Right to protest defended at public forum

By CHRISTINE LAI

Students at the University of Sydney held a public forum last Thursday discussing free speech on campus and the right to protest. The public forum follows the suspension of two USyd students for protesting the former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at a Sydney Law event in September last year, and the arrest of an activist off campus for protesting the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).

Deaglan Godwin, one of the students under suspension, chaired the panel. Guest speakers in attendance at the panel included: Greens Senator David Shoebridge, USyd Enviromental Officer Maddie Clarke, Education Officer and activist Cherish Kuehlmann and investigative journalist and activist Wendy Bacon.

2023 USyd Enviro Officer Maddie Clarke denounced the university’s decision to suspend both her and Deaglan, declaring that “he [Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull] should not be allowed to walk around without being criticised”.

Clarke stated that students “should not forget the crimes of politicians, even after they’ve left office”, reminding attendees of the forum of the Robodebt Scheme, introduced by Turnbull’s government that ran for four and a half years, using a defective computer algorithm to create unlawful fake debts against hundreds of thousands Australians.

The Robodebt scheme ran from July 2015 to November 2019, using an average of income through the Australian Tax Office (ATO) data to calculate debt repayments. During this time, $1.73 billion in unlawful debts were raised against more than 400 000 people.

“This scheme saw hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients get notices demanding payment for tens of thousands of dollars within a matter of weeks. People committed suicide and went through horrific ordeals trying to find a way to pay the money back”, Clarke stated.

She responded to the outcome of the internal investigation suspending her and Godwin, describing it as “constituting an attack on left wing activists at Sydney Uni”.

Clarke said “According to the university, we made him [Turnbull] feel very scared. This is a man who’s been in Question Time, many times. This is a politically targeted attack on university student activists”.

Journalist Wendy Bacon speaks on free speech and right to protest

Investigative journalist Wendy Bacon described the suspension of Clarke and Godwin as “ludicrous that it was regarded as a restriction of free speech”.

Bacon spoke on Turnbull’s decrying student activists closer to fascism than anything the students did.  “What is more fascist is the whole idea that the university expects people to be compliant. In my experience as an academic at UTS, there is a creeping control over free speech which seeks to intimate academics from speaking to the media,” she said.

She reflected on the “creeping authoritarianism on campuses, of academic freedoms and of political repression” from her time as student journalist at Tharunka in the 1970s.

Bacon was arrested following the publication of a poem titled “C— is a Christian Word” during her term as an editor on UNSW Magazine Tharunka when she was 23 years old. The poem was a protest of anti-censorship and Bacon was remanded for eight days in  Silverwater Remand and Reception Centre, then Mulawa Women’s Prison; this event was a defining moment in the fight for free speech during that time. She spent several other short terms in prison for protesting.

The right to protest is essential

Greens Senator David Shoebridge defended the right to protest, asserting that the “right to protest is the right to have that moment where somebody with substantially less power gets to challenge someone with greater power. It’s about creating that moment of friction,” he said.

When asked why freedom of speech is important for left-wing people Clarke responded, “The right to free speech is something the left has always taken up. It is important for the left to reclaim this because it is the capitalist system that is always trying to repress left-wing voices for ordinary people. They want to continue making billions of dollars without anyone challenging them”.

Kuehlmann echoed Clark’s sentiment, asserting that the right to freedom of speech was a question of “who has power in society”. She referenced conservative group ‘Christian Lives Matter’ as an example of right-wing politics that were being “espoused to give them the right to say whatever they want without being criticised for it”, and it was vital to “fight against this”.

The panel shared their ideas on what was the last step for “resisting encroachment on one’s civil liberties”, with a unanimous judgment on the need to “keep fighting and defying these anti-protest laws”.

“Protests are the only way to win such civil liberties. Plus it puts the onus on left-wing people to get involved and to show defiance in times of extreme repression,” Clarke said.