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The Defence Special Undertakings Act 1952 (Cth) is a draconian piece of Cold War legislation originally passed to provide security for British atomic testing in Australia. There are only two known prosecutions under the Act, both involving Christian pacifists entering the Pine Gap prohibited area. In 2007, the first ever convictions under the Act were overturned on appeal. A second prosecution has now commenced. This article considers the history and context of the current prosecutions and contends that the Act is being used to suppress contemporary dissent in a period in which the Australian government already faces criticism of its treatment of the right to protest.

Environmental destruction and climate change are driving new waves of environmental activism. In response, governments in several Australian states have enacted legislation designed to penalise and silence political protest. This article analyses Tasmania’s anti-protest laws and considers how the United Nations and scholars have reacted to them. We argue that protest suppression laws such as these reflect a neoliberal rationality which conceptualises society in market terms. This mode of thinking perceives protest as market interference rather than civic participation. Accordingly, anti-protest laws seek to secure the rights and interests of corporations to unimpeded market access.

This article argues that the colonization of Australia was justified by denying that Indigenous peoples possessed recognizable societies, law, property rights or sovereignty. This denial, in turn, rests upon the supposition that Indigenous Australians were living in a ‘savage’, pre-civilized state: the state of nature of liberal theory. Such concepts, deeply embedded in western political thought, informed the view that Australia was a terra nullius or unowned land. Consequently, the contrast between ‘savagery’ and its counterpart, ‘civilization’ formed a critical element of colonial arguments that Australia could be colonized without either a war of ‘conquest’, or making a treaty. We argue here that more than 14 years after the rejection of terra nullius in Australian law, its legacy and the assumptions that underpinned it persist in the concepts more recent debates deploy as well as in the concept of terra nullius that some of these debates rehabilitate.