EVA SALLIS ON COUNTER-TERRORISM LAW: “ART AFTER TERROR”, FROM “NEW MATILDA”  -  commentary by Tony Kevin, Canberra 5 December 2005

 

 

Last night,  I sent this letter to the following Senator and MHRs in Canberra: Senators Evans, Ludwig, Faulkner, Crossin, Payne, Brandis, Mason, Allison, Brown, Nettle, Bartlett, Miln; and MPs Carmen Lawrence, Petro Georgiou, and Judi Moylan.  I also copied it to a few media and publishing contacts.

 

 

“Please read this message from Tony Kevin to eminent Australian author Eva Sallis, which I am copying here to selected Senators, MPs and "publishers" as shown. There are also some BCC addressees.  

 

Regards

 

Tony Kevin, Canberra 4 December 2005  

 

 

Subject: Eva Sallis's "New Matilda" essay this week on sedition, "Art after Terror"

Dear Eva 

Thank you very much for your New Matilda essay "Art after Terror", (text copied below for convenience), and original on

http://www.newmatilda.com/home/articledetail.asp?ArticleID=1171  

  

I hope you don't mind my circulating this comment. There is a lot of good common sense in your New Matilda article and I hope it will be widely read. 

 

It strikes me that Mr Ruddock's latest concession last Wednesday night [November 30] in the Liberal party room in response to the L and C Committee's bipartisan recommendations on sedition in the counter-terrorism proposed laws is very suspect. The L and C Committee had recommended:

 

"Recommendation 29 -  If the above Recommendation to remove Schedule 7 from the Bill is not accepted, the committee recommends that:

          proposed subsections 80.2(7) and 80.2(8) in Schedule 7 be amended to require a link to force or violence and to remove the phrase 'by any means whatever';

           all offences in proposed section 80.2 in Schedule 7 be amended to expressly require intentional urging; and

           proposed section 80.3 (the defence for acts done 'in good faith') in Schedule 7 be amended to remove the words 'in good faith' and extend the defence to include statements for journalistic, educational, artistic, scientific, religious or public interest purposes (along the lines of the defence in section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975).”

 

Mr Ruddock responded:

 

“Sedition (see recommendations 27 - 29)

In relation to the provisions dealing with sedition, the Government proposes to amend the bill to:

Insert the phrase 'by means of force or violence' after the word 'effect' in the definition of 'seditious intention' to make clear that a seditious intention necessarily involves the intention to use force or violence to achieve a particular outcome

Remove the phrase 'by any means whatsoever' in the offences of urging a person to assist the enemy and urging a person to assist those engaged in armed hostilities.

Make clear that recklessness only applies to being reckless as to the consequences of the offence of urging the overthrow of the Constitution or Government, not the behaviour of an individual to ensure consistency with the other sedition offences.

Insert an additional good faith defence in relation to publishers of material who do so in good faith and in the public interest.

In addition, the Attorney-General has agreed to a detailed review of the sedition offence.”

Comment by Tony Kevin: 

The L and C Committee rightly wanted to remove the term "good faith" altogether because it is so spongy in meaning,  and open to abuse by an unscrupulous Attorney-General,  so as to target those persons or organisations he wants to go after,  and leave alone those that he does not.  Instead,  Mr Ruddock seems to have ignored the bipartisan Committee's very good suggested change to the proposed section 80.3, and instead threw a small bone - i.e., an additional good faith defence - to "publishers",  whatever that term means ( see below)

Mr Howard was bending over backwards on the weekend assuring both mainstream cartoonists and media publishers  " You are OK, this isn't about you " and hinting broadly that "We are not going to use this new sedition law any more often than the old one was used"  [i.e.,  I infer to mean - hardly ever,  and only against Muslim terrorist advocates].

 

Of course it is Criminal Law 101 that this is bad lawmaking - good law does not discriminate between persons - but Howard does not care what legal principles or values he corrupts in our society,  in his pursuit of ever-expanding power and control over Australian life.

I have a practical question here though - "what is a publisher?"

 

When the ABC or SBS transcribes {onto www.abc.net.au  ] a hardhitting radio or TV program eg on Lance Collins or Merv Jenkins or Andrew Wilkie or SIEV X, is it being a publisher?

When independent public interest websites like Crikey or New Matilda or Online Opinion or Webdiary or Greenleftweekly.com or tonykevin.com or Marg Hutton's sievx.com or Jack Smit's projectsafecom.com,   write and/or publish dissenting political texts that Mr Ruddock might think seditious, are they publishers?

 

I think it is perhaps quite important to know whether we have that miniscule figleaf of protection offered by Mr Ruddock last week to "publishers", or where he intends to draw the line here ?

 

I know it won't affect what I write - because basically,  I don't give an flying fig what Mr Ruddock might try to do to me, I'd be glad to be a test case of this law in the public interest - but it could concern some of those other internet sites I gave as examples. 

 

As to print media publishers -  newspapers, journals and books - your 'New Matilda' piece sets out the issues and likely corrosive effects on our freedom of speech very well.

 

If we are simply being told, as I think we now are,  " Trust me, I am your Prime Minister",  I do not find that a reassuring assurance at all. Nor, I think, would many of the parliamentary recipients of this message. 

 

I wonder, who would publish a book like my book "A Certain Maritime Incident: the Sinking of SIEV X" (Scribe, 2004) - a book John  Howard was quick to condemn in Parliament - after these sedition laws are passed?

 

I had a hard enough time getting it published under the old laws. Two publishers rejected it before Scribe's owner to his great credit took it on. It has sold 3500 copies and won several Australian literary prizes/shortlistings since.  

 

I don't think the rejectionist publishers' concerns were about its literary merit, they were scared of the high national security sensitivity of its subject matter. Even then, in 2004 ... how much more scared would they be of such a book now ?     

 

Best

 

Tony Kevin 

 

 

COPY:

“Art after Terror” -  By Eva Sallis

With thanks to “New Matilda”,  Wednesday 30 November 2005

 

What will be the effect of Howard’s proposed anti-terrorism measures on writers and artists? What will be the effect, for example, of removing our certainty that we can create works critical of the Howard Government’s actions in the War on Terror, or works that humanise people the Government wants us to see as despicable? What will be the effect on journalists who report unwelcome facts? How worried should all Australians be about potential restrictions on the way we tell stories in this country?

 

Realistically, at first little would happen. A certain guilty commonsense suggests that the Howard Government would use this legislation to chase down sheikhs they disagree with and to harass Arab and Muslim youth.

 

We guess that application of these laws will be political and discretionary. In other words, put bluntly, we all know that any application of these laws will at first be culture-specific and racist. But when I am seditious, which I suspect I will be often, I will have the unpleasant knowledge that I will be speaking because a government chooses to allow it, not because I have a right to.

 

I rang a literary agent to ask her views, and found her deeply disturbed by the proposed laws and all their implications. She was adamant that she would never reject a novel because of potentially seditious content. And, until publishers get shaky, she would seek publication for it in Australia. She was refreshingly feisty too. She said that we should all have in place codes by which we can let people know that we have been detained without actually saying it.

 

I rang and asked one of Australia’s smaller publishers. He said that he thought publishers would not be on the frontline in the way journalists might be. He suggested that, as a publisher and citizen, he found these laws profoundly objectionable.

 

But as we discussed it, he said thoughtfully that even the costs of seeking legal advice on a particular book might be off-putting to some publishers, let alone getting advice that they were exposed to a potential lawsuit. He said that book publishing should be a clearing house for ideas and then trailed off.

 

He sounded depressed.

 

I rang one of the bigger publishers and spoke to one of their commissioning editors. She was quite fierce about her company’s commitment to Australia’s cultural and intellectual life. She said, ‘put it this way — let’s see how many seditious books we can get out in the next 12 months.’

 

She also thought that good books would come out of this, that it might be a wake-up call to many sleeping thinkers in the country. She sounded as though, at least for a while, her company would be prepared to pit itself against the Government on this one. But if litigation became a real possibility, she said that they would have to help authors find less overt ways of communicating important ideas or dissent.

 

I asked a journalist. She said there was consternation among her colleagues, but that the spirit on the floor was that journalists must keep reporting the truth and the facts regardless. And she said that younger journalists even thought that these were exciting times — that there was a challenge to meet.

 

She believed too that the laws would not affect many people at first, but that journalists would be affected before other writers or private individuals. She wondered what would happen the first time the Australian Federal Police demanded a journalist reveal a source under the new laws, and how many journalists would go to prison. Then we got talking about the highly seditious play she is writing on the side.

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech is the key freedom — it is the means by which all other breaches of individual rights and abuses of power are made manifest and fought over. Freedom of speech is the test of a free society, the test that a society sees itself capable of full and open debate, and full exposure to facts. Freedom of speech is the marker of a social and intellectual fabric that is diverse enough and strong enough to cope with divisive and destructive opinions of individuals or groups.

 

Everyone should be very worried about the longterm survival of basic rights in a society when a government begins to seek secrecy, and to control what you can know and say about its actions. Everyone should leap up and dissent at the first sign that the government might like the power to silence individual opinion and to muzzle the media. If this legislation goes through, it will affect every single one of us.

 

Once a book the Government really dislikes is published and the first publisher is charged, self-censorship will begin and mainstream publishing of dissenting voices will slowly cease.

 

And what about journalists — whose job it is to research and tell a story so that people can imagine a complex rather than pre-packaged world? How many journalists will risk the costs of trial and the inconvenience to their already partisan employers? What will Australian society be like when the only story you ever see or hear in the media is the one the government of the day would like you to imagine?

 

And after the first attack on Australian soil? The government of the day will be empowered by this vague legislation to do a great deal to any dissenting individual it cares to target. The racism and culture-hatred won’t go away: quite the reverse, but we will have more and more difficulty talking about it.

 

The proposed anti-terror legislation will throw away the civil society we once had, a society in which injustice could be properly debated and questioned. The proposed legislation will not only inevitably lead to profound injustice, it also introduces measures that curb our ability to challenge these injustices.

 

The Public Imagination

What is the role of art in a time of crisis?

 

For a while longer, we will get published, we will get exhibited, and we will get audiences. The time is coming when we will have to use allegory, satire, humour, metaphor, and stage illegal performances. The time is coming. But now, the time is here for artists, musicians, writers, film makers, dramaturges and playwrights to express what we are becoming.

 

Art is powerless to stop us going to war. But it can bear witness. It is the job of art to bear witness.

 

Art in a time of crisis is about invoking the capacity to think and feel beyond ourselves, and to imagine the lives of others. Art is about keeping alive some part of the public imagination.

 

The curtailment of freedom of speech and the control of media is the curtailment of public imagination. More and more Australians will cease to recognise some Australians as human. Once exiled from our imagination, what are young Arab Australians to become? Put another way, if we continue to ratchet up the alienation young Arab and Muslim Australians feel, what will be the consequences? Where will they go to find themselves as Australians, their role in Australian history? Exile from the common imagination is the most terrible thing to happen to a group of human beings and has irreparable consequences. We should know that from history.

Artists must use all the imagination they have to wake people from this poisonous tragic fantasy. We are far enough gone that such awakening is deeply painful.

Australia is unreconciled, at war with ourselves, suspicious of all and willing our own blindness, our own destruction.

 

Who are we? What are we becoming? What have we become? These core questions will drive thinkers, artists and writers to sedition for a long time to come.

Eva Sallis, in “New Matilda” .