The University of Sydney's new Campus Access Policy is clear retaliation against effective, student-led demonstrations calling for an end to the University's relationships with weapons companies and institutional links to Israel following the genocide in Gaza.
These shocking new powers to detain students flow on from a decade-long trend of the criminalisation of activism in NSW. Draconian and undemocratic anti-protest laws rushed through the Parliament by the then Coalition Government and supported by Labor in 2022 have led to extreme and harmful impacts on protestors and the fundamental right to protest in NSW.
Across the state, young people are threatened with fines and prison sentences for climate and environmental activism. Knitting Nannas are dragged through the courts and forced to prove the harsh laws used against them were unconstitutional. Right now the punitive and severe anti-protest laws that make this possible are under review by the Attorney General and there is a growing call across civil society to scrap them altogether.
Sydney University has a proud tradition of student protest against injustice. It was the site of landmark demonstrations for First Nations rights, against the futile and failing war in Vietnam and the barbaric, state-sanctioned violence of Apartheid South Africa. The University community should be able to continue to bravely stand up in the face of injustice without the threat of being detained by campus security out of inconvenience to management or sent to prison or fined by the police or the criminal system.