ANU vice-chancellor (academic) Professor Grady Venville said the pro-Palestine encampment at the Australian National University posed an "intolerable risk" to safety as it was on an evacuation point. On May 27, the university issued a legal direction to the protesters to move on and the police may step in to arrest people if they do not comply.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 My name is Grady Venville. I'm Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic at the Australian National University.
00:05 Can you explain what the direction was to the ANU encampment today?
00:10 So today we instructed that the encampment be vacated for safety reasons.
00:16 The encampment is located in the busiest part of the campus and it is the main assembly point for
00:25 emergency evacuations.
00:27 Last week we had an emergency evacuation of Fenner Hall, which is home to 400 of our students.
00:34 Through that analysis of that evacuation, we realised that our secondary evacuation points
00:41 failed. And so this is a terrible,
00:45 intolerable risk for the university and hence we've taken immediate action.
00:51 We realise it's very difficult for the encampment students
00:56 and we appreciate their cooperation in restoring
01:00 safety to campus and we look forward to continuing to work with them to enable them to protest in
01:07 respectful and safe ways.
01:10 So we've invited them three times to come and talk with us and we have repeatedly
01:15 affirmed with them our concerns about their safety and also the safety for the broader community.
01:23 We take safety very, very important, you know, as utmost important for our importance for our community.
01:30 So we've repeatedly said that to them.
01:32 They actually refused a work health and safety check that we initially
01:38 initiated with them, but then they eventually did do a safety check of the internal encampment.
01:45 But as I said before, the
01:49 evacuation of Venner Hall, which is home to 400 of our students,
01:53 really enabled us to analyse the data and we realised that the
01:58 evacuation point exactly where the encampment is,
02:02 with the encampment there, is an intolerable safety risk for the university.
02:08 Some of the protesters have said that this safety reason is a pretext for
02:13 getting rid of the encampment. What's your response to that?
02:17 Oh, absolutely not.
02:19 Safety is our primary concern here and we would we welcome the students to continue to protest.
02:26 Our campus is a lively place and we have great respect for their
02:32 purposes for
02:36 continuing to protest and we would welcome discussions around how we can
02:40 enable them to continue to protest in respectful and lawful ways.
02:44 [BLANK_AUDIO]