[The following abridged letter was read out by Tony Kevin at a rally, organised by the ACT Network Opposing War and Racism, protesting the terror laws on November 28.]
Dear Mr Howard,
You are reported as saying that the federal government will not water down its anti-terrorism bill, and has no plans to scrap sedition provisions. You also reportedly rejected calls by Premiers Beattie and Bracks to remove the sedition provisions. Yet you assured the public that under the proposed laws, Australians will maintain their right to criticise politicians.
You said: "Journalists, cartoonists, actors and all other sundry critics of the government have nothing to fear from these new proposals ... People can still attack me and Mr Beazley and lampoon us, as I am sure they will, without any fear of being put in the slammer."
Mr Howard, in trying to make light of this serious issue, you miss the main point: that it would be wrong for your government to pass new laws, while at the same time assuring certain groups in Australian society that they are protected from these laws.
If there is to be a new sedition law, its provisions will have to apply impartially and without fear or favour to all groups or persons. If you are ready to pass and use sedition laws against Muslim clerics or teachers, whose words your officials decide might risk inciting acts of terrorism by Muslims, you have to be equally ready to enforce those same laws against people who are neither Muslim nor supporters of acts of terrorism, but whose speech and writing may come within the ambit of these laws.
I am a former Australian career diplomat, twice an ambassador for my country. I was a member of the Group of 43 former diplomats and senior defence officers who issued a statement in August 2003 condemning your involvement of Australia in the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq.
In response, you said on August 10, 2003: "The 43 people comprise a mixture of people who have over the years been, in some cases, regular critics of this government. They include one person who accused the Royal Australian Navy and the Australian Federal Police of complicity in the drowning of 353 refugees. To expect for a moment that I am going to treat that person with the sort of reverence that is asked of me by the Leader of the Opposition — as far as I am concerned I have dealt with the merits of their arguments ..."
My book, A Certain Maritime Incident: the Sinking of SIEV X (Scribe, August 2004) sets out your government's improper cover-up of whatever it might know about the events leading up to this maritime tragedy in Australia's naval and RAAF-patrolled border protection zone, in international waters to the south of the Sunda Strait.
I do not know whether the covert people smuggling disruption program that your government agencies conducted in Indonesia in 2000-2001 contributed to instigating this tragedy. I do know that your government's policy of preventing legal family reunions for refugees who had come to Australia on unauthorised boat voyages led directly to the tragedy. Most of the drowned victims were women and children trying to join their husbands and fathers in Australia, and who had no legal way of coming here under your migration laws as amended in 2001.
You have ignored for three years the Senate's repeated motions calling for a full-powers independent judicial inquiry into these unresolved questions.
Duty of care violated
You are responsible for many other illegal and seriously life-threatening policies and actions, in which you and your senior national security ministers have violated your duty of care to protect human life.
They include: policies and actions that made Australia a military party to the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent huge and ongoing crimes against humanity in that country. The misrepresentation and misuse of alleged Coalition intelligence about WMD said to be in Saddam Hussein's possession. The illegal invasion and commencement of armed combat in Iraq by Australian SAS forces, 30 hours before the expiry of a declared US ultimatum to Hussein to step down. The ADF's involvement in the destruction of the city of Fallujah in October-November 2004, which killed thousands of civilians and displaced 200,000 persons from their homes. The ADF's assistance to US Army efforts to conceal from the International Red Cross the facts about ongoing tortures at Abu Ghraib prison.
Your government's failure to warn Australian holidaymakers in Bali in 2001-2002 of high-quality intelligence, known to Office of National Assessments and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, that places in South East Asia where Westerners were known to gather in large numbers had become high-risk terrorist targets.
Your government failed to protect Australian citizens David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib from cruel and illegal torture, rendition and captivity in Guantanamo Bay. Your government is now failing in its manifest duty to return Hicks home after four years in US captivity without trial, to the point where he has had to request British citizenship through his mother.
Your government is failing to make sincere and serious efforts to save Van Nguyen from execution in Singapore.
It is profoundly unjust that your government is deporting and washing its hands of former Australian prisoners at the end of their sentences who have, in some cases, been permanent residents of Australia since early childhood, while Australian citizens with similar criminal records are released into the community when their sentences end.
Despite Australia's opposition to the death penalty, your government allowed the AFP to mount a sting operation in Indonesia against drug smuggling, as a direct and foreseeable result of which nine young Australians now face possible death sentences in Indonesia.
You lead a ruthless government that regularly violates international laws and obligations to which Australia is party, trampling on defenceless people's lives, even their very right to life.
Your present provocative "counter-terrorism" policies are creating great distress and insecurity in Australia's Islamic communities totalling some 300,000 people. Australians of goodwill understand the pressures it is putting on our multicultural society.
I will take no notice of whatever sedition law your government might pass. Any law that seeks to prevent, or discourage, people who have views like mine from saying or writing such things is a bad law, and needs to be defied.
If your government passes such a law and then tries differentially to shelter people like me from it, you will be improperly enforcing that law. Laws cannot be used selectively to try to intimidate or silence particular individuals or groups. To invoke sedition laws against people who speak out truthfully on matters that may discomfort or anger the government is a certain road to tyranny.
[The full text of Tony Kevin's speech is available from <http://www.tonykevin.com>.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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