The demonstration is one of the most tried-and-true tools in the collective political toolbox. A well-placed, well-timed protest can do anything from disrupting industry, to undermining a country’s political leader, to shifting entire political landscapes.
Even if those political goals aren’t met, the collective demonstration has a more immediate purpose: turning political subjects into political actors. The average worker or student spends their day regimented and subordinated, whether this takes the form of chanting “yes sir, yes miss”, to their teachers, following a line manager’s orders at work to ensure they can continue to pay rent and buy groceries, or internalising the structural sycophancy necessary to succeed in academia. These conditions of subordination mean that most people’s first reaction to discomfort or injustice is to appeal to a manager or some other paternalistic figure to solve their problems, instead of looking to themselves – or to each other. The protest undermines this self-reinforcing psychology – it requires people with no enshrined institutional power to claim agency and resist constant subordination through collective self-activity. Historically, the protest and associated social movements have won us everything from the weekend, to a (still contested) resurgence of Te Reo Māori, to the dismantling of South African apartheid.
Any protest worth its salt has clear demands, which are made of a specific target. One of the most common targets is of course the government of one’s country, as the state is the centralised political formation responsible for setting laws – and enforcing them. This is where today’s power struggle lies: the state also sets the rules for “acceptable” protest, and polices what it decides are violations of that acceptability. On a smaller scale, such policing and punitive structures exist within many institutions, such as universities, via policies set by management, and within local government via bylaws.
Please Dissent Using the Proper Channels
Here in Aotearoa, the legal framework surrounding protest and speech is the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. At a glance, the legal right of protest and free speech appears to be universal, protected by freedom of association, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of expression. However, this sphere of universal protest is carved out by a hundred exceptions. In Wellington for example, if your protest dares to disrupt the humble automobile, you’ll need permission from the Wellington City Council – or you’ll face financial punishment for your efforts. At the University of Otago, one may freely express themselves and their ideas, even if controversial, provided they are expressed “in those places and in the manner specifically established by the Director of Property Services” according to their “Campuses and Premises Regulations”. This was not always the case – the campus was once awash in political and artistic messaging, and only a few decades ago student unions were a powerful counterbalance to the (today, literal) policing of the academy. The recent uptick in collective protest action on Otago University campus has resulted in the Proctor’s Office discussing a potential University of Otago Protest Policy, according to documents obtained under the Official Information Act, to “provide some surety and protection to the Proctor’s [sic] as we navigate this challenging, and risk filled area of operation”. The situation at Te Pūkenga is more dire still, as political activity and speech is effectively banned by the boss.
Such restrictions are not aberrations, but reflect an ongoing shift across so-called “liberal democracies”, where everything from speech to the concept of “disruption” is being weaponised by law-makers. Here in New Zealand, anti-genocide protestors have adopted a tactic of noise demonstrations outside the homes of coalition government leaders, in a drive to shift imperialist foreign policy and save lives of Palestinians under illegal Israeli occupation. In response, justice minister Paul Goldsmith led the charge to outlaw demonstrations targeting people in their homes. University of Otago Law Professor Andrew Geddis supports this further restriction on protest rights. As he commented to RNZ in August: “Protests that take place outside someone’s home really do intrude into a sort of domestic sphere where people usually feel they should be able to exist unperturbed and unthreatened. So this particular change in the law will help to restrike that balance.“
Geddis argues that “the criminal law should treat protest effects on people in their private dwellings like it does the protest effects on people trying to picnic in a public park”. The academic drive for legal consistency is commendable, but the interests of the working class here are at odds with the interest of lawmakers. This is perhaps why the government did not allow public input on this law as it was written. An official report from Ministry of Justice officials criticised the “rushed” process of writing this law, as well as the removal of the legal requirement of police to give warnings before arresting protestors. At the time of writing, this Bill has passed its first reading and is in the Select Committee phase.
Socialists should oppose the weaponisation of law to protect the most powerful political figures this nation has to offer. The right to be in public without encountering a protest cannot be allowed to override freedom of speech, and the right of assembly should not be curtailed in the name of combatting ‘disorderly behaviour’ such as overly “offensive” or “insulting” protest. Targets of protest already tend to stretch reality to attempt to paint those protests as violent or intimidating . Nicola Willis and Simeon Brown surely do not genuinely believe that Christian priests singing waiata or workers placing signs outside an office are “intimidating”.
Such chipping away at legal protest rights is cause for concern – though frankly it is almost negligible compared to the overhauling of terror law legislation uncovered in recent months.
Please Dissent Using State-Approved Language
In July 2025, Newsroom revealed that the current coalition government was secretly looking to expand anti-terrorism legislation, to criminalise “public support for terrorist groups.” These legislative changes would be developed through consultation with hand-picked individuals and organisations. That is to say, a backroom handful of shadow consultants and allies of the ruling class would decide on how to police the speech of the public. The backlash to this brazenly anti-democratic plot, spearheaded by multiple civil society groups such as People Against Prisons Aotearoa, Amnesty International and Justice 4 Palestine (among many others), was so strong that it likely influenced the government’s decision to indefinitely extend the consultation period.
It is worth noting that while the abuse of fast-track processes and right-wing authoritarian politicking are favoured tools of this National-ACT-NZ First coalition, the Labour Party has also contributed to the restriction of dissent. In 2019, the Labour-led government passed the Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Act, giving the state greater powers to police New Zealand citizens who are found to have engaged in “terrorism-related” activities overseas. In 2021, Labour passed the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Act 2021, with the support of the National Party, expanding the power of the state to surveil, detain and prosecute people for suspected terrorist activity.
In October of 2023, then-Prime Minister Chris Hipkins contradicted international law, asserting that Israel “has a right to defend itself” against a threat emanating from a militarily-occupied territory, during Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. This ceded ground for the incoming government to label Gaza’s political authority Hamas a terrorist organisation, alongside its already terrorist-labelled armed resistance wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. These designations are not consistent with the international consensus, but rather are predicated on the New Zealand ruling classes’ imperialist ambitions and those of their allies. Attempts to “expand anti-terror legislation” are in fact attempts to build a mechanism by which the state can legally punish any speech that they can claim is in favour of its geopolitical opponents.
Five Eyes are Watching
We have seen how this plays out abroad. The British government (while selling weapons to apartheid Israel during an active genocide) has designated the non-violent direct action group Palestine Action a terrorist entity for the crime of tossing paint on military equipment. This punitive attack on speech is an attempt to curb popular support for national liberation of a people under illegal military occupation. This has already led to the arrest of almost 900 protestors at a demonstration in September. Defend Our Juries, the organisers of the protest, told The Cradle that the arrestees included “priests, war veterans, healthcare workers, elderly demonstrators, families of Holocaust survivors, and disabled people.”
In the US, president Trump has declared the anti-fascist ideology and broad social movement “Antifa” to be a domestic terror group. For many, the instinct may be to jeer and mock the nonsensical nature of such a declaration. Unfortunately, what matters here is class power, and the ruling class can and has mobilised police and military to crush protests. As the US empire atrophies at the periphery, these right-wing, increasingly neo-fascist assaults on free association and speech will only increase in intensity and scope as the US oligarchic ruling class becomes more desperate.
New Zealand is deeply intertwined with the US and its repressive apparatuses. At the end of July 2025, the New Zealand public was informed that Trump-appointee Kash Patel was in the country to open a standalone FBI base in Wellington, following six years of operation from the US embassy. Not only does the New Zealand public have no formal input into the ramping up of imperialist tensions between the US and China in the name of combatting “crime” and “terrorism”, but New Zealand’s Labour Party, as the formal “opposition,” has made clear that it has no problem with the murderous, invasive, anti-socialist, internal police of the USA setting up shop here. Hipkins has offered only “surprise” at being left out of the conversation, while the NZSIS and Labour’s GCSB spokesperson, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, also takes issue only with Labour being left out of the conversation, reminding us that “The FBI has had a strong relationship and collaborated closely with police in New Zealand for years”.
The New Zealand state is a small imperialist partner in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, alongside the US, Britain, Canada and Australia. Tacked on indirectly is Israel, which holds a deep intelligence-sharing relationship with the US, and is bolstered here in Aotearoa through Rocket Lab’s BlackSky satellite launches which have surveillance links with the Israeli Defence Force, according to trade media organisation Intelligence Online. [Editor’s note: since writing, still more evidence has come to light.] As class war deepens in these nations, the space allowed for protest, speech and assembly is bound to be restricted further, resulting in surveillance, political incarceration, or firing from one’s job, as recently happened to comrade Tom Alter in the US, who was fired from his job as a tenured professor for advocating for socialism, according to statements from Firebrand.
Our role today is not to obey creeping authoritarianism and the threat of fascism in advance, but to organise now and build a movement that is too large, strong, and international to be crushed by state troopers. This is of course easier said than done, but we cannot afford to view protest as a mere outlet for discontent, a release valve for the frustrations of an increasingly restrictive “democracy”. If we allow the realm of so-called “legitimate protest” to be encroached upon further, we will not have the capacity to defend climate protestors threatened with imprisonment, or protect anti-genocide advocates from police batons, or fight ideological bosses when they fire socialists on Red Scare grounds.
Our job is to defend the right to freely protest and dissent, to counter right-wing protest with our own self-organised demonstrations, and to build a cadre of educated organisers who know how to protest – and who are ready to take their place in mass movements.
Image: Banksy Mural on London’s High Court – Wikimedia Commons – https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/British_street_artist_Banksy_has_painted_a_mural_on_London%27s_High_Court_depicting_a_judge_beating_a_protester.jpg
