If you live on the east coast of Australia then you, like me, have probably been choking on smoke haze for weeks now. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling as though this eerie, apocalyptic atmosphere is a grim reminder of the future we're heading into.
If you're even less lucky, you might be living in one of the many regional towns across NSW that are rapidly running out of water. In some places, there's even talk of evacuation. Tuesday was also the hottest day ever recorded in Australia. Ever. And the rest of this week is a heatwave that's unprecedented for this time of year — with some areas set to hit 50C.
Toxic air, dwindling water supplies, extreme heat: it's pretty bleak stuff.
And yet, on Sunday afternoon, the UN Climate Change Conference — COP 25 — finished up with very little progress. Although governments recognised that we are currently heading for +3C, and that new short-term targets are urgently needed, few new targets were set, and little progress was made on other fronts. As a result, we way off track to meet the already inadequate Paris target of limiting warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels.
In the face of existential threat, and our new visceral appreciation of what it feels like to live on a rapidly warming planet, it is easy to feel as though confronting climate change is the only relevant game in town. But the fact is, we can't tackle climate change through individual action alone.
Incredibly, research has found that just 20 companies are responsible for over a third of global carbon emissions, while another 70 companies are responsible for a further third of emissions. What this means is that even if you go vegan, adopt a zero waste lifestyle, ditch your car, switch to renewables, and plant hundreds of trees (and, look, this would all be awesome), our planet is still going to warm to +3C or higher, unless we also do something about the vested interests that continue to profit from our demise. And they aren't going to give up their power (or profits) just because we ask nicely, which is where human rights come in.
Human rights are often legitimately criticised as elite liberal tools that work to uphold the status quo, but we need them right now more than ever. We particularly need our rights to freedom of expression and to peaceful protest, in order to make ourselves heard and to force those in power to listen.
"It has been claimed that people can still exercise their rights to protest; they just have to do it in a way that doesn't disrupt lawful activity. But often the whole point of these protests is to question the lawfulness of these disrupted activities."
The problem is that these rights are under serious threat around the globe, including in Australia. In recent years a series of laws have been passed to regulate and criminalise protest, particularly where it might disrupt resource extractive industries.
Perhaps the best known of these laws was the Tasmanian Workplaces (Protection from Protesters) Act 2004, which was successfully challenged in the High Court case of Brown v Tasmania. The Protesters Act excluded protestors from entering 'business premises' and 'business access areas', which included forestry land, land on which forestry operations were being carried out, and the areas around and outside those premises.
The applicants in the case successfully argued that by excluding protestors from such broad (difficult to identify) areas, the law 'impermissibly burden[ed] the implied freedom of political communication contrary to the Commonwealth Constitution'. In other words, it went too far in stopping people from engaging in protest activity. But this hasn't stopped the Tasmanian government from attempting to resurrect this law — with amendments to remove explicit reference to protestors.
Meanwhile, other state governments have been passing their own anti-protest laws. The NSW government's most recent of contribution is the Right to Farm Act 2019. Although presented as a law to protect agricultural activity, this Act actually works to criminalise a whole range of protest activity on 'inclosed lands' — a term that includes public land.
Similarly, the Commonwealth government recently passed the Criminal Code Amendment (Agricultural Protection) Act 2019 (Cth), which makes it an offence to use a carriage service to distribute material 'with the intention of inciting another person to trespass on agricultural land' (i.e. using social media to promote a protest). We were assured that this law was necessary to protect family farms from 'vegan extremists', but 'agricultural land' was defined to even include land used for wood processing facilities or forestry, and land accessible by the public.
Finally, in October this year, the Qld Parliament rushed through a law to criminalise the use of so-called 'dangerous attachment devices', which include a wide range of lock-on devices on the basis that these devices can be used to 'disrupt lawful activities'. When the Legal Affairs and Community Safety Committee called for public submissions on this bill, almost all of the submitters opposed the bill out of concern for its impact on the right to protest. A notable exception was the Queensland Resource Council, which supported the bill while calling for a broader, more flexible definition of 'dangerous attachment devices' in order to prevent protestors from avoiding criminal penalties by adapting.
What all these laws have in common is that they prioritise the convenience of businesses — often resource extractive businesses — over the right to protest. It has been claimed that people can still exercise their rights to protest; they just have to do it in a way that doesn't disrupt lawful activity. But often the whole point of these protests is to question the lawfulness of these disrupted activities. And, let's be honest, they'll never be as disruptive as a bushfire or running out of water.
The reality of living in a changing climate has become all too apparent this year. In response, it is natural to want to do everything we can to reduce our emissions and reduce the impacts of climate change. Ultimately, this means confronting the powerful vested interests who continue to profit from their destruction of our planet. But to do this, we need to protect our human rights — especially the rights to freedom of expression and protest — and to pay more attention to laws that encroach on these rights from governments around the world, including here in Australia.
Dr Cristy Clark is a human rights specialist. Her work focuses on the intersection of human rights, neoliberalism, activism and the environment, and particularly on the human right to water.
Main image: Protestors hold up banners during a protest at Kirribilli House in Sydney on 19 December 2019. Protestors organised the rally outside Prime Minister Scott Morrison's Sydney residence over his absence during the ongoing bushfire emergencies across Australia. (Photo by Jenny Evans/Getty Images)