A serial protester has been called out by the NSW Premier after costing taxpayers more than $5million in policing costs by repeatedly organising pro-Palestine rallies.
Josh Lees, a member of the Palestine Action Group and an array of other left-wing causes, has made applications to NSW Police every week for the past year to march through Sydney’s CBD to protest Israel’s bombing of Gaza in response to the October 7 attacks.
NSW Premier Chris Minns said the police presence at these protests had cost taxpayers $5.4million this year alone.
Mr Lees, 41, from Newtown in Sydney’s inner west, is regularly seen at the protests in a keffiyeh – a traditional male scarf and headwear – which has become a symbol of support for Palestine during the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
He is also an LGBTQ rights activist and writes for Red Flag, the newsletter of Socialist Alternative, a group that identifies as Australia’s largest Marxist organization.
Mr Minns this week said police should have the power to refuse a request for a protest when they are held so repetitively.
‘It’s my view that police should be able to be in a position to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing,’ he said.
‘I’m not talking about a union rally against the government over a wage deal, but when you’ve got someone putting in an application every seven days for 51 weeks to march through Sydney streets.
Josh Lees, a member of the Palestine Action Group, has been applying to NSW Police every week to march through Sydney ‘s CBD in the year since the October 7 attack on Israel
‘This is costing millions of dollars, and I think taxpayers should be in a position to say we would prefer that money spent on roadside breath testing, domestic violence investigations, knife crimes, rather than the huge resources that’s going into the city and the community.’
Mr Lees was also blasted by 2GB’s Ben Fordham on Wednesday morning, who described him as having ‘a finger in as many protest pies as he can handle’.
‘He’s one of the reasons why taxpayers have forked out well over $5million this year for extra police,’ he said.
‘With overtime added, it’s closer to $10million.’
Fordham questioned what Mr Lees did for a living and said he could write on his resume that he was a ‘full-time pain in the a**e’.
Mr Lees is seen with Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi and Sarah from group Families For Palestine
Mr Lees, 41, from Newtown in Sydney’s inner west, is regularly seen at the protests in a keffiyeh, which has become a symbol of support for Palestine amid the conflict in the Middle East
Mr Lees accepted he was a ‘serial protester’ after being described as such by Mr Minns.
‘I’d rather be a serial protester than a serial killer, and right now we have Chris Minns backing the serial killer Benjamin Netanyahu, who has killed over 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza,’ he told The Daily Telegraph.
‘We wish Minns was as concerned with stopping this genocide as he was with stopping people protesting against genocide and war.
‘But this isn’t about me, and any attempt to make it so is just another desperate distraction from the war crimes Israel is carrying out, with our government’s support.’
Unconcerned by the cost to taxpayers that he was causing, Mr Lees vowed he and his movement would keep protesting ‘to stop Israel’s invasion of Lebanon’.
Mr Lees has a very wide range of concerns he feels strongly enough about to arrange protests.
He was part of the Lockdown to Zero group, which campaigned for the NSW government to mandate lockdowns during the spread of Covid.
Yet he also was part of a Black Lives Matter protest during lockdowns in 2020 that defied laws at the time preventing such gatherings.
He was one of many protesters arrested for camping out in Martin Place in 2011 for the Occupy Sydney movement, which briefly rallied against economic inequality but also petered out.
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