The Court of Appeal (Bell CJ, Ward P and Free JA) declared invalid the PARD scheme introduced by the Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2025 (NSW), which empowered the Commissioner of Police to restrict all public assemblies in declared areas following a terrorist attack. The Court held that the legislative purpose of discouraging all public assemblies to preserve social cohesion was not a constitutionally legitimate purpose compatible with the system of representative and responsible government, because suppressing public debate cannot be a legitimate end in itself. Even if the purpose were legitimate, the PARD scheme was not reasonably appropriate and adapted because it operated as a blunt, indiscriminate restriction on all assemblies without any mechanism for assessing the characteristics, purpose or actual risk posed by any particular assembly, displacing the longstanding Form 1 authorisation system that allowed individualised balancing of competing interests.
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