David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Today I presented to parliament the Right to Protest Bill 2025. The bill seeks to protect one of the most fundamental democratic rights: the right to peacefully assemble and protest. It does it by putting into Australian law the rights enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

As global temperatures rise and social movements demand action, governments around the world are responding, but they're responding not with solutions but with suppression. In Australia we've witnessed an alarming erosion of our right to protest over just the last decade. This creeping authoritarianism, often cheered in this chamber, must be stopped. We can't allow governments to make protesting so legally dangerous that the only demonstrations left are those that cause no inconvenience, challenge no authority, achieve no change or are signed off by the powers that be. The Right to Protest Bill 2025 is about reversing this trajectory.

The Right to Protest Bill 2025 affirms that dissent is not a crime. It puts into law that Australians have the right to gather, to speak, to demand better from their governments without fear of police crackdowns or punitive legal consequences. We know the challenges of the coming decades: the climate crisis, the inequality crisis and corporate overreach. They're not going to be solved quietly. The people will not stand by idly as their future is literally sold out from under them, even if that's what the government would prefer. This bill, the Right to Protest Bill 2025, says they won't have to. I will see you in the streets.