Liberal-Democratic States and the Politics of Criminalising Climate Activism in the Anthropocene, Australia-2007-2024.

Global warming driven by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, is the most significant political feature of the Anthropocene. Since 1997 successive Australian governments have used spin and greenwashing to cover up their active policy support for Australia’s fossil fuel industry while avoiding compliance with the 2016 Paris Agreement.

In response a climate movement comprising hundreds of environmental organisations, has mobilised hundreds of thousands of Australians, including children and young people,

to demand government action. Ostensibly liberal-democratic Australian governments have responded by criminalizing climate action and especially direct action.

Why do liberal-democratic governments criminalise non-violent dissent?

Why in particular do these governments add to extensive police powers and a vast array of existing repressive legislation, by introducing new laws criminalising peaceful protest activity? The paper begins by documenting the scale of repressive Australian legislation criminalising direct action by environmental activists introduced between 2007-2024.

The paper then focusses on a recent case when the NSW government responded to climate activists engaged in direct action in 2022-3 with savage new laws criminalising direct action which even Italy’s current far-right Fratelli d’Italia government has merely threatened to introduce. Using this case, I propose an ideal-typical account of how governments come to introduce new repressive legislation. The paper then addresses the problem posed by the fact that Australian governments already have a massive body of law with which to quash dissent: why pass new legislation? I ask whether one body of recent work by scholars interested in the criminalisation process sheds any light on the matter. Given my negative assessment of that literature, I draw on Bourdieu’s theory of the state as the source of symbolic violence to interrogate the (il)liberal trope that liberal-democratic states are always compelled to balance the needs of order versus freedom.