On Tuesday, Tasmanian Liberal leader Will Hodgman declared that, if elected, he would introduce mandatory jail terms for environmental protestors who disrupt businesses. It was a promise he made just as the world mourned Nelson Mandela, the world’s most famous jailed protester. Such has been the pattern since Mandela’s death – politicians everywhere laud the ANC leader, even as they do everything possible to deter those who would emulate him.

Tony Abbott, for instance, now says Mandela was a "truly great man". But let’s note this passage from Troy Bramston in The Australian:

Diplomatic isolation and sporting and trade sanctions were important in galvanising global support for the black majority in South Africa. But it was investment sanctions that, more than anything else, hastened the demise of apartheid.

What Bramston describes is precisely the kind of campaign that the Abbott government wants to make illegal.

"We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians," said Mandela. That’s why Mandela’s key ally Desmond Tutu argues that the disinvestment strategy made an "enormous difference in apartheid South Africa" and could "make an enormous difference in creating a future of justice and equality for Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land". Yet the Liberals intend to block funding to those who share Tutu’s views.

The right to protest does not matter when everyone agrees with you. It takes no courage whatsoever to praise Mandela in 2013. But in the early days of the anti-apartheid struggle, things were very different.

Let’s remember that Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal party, refused to condemn the Sharpville massacre on the basis that apartheid was a domestic matter in which other countries should not interfere. "Honest and upright men could differ whether development should be based upon the separation of the races or upon their integration," he wrote. As late as 1986, US president Ronald Reagan denounced ANC as an organisation that "proclaims a goal of creating a communist state and uses terrorist tactics and violence to achieve it." That’s why Mandela remained on the US terrorist watch list until 2008; it’s why the British security services infiltrated the anti-apartheid movement from top to bottom.

In Australia, anti-apartheid activists faced similar harassment. During the protests against South African sporting tours, Queensland Joh Bjelke Petersen called a state of emergency, and unleashed some of the most savage police violence this country has ever seen.

Yet back then, Australian legislation was not nearly as draconian as it has since become.

Today, there is bipartisan support for Mandela. But there’s also bipartisan support for security legislation that means it’s an offense punishable by 25 years in prison to recklessly provide funds to terrorists, or supporters of terrorists, even if they’re overseas. Had that law been in place 40 years ago, it would have been a serious crime to raise money for Mandela – a man committed to the armed struggle in South Africa.

Back in 2006, Monash law lecturer Patrick Emerton went so far as to argue that, "if [the anti-terrorism laws] had been in force in the 1980s, it may well have been a criminal offence in Australia, punishable by up to 25 years in prison, to teach members of anti-apartheid organisations to use a photocopier".

Hodgman’s pledge to Tasmanians needs to be seen as part of a general trend to criminalise protest, and there are two aspects to it.

Most obviously, 9/11 allowed the security forces to reinvent themselves in a post-Cold War environment. Since 2001, there’s been an unprecedented expansion of ASIO and similar organisations, allocated resources and powers that would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier. George Williams from the University of New South Wales describes some of the powers accorded to the security agencies (specifically, the secret confinement of non-suspects by ASIO) as "more consistent with the apparatus of a police state, such as general Pinochet’s Chile than the laws of a modern democracy."

The post-9/11 security laws give authorities tremendous powers to use against protesters. During the 2007 APEC meetings, the NSW government partitioned Sydney into zones and then released a list of people who weren’t permitted into certain areas on the basis not of anything they’d done but on the grounds of what they might do. Similar measures will be in place during the upcoming G20 meetings, where we have already learned that, if you are inside the security zone, you will be arrested under special laws if you are in possession of a long list of prohibited items, including mobile phones, eggs, glass jars and, um, lizards (yes, lizards!).

And, of course, all of that comes on top of the surveillance detailed in the Snowden revelations – a system far more sophisiticated than anything the old apartheid leaders had at their disposal.

But anti-terrorism is only part of the explanation. Over the past decades, the free market has been normalised as the most sacred form of human interaction. The individual has been recast as a consumer rather than a citizen, someone who expresses his or her preferences most clearly by buying and selling.

In the past, even many politicians accepted political protests as a legitimate form of popular expression, a way that ordinary people could shape the direction of the nation. But in the context of the market turn, street demonstrations come to be seen not as part of democracy but as an attack upon it, since they inhibit the market exchanges that are taken as society’s most important element. In other words, the rights of businesses trump the rights of protesters – essentially, what Hodgman is arguing in Tasmania.

The two different strands of anti-protest rhetoric often converge.

In 2011, for instance, Robert Doyle justified smashing up the Occupy Melbourne camp on the basis that it disrupted business activity in the City Square. But he also said that the occupiers were "professionals", armed with "knives, hammers, bricks, bottles and flammable liquids" – the implication being that the protestors were something akin to terrorists. We will see a similar argument made during Brisbane’s G20: the demonstrators are terrorising the city’s commercial district. Naturally, as soon as you deploy the T word, there’s no kind of anti-protest equipment off the agenda – which is why police forces everywhere are becoming more and more militarised.

As Mandela is laid to rest, it’s worth recalling some remarks from the Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee, someone who knows a little more about South Africa than most politicians. In 2005, introducing a reading his anti-apartheid novel Waiting for the Barbarians, he explained:

I used to think that the people who created (South Africa's) laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But the real measure of what we have learned from Mandela comes not from the flowery rhetoric on every politician’s lips but in how we respond to those who, like him, stand up against the state.