After Secret Garden: The NSW Police State

Are police causing the harm that they exist to protect us from?

Over the weekend, a forested farm outside of Sydney hosted the final Secret Garden Festival. Where festivals have been closing all across New South Wales in response to the state’s new regulations, this one was ending for a gentler reason, with organisers simply wanting to focus their energies elsewhere. The festival is a popular and elaborate dress-up party for the ~5000 people who come to celebrate life through music, theatre, dance and sharing time with their friends away from the pressures of everyday life. This, for a great many of the punters, also involves using recreational drugs. Which, in the current climate, also invites a menacing element that has nothing to do with the impact of the drugs themselves: the police.

The festival crowd is chiefly made up of enthusiastic 20-somethings, and most of us can relate to the mood of the road trip there — your car’s packed full of food, camping gear and the costumes you’ve mangled together for the weekend. Some cheeky adventurers will have a bottle of spirits or goon hidden in the spare tyre. Others will inevitably be finding ways to sneak in more illicit substances.

Upon arriving at the gate, the excited summer-smiles fade as you see dozens of police with dogs intercepting and searching through vehicles. One of the dogs thinks your car might be suspicious — they are, after all, accurate nearly 25% of the time. The comfortable bubble of revelry is forgotten and you’re suddenly in a roadside tent where a polite uniformed officer asks you to remove your clothes and underpants, to squat down — and then, for many, to ‘spread’.

Perhaps you are relieved to have nothing and throw your clothes back on to re-enter the day and spend the festival with the grime of this surreal intervention sitting in your unconscious. But for some, it is an indignity shared in disbelief and anger. For others, it is a humiliating and visceral trauma with a far more resonant weight.

Maria*, 21, describes her encounter, after a dog identified the vehicle she was in:

“We were all visibly anxious and the police were talking to us about how angry drugs and liars make them, they were also making comments about how much they liked the girls in tiny shorts. When I was searched they told me they knew I had something and made the dog sniff me separately first. I was made to get completely naked and squat down, and then the officer told me to pull my ass cheeks apart. They then made me remove the drugs I had inside myself, told me to get dressed, and took me away for questioning.”

Recreational drug use is hardly the exclusive domain of hardened criminals. After all, more Australians have used them in the last year than the membership of every football, rugby, cricket, netball, basketball club and political party combined. It is a normal behaviour, by any measure.

“They weighed the marijuana I had (still wrapped in quite a few condoms, it weighed 20g), and told me that I was 5g over the amount that would’ve been just a caution, and that I was going to have to go to court. While I was being questioned many officers were making jokes and comments, and it all of a sudden seemed very lighthearted to them.”

The world is increasingly legalising cannabis, but back in New South Wales, Secret Gardeners who held what can only be non-commercial amounts will end up with an order to appear before a magistrate.

Which drugs should be illegal and why is another conversation. Here is a good window instead to reflect upon the draconian methods of detection that have crept into normalisation.

The indignity of strip searching is a dire use of state force at the best of times. That it was employed at Secret Garden as a near-indiscriminate routine, captures the increasing absurdity and violence of our nation’s drug prohibition.

In the quest to prevent harm, the police are degrading those who at best are merely carrying the amount of contraband that can fit into one’s cavities; and at worst, have committed no crime at all. Maria’s encounter is sadly increasingly familiar to many festival-goers across Australia:

“I have never felt more dehumanised in my life. I am still quite anxious now, as someone who has never been to court or had much interaction with the police.”

The irony cannot be stated strongly enough: most of the distress, loss of safety and fear experienced by festival goers was as a direct result of the police, who ostensibly exist to protect us from all of these things.

Emma Sutton, Principal Solicitor for EPS Lawyers, ran a stall at the festival offering free legal advice to punters and was alarmed by the apparent escalation of drug policing at the weekend.

“It was beyond noticeable and substantially harsher than other events. I have no doubt it was designed to intimidate.”

The flow of festival patrons seeking advice continued across the two days, with many echoing Maria’s experience.

“Some that approached us were distraught, having been subjected to a strip search in what they describe as particularly degrading circumstances. Most notably, in police tents with entrances that didn’t close and afford proper privacy. Others described friends being whisked away to police stations and not having a clue how to help or contact them. That police don’t explain this to young people increases their distress.”

If the process of discovering who is committing the crime were instead the punishment — the invasive, non-consensual strip search — we would be universally outraged. We hear stories of state-executed hymen examinations from places like Iran and Indonesia in horror and disbelief. These invasions may not be of the same severity, but they lie on the same spectrum.

As someone who doesn’t take drugs or even drink very much, I went from seeing the policing and security presence as a necessary evil to just a mundane regular evil.

And isn’t this the great futility of it all?

Seeing a wasted young guy being manhandled out of the festival that’d been ‘caught’ urinating in its bushland surrounds. Needing to ask police to stop lurking around the entries of the nude event I was hosting. Catching a security guard illegally taking photos of the nude audience within (to the credit of the company and the festival, he lost his job that night). Seeing the irreality of armed personnel weaving through a crowd of people having the time of their life dressed as BBQ Shapes, Tim the Toolman Taylor, a bunch of grapes, even an entire tour group on a cruise ship. Basically everything you can imagine — except police.

I have had plenty of positive experiences with police at the festival and understand that they are also people with a complex role to navigate. But the dehumanising processes that have crept in as a norm shatter that social contract for many, and the absurdity of the targeted drug enforcement we’re seeing in places like NSW can only multiply disrespect for both the laws and their enforcers. Social media isn’t the best measure of anything, but it certainly mirrored the anger and outrage at the police that I encountered from many at the festival.

If the intention is to deter young people from the harms of drugs, the harshness of the encounter doesn’t seem effective, Maria tells me:

“I never thought very highly of police, but after the weekend I think even less of them. They made me feel unsafe and afraid. The current drug laws in Australia need to change.”

For all of the violence of this method, the people caught with drugs numbered in the mere dozens. I wonder how perplexing it must be for our officers to spend hours catching so few drugs and then stroll around a festival where seemingly everybody’s pupils are dilating out of their sockets. I wonder if they muse upon the message it sends to bring scores of guns into a space where in my four years I didn’t see even one single violent incident — let alone one requiring the threat of fatal force.

Far more Australian years of life are lost each year from eating red meat than are from taking MDMA. Do we expect to see a full meat prohibition, enforced by strip searches and arrests, at picnics? Of course not.

The real problem for the police here, ultimately, is that their actions aren’t related to the effective prosecution of criminals or protecting the public from harm — and we all know it. Instead, it’s a reminder of who the incumbent power holders are in our society.

After the feeble sanctions issued in the wake of the grand heists exposed by the Banking Royal Commission, it’s hard to feel the justice in sights like the teenage girl sobbing in shock from having traces of THC scraped from her tongue on the way home from what was meant to be a fun weekend.

If Random Breath/Drug Tests were true to their name, they’d be just as likely to test that girl as a venerable MP, or be parked outside a long lunch at the ASX — but they of course aren’t random at all. There is logic to targeting festivals where everybody is taking drugs — but the missing piece of this puzzle is that people are taking drugs everywhere all the time.

In the interim, we’re left with a juvenile debate about whether we can permit testing of the potential fatality of the drugs that people are taking anyway; fewer festivals for artists and audiences to celebrate our lives; and a generation that’s increasingly learning that police exist to enforce unrealistic rules in a punitive manner that has very little to do with either justice or protecting society. At least in that last lesson, they will be well prepared for the society the rest of us are leaving to them.

Chris Endrey is an artist who performed at Secret Garden. Do not contact him for any reason thanks.

*Name changed for privacy