Like a river to the sea …

“I don’t get it, why would the government ban ‘from the river to the sea‘?” said the Brisbane City Cat Deckhand.

Here we Joh again. In August 1985, I attended a protest of 1,000 sacked SEQEB workers outside the Executive Building in George Street, Brisbane, and was attacked from behind, knocked to the ground and arrested by Snr Constable Walsh and Constable Monley. The latter did his best to snap my wrist. I was holding up an outlawed banner saying ‘Joh Must  Go’ … the Queensland government was facing the worst challenge of its reign with Joh Bjelke-Petersen as Premier. He had to stop the unions and the democratic rights movement. He had banned marches, strikes for union rights and pickets against uranium mining and export.

The Queensland is up to its neck in the genocide because it provides subsidies for materiel for weapons to Ferra Engineering at Tingalpa. Israel and the United states use those F35 parts to bomb civilians in Gaza, Jenin, Lebanon and Iran. The new anti-semitism law is a cover up of government complicity to deny Justice for Palestine the right to use language like From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Maximum penalty is two years jail plus a criminal offence against our name.

NOT OUR LAW
From the river …

We post this article by Samir Shah that helps explain what is going on …

Try to understand it: John Farnham’s ‘river to the sea’ and Queensland’s war on words.

The moment the state gets into the business of deciding which opinions are criminal, the key question shifts from “Is this hateful?” to “Who decides?” And the answer is always the same: politicians. Of course it was bloody Queensland. If any state in Australia was going to look at a rise in antisemitism and conclude that the urgent policy response was to criminalise two slogans, it was always going to be the one that gave the nation Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson, cane toads and the Gold Coast. Queensland is where political overreach goes to drink beer until it vomits, then gets burnt trying to get a tan.

The new law makes it a criminal offence to publicly recite, distribute, publish or display two “prohibited expressions” — “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” — if that use might reasonably be expected to make a member of the public feel menaced, harassed or offended. Maximum penalty: two years in jail. The law also says there are “reasonable excuses” for things like art, education, religion, law enforcement and public-interest debate, but the burden sits on the defendant to raise that excuse. In other words, the police can come first, and you can explain later.


Farnham mural starts a paint war, Angus Taylor’s short memory, and Reform candidate’s AI headache
Last week, Queensland Police contacted Brisbane artist James Hillier over three works listed on his online store that feature variations on the phrase “from the river to the sea”. Carter took the works down from his website (but not his social media) and escaped with a caution.

Artistic exemption apparently works the same way as a snakebite: technically there’s a remedy, but it only becomes relevant after something nasty has happened.

But here’s the part where Queensland’s brave war on extremism runs head-first into Australian pop culture. One of the works being considered a threat to our social fabric features John Farnham. Or more specifically, a line from Farnsey’s 1988 ARIA chart-topping hit “Two Strong Hearts” that includes the fatal words “river to the sea”.

In a show of solidarity, street artist Scott Marsh painted a mural of Farnham in Brisbane, all heroic locks and soft-focus nationalism, alongside watermelon imagery and the same lyrics.

The thing was a legal stress test disguised as a tribute mural. And because Queensland is where nuance is treated as suspicious foreign influence because it’s pronounced with an accent, the mural promptly became its own little theatre of absurdity as it was painted over, and then painted over again. Police said “further inquiries” were being conducted.

Honestly, at this point, I’d respect the government more if it just admitted it has started policing metaphors.

That’s the deranged logic of all this. Queensland hasn’t tightened laws against threats, harassment or incitement to violence. Those were already crimes. If someone wants to menace Jewish Australians, terrify them, attack them, threaten them, urge violence against them, that was already illegal before Premier David Crisafulli and his mates decided to become the first government in Australia to criminalise a chant and accidentally pick a fight with the Farnham back catalogue.

The new bit is the criminalisation of phrases. Which raises a question nobody in the state parliament seems to have asked, probably because they were too busy congratulating themselves for saving civilisation one preposition at a time: why stop there?

If “from the river to the sea” is illegal, can we say from the creek to the bay? From the canal to the inlet? From the dam to the estuary? Queensland is full of bodies of water. We now need a government-issued hydrology guide so artists, activists and half the tourism industry know which waterways are politically safe.

And what about poor old Farnham? The man sings one line about love reaching out “like a river to the sea” and suddenly his mural needs legal vetting. Perhaps the Queensland-approved rewrite should now be: “Reaching out forever like a body of water to another body of water that does not signify anything political, particularly not the dispossession of a people.”

Not as catchy, granted, but safer — which is, as we now know, the highest permitted aspiration of art.

To help the authorities through this difficult musical period, perhaps artists should pivot to a safer playlist, banning covers of: “Moon River”, “Cry Me a River”, “The River”, “River Deep — Mountain High”, “Sea of Love”, and “Beyond the Sea”. Maybe even “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, unless they fill out the correct forms in triplicate.


Back at Bondi, we remember the dead. To stop more terror, Australia can’t look at antisemitism in a vacuum
Likewise, “globalise the intifada”. If the problem is the suggestion of spreading resistance, uprising, the shaking-off of oppression — intifada means “shaking off”— then someone should probably have a quiet word to Taylor Swift. “Shake It Off” is basically a stadium-sized call to cast off your oppressors.

The joke, though, is that this law isn’t just stupid; it’s politically self-harming.

The government says this is about protecting Jewish Queenslanders. Fine, let’s accept that as the intention. The effect, however, is something else entirely. One of the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theories is that Jews are uniquely powerful, uniquely protected, secretly able to bend governments and institutions to silence criticism. So, what has Queensland now done? It has banned two anti-Israel or pro-Palestine slogans and sent police after artists. It has, with staggering clumsiness, handed every antisemite in the country the easiest line imaginable: “See? You can’t even say words.”

If you wanted to design a law that feeds paranoid resentment while claiming to combat hatred, you’d struggle to do much better than this. You have created the optics of special protection and then acted surprised that people might draw ugly conclusions. The uglier truth is that hate speech laws always sound much more sensible in theory than they look in practice. In theory, who wouldn’t oppose hateful speech? In practice, the category turns to mush the second you lean on it.

The moment the state gets into the business of deciding which opinions are criminal, the key question shifts from “Is this hateful?” to “Who decides?” And the answer is always the same: politicians. The same people who cannot regulate gambling ads, housing speculation, fossil-fuel capture or basic political honesty are suddenly being trusted to fine-tune the moral boundaries of Middle East speech in Australia. It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

And dangerous it is, because banning words doesn’t defeat ideas. It canonises them, turns slogans into contraband and idiots into martyrs, and makes every chant sound more thrilling because now it comes with legal risk and a story about state oppression attached. The Queensland government has taken phrases that most Australians either misunderstood or barely thought about and transformed them into a free-speech test case. That is political malpractice.

There’s a broader Australian hypocrisy here as well. Home Affairs still tells would-be citizens that freedom of speech is a core Australian value and says people here should be able to express their ideas freely, speak and write what they think, and protest peacefully, so long as it is lawful.

Home Affairs needs to update its explanations of what Australia is, because if freedom of speech just means “whatever the law currently allows”, then it means almost nothing.

And yes, before the inevitable emails arrive: Queensland is not Pakistan. Nobody is being dragged from their home by a mob because of a slogan. The penalties and the political culture are obviously not comparable. But the instinct is recognisably related: blasphemy laws also begin from the belief that certain utterances are so offensive, so destabilising, so socially corrosive that they must be prohibited by law rather than challenged in public.

It’s a different scale with different consequences, but the same underlying temptation: to substitute state punishment for democratic argument.


With crackdown on Gaza slogans, Crisafulli takes Queensland into places that even Bjelke-Petersen wouldn’t go
History is littered with examples of governments making that trade and congratulating themselves for it. They always say it is about order, about safety, about stopping hatred before it spreads. What they usually end up stopping is open argument, honest dissent and the ability to expose stupidity by letting it speak.

That is why free speech matters. It isn’t because all speech is noble — most of it is garbage. It’s not because bigots deserve our admiration — they don’t. It’s because once you concede the principle that words can become crimes simply because they are offensive, or politically loaded, or understood in contested ways, you’ve handed the state a power it will never use neatly and will never give back willingly.

If someone really does want to threaten Jews, harass Jews, incite violence against Jews, terrorise Jews — that should be dealt with ruthlessly. But that is not what this law is. It’s a government hauling language into the dock and pretending it has made Queensland safer.

Instead, it has made Queensland more censorious, even more ridiculous and, in a particularly Queensland flourish, even more convinced of its own righteousness while doing something plainly counterproductive. Which, now that I think about it, may be the most authentically Queensland part of the whole thing.

After all, what about the Age of Reason?