Police state
Australia is becoming a police state, with hysterical support after the London bombing atrocities for extension of already draconian detention without trial measures.
The Coalition government and politicised and intimidated public servants are comprehensively following world's worst practice in addressing Australia's security, as well illustrated by the "children overboard" affair (when the Australian government demonised hundreds of Muslim refugees rescued in August 2001 by the container ship Tampa in the Indian Ocean by falsely asserting that refugees had thrown children into the sea).
The Coalition government (with dishonest and improper support from politicised public servants) has succeeded in enacting draconian laws permitting detention and silencing of Australians without charge and now demands further repugnant and counterproductive violations of our long-held democratic, habeus corpus, due process, freedom of speech and freedom of association rights — and even the power to terminate the very citizenship of Australians.
Media non-reportage and poll-driven Opposition timidity have substantially contributed to the appalling rise of "democratic tyranny" in Australia. We are indeed approaching an Orwellian 1984-style nightmare in which "war is peace", "freedom is slavery" and "ignorance is strength", as well illustrated by mass hysteria over 5000 Western civilian deaths from non-state terrorism over 20 years versus comprehensive Australian ignoring of 2 million avoidable deaths in post-invasion occupied Iraq and Afghanistan due to US state terrorism in gross violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Australians concerned with the "terrorist threat" to ourselves and to other human beings should at least get to the first stage of considering the actual data on "avoidable mortality". Thus, consider the following "risk estimates" expressed as "annual percentage mortality": 0.00003 (Western civilians from jihadist terrorists over the last 20 years), 0.00003 (from shark attack), 0.0001 (Western civilians from jihadist terrorists over the last four years), 0.008 (car accidents), 0.1 (smoking-related causes; 19,000 Australian deaths annually due to bipartisan lethargy), 2.6 (under-five infants in occupied Iraq), 5.8 (under-five infants in occupied Afghanistan) and 10.4 (Australian POWs under the Japanese in World War II — 8000 deaths out of 22,000 POWs over 3.5 years).
Australia's Gadarene slide into entrenched human rights abuse, war criminality and "democratic tyranny" can be halted by resolute, bipartisan insistence on rational risk assessment and the uncompromised retention of our civil rights.
Dr Gideon Polya
Macleod, Vic
Terror laws
WA governor Lieutenant-General John Sanderson recently made the comment: "Australia should not have been involved in the Iraq war without the backing of the UN. This merely created recruits to the cause of terror." This is clearly seditious under the new "anti-terror" laws which prevent giving support to the enemy or bringing ridicule on the government. Arrest him I say.
Dr Colin Hughes
Glen Forrest WA
Latham Diaries
The Latham Diaries may shock readers who are unacquainted or disinterested in political history. It is presented to us as something sensational. Criticism of political parties by their former leaders has occurred in the past.
In his first speech in the federal parliament, former NSW Premier Jack Lang (on November 7, 1946) said: "There is an evil influence that affects all Labor governments in Canberra. All the later Labor prime ministers seemed to have been determined to prove that the Labor Party platform will not function in a practical manner for the government of our country."
In his autobiography An Unlikely Liberal, former Liberal leader Sir Billy Snedden stated: "The Liberal Party is not a liberal party in the philosophical sense. The Liberal Party is a conservative party and a reactionary party."
As I perceive the Latham Diaries, they only provide more up to date evidence to support the criticism of Lang and other former ALP members such as Maurice Blackburn, MP for Bourke (1934-43), and his predecessor, Frank Antsey, who held the same seat from 1910 to 1934.
Viewed from the standpoint of political science, it is merely a storm in a tea cup. It can serve a useful purpose by enabling the reader to become acquainted with the intrigue and rivalry that prevails behind the scenes in our parliamentary parties and the pettiness of bourgeois politics.
Bernie Rosen
Strathfield, NSW
From Green Left Weekly, November 9, 2005.
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