The Government’s ban on protesting outside someone’s home will rebalance the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy, a law professor says.
But another academic has questioned whether a new law is necessary, and says police may struggle to enforce it.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced on Friday that protesting outside someone’s home would become an offence, punishable with a fine or jail time.
While it would apply to all residences, Goldsmith said there had been increased reports of demonstrations targeting the homes of public figures like MPs, judges and other officials.
Otago University law professor Andrew Geddis said current laws around protests only related to public settings.
“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,” he said.
“So this particular change in the law will help to restrike that balance.”
Geddis said the change would plug a legal gap highlighted by a Supreme Court ruling nearly two decades ago.
The 2007 case, Brooker v Police, involved a man who was convicted of disorderly behaviour for standing outside a police officer’s house playing the guitar and singing protest songs against her, he said.
But the Supreme Court found his behaviour was not disorderly.
“The Supreme Court said that disorderly behaviour only applies to the public consequences of your behaviour, how that affects the public place.
“And just because it’s intruding into someone’s private home, that’s not a consideration as to whether the protest is covered by disorderly behaviour,” he said.
It meant the balance between people’s rights within their home and people’s rights to protest in public was “out of whack”, Geddis said.
One of the judges noted the court’s finding could lead to more protests outside people’s homes, and Parliament would need to consider that at some point, he said.
“It turns out he was right.”
Victoria University law professor Steven Price said police may find it hard to enforce the new law.
Goldsmith said it would be tightly targeted and prohibit “unreasonable disruptions”, but Price said the independent police watchdog’s review of policing protests found officers struggled to make a call on that.
“What the IPCA had to say about that … is that police have trouble on the ground having to make fine distinctions about what’s an unreasonable disruption and what’s not, and that seems a fair point to make,” he said.
“But on the face of [Goldsmith’s] press release, it doesn’t really solve the problem.”
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