Honourable Members of the Legislative Council,

I imagine that by now you have received numerous pleas to either vote for or against the Police Offences Amendment (Workplace Protection) Bill 2022. I can say with certainty that much of the correspondence will be sincere, motivated either by a drive to protect our active Tasmanian democracy, and the capacity therein for advocacy and protest, or the perceived need to maintain order and the capacity of industry and business to continue operating unhindered by political disruption. I also imagine that by now many of you have made up your minds as to how your vote in the Legislative Council will be exercised. Hence, I will not presume to be able to educate or sway you by repeating the same ideological, philosophical or technical arguments that you have heard many times over the last decade. I merely ask that, in the interest of the function your esteemed chamber serves, you take into account what took place when the first manifestation of this legislative effort was inserted into our political psyche.

It is by no means easy for me to do this. Many good people will see this as treachery. People whose ideals I share, whose aspirations for a Tasmania not beholden to lobbyists and industry heavyweights, I applaud. However, it would be disingenuous of me not to bring to your attention the fact that a counter to this legislative drive was formulated, and remains current and applicable, eight years ago.

To understand this counter, we have to go further back than 2014, to the time when the Wilderness Society, Huon Valley Environment Centre and other organisations and active citizens were sued by Gunns Ltd. At that time protests were being carried out at fever pitch and civil society could no longer stand the degradation of our democracy due to corruption, nepotism and the hubris of corporate influence and heavy-handedness. The environment movement was united by a sense of justified zeal for change. Conservatives, reformists, progressives and moderates could no longer countenance the order of the day. However, organisations and individuals facing litigation could not conduct themselves in the same manner as it was perceived to be detrimental to their chances of success either due to their standing in negotiations with Gunns Ltd or due to the burden of legal costs detracting from the capacity for active resistance and advocacy. Amidst, and due to, these circumstances, the idea of a shared network of ‘banners’ was born.

Activists realised, quite rightly, that the only real virtue of a formalised organisational structure was consistency in branding and repetition of messaging, and with the acquisition of the necessary skills for effective media generation and communications strategies, the same could be achieved by a network of individuals dedicated to the same standards, procedures and operational protocols by the application of a few hundred dollars of canvas and paint.

Still Wild Still Threatened and Code Green came into existence, two banners strengthened by the diversity of experience and tactical enterprise gathered by a subscription to non-hierarchical self-motivation. The individual became responsible and law enforcement agencies and corporations could no longer target the weaknesses of formalised organisational hierarchies. These two collectives, that would accommodate all individual efforts from around the world as long as the foundation principles of non-violence were adhered to, became the tip of the environment movement’s spear and would, over the next nine years, target every link of the extractive and commercial chains of forest industries, to the point that the cost of operation and law enforcement would force government and business to what became known as the Tasmanian Forest Agreement (TFA).

Proponents of the TFA will applaud its success and measure it by numbers of hectares locked away and guarantee of wood supply. Opponents decry its failure to progress the nature and style of resource management. However, the real success of the TFA was the division it sowed amongst a united front of environmental ambition and the subsequent neutralisation of active resistance to the practices regime of the day. Disheartened and dismayed by the seemingly low-flying approach to practices reform, and as a counterpoint to the proclamations of pro-TFA organisations formerly thought of as allies, the perceived need for a new, accessible organisation brought some together and would eventually gave rise to the Bob Brown Foundation.

The election of the Hodgman government brought about the entirely foreseeable dismantling of the TFA and the subsequent introduction of the first anti-protest legislation. The environment movement remained split along lines of support for the TFA or otherwise, and those that wanted to continue actively campaigning in Tasmania’s forests gravitated to a new organisational home and the Bob Brown Foundation was born.

The Foundation benefited from decades of learnt agility and professionalism and seamlessly incorporated old and new media practices in a global hearts-and-minds campaign. The use of increasing cost to industry and law enforcement in a campaign of attrition was perceptibly abandoned and communications became the preferred tool, one that was very successfully employed on a global stage. One result of its phenomenal early successes was that the Foundation suffered from what all advocacy organisations eventually experience – its branding assets and energy could only be deployed in a limited number of places at once. The movement, or what remained of it, saw its domestic impact sandboxed and direct-action campaigns centralised.

Why is this historical narrative important to your deliberations? It is important because alongside the conception of the Foundation, a sister-strategy to revert to the former decentralised, local organisation of resistance was formulated to counter the foreseeable eventual emergence of anti-protest legislation that would not suffer from legal and constitutional inadequacies to the same extent as that first effort did. That is where we find ourselves today.

The only practical impact, if successful, the Bill will have is to increase the reach and effectiveness of the Foundation’s considerable communications and fundraising capacity. It will not curtail environmental protest activity in Tasmania.

What may change is that the Foundation’s banner will appear outside the protest zone and not inside it. Individuals will take responsibility for their own actions and legal professionals that assist them by advocacy in the courts will continue to refer to the individual client. Increased fines will be payed at the same fortnightly rate as now, court lists will be populated by cases and should more activists take to the idea of breaching court-imposed restrictions to use a term of imprisonment as a symbol of the absence of social license for current resource management regimes, overburdened and understaffed prisons will bear the cost of becoming a tool of protest as there is simply no rehabilitation for an ideologically and philosophically justifiable position. The environment movement will once again be united by a homogeneous stance of opposition.

I challenge the proponents of the Bill to demonstrate otherwise. I humbly request, that in the absence of such demonstration, the Bill be abandoned.

With gratitude for your time,
Ali Alishah