Senator John Faulkner in the Senate on 5 December,  commenting on the Anti-Terrorism law that is about to be passed today – commentary by Tony Kevin, 6 December 2005.

 

As journalists and special interest groups get ready to write their editorials and commentaries for tomorrow, which I predict will generally be on reassuring lines ( i.e., “Yes, it was a very dangerous bill originally,  but the political process in the Senate over recent weeks, flawed and rushed as it was, has made it all a lot better and we respectable folk e.g., publishers, writers,  and creative people, can again rest  easy – politics is the art of the possible, and there is a sort of government promise that sedition will be reviewed next year”), here is a salutary reality check – from Senator John Faulkner, in  last night’s Senate adjournment debate. (Proof Hansard, Senate 5 December,  page 129).  

 

Faulkner is unsparing in his condemnation of the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No 2) 2005.  He uses the adjournment debate to get important things he wants to say on the Hansard record – as he did in 2002,  when he put his three historical speeches asking questions about the sinking of SIEV X and the Australian Government’s people smuggling disruption program in Indonesia, in three successive adjournment debate speeches on 23, 24 and 25 September 2002 (texts on Marg Hutton’s www.sievx.com) .

 

Here is what he said on the Anti-Terrorism bill late last night, after hearing the day’s truncated debate.  I assume he already had (detailed or broad) knowledge of the latest amendments negotiated (since the party room meeting last Wednesday night) between the Attorney-General and the key government senators on the Legal and Constitutional Committee (Senators Marise Payne and George Brandis), and that these senators were referring to favourably in their statements in the Senate yesterday .

 

Historians will go back to Faulkner’s  speech here, when they come to evaluate Payne’s and Brandis’s role in this process of lawmaking under gross government pressure,  and ask – why did our Parliament let so bad and dangerous a law ever be passed?  - TK , 6 December 2005. 

 

Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005

 

Senator FAULKNER (New South Wales) (11.22 pm)—

 

This afternoon the government used their Senate majority to block debate on the second reading of the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005. It is chillingly ironic that the antiterrorism bill, with its potential to infringe the freedom of speech of many in our community, is itself the subject of a gag. It was legislation that ought to have been exposed to proper scrutiny. These are bad laws written for bad reasons. The government acknowledge that these laws are flawed. They have admitted that they need to be reviewed. But, rather than allow proper legislative process with adequate scrutiny and amendments, the government propose passing the laws first and fixing them later. A responsible government one might think would get the laws right before they got them passed. A responsible government might try to fix the problems in the laws before innocent people’s rights and liberties are unnecessarily infringed.

 

Just how flawed are these laws? To start off with, a government controlled and chaired Senate committee inquiry into the antiterrorism bill made 52 unfavourable

recommendations, one for every week of the year. And that is after a farcically abbreviated inquiry designed to prevent genuine scrutiny of the bill. I will not

go through each and every one of those recommendations, but let me draw your attention, Mr President, to a few key issues.

 

First of all, I draw your attention to schedule 4, control orders and preventative detention

orders. These orders are designed to make it possible for people to be put under house arrest or in actual detention when no charge has been proved or even brought against them. After the public outcry when an early draft of this bill was made public by Jon Stanhope, the ACT Chief Minister, some judicial review of these orders was included in the bill. But those changes remain inadequate. Serious questions remain about the

constitutional validity of these provisions and serious questions remain about the necessity of these provisions when existing powers of arrest for broadly defined

preparatory terrorist offences, combined with ASIO’s powers of questioning and detention, provide alternatives with less impact on civil liberties.

 

 

I would also like to draw your attention to schedule 7 which relates to sedition. Sedition is an archaic and anachronistic offence. It has no place on the modern statute book. Our federal criminal law already provides an avenue for prosecuting those who incite others to crime. The sedition provisions in the antiterrorism bill in part duplicate the existing law and in part go dangerously beyond it. It will be possible for a person to

be prosecuted even if the conduct they urge is not a crime. The Howard government cannot sugar-coat the violation of freedom of speech and freedom of expression

in these sedition provisions of the bill by including a new offence of incitement to inter-group violence. In principle this is a welcome protection for members of

the Australian community suffering vilification and violence. Why not, then, put it where it belongs—in anti-vilification law?

 

It is a new development for John Howard’s government to show concern for protecting the rights of the marginalised and the minorities in our community. It was, after all, Mr Howard whose response to Pauline Hanson’s inflammatory, ignorant and racist comments was a mild, ‘You may not agree with everything that is said but you defend the right of people to participate.’

 

It was Mr Howard’s government that whipped up anti-refugee feeling with false stories about kids overboard and false speculation about al-Qaeda terrorists on asylum

seeker boats. Under John Howard, as former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser said last week, the Liberal party ‘has become a party of fear and reaction.’ It has allowed—and some would say promoted—race and religion to be part of today’s agenda.

 

The narrow provisions of the antiterrorism bill will do nothing to protect those in real danger of vilification and racial and religiously motivated violence in Australia.

But they will allow the government to pretend that the revival of sedition in our modern legal code is not a massively retrograde step. The good-faith defences in

the antiterrorism bill are limited and inadequate, and minor changes to these defences in recent days do little to blunt the effect of the sedition provisions in these

laws.  [Tony Kevin – my highlighting].

 

What is the government proposal to deal with the massive problems with these new sedition laws? They will review the legislation some time into the future.

That is right: they will pass legislation that they know that members of their own government have told them is flawed, badly flawed, and then they will fix it later.

If legislation is flawed, it ought to be fixed. And if it cannot be fixed, it should not be passed.

 

That is the responsible attitude. That is the response of a responsible government, a responsible Prime Minister, a responsible Attorney-General. That is the approach

that they would take; but then a responsible government would not take the nation to war based on a lie. A responsible Prime Minister would not deny the connection between his own grievous error and the increased danger to Australians and Australian interests from terrorism, and a responsible Attorney-General would not allow shoddy laws to be put to the parliament for cheap political effect. What a pity then that Australia does not have such a government, such a Prime Minister or such an Attorney-General.

 

Instead, Australia has Mr Howard and Mr Howard’s government. Australia has Philip Ruddock fresh from his time as minister for immigration, where he got plenty of practice locking people up or making people disappear. Having done John Howard’s dirty work at

DIMIA, from lies about ‘children overboard’ to more than 200 unjustified and illegal detentions and deportations, now Minister Ruddock is doing John Howard’s bidding in a new portfolio, the Attorney-General’s portfolio. Once a self-styled moderate, Philip Ruddock has become the pallid poster boy for the inhumane face of the Howard government’s policies. He oversaw the development of a culture in DIMIA that prioritised detention and deportation over accuracy and fairness. I just ask this: what kind of culture will Philip Ruddock oversee when these laws are passed?