Tony Kevin
ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope has done all Australian citizens and residents a great service by making public on October 14 the proposed raft of counter-terrorism legislation that PM John Howard had laid confidentially before Australian premiers a few weeks ago on September 27. (See <http://www.chiefminister.act.gov.au> or < http://www.chiefminister.act.gov.au/docs/B05PA HREF="mailto:G201_v281.pdf"><G201_v281.pdf>.)
It is not as if we did not already have a pretty good idea of what the package would contain. We knew its philosophy and assumptions from many speeches, interviews and background briefings to journalists from Howard and Philip Ruddock and senior officials like Mick Keelty (Australian Federal Police) and Paul O'Sullivan (ASIO). Pro-government commentators, like Gerard Henderson and Neil James (Australian Defence Association), have done their bit to prepare us for the alleged necessity and benign nature of the new laws. Weak populist political leaders like Kim Beazley and the Labor state premiers have helped to soften us up.
Too many have been swamped and brainwashed into accepting the alleged inevitability of this serious erosion of our liberties, as the claimed lesser evil to feared acts of terrorism. But the case for this has not been plausibly made it has simply been asserted by the men in power.
Even Stanhope succumbed to the pressure to fall into line at Howard's stage-managed security briefing of premiers on September 27 while a pair of RAAF Blackhawk helicopters circled ominously around Canberra all day, presumably to drive home the perception of a terrorist threat. God knows what lies were told to the premiers about the reason for the Blackhawks being there.
We now know why eminent Australian lawyers like Alastair Nicholson, ACT Justice Terry Higgins, John North of the Australian Law Council, Terry O'Gorman of the Australian Civil Liberties Union and Cameron Murphy of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, have expressed such grave and well-founded misgivings about these proposed laws.
These people — and there will be more — show how injurious these laws will be to our most cherished democratic freedoms, so hard-won in our brief colonial history.
Declaration
What will these laws do to the way people like me exercise our rights to take part in Australia's public political conversation as citizens, residents and voters? Such a personal affirmation has been turning around in my mind for some weeks. So this, if you like, is my "Wittenberg Declaration". (For those whose history is a bit rusty, Martin Luther dealt the symbolic blow that began the Reformation when he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses against church corruption to the door of the Wittenberg Church in 1517.)
For the past few years, I have exercised my democratic rights freely by speaking and writing in books, newspaper articles and letters, and on my own and other websites. I have expressed some strongly dissident views, touching often on delicate areas of national security and foreign policy, relating to my former professional knowledge and expertise.
I have strongly criticised some actions and practices of the present Australian national state, most significantly asking questions, well-based in evidence, as to whether the sinking of SIEV X on October 1, 2001, which killed 353 innocent asylum-seekers, mostly women and children, might have involved Australian government agencies engaged in criminal, life-threatening covert disruption operations, and whether such facts of state criminality may have been deliberately covered up since then.
I condemned the federal Coalition government's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, outside the rules-based UN Security Council system, and the dire consequences that the unlawful coalition decision has had for Iraq and its people, and for Australia and its people. I condemned the SAS secret commencement of invasive warfare inside Iraq more than 30 hours before Howard announced we were at war, as illegal under the international laws of war. I condemned Australia's military involvement as a coalition partner in the great war crime and crime against humanity that was the coalition forces' methodical destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in October 2004, when thousands of civilians were killed and 200,000 rendered homeless from a city of 250,000.
I condemned the Australian government's betrayal of the Australian people in ramming through parliament an unequal, exploitative and unnecessary free trade agreement with the USA that will damage the lives of ordinary Australians.
I condemn ongoing examples of anti-Islamic prejudice and cruelty in Australia, in which I include the proposed terrorism laws. I have urged a greater public understanding of the political root causes of the present wave of global terrorism involving small numbers of enraged Muslims.
I have never, and would never, support any terrorist acts, because of the principle that the end does not justify the means. I also note that such a belief is common to all the world's great religions and philosophies. I happen to be a Catholic, but my position would be the same if I were a Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian or atheist.
I have never, and would never, associate with any people who might, in my view, be at risk of inclinations to engage in acts of terrorism.
Yet, I can well see how some of my writing over the past few years might be construed by certain suspicious or prejudiced minds in Australia's national security apparatus to be some kind of incitement to terrorism under the proposed laws, or how, even if this were not believed, some such official might think it politically useful to present me with such a question.
The intention of such interrogation might be a seriously based desire to check facts, or it might stem simply from a desire to intimidate me from expressing my political views: to fire a warning shot across my bows.
The justifying logic would be simple to construct for a naive, fearful and credulous public.
Since I have accused the Australian state of being involved in possible acts of state terrorism in Iraq or around our maritime borders, and since I have exposed such disturbing questions to general public access, what is my defence if officials in national security authority in Australia were to call me in for questioning, to accuse me of inciting acts of terror by the kinds of public writing I put out?
Worse than this: if such officials were to claim to me and I would have no way of testing it that they already knew that some person had contemplated committing a terrorist act as a result of having read something I had written, could that make me some sort of unknowing accomplice in, or inciter of, terrorism?
I don't think it could, and I hope a decent pro bono civil rights lawyer could put up convincing reasons why not, but someone who had a legal power to detain me under this new law might think it worth a try sometime even if only to give me a scare. After all, they kicked Scott Parkin out of Australia on charges no more credible.
Could such security officials, on the basis of what is on my website, deprive me of my liberty for hours, days, weeks or months, under the proposed new law? Could they hold me for as long as they wanted to question me, and deprive me of my right to divulge, much less complain about, this treatment publicly afterwards? Could they try to break my spirit in this way?
Criminalised?
I am a law-abiding retired former senior public servant. I am not a criminal. I freely admit that I loathe John Howard for what I think he is doing to my country, but it is my democratic right to make those judgements about an Australian prime minister.
But I can now see clearly how this law, clumsily or vindictively applied, could feasibly send me to prison as a criminal. And, since I will not be self-censoring my public writing as a result of this law, it is now possible that I may find myself in that position, once this law is passed, as it probably will be.
So here is my Wittenburg challenge to Howard and his agents. If any of our national security people ever want to have a private conversation with me about any of my writing, at a time and place convenient to me, I would civilly cooperate with them as a good citizen. But if they harass, intimidate or try to embarrass me in any way under this proposed new law, I would be likely to make those facts public, regardless of possible adverse consequences to me.
I find the possibility of secret temporary arrest or detention for secret interrogation that I was not allowed to publicly reveal and protest about afterwards abhorrent and disgusting. I see that it is precisely this possible eventuality that would be likely to push me into making a public martyr of myself, also because I am old and stubborn enough to think that the cause mattered enough to the public interest to make such action necessary.
These proposed laws are not about somebody else; they are not only about intimidating Australian Muslims, though the proposed laws will bear down especially hard on them initially. Later, the net will widen, to intimidate all of us.
While there is still perhaps some time, make your views known on this pernicious proposed legislation. Don't let Howard succeed in this further attack on our democratic freedoms and values. He'll try and slide it in behind the industrial legislation while all our attention and public energy is focused on that. Don't let him get away with it. Protest, because the defence of our living in freedom depends on you protesting.
[Tony Kevin was ambassador to Poland 1991-94, and to Cambodia 1994-97. He has been a visiting fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University since 1998. He is the author of A Certain Maritime Incident — the Sinking of SIEV X, Scribe Publishing, Melbourne, 2004. His website is <http//www.tonykevin.com>.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 2, 2005.
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