It is three years since the genocide in Gaza began.
Its effects are echoing around the world.
This is but one of those stories.
No names are mentioned in this story, to protect the innocent and the guilty.
A mother waits
She is waiting for her teenage son to get home.
There is a rally she wants to get to, but she can’t leave yet. Her younger boy is ten, and somebody has to look after him. When his older brother gets home, she can go.
This is how she comes into the story.
She has been coming to the rallies and events when she can. Sometimes that means waiting for one boy to come through the door before she can walk out of it herself.
She isn’t a union member. She isn’t a politician or a constitutional lawyer. She isn’t one of the people whose names appear in newspaper reports when governments make decisions about wars.
She has two boys.
And Gaza has made the distance between her children and other people’s children impossible to ignore.
One of her boys is a teenager, already approaching the adult world. The other is ten — an ordinary age for school, friends, bicycles, arguments with his brother and all the small things that make up a child’s life.
There are ten-year-old boys in Gaza too.
There are teenage boys.
There are mothers trying to keep them alive.
She doesn’t need to imagine that a Palestinian child is her own before that child’s death matters. But raising two boys makes some of the language surrounding Gaza particularly brutal.
Collateral damage.
Acceptable civilian casualties.
Military necessity.
Words devised a long way from the child.
Mothers and fathers in Gaza put their children to bed and pull them from the ruins of their homes. Children are killed while sleeping. Children are carried into hospitals with too little medicine, too little blood and sometimes no electricity. Parents call their children’s names into the rubble. Some children wake up in hospitals and discover there is nobody left to come looking for them.
A child is not collateral damage to its mother.
And this isn’t war in the ordinary meaning of the word. In a war, armies seek to defeat opposing armies. What she sees is civilians being killed in their homes, children killed in their beds, hospitals and neighbourhoods destroyed, and people deprived of food, water and shelter.
She calls it genocide.
After three years of this, the Queensland government has found something it is prepared to act upon.
Words.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
“Globalise the intifada.”
People are being arrested for saying them.
And somehow those four words — “Globalise the Intifada” — send me backwards through history.
Where do they come from?
Who first says them?
How does a phrase apparently spoken at a demonstration in Washington more than twenty years ago travel all the way to Queensland, where saying it can now expose somebody to criminal prosecution?
That search takes me to the people who spoke, wrote and organised around the movement against the coming invasion of Iraq.
Tariq Ali. Esther Kaplan. Brian Becker. Sara Flounders. Randa Jamal. Amer Jubran.
And others.
At first I am looking for a speaker.
Somewhere along the way I realise I am looking for a movement.
What happened to the peace movement?
Eleven appearances
There is another part of the story that begins two and a half years earlier.
On May Day 2024, pro-Palestinian unionists march to the Exhibition Grounds.
Another person has already been arrested during the march.
At the Exhibition Grounds, we listen to the union speakers. We do not turn our backs on ACTU Secretary Sally McManus. We do not turn our backs on Queensland Council of Unions Secretary Jacqueline King.
Our protest is directed specifically towards Premier Steven Miles and his government because of their complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
When the Premier speaks, we turn our backs.
That is all we do.
Then a woman in the crowd calls out to the Premier over his government’s complicity.
The police move in.
They chase the woman through the crowd. In the confusion, police knock a retired union member to the ground. I see them assault him before dragging him away.
They do not catch the woman that day.
Five days later, at another demonstration, police arrest her and charge her with assaulting a police officer.
Yet what I had seen her do on May Day was heckle the Premier.
That is the extraordinary sequence: a political protest directed specifically at the Premier and his government becomes a police pursuit through a May Day crowd; a retired union member ends up on the ground and is dragged away; and five days later the woman the police had been chasing is arrested and accused of assaulting one of them.
And I am charged too.
Then begin the “mentions”.
Under the bail arrangements applying to my case, I am required to keep appearing before the court while the matter works its way towards trial. These preliminary appearances are called “mentions”.
There are eleven appearances altogether.
That is one of the absurdities of the criminal justice system. A defendant can spend months returning to court for “mentions” before the case is finally heard. In my case, the process drags on while I wait to get before a magistrate for trial.
Each time I appear, my matter seems to be left until last. I stand around the court for three or four hours waiting for my name to be called.
I total the time eventually.
More than 40 hours.
Forty hours spent waiting in and around a courtroom before the prosecution even has to prove its case against me.
Eleven appearances.
You learn quite a lot about the majesty of the law when you have to turn up eleven times to establish that you haven’t committed an offence.
Eventually the magistrate finds that the prosecution has failed to prove the charge against me beyond reasonable doubt.
Not guilty.
But another question has emerged during the case.
Were the police actually acting in the execution of their duty when they intervened against us on May Day?
I argue that there is a serious question about that.
The magistrate doesn’t decide it. He doesn’t have to. Once he finds that the prosecution has failed to prove the charge against me beyond reasonable doubt, there is no need for him to determine the second question.
So it remains hanging there.
At least it remains hanging there for me.
Nearly two and a half years later, it is still hanging there.
Only now the circumstances have changed completely.
Turn it up
The Queensland government has passed legislation restricting political expressions used at Palestine demonstrations. People are being arrested. The argument about political expression has moved from the streets into the courts and towards the High Court.
And the union secretary is standing outside Queensland Parliament to speak against those restrictions.
The same union secretary who had been there on May Day 2024 when our protest was directed towards Premier Steven Miles and his government.
There is an irony in what happens next that I could hardly have invented.
She needs a microphone.
I have one.
She needs an amplifier.
I have that too.
Our microphone.
Our cables.
Our speakers.
Our electricity.
Nearly two and a half years earlier, I had ended up before the courts after a May Day protest against the Labor government.
Now the union secretary has the microphone, and I am standing behind the sound system making sure Parliament can hear her.
She begins by expressing solidarity with the people of Palestine, particularly the people of Gaza.
Then she talks about political expression: the right to speak, the right to organise and the right to protest. She describes those rights as fundamental to a democratic society and connects them with the rights through which workers have won safer workplaces, better wages and democratic freedoms.
Her voice travels across the crowd, through the Parliamentary Annexe gardens and towards Parliament itself.
Security comes over.
Could I turn the speakers away from the building?
Certainly.
I turn them.
They can still hear her.
That is the beautiful thing about sound.
It has very little respect for property boundaries.
Her voice finds the corridors, the offices, the members’ rooms.
Close the window if you like.
Shut the door.
She is still there.
Then she turns on the opposition for its silence.
The opposition is Labor.
“I’m not afraid to criticise the Labor opposition,” she says.
I am standing behind the equipment listening.
I could turn her down.
I turn her up.
Then a young person comes through the crowd towards me. He has the peculiar expression people get when two pieces of information have collided in their head and refuse to fit together.
He looks at the union secretary.
Then at me.
Then back at her.
“Ian,” he asks, “were you the person she ordered to be arrested?”
He sounds genuinely astonished.
I look at him.
I look at her.
I look at the volume control.
There are questions that require an answer.
There are others that have already answered themselves.
The union secretary is still speaking.
“Repeal the laws.”
“They’re unjust.”
Her words come booming out of our speakers.
I don’t remember exactly what I say to the young bloke.
I just nod.
There is a PhD thesis on the memory of activism yet to be written — on what we remember, what we forget, and what memory quietly invents for us.
This can go in Chapter One.
Because he sees immediately what it has taken me eleven court appearances and nearly two and a half years to arrive at.
Politics has performed one of its little miracles.
Once she possessed the institutional authority and I possessed the protest.
Now she has the protest.
I have the volume knob.
And I turn it up.
Not because I have forgotten May Day.
Precisely because I haven’t.
If somebody who once tried to silence you eventually stands in front of Parliament and says people must not be silenced, there are several things you can do.
You can call them a hypocrite.
You can walk away.
You can remind everybody what happened last time.
Or you can hand them the microphone.
I hand her the microphone.
And make sure Parliament hears her.
The silence inside representative democracy
But who inside Parliament is listening?
Queenslanders have already used one of the formal mechanisms supposedly available to them.
They petition Parliament.
The petition is called Protect the Right to Political Expression.
The parliamentary record now gives the total as 4,184 signatures. We had been told there were 4,678 signatures, a figure that had appeared on the parliamentary website.
The petitioners ask Parliament to do three things:
First: repeal the provisions that criminalise political expression.
Second: withdraw charges brought solely under those provisions.
Third: protect the democratic right of Queenslanders to protest, advocate for human rights and participate in political debate.
These are not abstract demands.
People have already been arrested and charged under the legislation.
The petition closes on 15 September 2026.
Two days later, Michael Berkman, the Greens member for Maiwar, tables it in Parliament.
It is referred to Attorney-General Deborah Frecklington. Her formal response is due on 19 October.
But Parliament does not debate what those 4,184 Queenslanders are asking it to do.
That is the extraordinary part.
People use one of the formal mechanisms of representative democracy — a petition to Parliament — to challenge a law restricting political expression.
They gather more than four thousand signatures.
Their petition reaches Parliament.
But their argument does not.
Outside Parliament, people can be arrested for political expression.
Inside Parliament, there is silence about the law restricting it.
So the silence is not separate from the law.
It is part of the political circumstances surrounding it.
We call Parliament the centre of representative democracy.
But representation depends upon more than the opportunity to put a number in a box every few years.
It depends upon information.
It depends upon public argument.
It depends upon knowing what our representatives think and what they intend to do.
How can we be expected to vote when we are not being given sufficient information upon which to base our vote?
How can we make an informed democratic choice if the argument itself is kept out of public view?
And if political expression is restricted in the streets while political argument disappears from Parliament, where exactly is democracy supposed to take place?
Perhaps that explains why the argument keeps moving elsewhere.
Into the streets.
Into the unions.
Into the courts.
And now into the High Court.
As if to rebuke Jacqueline King — a representative of Labor inside the union movement — the New South Wales Labor Attorney-General enters the fray a few days later.
He does not become a defendant in the case.
He intervenes in his formal capacity as Attorney-General of New South Wales, putting the NSW government’s legal position before the High Court on the constitutional questions raised by the challenge.
And that position places New South Wales on the same side of the constitutional argument as the Queensland LNP government: defending the power of government to restrict political expression.
King’s speech is not made behind closed doors.
It is publicly posted on social media.
Whether the NSW Attorney-General actually sees it, I cannot know.
But the political contrast is there in public.
Jacqueline King, Secretary of the Queensland Council of Unions, stands outside Parliament and says: repeal the laws.
A few days later, the New South Wales Labor Attorney-General intervenes in the High Court case on the side defending them.
Where does power lie?
There is something else about Jacqueline King’s speech that is quite stark.
More than 200 people are standing in front of her, a substantial proportion of them union members.
She tells them the laws are unjust.
She calls for their repeal.
She defends the right to speak, organise and protest.
She criticises the Labor opposition for its silence.
But she does not ask the union members in that crowd to take any action.
That absence strikes me because I have come with a concrete organising demand.
The Queensland Council of Unions used to hold a monthly delegates’ meeting bringing together delegates from its affiliated unions.
The QCU, under the leadership of Jacqueline King, needs to reinstitute that meeting for all its affiliates.
That responsibility belongs particularly to the QCU because no single union can map the whole chain. Workers involved in engineering, manufacturing, transport, logistics and military systems may belong to different unions and work in different places.
The QCU can bring those unions into the same room.
Which Queensland workplaces are involved in the military supply chain?
Which unions organise those workers?
What is being produced and where does it go?
Delegates can take those questions back into their workplaces and return with answers from their members.
Then the discussion changes.
It is no longer simply about whether the union movement opposes the genocide.
It becomes a question of what organised workers can do about their own involvement in the machinery that sustains it.
That is the QCU’s responsibility: to create the structure in which that question can be answered collectively.
Where do you begin?
In Brisbane/Magan-djin, we have plenty of choices about where to go.
That is one of the things you discover once you begin looking at the connections between Brisbane/Magan-djin and the machinery of war.
Where do you begin?
Jim Chalmers’ office?
Coles?
Ferra Engineering at Tingalpa?
The specialist engineering and heat-treatment facilities scattered through Brisbane’s industrial suburbs?
Or Boeing Defence Australia, headquartered at 123 Albert Street in the middle of Brisbane/Magan-djin?
The supply chain begins to look less like an abstraction and more like a map of our own city.
That is the point.
Gaza may be a long way from Brisbane/Magan-djin.
A weapons factory gate in Brisbane isn’t a long way from Gaza.
Because the distance between Brisbane/Magan-djin and Gaza isn’t measured only in kilometres.
It is measured in supply chains.
Contracts.
Components.
Software.
Radar.
Freight.
Finance.
Once you begin following the machinery of war backwards, Gaza doesn’t seem quite so far away.
What happened to the peace movement?
That question sends me backwards more than twenty years.
At first, I am not looking for the peace movement at all.
I am looking for four words.
Globalise the Intifada.
The Queensland government has made those words a matter for the criminal law. People can now be arrested for saying them.
So I want to know where they came from.
One of the earliest documented appearances I can find takes me to Washington in April 2002, as the movement against the coming invasion of Iraq is gathering strength.
Esther Kaplan is at the demonstration. She later writes that one speaker calls on the crowd to “Globalize the intifada.”
She doesn’t name the speaker.
So I start looking for people who were there.
Tariq Ali. Esther Kaplan. Brian Becker. Sara Flounders. Randa Jamal. Amer Jubran.
Do you remember who said it?
What did those words mean at the time?
Was Palestine already moving towards the centre of the anti-war movement’s imagination, or could people still oppose the coming invasion of Iraq while leaving Palestine somewhere towards the edge?
Those are the questions I think I am investigating.
Then another question gets in the way.
What happened to the peace movement?
It is difficult now to convey the scale of what happened in 2003.
Millions of people came onto the streets around the world.
In Australia, hundreds of thousands demonstrated. Brisbane itself saw an enormous march.
The union movement wasn’t absent.
Unionists marched.
Unions passed resolutions.
Union leaders stood on platforms.
The ACTU opposed Australian participation in a unilateral US-led invasion.
The federal Labor leadership opposed John Howard taking Australia into Iraq without United Nations authorisation.
For a moment, an extraordinary coalition of people appeared to be saying no.
And Australia went to war.
That is the fact you eventually run into.
We failed.
Not because people didn’t care.
Not because they didn’t march.
Not because there weren’t enough placards.
Not because the speeches weren’t good enough.
Millions of people said no and the machinery of war continued moving.
Ships sailed.
Aircraft flew.
Military bases operated.
Freight moved.
Components were manufactured.
Orders were filled.
Invoices were paid.
Governments discovered something important about demonstrations.
They could survive them.
That doesn’t mean the demonstrations were useless. Far from it. They showed that the invasion did not possess the popular consent its architects wanted to claim. They brought people together who might otherwise never have met. They created organisations, friendships and political memories that lasted long after the marches ended.
But they didn’t stop the invasion.
And that raises an uncomfortable question about power.
The peace movement had numbers.
Governments had the state.
Corporations had production.
Workers were somewhere in between.
The weakness of the movement against the Iraq War wasn’t that organised labour was absent.
It wasn’t.
The harder question is whether the movement ever succeeded in bringing the union movement’s particular power fully into the struggle.
There is a difference between a union banner in a march and workers withdrawing their labour.
There is a difference between a resolution and a refusal.
There is a difference between a speech and a strike.
More than twenty years later, that distinction has come back to haunt us.
Italy
But there is another experience we can look to.
Italy.
When the Global Sumud Flotilla set out to break the blockade and bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, large sections of the Italian union movement supported it.
The dockworkers were particularly important.
In Genoa and Livorno, workers did not restrict themselves to passing resolutions of solidarity. They struck and disrupted the ports. Genoa dockworkers blocked access roads to the port, while unions and workers demanded an end to Italy’s involvement in arms shipments to Israel.
And the action spread far beyond the waterfront.
Workers across transport and other sectors joined nationwide action over Gaza and in support of the flotilla. When Israel intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla, Italian unions called a nationwide general strike.
This is precisely the distinction I am trying to make.
The Italian workers didn’t merely say that they supported the people trying to take aid to Gaza.
They used their union power.
And the dockworkers understood something particularly important.
A port is not simply a place where workers can demonstrate against the shipment of weapons.
It is the place through which the weapons have to pass.
That changes the nature of solidarity.
A resolution says: we oppose this.
Union power says: you need our labour to do it.
That is the lesson I want the Queensland union movement to consider.
Not whether unions should express solidarity with Gaza.
They already have.
The harder question is whether organised workers are prepared to use their union power at the points where the machinery of war depends upon their labour.
The world has become very small
And suddenly the world has become very small.
Diesel has helped shrink it.
Take diesel away and the effects travel everywhere.
Trucks stop.
Freight slows.
Farm machinery stops.
Prices rise.
Supply chains begin to break.
A disruption thousands of kilometres away arrives at the supermarket, the factory gate and the petrol station.
The same thing has happened politically.
The conflicts involving Iran, the United States, Israel, Gaza and Lebanon cannot simply be contained within national borders.
They reach the Strait of Hormuz.
They reach the shipping lanes.
They reach the world’s fuel supplies.
They reach workers thousands of kilometres away.
A ship carrying weapons needs a port.
A port needs dockworkers.
A truck needs diesel.
A weapons factory needs workers.
A military supply chain needs all of them.
That is where union power enters the story.
The world has become small enough for a dockworker in Genoa to stand between a weapons shipment and its destination.
And small enough for a union delegate in Queensland to ask where the components made in their own workplace are going.
Peace
And then there is the Board of Peace.
The Board of Peace has done nothing. It has merely facilitated the genocide in order to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza.
That is why words like peace and ceasefire are not enough.
Neither is a union resolution.
The test is what changes.
The people who marched against the Iraq War are older now.
Some of the organisations they built have disappeared.
Others survive.
Union membership has declined.
The wars didn’t disappear.
And somewhere in Magan-djin, a woman waits for her teenage boy to get home so that he can look after his ten-year-old brother.
Then she can go to the rally.
It is a very small thing beside the machinery of states, armies and corporations.
But perhaps that is where the question has to begin.
Millions of us have learned how to march.
We have learned how to petition.
We have learned how to speak.
We have learned how to say no.
The Iraq War taught us that governments can hear millions of people say no — and continue anyway.
So the question three years into the genocide in Gaza is no longer simply whether we can make ourselves heard.
We can.
The question is whether the people who make the weapons, move the freight, load the ships and keep the machinery running can rediscover their union power to stop it.
A speech can be ignored.
A petition can be filed away.
A demonstration can be policed.
But when workers stop, something else stops with them.
Ian Curr
6 October 2026