Kathy Newnam, Darwin
On October 19, social justice campaigner Stuart Highway was sentenced to eight months' jail, suspended after three months, for his involvement in a smoke-in on October 2002.
The smoke-in, organised by the drug-law reform group Network Against Prohibition (NAP), was a protest against the NT Labor government's "drug house" legislation. This law allows police to affix a 1.2 metre-high, fluorescent green sign to a premises declaring it a "drug premises". No criminal conviction is required and no charges have to be laid for a premises to be so labelled.
After the protest, which was attacked by police, Highway and three other NAP members, Michael Barry, Nicolette Burrows and Gary Meyerhoff, were charged with unlawful damage to police vehicles.
Barry and Burrows were each sentenced to five months' jail, wholly suspended. Meyerhoff will face a trial by jury at a later date. In the previous week, he received a five-month suspended sentence for occupying Chief Minister Clare Martin's electorate office on August 1, 2002, the day the "drug house" laws came into force.
NAP activist Fiona Clarke said: "This is all part of the ongoing targeting of NAP members because of their political beliefs, and the ongoing criminalisation of dissent in Australia." This has included attempts to intimidate NAP members by charging them with contempt of court, for which Ema Birkeland Corro was last month given the maximum sentence of 14 days' jail.
Letters can be sent to Stuart Highway at Darwin Prison, PO Box 1407, NT 0801.
From Green Left Weekly, October 26, 2005.
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