Vegan activist Tash Peterson — well known in Western Australia (and beyond) for her confronting animal rights protests — has left the state after being banned from every one of WA’s licensed venues including nightclubs, pubs, licensed events, liquor stores, restaurants and bars. Heck.
“I have no doubt it is an attempt to try and silence me as an animal rights activist,” Tash told the ABC. “And I believe I have my rights to speak up for non-human animals in a non-violent manner, and I’m always non-violent in my protesting.”
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The ban is under Section 115AA(2) of the Liquor Control Act. Under the law, the Commissioner of Police (or his delegate) is able to issue this ban when it is believed “on reasonable grounds” that the person has broken any law at or near licensed premises, or has been violent, disorderly or indecent.
The Liquor commission overseeing the use of the law wrote that the purpose of the ban was to “protect the general public or a licensee and is not to act as a tool to punish the offender”. But other experts think that the ban against Tash isn’t for its intended reasons.
A lecturer at Edith Cowan University and the school of Business and Law, Haydn Rigby, told the ABC that these kinds of banning notices are “for the people who get violent, and they hurt people, they glass people.”
“It’s really clearly designed to kind of address disorderly indecent behaviour or disorderly conduct associated with alcohol consumption,” Murdoch University Associate Professor Anna Copeland added.
“It’s that problem that every Act has to be limited [to its purpose] because, otherwise, you would have overreach on all sorts of fronts. I think it is misusing the Act in this circumstance.”
But the written decision from the Commission stated: “It is sufficient that the incident took place upon licensed premises.”
Under international human rights treaties that our country has signed onto, Australians have the right to peacefully protest. But they differ per state and territory and WA does not have its own Human Rights Act. WA Labor Government distributed a draft bill to introduce its own Human Rights Act in 2017 but the bill was never passed.
This makes it difficult for Tash to challenge the barring order. University of Sydney law professor Simon Rice told ABC that if Tash’s ban was made in QLD, ACT or NSW, for example, then “She’d have a basis for asking the courts whether the act against her, the exclusion of her, is a proportionate limit on her right of free speech.”
Tash has been convicted over her protests, including one count of trespassing and two counts of disorderly conduct. She plans to appeal the latter two through the Supreme Court.
