Jail time, climate change, and the philosophy of protest

Colette Harmsen was first arrested on August 27, 2009, for disobeying police orders outside the Tasmania’s Parliament. Since then, the 47-year-old veterinarian cheerfully tells me, she’s racked up 20 charges relating to her climate activism. Each arrest on the list she sends me is set out precisely, with a date, location, charge and the cause it was accrued for: “16/09/2011 trespass land, obstruct — Pulp Mill site Long Reach”, for example. This series culminated in a three-month prison stint this year.

This time Harmsen was protesting native forest logging in Tarkine, home of the critically endangered swift parrot. In a context where harsher laws targeting protest are coming into effect around the country, she is one of many protesters risking prison to continue what they see as an existential fight. 

Prison, in Harmsen’s case, wasn’t as bad as it might have been. She told Crikey: “I found that the inmates that I spent time with were really lovely and friendly and supportive. It was really quite nice at times to make friendships in that kind of space.”

The surveillance and restricted contact was wearing though: “My phone privileges were revoked for a week and I had to have my five friends on my phone list removed because I rang into a couple of protests [aimed at stopping] logging of native forests. So I was punished for doing that. But it was definitely worth it.”

Indeed, if jail was supposed to reform Harmsen’s ways, it was a dismal failure. Harmsen went almost straight from prison to another protest over native forest logging near the Maydena bike trail, roughly 80km north-west of Hobart. Also there was Violet Coco. In 2022, Coco was arrested and sentenced to 15 months in prison for blocking traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, setting off a flare in a public place and resisting police.

Prison time inspires

“Colette and I met on the phone just after I lit up the flare on the Harbour Bridge and I was on 24-hour house arrest,” Coco told Crikey. “She had a court date coming up, and reached out to me because I had just hit the spotlight for the first time.” 

Coco’s sentence was overturned in April, after she had spent 13 days in prison. She said she’d received feedback that her arrest and detainment had increased participation in climate protests: “People were telling me, ‘If you didn’t get out from your prison sentence, we were prepared to, like, block the major bridge here and set off a flare. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so sweet’ … But in my head I was like, ’Why is it that it takes me go into prison for you to feel like that’s the appropriate response when we’re facing the collapse of our liveable planet?’ ” 

She and Colette were two of six protesters at Maydena to have been jailed in the past two years. 

Shock as strategy

Gerard Mazza was one of three people arrested by Western Australian Police Force’s state security investigation group in August for the planned graffiti-ing of the home of Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill. He spent 34 hours in custody.

That was the latest in a series of raids and arrests by WA’s counterterrorism police aimed at climate protests: from the August 2021 arrest of six members of Extinction Rebellion for covering a pedestrian footbridge near Woodside’s Perth with slogans written in washable chalk, to the arrest of two for the “stink-bombing” of Woodside’s annual general meeting this April, to an armed raid on the home of climate activist Joana Partyka after she had spray-painted the Woodside logo on a Frederick McCubbin painting at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Speaking to Crikey, Mazza acknowledged that there was an inherent risk of alienating people via disruptive protests, but it was part of the process.

“Part of what we’re trying to do when we create the disruptions is to create a shock; the kind of shock that catastrophic bushfire season can create, we can kind of create that too,” he said. “The idea is that we create a dilemma. Yes, what we’re doing might be disruptive and maybe inconvenient and maybe offensive even to some people. But what’s the alternative?”  

A bracing moral calculus

The coming summer, which has the potential to be as catastrophic as that suffered in late 2019 and early 2020 offers, via a bracing moral calculus, an “opportunity” for protesters.

“Context is always a very important thing when it comes to social change, and the context that we’re about to step into is one where there’s this catastrophic risk, and that catastrophic risk will make people have to step back a little bit and which could bring us back into a moment like summer 2019-20 where there was that real sense of anger in the community,” Mazza said.

He envisaged it would take “a large-scale, civil resistance movement, large-scale disruption” to change the level of influence fossil fuels have over governments: “What we’re doing is a precursor to that, and hopefully, will help to set it in motion.”

Everyone Crikey spoke to argued that this work was key to their understanding of who they were and what it is to be a human being.

Coco said: “I am a moral philosopher, and I do believe in our pursuit of being a good person and it is our moral duty to dismantle any government that is not serving its people.”

Mazza said: “It’s difficult to do this stuff, but it’s also very rewarding. And it makes I feel like I’m an authentic human being. For me in my situation in life, it’s the way that I can be true to myself and do something meaningful.”

A new avenue of protest

From Tuesday, October 31, to Thursday, November 2, at the ACT Magistrates Court, five Canberra grandparents faced trial over blocking the doors to the local office of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, the fossil-fuel peak body.

The grandparents — represented by lawyer Bernard Collaery, most famous for his work with whistleblowing former spy Witness K — are relying on the “sudden or extraordinary emergency” defence, arguing they were acting reasonably in response to the climate emergency. High-profile “expert witnesses”, including former Liberal leader John Hewson and former chair of the Australian Coal Association Ian Dunlop, were to be called. Thus the trial itself became an avenue of protest.

After an objection from the prosecution, the expert witnesses were not permitted to testify. The judgment has been reserved until December 18.

Do climate protesters enrage you or do you see them as fighting the good fight? Let us know 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.