NSW Premier Chris Minns continues to defend his NSW Labor government’s anti-protest laws, despite the NSW Court of Appeal striking them down in April as unconstitutional.

The Public Assembly Restriction Declaration (PARD) laws, amendments to three acts, were rushed through parliament after last December’s Bondi terror attack. They included giving the police commissioner the right to stop public assemblies in “restricted” areas after a terrorist event and the power to renew the restrictions for 90 days.

Since then, Minns said he “absolutely” stood by the laws, despite the justices finding that they were “was not compatible with the maintenance of the constitutionally prescribed system of representative and responsible government”.

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon, NSW Assistant Commissioner Peter McKenna and NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley have also defended the laws.

The judges found that the laws was were unconstitutional because they sought to shut down all protests — rather than those that may be deemed to provoke another terror-related incident. They said there was a “lack of proportionality between the notionally legitimate objective and the means chosen to pursue that objective”.

Meanwhile, it’s week 14 of the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission’s (LECC) investigation into more than 800 complaints about police conduct at the Gadigal Country/Sydney protest in February against visiting Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

The LECC said on May 24 that 556 of these complaints were made directly to the commission and 267 to police. Commissioners are said to be reviewing 450 items submitted through its portal and more than 1000 hours of CCTV footage. It will also consider video footage from police body........

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