Tuesday, 14 May 2024

Community safety

Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (19:22): (657) My adjournment today is for the Premier. The action I seek is for the government to ensure the safety and rights of protesters at university encampments for Palestine. Over the last few weeks thousands of students have set up tents at campuses around the world to show solidarity for the people of Palestine and call for an end to the atrocities being inflicted on them by the Israeli military. I recently visited the University of Melbourne encampment. Students from a wide range of backgrounds, including Muslim and Jewish students, welcomed us to a peaceful and uplifting environment. They had organised food stations, tea stations and first aid areas. I saw how students organised themselves so that they could still study and get their assignments in while others organised safe spaces for regular prayers and spaces for staff and students to engage in dialogue about what is happening in Palestine. When people from outside the university turned up to deliberately antagonise and intimidate the protesters, the students peacefully held their ground and refused to engage.

These students and staff, like so many of us, have been utterly horrified by watching what is unfolding in Gaza. They want their universities to divest from their partnerships with weapons manufacturers. Their message for the Victorian Labor government is also clear: end your complicity in Israel’s brutal attacks on Palestine. This Labor government in Victoria has signed an MOU with the Israeli Ministry of Defense – actively signed that MOU. If that was not bad enough, Labor in Victoria has given taxpayer dollars to Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer whose drone killed an Australian aid worker in Gaza and whose equipment has murdered literally tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, including tens of thousands of innocent children. Let us be clear here: with these decisions Labor is choosing a side, and it is not the side of the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians who are being killed.

Like millions of students before them, these brave students are standing up and using the tools available to them – their voices and their bodies – to say, ‘No. No, not in our name.’ And make no mistake, protests like this change the course of history. It was student protests that changed the course of the Vietnam War and helped lend international pressure to end apartheid in South Africa. Today students on campus are changing history before our eyes, yet disappointingly we have seen agitators turn up at these peaceful protests at all hours of day and night to cause violence, including people armed with bats and bottles and fire extinguishers. The government must work with universities and the police to ensure that peaceful protest and free speech on campus is allowed to exist. Labor might want to sweep these students’ message under the carpet, but students’ voices will continue to be heard.