Activist Josh Lees drains taxpayers of $5.4MILLION for Australia’s weekly pro-Palestine protests

A serial protester has been summoned by the NSW Premier after costing taxpayers more than $5 million in police costs by repeatedly organizing pro-Palestinian rallies.

Josh Lees, a member of the Palestine Action Group and a range of other left-wing causes, has applied to NSW Police every week for the past year to march through Sydney’s CBD to protest the Israeli bombing of Gaza in response to the attacks of October 7. .

NSW Premier Chris Minns said police presence at these protests has cost taxpayers $5.4 million this year alone.

Mr Lees, 41, from Newtown in Sydney’s west, is regularly seen at protests wearing a keffiyeh – a traditional male scarf and headdress – 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 said this week that police should have the power to refuse a request for a protest when repeatedly detained.

“I believe that the police should be able to deny a request for a march due to the limited resources of the police,” he said.

“I’m not talking about a union meeting against the government over a wage deal, I’m talking about someone applying to march through the streets of Sydney every seven days for 51 weeks.

‘This will cost millions of dollars, and I think taxpayers should be able to say that we would rather spend that money on roadside breath testing, domestic abuse investigations and knife crime, rather than the huge resources that go into the city and the community to go. .’

Mr Lees was also criticized on Wednesday morning by 2GB’s Ben Fordham, who described him as someone who has ‘a finger in as many protest pies as he can handle’.

“He’s one of the reasons taxpayers spent over $5 million on additional police this year,” he said.

“With additional overtime, it’s closer to $10 million.”

Fordham wondered what Mr. Lees did for a living and said he could write on his resume that he was a “full-time asshole.”

Mr Lees is seen with Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi and Sarah from the group Families For Palestine

Mr Lees, 41, from Newtown in Sydney’s west, is regularly seen at 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 would rather be a serial protester than a serial killer, and right now we have Chris Minns supporting the serial killer Benjamin Netanyahu, who has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“We wish Minns were as concerned about stopping this genocide as he is about stopping people protesting genocide and war.

“But this is not about me, and any attempt to do so is just a desperate distraction from the war crimes Israel is committing, with the support of our government.”

Without concern for the costs he was causing to taxpayers, Lees promised that he and his movement would continue to protest “to stop the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.”

Mr Lees has a very wide range of concerns that he feels strongly enough about to organize 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 was also part of a Black Lives Matter protest during the 2020 lockdowns, which violated laws at the time preventing such gatherings.

He was one of several protesters arrested in 2011 for camping in Martin Place for the Occupy Sydney movement, which briefly opposed economic inequality but also ceased to exist.