Her right eye swollen shut, blood streaming down her cheeks. Hannah Thomas posted the image after sustaining injuries while being arrested and forcibly removed from a pro-Palestine protest last Friday. Thomas, who ran as a Greens candidate against Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in his electorate of Grayndler in 2025, may lose sight in her right eye.
So far, the only person to face any legal sanction for this is Thomas herself — for allegedly hindering or resisting a police officer and refusing to comply with a direction to disperse — and four other protesters.
“I’m five foot one. I weigh about 45 kilos. I was engaged in peaceful protest, and my interactions with NSW Police have left me potentially without vision in my right eye, permanently,” Thomas said via an Instagram video from her hospital bed on Sunday night.
She had clear culprits in mind:
I look like this now because of [New South Wales Premier] Chris remembers and [New South Wales police minister] Yasmin Catley and their draconian anti-protest laws and their attempts to demonise protesters, especially protesters for Palestine. They’ve emboldened the police to crack down with extreme violence and brutality, and they were warned that those laws would lead to this outcome.
Crackdown on dissent
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New South Wales Labor has always been clear about its views on protest.
“I don’t want to see protests on our street at all, from anybody,” New South Wales Police Minister Yasmin Catley said in the days following the Hamas atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. “I don’t think anybody really does.”
But in February this year, in the aftermath of the Dural Caravan hoax (more on that later), NSW passed new laws restricting the right to protest, and police were given additional powers to move on protesters near places of worship. Further, any conduct that could be construed as harassment or intimidation of worshippers could result in up to two years in jail. The laws also broadened the coverage of NSW’s protest permit system.
NSW Police has denied that the new anti-protest laws were used in the arrest of Thomas and other protesters, and said the protesters were given a move-on order for allegedly blocking pedestrian access to SEC Plating, the business being protested.
“The new laws that have been mentioned during the media over the weekend were not utilised on this occasion,” NSW Police assistant commissioner Brett McFadden told 2GB.
However, arrest documents for one of the five people charged, which have been reported by both the ABC and Nine papers, included a reference to a protester being outside a “place of worship”.
Dural Caravan
The flurry of legislation followed weeks of roiling media coverage of the discovery of a caravan laden with decades-old explosives and the address of a Sydney synagogue in the outer suburb of Dural in January this year.
As soon as the discovery was leaked to the media, NSW Police said it was considering whether the situation was a “set-up”. Australian Federal Police deputy commissioner of national security Krissy Barrett later contended that the AFP’s experienced investigators “almost immediately” believed the plot was fake on account of how easily the caravan was discovered, how “visible” the explosives were, and, crucially, the lack of any detonator.
None of this stopped NSW Premier Chris Minns from saying the police had discovered “a potential mass casualty event”, adding “There’s only one way of calling it out and that is terrorism.” The next day, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unequivocally agreed with Minns’ assessment.
In March, by which time the anti-protest laws had passed, the hoax was made public. There is currently a state legislative inquiry looking at whether the public was misled in the lead-up to the laws passing.
Minns’ chief-of-staff James Cullen — who, along with four other senior staffers had initially risked arrest by failing to show up when summoned the previous week — told the inquiry on Friday, “The relationship that’s been constructed by some between the Dural caravan event and the passage of those three pieces of legislation is extremely unfortunate and unfair.”
Regardless, McFadden’s insistence that what happened to Thomas did not require this new legislation tells its own story — the crackdown on dissent has been ongoing for years.
The erosion of civil space
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An illustrative detail into just how deep-seated and bipartisan the aversion to protest is in NSW: back in December 2022, under the previous Liberal government, then government minister Alister Henskens happily endorsed the anti-protest laws that sent his niece, climate protester Deanna “Violet” Coco, to jail.
NSW is far from alone. In recent years, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia have all cracked down further and further on dissent, either via legislation or police raids.
Since October 7, 2023, the primary targets have expanded from climate protesters — Australia leads the world in jailing climate protesters — to include protesters against Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Official responses
NSW Police assistant commissioner Brett McFadden was, as you might expect, unrepentant on 2GB: “Our police are asked to do difficult things every single day of the week, and in the information available to me, there’s no misconduct identified, and I back the actions of my police.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke expressed some sympathy toward Thomas’ injuries, but took a similar line.
“When people were asked to move on by the police, they should have followed the police direction. Apparently they didn’t,” he told Sky News.
“The issue of the injury will be dealt with by the police review, but for anyone wanting to have a protest, you know, no-one’s above the law.”
At the time of writing, Albanese has not commented on what happened to Thomas, his former rival for Grayndler and current constituent.