The following is abridged from a speech by Alex Bainbridge to a 800-strong civil rights rally organised by the Council for Civil Liberties in Hobart on November 12.
I want to begin by telling two stories.
The first is about by-law number 418, which most anti-Vietnam War campaigners in Melbourne in 1968 hadn't heard of, probably because by-law 418, a law against littering, had been on the books for more than 100 years but had never been used. That was until the beginning of 1969, when the Melbourne City Council started using it to stop anti-Vietnam War campaigners from handing out leaflets.
Free speech doesn't get more basic than the right to hand out leaflets. Yet the authorities at the time were quite prepared to use this law in an undemocratic way. The campaigners responded by defying the law; more than 100 people, including Labor MP at the time Jim Cairns, were arrested for handing out leaflets.
Eventually, the authorities had to give in. The anti-war campaigners won that right, as well as other democratic rights such as the right to march on the street, which had not been allowed prior to the anti-Vietnam War campaign.
My second story goes back to the Great Depression era when police and councils routinely tried to prevent unemployed movement activists from spruiking on street corners.
Noel Counihan relates an example from Melbourne in May 1933: "One Friday night, I went out to Brunswick, where there was a horse and a lorry on a vacant lot, and bolted to this lorry was an old steel mesh lift. I was given an old gramophone horn as a loudspeaker and I got in and bolted the lid of my cage from the inside, a sheet of hessian was thrown over it, and off we went down to Sydney Road.
"One of the unemployed was standing guard over a vacant space opposite Coles and he chained the wheel of the lorry to the verandah post of a shop. The driver unharnessed the horse and whipped it away and I was left to get on with it ...
"An enormous crowd gathered and so did the police ... They had no hope [of getting the roof off the cage] of course, so they got a massive piece of timber from somewhere and five or six police used it as a battering ram and charged the wall of the cage. I spoke all about the plight of the unemployed and about the campaign for free speech and, after I'd said all that and saw they couldn't get at me, I talked about broader issues, about the threat of war and the rise of Hitler in Germany — I went on for about 25 minutes."
This shows the creative lengths to which activists had to go to assert the right to free speech. The police eventually got Counihan and fined him, but this episode was part of a successful campaign that, barely a month a half later, resulted in a major victory when the government introduced the Street Meetings Act, which enabled such public meetings to be held.
These stories demonstrate that it is possible to win against government attempts to suppress democratic rights.
The new so-called "anti-terror" laws are a major attack on all of our democratic rights, and we have to build a campaign not only to stop the laws from being enacted, but also in solidarity with those whose democratic rights will, and are being, threatened.
Our experience tells us that it is possible to defeat attempts to suppress our rights. Virtually all our democratic rights have been fought for, and won, by people like us. Even with such laws on the books, strong people's campaigns place limits on how much governments can use them. For instance, sedition laws have been on the books for over 100 years, but the anti-Vietnam War movement rendered them useless. We have to do the same today with the proposed new sedition laws.
Our campaigns need to point out that the premise of these laws is false. The Howard government's "war against terror" is a war of conquest against the Third World. If it really wanted to protect us from terrorism, it would bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan today.
We need to stand in solidarity with the Muslim community and in defence of their democratic rights, because they are the first victims of these laws. But it's also likely that these laws will be used against others — including anti-war activists.
It is no coincidence that many of the free-speech campaigns in Australia's past have been waged by communists, anarchists, socialists and other radicals. So if you support free speech, you also have to support free speech for radicals.
[Alex Bainbridge is the Hobart convener of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 30, 2005.
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