Australian Politics and Active Citizenship
Introduction
Australia has a long history of protests. Following George Floyd’s murder in the U.S., protestors gathered in Sydney to rally against Indigenous deaths in custody. Other Australian cities also planned the demonstrations. As a result, Scott Morrison warned Australians against “importing the things that were taking place overseas to Australia.” Under the banner, “Black Lives Matter,” Australians protested against divisions that are being seen in America due to white supremacy. In the lens of liberal democracy, these protests have both merits and demerits to citizens and the country at large.
Arguments for
The legal ground of the right to protest in NSW is the common law right to peaceful assembly. The Australian Constitution protects the right to peaceful assembly under the implied freedom of political communication. The recent protests in Australian cities, “Black Lives Matter,” can be defended based on the following reasons:
Demonstrations allow citizens to voice their concerns: The right to assemble grants citizens the right to protest against the unfair application of the rule of law by the government. In Australia, for example, the protests allowed the citizens to demand justice over minority deaths in police custody.
Sign of solidarity: When masses of people protest, this attracts government attention, for it shows the magnitude of the issue to the citizens. Like in the case of Australian protests, the demonstrators shown solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Indigenous rights groups demanded that the government stop black deaths in custody.
Protests give subjects the illusion to exercise liberal democracy: As a nation, Australia maintains a stable liberal democratic system as stipulated in the Constitution. The power is not only vested to its federal government but also the people. Thus, such protests allow the people to vent their anger and pressure the federal government to act in collaboration with the rule of law, to ensure that the right to live is equally acquitted to all citizens without any form of discrimination.
Arguments against
Damage of property and committing of crimes: Although holding protests helps transform the history of governance for better, in contemporary Australia, such demonstrations have been used as a sinister scapegoat to steer hateful crimes and actions by citizens. Often, the right to assemble and speak result to damage of property, injury of citizens, and committal of other crimes such as stealing and looting of property. In my opinion, these cannot be termed as peaceful protests by people claiming their rights. In Australia, the fear by the government that the protestors can damage properties across its cities made the government counter-act, with the prime minister warning that Australians must avoid copying what the Americans were doing following Floyd’s murder by a white cop.
Peaceful protests can turn violent: In my opinion, peaceful protests no longer work; they have fallen short of grace. Although the Constitution protects the act of protesting in Australia, protests have changed from a noble cause to something that a democratic government can use to get looters into a jail card. Typically, protestors are forgetting the essence of demonstrators and changing its significance by committing evil deeds that do not promote change but instead create more divisions.