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Address to “Green Left Weekly” public forum in References: 1. The over 270 submissions to the Senate Committee examining
the proposed anti-terrorism laws, most of which have been highly critical: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/legcon_ctte/terrorism/ 2. Hansards of three days of Legal and Constitutional Committee
hearings in http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/s-lc.htm
The question now is
– to what extent can we trust our state? And how does that affect
the way we are to live in We rely on our state to protect our security as citizens and residents, and to act justly. It is a great shock when one discovers – in my case rather late in my life – that there is no reason to believe our state or its agents can be relied on to do those things, if the ambition and opportunism of political leaders has led them to neglect or reject their obligations, and if the habit of obedience and the power of service oaths over people working in chains of official command leads them to obey their orders without question, setting all ethical issues aside. If one has ceased to believe in the moral integrity of the day-to-day operations of Australian state, one approaches the present anti-terrorism laws from a very different perspective, than do those who still have the belief that our state is an ethical entity that generally respects us all, and sets out to protects our lives. For the latter group of people, the issue is essentially a technical practical question. How can one build more safeguards into these laws, more checks and balances, so that the occasional mistakes or abuses of power by individuals in the system may be prevented or, if they happen, brought to light and corrected? ? How can one convince politicians who will shortly vote on these laws in the Senate, and who are assumed to be generally people of good faith regardless of party, that the laws as submitted by the Howard government might be unnecessary and dangerous to our liberties? And that if they are passed, there is a need to build stronger safeguards into them, to delete or soften certain parts of them? But what happens if one starts with a different view of the good faith of those who currently have the executive power to govern us and make our laws? And for that matter, a different view of the good faith of the Leader of the Opposition? If one has come to
a view that such people have a proven track record of regularly
and systematically manipulating or omitting facts or lying on
matters that affect the life or death of people under their duty
of care? And who will, when challenged on such lies, put the entire national security resources of
the state behind reinforcing the lies and trying to give them
a semblance of retrospective credibility? What kind of a useful
citizen-state dialogue can one then have with such people, if
one has lost faith in their decency or loyalty to As a loyal Australian
I have what I think is a clear view of I now think of the
For me the urgent question now is, what can I do to help show the Australian people how these men, with their endemic lies and bad policy decisions, are progressively corrupting our country? What can I do, as an independent public commentator, to try to slow down their destructive march through our institutions and values? One thing I can do is to hold determinedly on to facts and truth. Two and two still make four for me. I have not yet been brainwashed or terrorised into saying they make five. [The reference here of course is to Orwell’s 1984 – required reading these days]. Former ASIS officer Warren Reed said on an ABC Background Briefing program “Intelligence Wars: Behind the Lance Collins Affair”, on ABC Radio National, 30 May 2004: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s1121412.htm “Truth and accountability in the whole intelligence process, and a detachment from poltical influence, is absolutely crucial. If you lose truth and accountability in intelligence, you can’t have a national interest”. I think Reed’s point goes to our whole system of governance, not just the intelligence process. Let me give a few examples of where our whole present national security system is projecting and protecting things that I know to be lies – lies that have destroyed people’s lives, to whom our Australian state had a duty of care. The government lied
in not passing on to Australian holidaymakers through the DFAT
travel advisory system good intelligence information that it had
during 2001-2002 that Bali, as a holiday resort area in Indonesia
where Westerners were known to gather in large numbers, was at
risk of terrorist attack. DFAT warned its own employees by secure
means to avoid going to such places on the day before the attacks
happened: yet for nearly a year it had falsely reassured the Australian
public that “tourism services to I believe the unstated
purpose of that neglected duty of care was an Australian government
view from the top to allow matters to take their course in I refer also to Bruce
Haigh’s recent important Canberra
Times commentary, analyzing the links between the Indonesian armed
forces and JI, and the former’s interest in covertly enabling
acts of JI terrorism in order to obtain more And there has been no accountability. Labor helped the government paper it over, in the failed Senate inquiry into pre-Bali intelligence. There was a huge smoking gun, senior official ONA witnesses were held up to ridicule by government senators, but the parliamentary inquiry went nowhere. As usual, Labor fudged the report. You must read the Greens and Democrats statements to get to the real truth of what happened in this inquiry: See http://www.tonykevin.com/Bali-Senate-Report.html [The Senate Foreign
Affairs and Defence Committee report on Similarly, the deaths
of 353 people trying to reach http://www.sievx.com/testimony/2005/20051006 Truth is what the system says it is, or so our national state would now have us believe. Whichever persons blow the whistle on the SIEV X cover-up now from within the national security system will probably go to jail. But they will be heroes. Just this week, a
little family group of asylum-seekers from West Timor are being
flown thousands of kilometers from It is their own fault,
we are told – if they had not insisted on making refugee claims
they would be back home by now. Forget that they landed on Australian
mainland soil, that had not been conveniently excised. Forget
that there was a recent promise, that children would not again be put in detention
except for short periods while identities are checked We are told
the family of four (father, mother, two children) will be allowed
out soon to house detention on Christmas Island Three
other single men will stay locked up alone, presumably for as
long as they pursue their refugee claims.
We now have another case like Aladdin Sisalem, who was
locked up alone for years on I could go on and on – Defence Minister Hill’s proposal that the Australian Army go into active service in the Philippines to help the Philippines Army better carry out search-and destroy mission into Muslim insurgent areas – an aggressive militarisation of a complex inter-communal internal problem that Australia should definitely not be interfering in: See http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17282539-421,00.html?from=rss “New role for SAS
mooted”, from The Advertiser, by Phillip Coorey, November
18, 2005. See also: http://www.minister.defence.gov.au/HillTranscripttpl.cfm? http://www.asiantribune.com/show_article.php?id=2822 If the And I have not yet even mentioned the Iraq War which is surely the extreme example of an arrogant national security regime out of control in Australia – 1 million demonstrators against the invasion contemptuously dismissed as the mob, the false intelligence case for invasion exposed by Andrew Wilkie before the war started but shrugged off, the illegal initial SAS campaign of covert undeclared war starting two days before Howard announced we were at war in Iraq, the ADF involvement in the war crime that was the November 2004 Fallujah massacre, the ADF assistance in helping cover up US tortures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the prolonged crucifixion of David Hicks merely to curry favour with the present gang that rules in Washington. And the way Cheney’s
company Halliburton is quietly taking control of large parts of
Australia’s national infrastructure including the Alice Springs
to Darwin Railway, built by a Halliburton company (under a build,
own and operate for 50 years deal), and intended, Alan Ramsay tells us, to bring
the world’s nuclear waste cheaply into Central Australian dumping
grounds. And were it not for Richard Tonkin’s pathbreaking work
this year on Halliburton’s spreading influence in http://margokingston.typepad.com/harry_version_2/2005/03/ and Alan Ramsay in SMH Opinion , “Railroaded up the Bulldust Track” - a must-read article: http://smh.com.au/news/opinion/railroaded-up-the-bulldust-track/2005/11/18/1132016984636.html?page=4 what would we know of this pending huge betrayal by the Howard government of the Australian national interest? I hope the relevance
of this long preamble to my discussion tonight of the new counter-terrorism
laws is clear. Our present
terrorism threat in Australia – the possible self-activation of
a few utterly dedicated suicide bombers, of a few Muslim men –
it only takes a few – fuelled by implacable rage against the terrible
things that Anglo-Western society is doing to their societies
and has been doing for at least 30 years - that threat comes entirely out of our own government’s
huge and continuing wrong decisions, that are leading to the deaths
of so many innocents in Muslim countries. For years now, we have
been sowing the seeds of the hatred we now fear and try to protect
our populations from. With wise foreign and strategic policies,
none of this anxiety would have been necessary. We
only have to look across the Tasman or to If we do not now argue for a clear and correct analysis of truth and accountability about Australian security – where the threats are coming from, and why - we will, having lost sight of our true national interest which lies in not invading and hurting others, have lost the capacity to preserve our precious multicultural society based on decent public behaviour and trust. We will, step by step, destroy everything that is good in our society. The evidence is all
around us. It is clear that, for the government and the national
security agencies that do its work, and for the media interests
that feed off them, 300, 000 Australian Muslims are finally expendable.
In the end, as Brendan Nelson says, if these people don’t knuckle
under to us “they can just clear off”. As Bronwen Bishop tirelessly
tells us, even Muslim schoolgirls are “defying” our society by
wearing the hijab to high school. Under
this mindset, and many of our federal politicians represent it,
if Muslims don’t like the pressures they are coming under, if
they don’t like being subject to the presumption of guilt, we
don’t need them here: it was probably a mistake to let any Muslims
come here in the first place. Fortunately, there are few enough
of them that we can still intimidate and control them. We can
subject them to control orders, preventive detention, lock up
their writers and lawyers and
religious leaders for sedition, why we can even follow Beazley’s idea and lock
down their neighbourhoods ! Hitler
did that to the Jews and look how well it worked. We can seal
off As Glenn Milne assured us recently – having no doubt been fed the statistic by a friendly government source – these laws will leave 99.9% of Australians untouched ! Why worry about the rights of the other 0.1%, the 20,000 Muslims who may be rounded up on suspicion, or be the close families of those rounded up ? “These laws aren’t about us, mate – they are only about them,
and why should we care about them”? Clearly, 2/3 of us don’t care about them – 2/3 of us think the Howard terrorism laws are just fine according to an SMH poll published today. So as usual it is left to the few, to point out how cruel and counter-productive all this wrong thinking is. Of course it could finally push a few young Muslim men, as a matter of pride and honour, to acts of desperate suicidal violence. History teaches us that is what happens when you push any minority community into a corner, as a reviled and mistrusted alien element – whether it be the Irish, or the Basques, or the anarchists or the Trotksyites, etc. Terrorism is the traditional weapon of the weak, oppressed by superior force. There is nothing new here. The problem is – and nothing illustrates better than this, how much I despise Howard and those collaborating with him now on national security issues, in which number I include the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition - that this is exactly what they want to see happen ! They want to see Australian innocent blood shed by an Australian-born Islamic terrorist. They want their case
to be thus proven. As
they perhaps wanted the Which throws an interesting light, does it not, on all the police –media collusion and media overkill of the highly telegraphed 18 arrests a couple of weeks ago? Of course the police wanted media there – to witness the shootouts and the deaths that some people may have been hoping might result. Why were the media used – utterly predictably – to ensure that the news of impending raids leaked out to Muslim community leaders – who were even invited along to watch the fun ? Did some people in authority want to provoke desperate suspects into action, did they want the catharsis of armed exchanges from which people on either side might die? These were not quiet
efficient police arrests of suspects – they were acts of public
theatre, more akin to the anti-Semitic pogroms of years gone by
in In the end, fortunately,
only one arrestee was shot, in the neck. It is alleged he shot
first. He is lucky to be alive – the shot to the head would seem
to have been intended to kill, as the unfortunate Menendes was
killed in This is the So do we succumb to
rage or despair? I hope
not. As long as there is still one good family living in All our political villians are fortunately mortal. John Howard may have to be carried out in a box, but carried out he will eventually be, as we all will be. Meanwhile, some of us will go on speaking truth to power. I spoke in http://www.tonykevin.com/SubversionDemocracy.html To conclude, I hope these sedition laws will be thrown out. Here I put my
main hope in the brave band of “small-l liberals” in the Coalition
backbench, and in the party branches, to put enough pressure on
Howard to make him concede. If
the present Senate Committee produces a full consensus on those
lines, it will I hope be hard for Howard to resist that consensus.
Here is an example of where the thoughtful informed minority
view might prevail over mass indifference and ignorance of the
risks we are running if we pass these laws.
On the control orders and preventative detention proposed laws, I cannot add
to the voices of wise opposition from Malcolm Fraser, Jon Stanhope,
and so many of Under the new laws, it is possible that while we sit down to our Christmas
dinners, Australian terrorism suspects will have been secretly
rendered to offshore preventative detention on Christmas Island,
effectively beyond reasonable defence lawyer access and the protections
of Australian law. The new detention centre there is nearly ready
for them now. Obviously those laws are going to be passed. Some of us may then have to remind
government and opposition leaders that laws are not to be applied
selectively or whimsically. The
first principle of law is to apply it in a non-discriminatory
way. There cannot be one law for suspected Muslim terrorists, and another law for the rest of us. Some of us
may have to go to jail under these laws, to show just what bad
laws they are. Tony Kevin,
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