NSW Government Continues Its Rights-Eroding Bonanza

The Minns New South Wales Labor government announced this week that it will further be eroding basic human rights in the same manner as it’s been doing since it entered office in 2023. And this time, the change involves removing the prohibition on producing identifiable photos of drivers captured by tolls road cameras, as NSW police is set to be given access in order to prevent crime.

The ongoing removal of rights and freedoms understood to be fundamental to democracies has been a key preoccupation of the current administration, whether that’s been with attacks on the right to privacy or on the freedom of political communication, and it’s even led a stealth attack on Aboriginal land rights, as it considered choice Sydney real estate was being returned to First Nations hands.

A 21 July 2026 NSW government press release outlines that the NSW police will be able to access “unredacted images captured by toll cameras”, when investigating serious indictable offences or missing persons. Regular drivers, evidently, don’t have to worry about this system affecting them, and the law will cover the Sydney Harbour Bridge and tunnel, prior to moving on to private toll ways.

As he yet again waved away the basic rights of the constiuency, NSW premier Chris Minns told the press that it is “insane that a picture could be taken, that could help NSW police in a criminal case but not be able to use the information that is collected”. So, his government is “going to change the law”, so NSW police can identify who has been driving around where and at what time.

Having one’s photo taken as they drive past a toll camera may not trigger everyone’s rights erosion threshold, but it’s rather the incremental creep that the new measures contribute to, in terms of the ever-increasing surveilling, silencing and criminalising of the NSW constiuency, that is at issue here, and the Minns government shows no signs of slowing down this process.

Erasing the right to protest

The Chris Minns-led NSW Labor Party had shown clear signs that it might have rights eroding tendencies when in early April 2022, it voted in favour of a law that restricts unauthorised protests on major facilities, roads, tunnels and bridges, via the threat of 2 years imprisonment, which has gradually served to criminalise the right to protest around the country since enactment.

But on taking office, the Minns government was not satisfied that these measures, which served to seriously corrode the local climate defence movement, were enough. The major reason for this appears to have been that the Gaza genocide commenced in October 2023, and the outpouring of civil society opposition to it was too much for the Zionist-leaning NSW Labor cabinet to take.

On March 2023 NSW Labor election, no one knew that this industrial-scale mass murder was about to take place and that the head of the state had a deep commitment to the Zionist cause and Israel, but this fact is the reason that tens of thousands of local constituents gathering on Gadigal land every week to oppose the slaughter was a problem for him, as well as to the Netanyahu government.

The need to silence pro-Palestinian supporters in NSW led the Minns government to pass two sets of laws that were found to have directly impinged upon the right to freedom of political communication that is implied in the Australian Constitution. And NSW activist groups took Labor to the Supreme Court twice to see these laws successfully struck down due to their rights eroding nature.

These laws consisted of a move on power and a ban on protests near places of worship, which are laws that still stand in a revised manner, along with the seismic impact of the public assembly restriction declaration or PARD law, which served to ban street protest marches in defined areas after an act of terrorism had occurred.

The premier shrugged away the second repealing of his legislative work, stating that lawyers and courts have it easy and suggested that sometimes lawmaking necessarily involves colouring in that strays outside of the lines.

And after this last defeat in the courts, Minns also determined not to progress laws banning pro-Palestinian political slogans that he conceived last summer, as he’s decided to see how such measures already progressed by the Crisafulli government in Queensland stand up to court challenge there, as currently in that state, people are facing prison time for uttering six words in a row.

Getting right up in your face

The provision of law enforcement and the surveilling of the public have also been key concerns for the Minns government.

Attempts are being made to expand laws that provide police with the means to scan the mobile devices of organised crime suspects to ascertain if they are dedicated encrypted criminal communication devices (DECCDs) or those alerted to facilitate crime, so that civilians might be required to open their devices for quick a scan during on-the-spot arrests or traffic stops.

The Minns government also rolled out wanding laws, or powers that allow police to run metal detecting scanners over a civilian’s body in places, like public transport stations, shopping precincts, sporting venues and other public places, to see if they have a concealed knife on them, and legislation recently introduced plans to broaden these powers and make them permanent.

The idea of someone briefly scanning another on the roadside can sound rather unobtrusive, but an armed, uniformed police officer approaching a civilian on the footpath to run a metal detecting device over their body is never as casual as it sounds. And such arrangements do lead to other law enforcement matters beyond knife possession, and it’s the approaching of civilians that is key to this.

Even prior to the passing of wanding laws, NSW police have long been empowered to approach the public with sniffer dogs in tow in certain designated areas on the off chance that individuals might be holding some illegal drugs, and if an initial pat down search turns up nothing, then these officers are permitted to require the civilian to strip off in front of them just to make sure.

The decision of the premier and NSW health minister Ryan Park to officially announce that drug decriminalisation, or the removal of the criminal offences of drug possession and use, was off the table at the head of the Sydney leg of the 2024 NSW Drug Summit may have had as much to do with the facilitation of the sniffer dog regime, as it had to do with preserving constituent brain cells.

But the most prominent indication that the approach to enforcing the law has changed in NSW was the fact that 3,000 NSW police officers were set upon 20,000 pro-Palestinian protesters on 9 February 2026, to prevent them from breaking the since-struck-down PARD law, and to do this, officers were permitted to use excessive force and to brutalise civilians at their own discretion.

To this day, the NSW premier, NSW police minister Yasmin Catley and NSW police commissioner Mal Lanyon have refused to apologise for the cops having beaten up the public, and instead, they’ve repeatedly insisted that officers were just following the orders of superiors.

Rights protections considered

The Minns government has a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to rights-stripping in NSW, as this state has no laws protecting the rights of its citizens and residents and neither are there any such laws protecting such freedoms at the federal level in this country. In fact, Australia is the only western liberal democracy without something like a national bill of rights.

As former High Court Justice Michael Kirby tells it, the drafters of the Australian Constitution had considered enacting rights protections into the founding document in the 1890s, as is the case in the United States. But that idea was dropped when it was considered current laws of the day that served to discriminate against First Peoples and Chinese people might be made voided in the process.

The impact the dearth in rights protections has is hard to weigh up. However, the recent Minns government Supreme Court defeats tend to reveal the power of rights protections, as NSW Labor’s places of worship move on power and its PARD law were both struck down because of the presence of the right to freedom of political communication in the Constitution.

And this freedom of political communication contained in the founding document is only implied, which means that it isn’t even directly stated, but rather in 1992, the High Court found in two separate cases – Australian Capital Television versus the Commonwealth and Nationwide News versus Wills – that there is such a right inferred because the people choose the government.

The Human Rights Bill 2025 is before NSW parliament because NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong tabled it on 23 October last year, and it’s currently before a parliamentary committee inquiry, which is a significant milestone in itself.

NSW Labor attorney general Michael Daley has indicated that his government is willing to work with the NSW Greens to progress this rights upholding legislation.

Yet, in considering the work the Minns government has been doing on the erosion of basic rights, one wouldn’t want to hold one’s breath too long in waiting for it to enact rights protections.

Main image: Chris Minns speaking at a fundraising function by Phil Desveaux is licensed under CC BY – SA 2.0