By Stephen Hammond
Last month the minutes of a meeting came to light outlining the WA deputy police commissioner's plans for "anti-hooligan" police patrols. According to the document, the main task of these patrols is "to harass potential offenders". Police minister Graham Edwards said "harass", meant "targeting a group to protect the public ... surely that is what police are about."
In Alice Springs more recently, Professor Fred Hollows advocated targeting another group: "If you have verifiable proof that people who are HIV positive are spreading the disease — and there are a lot of them — then their personal liberties should be sacrificed." Dr Leo Laden went further, supporting measures to scare, threaten and restrain. "Talking", he said "is the least effective way".
It's an old story: society is under attack and ordinary Australians have had enough! Juvenile crime is out of control and innocent people are dying as a result of re-offending young "thugs" in stolen motor vehicles. Meanwhile, HIV-infected homosexuals are "recklessly spreading the virus" and the media are called upon to "apply more scrutiny to the gay community."
The mechanisms of moral panic are well known, says author Jeffrey Weeks: the definition of a threat; the stereotyping of the main characters as particular species of monster; a spiralling escalation of the perceived threat, leading to absolutist positions and moral barricades; the emergence of an imaginary solution (tough laws, for example); followed by a reduction of anxiety, with the chosen victims left to endure new proscriptions or penalties.
If police really believe that harassing potential offenders might offer a solution to juvenile crime, it is reasonable to ask how officers are to identify such people. Given that 70% of children in custody in WA are Aboriginal, the answer is not too difficult to surmise.
Similarly with calls for "monitoring" and "control" of people who might transmit the AIDS virus, it is easy to speculate how such people might be identified by the monitoring agency.
The vast majority of young Aborigines, who are not potential offenders, and the vast majority of gay men, who are not "promiscuous" (the media's favourite word in relation to homosexual behaviour), are sacrificed for the perceived greater good. As a result, all young Aborigines and all gay men can expect to suffer as a result of measures to reduce community anxiety levels.
Evidence that runs counter to the measures, such as figures showing that WA's juvenile crime rate has declined by 10% in the past two years, or a Sydney study of 1000 gay men which reveals no new cases of AIDS in the past year, is given similarly scant regard.
It is true that society faces enormous problems, but these are not created by juvenile offenders or the innocent (all) victims of s we face are a direct result of our obsession with materialism and our lack of respect for the different cultures and sexual identities of our fellow human beings.
It is true that legislation is urgently needed in WA, but not legislation like the Crime (Serious and Repeat Offenders) Sentencing Act 1992, which was drafted, amended and passed within a month — a time frame usually applied only in times of national disaster.
It has taken seven years, not four weeks, to get the justice minister to direct the WA Equal Opportunity Commission to prepare a report examining discrimination based on sexuality as a ground for complaint under the Equal Opportunity Act. Land rights, recognised by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody as vital in providing Aboriginal people with their own economic and spiritual base, are still not even on the agenda in WA.
Legislation in these two areas is essential to protect the legitimate rights of people in a society that continues to operate on the narrowest of agendas.