Today in Parliament, Abigail spoke in support of a Greens disallowance of the Major Events Amendment (Israeli Presidential Visit) Regulation 2026, warning against police violence, the government’s role in inciting that violence and the need to defend our fundamental democratic rights.
Abigail said:
I support the disallowance of the Major Events Amendment (Israeli Presidential Visit) Regulation 2026, which grants additional powers to police to suppress legitimate protests against the visit of Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel. President Herzog has been found by an independent United Nations commission to have incited genocide. That is a crime under both Australian and international law. Yet he has been invited here by the Albanese Labor Government, and his trip has been facilitated by the Minns Labor Government, as an official honoured guest of those governments.
While the New South Wales Government rolls out the red carpet to a man legitimately accused of inciting genocide, the public is appalled. The Government is of course fully aware of that. While the Premier bleated about social cohesion, it was already preparing for a violent repression of political dissent. Tens of thousands of us came together to express our dismay and outrage at our Government wrapping itself around, and granting legitimacy to the actions of, the head of state of a country that has been waging a genocidal campaign of collective punishment and displacement against the Palestinian people.
The sometimes hidden brutality of coercive state power and authorised violence that serves the interests of imperialism, extractivism and capital took its mask off on Monday night for the whole world to see. Those excesses and abuses—which for so long have been wielded and activated against First Nations people and ethnic and cultural minorities in this country—were brought to bear on society as a whole in defence of not just one man found guilty of incitement of genocide but also a political and economic system that relies on the oppression of people around the world and at home, a system that claims to be founded on the consent of the public but, when its dominance is challenged in any way, is willing to instead rely on the public's submission, and a system that is crumbling. Antonio Gramsci is a theorist and practitioner of anti-fascist struggle, whose insights are particularly important today. He wrote in his famous Prison Notebooks from a jail cell in Mussolini's fascist Italy:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
These morbid symptoms can be seen today in the turn towards social reaction, anti-immigration sentiment, the stifling of dissent, and police overreach and violence towards political activism. By deploying the full violent power of the police against peaceful protesters expressing their dismay at the presence and warm embrace of that genocidal head of state, the Minns Labor Government is acting in concert with those same reactionary forces that are lashing out against civil society, against pluralism and equality, and against those who dare to hope and struggle for a better and more equal world. The state maintains its power through coercion and direct control over society through institutions like the military and the police. But, in a hegemonic state, the ruling class does not rely solely on force to maintain control. Just as important is the way in which it seeks to manufacture consent among the population through media and propaganda, through alliances with other social groups and incorporating their interests into the interests of the dominant ideology, and through the neutralisation of opposition through silence or cooption.
In New South Wales the propaganda machine is in full swing. The Premier claims police were put in an "impossible" situation and their violence was proportionate. The Premier and police Minister have sought to place the blame for police violence on the rally organisers and the victims of police brutality. In defence of their actions, New South Wales police said protesters "made their choice"—indicating that the mere presence of protesters was carte blanche permission for the police to inflict horrific brutality and dangerous inflammatory tactics against them. That is not an impossible situation; that is premeditated violence. The premeditated police violence comes directly from the top. The Premier said:
This is a situation that's incredibly combustible. And the circumstances that weren't shown on the news this morning, or on TV last night, is what would have happened if protesters breached police lines ... it would have been dangerous ... it would have been infinitely worse if NSW police didn't do their job last night.
That is an admission that this was a pre‑emptive assault on protesters who had not presented any danger to the public in any way. The entire basis for the police violence inflicted on people demanding peace and for the reasonable and universal application of international law is an utter fabrication, a delusional fantasy or convenient fabrication of an imagined potential danger.
The Premier and police are telling us not to believe our own eyes and not to listen to the stories of the countless victims of police violence from Monday night, and to instead be grateful that an imagined threat had not occurred and to use that to justify real violence by police. The Premier—and the police—is telling us, "Yes, the footage is bad, but—bear with me—imagine, if you can, something worse than that and then imagine that happening. Well, that's what could have possibly happened if we hadn't beaten these people to a pulp. I cannot provide any evidence or reason to believe that would have actually occurred, but just imagine if it had. In those circumstances, I think the indiscriminate violence against peaceful protesters is justified. Don't you? Therefore the police should have complete impunity to act as aggressively as they like, because it's not as bad as the worst thing you could imagine that I have now put in your head."
Where do we draw the line? We have spent a lot of time in recent months talking about restricting rhetoric that could be conceived to constitute an incitement to violence. How about we apply that test to the Premier and the police themselves? How could those comments and the expectation and permission structure for violence they contain constitute anything other than an incitement to violence? But, of course, state power is never considered violence, no matter its brutality. What about the Government's decision—as it scrambles to reclaim a narrative that is getting away from it in the face of truly damning footage—to leak the details of arrestees to hostile conservative media? That is the exact same tactic that was used against people charged after the 1978 Mardi Gras protest, and the fact that those names were leaked to the press makes it clear that the Government wants to retaliate against anyone who dares criticise it.
Even if we take the Government's protestations at face value—that its actions were to preserve social harmony, to protect public safety or to keep protesters away from attendees at the International Convention Centre [ICC] event with President Herzog—the police have failed on every one of those self-imposed metrics. The intended march route would have taken us further from the ICC, not closer. In fact, the police instructed protesters to make their way down George Street, heading south—the exact route you would take if the intention was to disrupt the ICC event, which nobody had any intention of doing. The protection of public safety was clearly, dramatically, tragically undermined by police brutality. Injuries abound. A public was brutalised. Even lawyers and medics were assaulted by police. And social harmony has been ruptured, and not just by the presence of Herzog. One only has to witness the group of peaceful men engaged in prayer being set upon by police to understand the gross betrayal of multifaith communities that has occurred.
The Premier, Chris Minns, has asked us all to consider the context. The context is that a genocide is occurring. The context is that earlier this week, as Herzog began his Australian trip courtesy of the Australian Government, Israel's security cabinet announced plans to tighten Israel's grip over the occupied West Bank, which would allow Jewish Israelis to buy West Bank land directly and extend greater Israeli control over areas where the Palestinian Authority exercises power. That sparked outrage from the international community, with the UN head Antonio Guterres saying he was gravely concerned by the decision. The action continues Israel's explicitly genocidal campaign. Guterres warned the changes were "eroding the prospects for the two-state solution". That is clearly the plan.
Announcing the plan, Israeli finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed the intention was to "continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian State ... deepening our roots in all regions of the land of Israel and burying the idea of a Palestinian State". Welcoming the President of that country at this time only serves to legitimise the actions and decisions of the Cabinet and Government of Israel and the decisions they are taking. By providing that regime with political cover and legitimising its actions against the Palestinian people, our governments intertwine themselves further in complicity. Implementing the additional police powers and expending State resources to facilitate the journey by the Israeli President signals an endorsement of those actions by the Government.
When we vote on the disallowance, The Greens will demonstrate that we do not endorse those actions—not in our name and not with our consent. If the actions on Monday are anything to go off, we need to work together to strengthen our resolve and resilience. We need to organise our workplaces and our communities and build deeper ties of solidarity so we can overcome those awful, dark forces and morbid symptoms. I say to members and others to please come and speak to me if they have any questions about what happened on Monday or if they want to see the footage showing that I did absolutely nothing wrong and yet was brutalised by three separate attacks from police. I have only just been able to write again today because the coordination in my hand is gone from the attack. I have heard a lot of ignorant speech being repeated in the Chamber today.
Read the debate in Hansard here.
12 February 2026