The JATL Law and Social Movement series will be a series of conversations with Queensland law graduates who have gone on to do incredible work in the social movement organising space. It can be difficult to navigate how to use your legal education towards truly progressive social change, so this series will grapple with how to do so, and also provide ideas of different pathways people have taken since leaving law school.
For our second conversation, Pandora’s Blog editor Samantha Haran sat down with Action Ready co-founder Clare Scrine. Action Ready is a grassroots collective focused on providing legal information and support for activists in Meanjin, particularly in their confrontations with police at protests and actions. Action Ready believe that educating the community in the law can help ordinary people subvert the system in new and creative ways while making informed, strategic decisions. Clare also currently works in Greens' MP Max Chandler-Mather's office, as Director of Community Organising and Campaigns. She is also a self-taught cook and author of the cookbook 'The Shared Table.'
In this interview, Clare and I spoke about everything from navigating UQ law school whilst feeling alone in your values, to the 2019 climate movement that formed that backdrop to the founding of Action Ready, and the different privileges people bring with them when they come to activism work, particularly to protests. We also spoke about the law’s relationship to social movements and change; specifically about how it is designed to preserve the status quo, and thus is typically a weapon wielded by the powerful to oppress the powerless, and thus is the antagonist in all stories about positive, progressive social change.
Interview with Clare
Tell me a little bit about your journey here since law school.
I went to law school at UQ straight after high school, and graduated with Arts/Law degrees in 2017. I knew I probably didn’t want to pursue law, at least at that time. Everyone was going into grad jobs and had done clerkships and all of that stuff and I just… didn’t get it. I just never felt that pull. Which was honestly quite isolating. I felt very alone in that decision and people would be like, that’s weird, why have you done law if you’re not wanting to jump straight into “using” it?
So I graduated with no real plans. I was involved in various activist projects at the time and I knew that was where my heart was. I ended up getting a job at Michael Berkman’s office, MP for the Greens. I worked there for 3.5 years, running his re-election campaign and got quite embedded in doing community organising work and advocacy work out of an electorate office, which I really loved. I learnt an enormous amount working with Michael and navigating that process of being Queensland’s first Greens’ State rep. I was also working there part-time, so I had time to do other things. I was able to start the work with Action Ready, write a cookbook, along with a lot of other random things… I loved it, because I never really accepted this notion that you should pick a career and that’s your whole life. That your whole life is working, and then recovering from working. I had all these volunteer things I wanted to do, all these community building projects, and passion projects, and of course, fun things as well. So yeah, that ended up being a perfect role for me at that time.
About a year ago, I decided to leave my Greens job to go do my PLT, and ended up working at a community legal centre (CLC) for a bit. But, recently, with the announcement of the election results, I quit my job and went back to working with the Greens. I’m really excited to get stuck into this work now, doing community organizing for one of the new federal MP offices.
I love that! And that's so good to hear that you were able to find a job that was rewarding but also gave you enough time to pour into your community, into things you are passionate about and just like… live your life. Because that is definitely something that worries me about graduating university - being funneled into full time work that doesn’t allow time for other things. The things that, honestly, bring my life the most joy and meaning.
Exactly.. And I think the thing I realised very late in law school was that the thing that gave me the most meaning in my life was… it wasn’t necessarily feeling like ‘oh, I’m making change’ or whatever… it was finding solidarity. It was that feeling of being with people who just fundamentally understand that sense of “we’re all fucked, every part of this system is rotten- so now what? How can we do some good things anyway?”
It wasn’t until I found friends who felt like my people, very late in the law school game, who got that, who were with me on that. is what it feels like to be… happy. Or to find meaning.
Exactly, I couldn’t agree more. I feel like you’ve already started to touch on this a bit, but I wanted to ask: what was your law school experience like at UQ?
Honestly the first word that comes to my head is lonely. I had a couple of great friends but I really didn’t feel like I found a community there. I realised later that so much of what was making me unhappy was that I didn’t… I just didn't feel like I had people that shared my values. That being said, there were some good bits too, like going on exchange.
I remember there was a turning point though, right towards the end of the degree. I’d held off from doing much activism up until that point, mostly because I was so busy throughout uni, working 30-40 hours a week in a kitchen to save money. But at the start of my final year, I just made the decision to myself that I was going to try to get a bit more involved with activism and volunteering.
So I started doing a bunch of pro bono placements in CLCs, and also got involved with Fossil Free UQ, which at the time was the group on campus doing the coolest direct action work sticking it UQ (which, to this day invests in fossil fuel projects)… It sounds corny, but getting involved with that group really changed my life. For the first time, I met people I really loved and this leftie group was really serious about the work they were doing. It wasn't just let’s protest sometimes… It was, every semester, coming in and saying ok what's our goal in this work, what is our strategy, let's have a planning day, let's do trainings, workshops. Seeing how seriously people were taking that work, and their place in the climate movement, just really was a real eye opener for me. I absolutely loved it. I felt such a distinct sense of this is what I’ve been missing. And so my last year of uni ended up being really wonderful! I met more people in that final year doing that work, than the 5 years beforehand and that ended up directing what I did afterwards.
Speaking of what you did afterwards, I’d love to hear more about Action Ready, which you co-founded a few years after graduating - tell us what it's about, how it began and your involvement with it!
So, basically I started it in 2019, with Bri and Anna, two friends who work at the Environmental Defenders Office (both utterly brilliant people doing incredible work with their legal training). We’d all been involved in the climate movement in Brisbane in some capacity. At that time, the climate movement was particularly focused around trying to stop the Adani coal mine. We’d all been up north to the blockade camp and been involved with solidarity actions here. One of the things I love most about activism is how there is always a role for everyone in an action or campaign. Given my law degree, the role of “legal observer” appealed. It’s a role whose primary job is to monitor the police and their interactions with protestors to try to make the space safer for everyone. Throughout that year, 2019, there was a real escalation of climate activism in Brisbane… it felt like a very exciting time, there were a lot of protests, a lot of disruption and a lot of media attention on the climate crisis.
However, we also really felt there was this very stark gap, in that there was no legal information for protesters. So much of the theory, history and background you learn about in direct action movements is how important it is for people to feel empowered and actually have knowledge before getting involved with those spaces. And how important it is to recognise that those spaces aren’t the same for everyone. There's a lot of privilege white people in particular have, who will run into those spaces, not realising they are potentially putting the Bla(c)k and brown people on either side of them at much greater risk, than necessarily themselves. The police are an inherently racist institution, and it's very important at protests and in direct action to understand de-escalation and the importance of informed decision making where possible. We also felt there were some kind of concerning ideas floating around about putting this idea of ‘getting arrested’ on a pedestal, which is very tied up in people’s privilege… the idea that being arrested and put in a watchouse is some minor act that everyone should do if they care about climate change. So I guess part of our Action Ready project was about trying to shift that dialogue a bit.
Initially, we said there just needed to be information - there was no Queensland-specific place where activists could get accurate information about their rights
I should say too, the other part of the reason we started this is because we believe civil disobedience is a core part of protests and movements, so in creating our project, we were not at all intending to say ‘don't break the law’; rather, we wanted to support people to engage in those things in a way that felt safe and empowered to do because they had information.
So that's how it started really, as a website, and we created flyers and documents which we distributed to various protest groups. After that stage, we had all this energy, so we were like - what are we going to grow this project to? So we started running trainings, legal briefings and fielding legal observers at all these protests. And then, quite soon after, we ended up coordinating a campaign fighting theQueensland government’s newbullshit anti-protest laws to target theprotesting that was happening against the Adani mine. And we ended up finding ourselves in this position where we were the natural group at the time to be coordinating and leading that fight against those orders. So Action Ready turned into a bit of a campaigning operation for a while.
From there, over the last few years, as a project it's really ebbed and flowed based capacity. Brilliant new activists have come in and done an enormous amount of the work, and we’ve had months at a time of intensity, and many months of quiet as capacity wanes- as seems to be the case with all grassroots projects. I think the most consistent work we’ve tried to do is legal observing actions and protests… there's a lot of value in having similar people legal observe in a city because they are able to observe trends and report on them, and be somewhat of a knowledgeable voice on how things are changing over time.
That’s incredible, I’m genuinely so inspired by the work you have done and are doing in this space. I think the point around different peoples’ safety levels when it comes to interactions with the State and the police is such an important conversation to be had in activist circles, and it is not a conversation that is being had or understood enough.
Absolutely! It's the kind of consideration that a lot of white activists don't do enough of and it's a problem. I guess making that more visible and having those conversations is really hard. Because sometimes there’s this attitude of well its all so urgent and we all just need to do all the things and it doesnt matter and throw anything and fuck the police and all of this, and of course… yeah, fuck the police, and yes, it is unbelievably urgent. But we still need to care for our communities. Because if we’re not doing that, then what’s the point?
Absolutely. I love the way you phrased that. At the end of the day, our work has to prioritize that - caring for one another whilst we’re building people power. And it is so important that we don’t forget that.
I also wanted to ask you - I feel that the law is sometimes (mis)understood as a potential tool for radical social change, rather than an active enemy of it. Would you agree with this? How do you understand the relationship between the law and movement work? For example, in what ways does the legal system have a vested interest in suppressing social movements? How does it do this? And, perhaps most importantly, what advice do you have for other law students and grads who are trying to navigate their place in movement work, knowing that we have been trained in a discipline that does not at all equip us to be agitators nor agents of social change?
The law definitely does serve to suppress social movements, and it is important to remember this. Firstly, in a meta way, the law basically exists to uphold the status quo. That’s the whole way the law works and was designed… to build on precedent and largely only enable slow, incremental change… it's also designed to enforce and protect capitalism and neoliberalism and uphold systemic racism and oppression.
I don't particularly see the law itself as a tool for change, you're right, that's a really misleading way to think of it. We can use legal knowledge to help support movement building, but in doing so, in a way we’re actually subverting the law or actively manipulating it. But I think ultimately the legal system we live under is fundamentally built on the economic system that has caused the planet to be now facing mass extinction.
I 100% agree. Before we wrap up, I have one last question: what is your ultimate goal with the work you are doing at the moment?
To be honest, I don't feel like I have an ultimate goal. I think the thing that gets me the most motivated at the moment is feeling really excited about building mass mutual aid projects and strong community networks. Building those tangible connections in communities based on solidarity. I don't quite know what that looks like over the next few years, as we face down the barrel of climate collapse and quite likely the end of the world as we know it. But I guess I do know that we are going to need strong communities supporting each other and organisers as well, facilitating those connections… I think that's something else I realised recently. I did all this legal training but… I’m an organiser at heart. I want to organise big shared meals for people, organise and facilitate networks through which neighbours can help each other, and organise events and protests and big volunteer events that make people feel tangibly a part of something that matters. I suppose prioritising that is my ultimate goal for now.
To learn more about the incredible work Action Ready is doing, you can check out their website site here. They always need more volunteers to act as legal observers and report on policing in Meanjin. To keep up with Clare and her incredible vegetarian cooking (and stay tuned for her next cookbook!), you can follow her on instagram and check out her website.