NSW ‘anti-protest’ laws fall down on first test in Mudgee court

“Today is a fantastic outcome for the Wollar Three and it’s also a broader statement about the predicament that villages like Wollar find themselves in. You’ve got three people who went beyond, put themselves on the line, standing up for things that are really important,” solicitor Sue Higginson said outside the court.

“These protester laws were the product of the then-Baird government introducing anti-protest legislation and they’re really significant charges with penalties of facing up to seven years imprisonment. Today the three defendants were found not guilty of those charges.

“The two Crimes Act offences associated with people interfering with mines and equipment belonging to the mine, the legislation introduced attempted to make those offences as broad as possible to capture behaviour like this. Where you have people standing on a road in front of a mine stating their conscientious objection.”

However, Ms Higginson said that while charges for obstructing a mining operations in this case were dismissed for lack of evidence, a different charge of ‘interfering with equipment associated with the mine’, may have been interpreted far more broadly and resulted in criminal convictions.

And that the question of whether these anti-protest laws breach the implied freedom of political communication under the Australian Constitution, didn’t need to be answered.

“What happened here is the police laid two charges, one in relation to rendering the road belonging to a mine useless and also interfering with equipment associated with and belonging to,” she said.

“Under the law the definitions of ‘belonging’ traditionally – and what’s maintained here – connotes real ownership of the equipment of the mine and the road.

“The prosecution did not present the evidence required to show ownership, so these charges failed on this account. The Magistrate did say though is that had the charge have been rendering useless equipment associated with a mine, as oppose to belonging, perhaps these charges could’ve been made good.

“That’s a really important understanding of these laws as they’ve been passed by the NSW Parliament to crack down on members of the community that are protesting things like losing a village to a mine.

“That question is still live and open, ‘do these actually burden that freedom of political communication?’ What we know that in these facts and these circumstances, with the law applied to these three people, that’s not the case.”