Incarceration of speech in ‘the most progressive state in Australia’

Back in September 2020 when supporters of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews were bristling at all the “Dictator Dan” jibes, the cops were dispatched to arrest a pregnant woman for a Facebook post.

The woman, Zoe Buhler, had attracted the authorities’ attention — not for any action, but for proposing a protest on a social media platform, which breached the “incitement” provisions of the Victorian Crimes Act.

You didn’t have to agree with any of Buhler’s views to see this as fairly chilling.

Yesterday, after nearly two years, the charges were dropped. Police said to continue would not be “in the public interest”. Last month incitement charges were also withdrawn against anti-vax and anti-lockdown campaigner Monica Smit. Meanwhile, the organisers of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest are still facing prosecution.

It’s so redolent of a different time you may barely remember it, but back when the BLM protests were held in June 2020, before Victoria’s new daily cases were breaching triple digits and before Victoria went into stage-four lockdowns, a great deal of effort was put into finding out exactly where any individual case of coronavirus was contracted.

This is worth remembering when you ask yourself if it’s in the public interest to continue to pursue charges against Crystal McKinnon, an Amangu Yamaji woman and Indigenous research fellow at RMIT, and Gunai and Gunditjmara woman and activist Meriki Onus some two years later. Because to this day there is no evidence anyone caught COVID at that protest.

At the time, Victoria Police warned the protest organisers they would be fined if the chief health officer’s directions were not complied with, but that it would not fine people who attended the rally. Again, this was before the brutal stage-four lockdowns that would dominate the rest of the year in Melbourne. At the time, Victorians could leave home for any reason, but the directions in place required people to take reasonable steps to maintain a distance of 1.5 metres from others and restricted gatherings outside to a maximum of 20 people.

The organisers encouraged protesters to adhere to the restrictions. But of course it’s impossible to prove that every one of the thousands who showed up that day did so, and so the organisers were slapped with a $1652 fine.

Consider also that the Victorian government is so relaxed at the prospect of the COVID wave engulfing hundreds of thousands more people than it already has that it is ignoring the its acting chief health officer’s advice to reinstate a mask mandate.

There’s not much weight to the idea that this is a deterrent against future protests during future lockdowns, because it appears future lockdowns aren’t coming.

Victoria’s recent passing of harsh laws aimed specifically at environmentalists — 12 months’ jail or a $21,000 fine for interfering with timber harvesting operations — makes its view of the right to protest pretty clear.

Still, why is the prosecution of the BLM organisers in the public interest if Buhler’s prosecution isn’t?

Should the Victorian government just drop charges against the BLM organisers and move on? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.