‘POLICE STATE’ TACTICS INAPPROPRIATE

Greens MLC Robin Chapple has criticized the heavy-handed tactics of the State Government in its deployment of a large contingent of police officers to Broome.

“This is a gratuitous over-reaction to lawful protests by members of the Broome community.

“The community is being bullied by the Premier’s insistence on the development of an LNG processing precinct at James Price Point in spite of comments from many quarters suggesting there are far better places to build the facility,” Mr Chapple said.

“To this end I have asked the Police Minister to justify the deployment of what is reported to be hundreds of police officers preparing to guard the interests of a private corporation against lawful protests by citizens of the state.

“If that’s not ‘Police State’ tactics I don’t know what is,” Mr Chapple said.

Mr Chapple said he hopes sanity will prevail and there won’t be a recurrence of last year’s police action.

“I sincerely hope that we won’t be seeing a repeat of last year’s clashes between protestors and police, when dozens of community members, including quite elderly men and women, were manhandled and moved off the road to let Woodside’s heavy earthmoving machinery pass.

“I call on the Premier to stop the deployment of police now, before anyone is hurt.

“Let him convince the community of the efficacy of the gas processing precinct if he can.

‘If not, he needs to swallow his pride and go back to the drawing board, sit down with Woodside and its joint venture partners, sit down with the community opposed to the development and come up with a solution.

“The thing that caused last year’s protests to become disorderly was not the actions of protesters but the huge influx of police using ram-raid tactics.”

For more information please contact Robin Chapple on 0409 379 263 or 9486 8255

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