NSW Premier Chris Minns has admitted he was wrong to follow police advice that allowed a pro-Palestinian protest to march from Sydney Town Hall to the Opera House.
Mr Minns said he was still a “baby Premier” when the decision was made in the days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
He said police had advised him that allowing protesters to move through the city would help defuse tensions and prevent a confrontation.
But in News24 host Sharri Markson’s new book ‘Bondi Terror’, Mr Minns says the strategy failed and instead allowed the protest to develop into an angry crowd chanting hateful slogans.
“It’s bulls**t. It doesn’t work,” he said of the police’s strategy in the book.
“I learned a bitter lesson that night and it’s really guided the government’s policy ever since.”
He recalled being told by police that allowing demonstrators to move further through the city was part of the standard approach to managing protests, and he shared his regret at letting himself be led by that advice.
“I was a new Premier, a baby Premier, and we saw the march move from the Town Hall down to the Opera House,” Mr Minns said.
“The constant advice I got from police at the time was, ‘That’s the way we do it, we marshal protests. We just let them go a few more streets, let them get it out of their system, and then they dissipate and there’s not a conflict’.
“The phraseology they often use is: ‘We don’t make a bad situation worse’.”
Mr Minns said he understood the reasoning behind the approach but no longer believed it worked.
“I’m not disputing the motive for that theory, I think it comes from not a bad place. It’s just wrong,” he said.
He said protesters did not simply release their anger before returning home.
Instead, he argued the march became more hostile as it moved through the city.
“The group that marches from the Town Hall to the Opera House, it then turns into an angry mob where they chant hateful slogans,” he said.
“And does anyone really believe they then go home and say, ‘We’ve got that out of our system. Now we can go back to being good Australians, and I love my Jewish brothers and sisters’?”
His comments come as the government’s handling of protests after October 7 remains under scrutiny.
In the aftermath of the Hamas attack, Mr Minns said intelligence and law enforcement agencies supported an approach that allowed some pro-Palestinian demonstrations to proceed as an outlet for anger over the war in Gaza.
Mr Minns said he had viewed the strategy as effectively “letting a bit of steam out of the kettle”.
He now believes the approach risked normalising antisemitism, racism and increasingly hostile rhetoric.
“We’ve seen this over and over again, that with a certain group in our community, if you give them an inch, they will take a mile, and it becomes a green light for worse and worse and worse behaviour,” the NSW Premier said.
Mr Minns later introduced tougher restrictions on protests following the Bondi terror attack.
The laws were ultimately ruled invalid by the NSW Court of Appeal after the court found they breached the Constitution.
Despite the ruling, Mr Minns said he had no regrets about introducing the measures.
“My view is that got us through the summer. I wish they were still in place, and I think the decision was wrong, but I’m glad we did it,” he said.
He also said the laws prevented protests from being held at locations that could have caused further distress for the Jewish community.
“I think you would have had protests down on Bondi Beach, right in the middle of the Jewish community, if we hadn’t had them in place.”
Bondi Terror, by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin, tells the story of the deadliest terror attack in Australian history – in gripping, minute-by-minute detail.
It’s scheduled for release in paperback on September 15, and is currently available for purchase through major booksellers including Amazon Australia and Booktopia.