ideas are permissible; a principle the hard left might come to regret.

But this instinct lurks in less radical responses, too. Take Philip Dalidakis, a former Andrews government minister, who made a thoughtful argument in The Age for an NSW-style permit system, where protesters seek police approval a week in advance, especially where they would block trams or major roads. But, he insisted, “protected industrial action must remain exempt”, which immediately seeks to treat protest differently based on what it’s about. Perhaps Dalidakis is right that “workers fighting for fair pay or safe conditions should never fear being locked up or fined simply for standing up for their rights”. But it’s less clear why, provided they aren’t violating hate speech laws, people protesting what they see as a genocide, or against their families being slaughtered, should face such fear.

Perhaps, then, there is some small mercy in the fact we’re now ricocheting between protests of opposite political persuasions. As pro-Palestinian protests yield to anti-immigration and anti-fascism protests, there’s an opportunity for us to sharpen our concerns beyond some gut-feel objection to this or that rally. If our concern is violence, then prosecute the perpetrators – even if they are police, as is now formally alleged in the Hannah Thomas case in Sydney. The same is true for hate speech. If, however, we’re concerned that CBD businesses are being cruelled through no fault of their own because of incessant protests repelling customers, and that eventually this will hollow out the city, then we need laws that allow courts to consider the cumulative effect of protests and find a lower-cost way of facilitating them.

What we don’t need is the demonisation of protest as such. Or to form our response around which protesters we do and do not like. Or some belief that protest is only legitimate where it is neither disruptive nor inconvenient. Such is the price of democracy. It’s not cheap or efficient. But it’s a price we long ago committed to paying.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author and academic.

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