90,000 halt city with march across Harbour Bridge

McKenna said part of the problem was the organisers’ application to march stated that 10,000 people were likely to attend, not the 90,000 people the police estimated turned up.

He said any future march should be organised with much more time than the seven days provided by the organisers ahead of Sunday’s protest. The plan to stage the event dominated NSW politics last week, and the decision to allow the protest to proceed came down to a Supreme Court ruling on Saturday morning.

PAG spokeswoman Amal Naser said efforts by Premier Chris Minns and NSW Police to stop the event from going ahead fuelled the huge turnout by members of the public.

“The reason why that number quadrupled was because the police and the premier issued a co-ordinated campaign to attack the right to protest, and people took the emergency to come out today. [Minns and NSW Police] gave us more publicity than we could have ever asked for,” she said.

McKenna would not specify how much time police required before allowing another march across the bridge of a similar size. About 1000 police were deployed, including mounted police and police helicopters.

The last major march across the bridge was 25 years ago, when 250,000 people marched in support of reconciliation.

After the march started at Lang Park near Wynyard station, the bridge’s road lanes were turned into a sea of umbrellas, signs and chanting protesters opposed to the Israeli government’s military action in Gaza. The throng of people spanned more than two kilometres.

Protesters chanted, “Netanyahu/Albanese you can’t hide. Stop supporting genocide” and protesters carried signs calling for a ceasefire and the end to the starvation of children.

Behind a large banner, protesters at the front included WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former NSW premier Bob Carr, former federal government minister Ed Husic, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and human rights activist, former Socceroo Craig Foster.

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Carr said the march had attracted “ordinary people” because of outrage over the “policies of starvation”.

“There are a lot of very ordinary people here who wouldn’t have been to a demonstration even any time in their lives, and they’re outraged by policies of starvation enforced by the IDF,” he said.

Despite Minns’ opposition to the march, many Labor figures braved the rain including state MPs Jihad Dib, Anthony D’Adam, Cameron Murphy and Lynda Voltz, and federal politicians Tony Sheldon and Alison Byrnes.

Husic said Minns couldn’t ignore the public sentiment towards the conflict in Gaza. “I think we had a turning point in the mind of middle Australia. They just don’t want kids to be killed,” he said.

Federal Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi and the party’s state MP Sue Higginson were also in attendance. Higginson said the march was a “remarkable moment in our history”.

Minns had opposed the protest, saying it would be “disruptive” and that it would cause “real public safety concerns”.

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There were fears the march would not go ahead, but in an urgent decision on Saturday, the Supreme Court rejected an application by NSW Police for a prohibition order over the protest.

The order would not have banned the event, but it would have exposed protesters to potential criminal liability for blocking or obstructing traffic and pedestrians.

Justice Belinda Rigg’s decision meant protesters had a limited range of immunities from criminal sanction.

Rigg said the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech ultimately outweighed any inconvenience caused by the protest. She rejected a police submission that the court would be “condoning violent scenes, traffic gridlocks, ambulances not getting to where they need to go, and other undesirable consequences”.

Rigg said police still had “extensive powers”. NSW Police said ahead of the event they would be targeting unlawful and anti-social behaviour.

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