My kid gets a free lesson in social cohesion from the Minns militia

The government’s response to crush our rights under the guise of social cohesion while kowtowing to a murderous foreign regime is a betrayal and epic failure of moral courage. Thea Henstrom reports.

Here is an image of social cohesion in contemporary Australia. It is my young adult child being violently arrested at a November 2025 protest in Sydney against an arms expo showcasing Israeli weapons of war, sponsored by the NSW Minns government. Video footage shows them being pulled over a crowd control barrier, thrown to the concrete, and dragged by four burly officers. They were arrested, locked up, and sustained bruises and lacerations and a trauma that they will carry indefinitely. They now face a potential criminal conviction.

I was at that protest. The police presence was overwhelming: riot police, dog squad, mounted police, snipers on buildings. Pepper spray filled the air, and I copped a lungful. Protesters were injured. Three months later, I understand it was a dress rehearsal for the systematic dismantling of democratic rights we are now seeing.

On 14 December, fifteen people were killed in an attack on Jewish people at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah festival by two assailants with no ties to the Palestine solidarity movement. This was horrific, and deserves unequivocal condemnation.

What followed was cynical exploitation. State and federal governments seized upon the tragedy to justify measures including draconian protest bans and speech laws. These were advocated, says leading Jewish figure Louise Adler, by pro-Israel lobby groups.

It is notable that some of the strongest voices opposing Israel’s actions in Palestine, like Adler, are Jewish, including the Jews Against the Occupation ’48 and the Jewish Council of Australia. These groups have repeatedly highlighted that repressive tactics designed to stamp out protest and speech endanger Jewish people, exacerbating antisemitism. The JCA’s Sarah Schwartz has said that the effect of Minns “hiding behind the Jewish community” and “criminalising various forms of speech”, will be to “make Jewish people less safe, because they can be blamed for increasing violent, oppressive, antidemocratic state power”.

Now, as Ben Saul, Challis Chair of Law at Sydney University and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism says, NSW is one of “the most draconian anti-protest jurisdictions in the democratic world”.

This crackdown is being sold under the Orwellian banner of “social cohesion”. Minns claims his anti-protest laws are designed to prevent “mass protests that rip social cohesion apart”. NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon echoed this, saying protest activity would “aggravate fear and divisiveness”.

This is a crock. My kid has experienced what “social cohesion” looks like under the NSW government. It’s four cops violently restraining them as they protest a genocide. It’s a bruised body, and Kafkaesque criminal charges. It’s a young person now more impassioned than ever to peacefully raise their voice, and at increasingly greater risk of serious physical and legal harm for doing so.

As NSW Council for Civil Liberties president Timothy Roberts observed: “You don’t get cohesion by regulating it through laws and using police powers for arrest. We get cohesion through talking about issues, hearing from all members of our society.”

Then came Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit. The pro-Israel lobby – which former Foreign Minister Bob Carr has described as a “foreign influence operation designed to put the interests of Israel above the interests of Australia” – invited him. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese dutifully fell in line, capitulating so as to avoid an inevitable pile-on abetted by swathes of the mainstream media.

We were instructed by Foreign Minister Penny Wong to recall the context of Herzog’s visit.

Surely this would include the findings of the UN Commision of Inquiry, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty Interntional, the International Assocation of Genocice Scholars and others that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? How about those thousands of dismembered Palestinian bodies filling our news feeds year after year? Herzog’s performative autographing of an artillery shell, like those that have relentlessly rained down upon besieged and starving Palestinians?

And what about the finding of the UN Commission that Herzog incited genocide and its recommendation that he be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court? As Nasser Mashni of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network said, the context “is impossible to forget, Israel’s genocide is ongoing and livestreamed. Humanity has all the context it needs.”

Nevertheless, Albanese and Minns rolled out the red carpet, gladhanding the president of a foreign state that, by its own admission, has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, since October 7, 2023, likely a gross underestimate.

Tens of thousands of us gathered at Sydney Town Hall and around the country to stand in solidarity with Palestine and oppose Herzog’s visit. This was just the latest in over two years of weekly peaceful demonstrations by a movement of, collectively, millions of Australians of all ages, backgrounds and walks of life, including over 300,000 who marched in a downpour over the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2025.

The police presence at dusk in Sydney Town Hall Square on February 9 was chilling. Helicopters whirred deafeningly overhead, scaring the birds from the trees. Hundreds of cops surrounded peaceful protestors in an impenetrable phalanx – like at the arms expo, snipers, riot squad and mounted police. A sound cannon, which may cause permanent hearing damage, sat ready to be deployed.

What occurred there was described by witnesses and legal observers as a police riot. Human Rights Watch condemned the use of “excessive force”. The footage shows a group of NSW police repeatedly head, gut and kidney punching a spindly young man they had already pinned to the ground, his torso blooming yellow and black bruising moments later. They repeatedly lay into an older office worker standing with his hands up. Videos show lines of officers charging into the crowd, and unleashing pepper spray indiscriminately and directly into protestors’ eyes and faces. They show the violent dispersal of a group of Muslims peacefully performing their prayers. An old lady had her arm broken, and another sustained fractured vertebrae. It’s ICE, Australian-style, underwritten by Minns and Albanese.

The scenes mirrored what happened at the November arms showcase, now writ large.

Underpinning this repression is a conflation of legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The weaponisation of this conflation serves to silence political opposition to Israel’s atrocities, and helps enable what we witnessed in Sydney on that Monday night in February.

This is now being codified into law. NSW is considering “hate speech” legislation to ban phrases such as “globalise the intifada”, a reference to resistance against the illegal Israeli military occupation of Palestine (intifada means “shaking off”). Queensland has already announced a ban, with penalties of up to two years in prison for “globalise the intifada”, and for “from the river to the sea” – which calls for freedom from occupation and equal civil and political rights in the region from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Criminalising these words represents an extraordinary legislative assault on our implied freedom of political communication.

Astonishingly, democratic expressions of Palestinian solidarity and critique of Israel have now been re-framed as an insurgency that must be quelled.

Having tested their tactics on individuals like my kid, the state seems emboldened in the view it can brutalise protesters with impunity. The anti-protest laws and speech bans are the legislative architecture for the normalisation and routinisation of the police violence I first saw at the arms expo. Sydney Town Hall on 9 February is the logical progression of a policy that treats democratic resistance as criminality.

The Bondi attack was unspeakable. The government’s response is to crush democratic rights under the guise of fighting antisemitism and protecting “social cohesion” while kowtowing to the interests of a murderous foreign regime. This is both a betrayal of the people and an epic failure of moral courage.

Addendum: There was news on 17 February that the NSW Police Commissioner has (for now) ended the protest bans put in place after the Bondi attack. It is difficult to see this as anything other than damage control after the authoritarian enforcement of social cohesion spectacularly backfired. Whether this represents the first signs of a more generalised move toward the restoration of democratic freedoms and rights remains to be seen.