Opinion – 3 January 2012

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Fearmongering & civil liberties in Australia: A decade of fear, and counting…

by Bill Rowlings, CEO Civil Liberties Australia

Who said this:

‘…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country…‘

I won’t reveal who the speaker was, until the end of this item. But meanwhile, the cartoonists – who are usually excellent at putting their ink-stained fingers on the nub of an issue – have made telling comments on the same subject matter: fear and terrorism, and why we have to be very afraid of being afraid.

For example, here’s Geoff Pryor in the Canberra Times on 12 November 2005:

It’s almost a pleasure to see the old, familiar figures back in the cartoon! There’s Howard on the left, Costello on the right, and Ruddock dutifully cranking up the ‘Spin’ meter in the middle. Nobody could tamper with refugee fears like Ruddock and Howard.

The cartoon is an excellent summary of the Howard years, from 1996 to 2007, when the government used fear as a wand to wave over Australia to keep us unruly Australian people in line.

For example, you’ll recall that within a few weeks of Howard coming to power in 1996, we had the Port Arthur massacre. Howard learned from that episode that it was easy to force national change – slashing the numbers of weapons in private hands, in that instance – if you could ferment national revulsion of an event, and feed fear of what might recur. He used the same principle to advantage for the next decade, simultaneously playing the patriot card.

The Howard period seamlessly morphed into the Rudd/Gillard years. Those of us in civil liberties and to the middling left of politics welcomed the emergence of a Labor federal government in 2007 – after 11 years of hard Liberal, trending righter – as a sea change. But we have been bitterly disappointed. There were high hopes of Australia at last getting a Bill of Rights because more than 80% of Australians supported the idea in a proper poll conducted by the Attorney-General‘s Department. But the federal Labor government discerned that there was too much “division” in the community over the question. 80% in support? That’s division? Perhaps the misreading of the electorate over the human rights poll was when Labor started to lose the plot in relation to polls generally.

The major fear generated over the decade from 2001 to 2010 has been the attacks, using highjacked aircraft, on the Twin Towers buildings in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. But some people forget that we started the period a year earlier with a doozy: remember the Millenium Bug that was going to consume all our computers at midnight? For the preceding four or five years, we had lived in rising fear of the bug biting. So the first decade of the 21st century really got off the most fearful of starts.

Then, in September 2001, Al Qaeda struck from the air over the USA. What followed were unprecedented police–security–defence laws in Australia over the period 2001-2004. The massive legislative over-reaction to “9/11” was further escalated by the Bali bombings in October 2002. New terror laws were appearing at the rate of one every seven weeks.

Three years later, in 2005, terrorist bombers struck in London. In Australia, we got another raft of “emergency” terror laws when States and Territories agreed to preventative detention.

Basically, the Australian Parliament could not pass the type of ‘preventative’ laws sought – the Constitution forbids punitive detention without a person firstly being tried or convicted by a court. But the states and territories were free to pass laws, and they did, introducing preventative detention and control orders, which comprised an even more draconian regime of anti-civil liberties and human rights restrictions.

Talking about the need for future vigilance, ACT Chief Justice Terry Higgins in 2005 said:

‘What is brought in with a dramatic bang often stays with an insidious whisper; these laws are like a dubious party guest who refuses to leave.’

The ACT version of the laws had a five-year ‘review’ clause. They had to be re-considered by November 2011. A week earlier than that, in late October 2011, the ACT Government extended them for five years. These are laws that have never been needed, have never been used…and there is absolutely no evidence that they’re needed now.

By the way, the UK Government – at almost exactly the same time, November 2011 – was about to wind back some of their equivalent counter terror laws after a 2011 British government inquiry found that, in some areas, their

“counter-terrorism and security powers are neither proportionate nor necessary”.

But please, don’t just take my word for these things. Here’s what Prof George Williams said about them late in 2011 on Hayman Island in the Barrier Reef at the annual conference of the Australian Lawyers Alliance. Prof Williams is by no means a bleeding heart liberal and, like me and most members of Civil Liberties Australia, believes laws had to be tightened after the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks. He is certainly not “anti” the current government, as he put his hat in the ring for pre-selection in Canberra for Labor in the early lead-up to the 2010 election.

Prof Williams is now an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow who is engaged on an international project on anti-terror laws and democracy. He made these comments in October 2011 on the features of Australia’s terror laws:

• scope too wide
• discretion to label groups as ‘terrorist’ too great
• penalties too harsh
• police – & non-police – powers are too broad
• application of law too wide
• intrusion into person and property too invasive

But, in our Tweedledum and Tweedledummer parliament, both major parties take the same approach to laws which restrict the human rights of Australians and severely impinge on the civil liberties of citizens and residents.

And so, the ramping up of fear continues. Australia’s then Attorney-General Robert McClelland said in the Australian Parliament on 12 September 2011:

‘The September 11 attacks on the US changed the global security environment for ever.’

The “global” security environment? I’m not sure the attacks changed the security environment in Botswana a great deal. And I’m absolutely certain that in Colombia they had many more security concerns to worry about in terms of local murders and mafia than what happened in New York. So the McClelland “global” hyperbole is just another example of local politicians ramping up fear, when the threat level in Australia has not moved from the ‘Medium” setting it was the day before 9/11. It was Medium then, it is Medium now: all that has gone up is the needle on the government fear meter, latterly tweaked – or even given a gigantic twist or two – by Labor rather than Liberal.

McClelland, in the same speech, also said:

‘Investment in national security (including defence) has increased from … $18 billion in 2001-02 to over $33 billion in 2011-12.’

That’s probably as right a figure as anyone can come up with…though personally I believe it understates the volume of money wasted on excessive security measures. Think for a moment what an extra $15 billion (repeat, billion) each year (each year) could be doing for our schools, or our hospitals, or for road or rail or port or air infrastructure.

I read the other day that the Bureau of Meteorology was crying out for extra funds, saying that it would have to close services if it was not given more money. It’s smaller agencies like BoM and a host of other service entities, as well as the museums and galleries and so on, that have suffered because successive governments have wasted probably at least half, maybe three-quarters, of the additional expenditure on excessive security measures.

Take BoM, for example: what are the real threats that have most affected Australia over the past few years? Cyclones, floods, bush fires, droughts, microburst storms…yet the government has cut funds from an agency like BoM which is on the front line of the real, repeating, day-to-day, year-to-year threats which face Australia and Australians. The threat level for all these natural disasters in Australia is virtually always on RED, HIGH…but we ignore that, and spend money on a threat that was and is “Medium” for an event – a terrorist attack – that has not occurred once in Australia in the past decade, or even for many decades before that.

The Attorney-General boasted about how well Australia has done to “disrupt terrorist plots”. He said, in the same speech in parliament:

‘Since 2000, four major terrorist plots have been disrupted in Australia. To date, 38 individuals have been prosecuted as a result of counter-terrorism operations and 22 have been convicted.’

But I ask, what about the innocent? Yes, 22 were convicted out of 38, but that means that 16 innocent people were kept in jail, on remand, for two years or more in solitary confinement in Australia’s super max prisons in Goulburn, NSW, and Barwon, Victoria, in awful conditions, locked up 23 hours a day.

Despite all the extra laws, manpower, funds and resources handed out by governments over 10 years, police and security agencies have been proven to be wrong in court 42% of the time on the evidence, as 16 out of 38 charged with terrorism preparation offences have been proven innocent in court.

That is a woeful record by Australia’s police and security agencies. You would think that they would be ultra-careful to get it right, to have incontrovertible evidence, and to make sure that those they brought before the courts were proven guilty, simply for the forces’ own credibility if not for any other reason. I would have expected a 90-95% success rate by the state in bringing terrorism charges, given that they have at their power all the new laws, thousands more police and security personnel, the massive expansion of surveillance devices, the new ability to plant bugs on phone, computer and/or cars and in houses, the ability to detain people for a week without trial, and so on.

But no, our guardians got it right less than 60% of the time, wrong 42% of the time. And 16 innocent men suffered jail for two years or more for no reason. We usually think of other countries acting like that, not Australia. The treatment of the men on remand in Victoria for more than two years was so bad that Judge Bongiorno threatened to release them on bail unless prison and court authorities dramatically improved the way they were being treated.

Speaking of budgets and staffing, the Australia Security and Intelligence Agency, ASIO, has had an enormous boost: it has gone from 660 staff in 2005 to 1860 in 2011…plus of course the monstrous new building almost on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, which it now says is too small for all its staff. I have a question for you? What are 1200 extra domestic spies doing every day? Have they been round to your place?

You probably laugh, or giggle, thinking: “I’m not the type of person that ASIO visits!” Well no, maybe you’re not. But did you realize that ASIO and other spook agency people can secretly enter your home, without telling you, to keep watch on a neighbour…next door to the right or left, or over the road, or over the back fence maybe. They can plant surveillance devices on your property, on your computer, or your phone…they can do a myriad spooky things of which you will remain totally unaware. So, maybe you are innocent, but how well do you know what your neighbours are doing?

And don’t think for a moment that the police and/or security agencies are not keeping watch on little old organisations like the Independent Scholars Association of Australia. I recall taking photos from behind this same lectern as Andrew Wilkie gave the keynote address at the 2006 ISAA conference. Two well-dressed people – one male, one female, both in suits, which is most unusual for an ISAA audience – stood out for trying not to stand out: both were ducking and weaving to try to stay hidden behind the person sitting in the row in front as I took a photo with Wilkie in the foreground and the audience in the background.

The two were sitting apart, but linked up as they left later. Wilkie at that stage had not even thought about entering the Tasmanian or the national parliament: he was a whistleblower on the Iraq war who had recently quit the Office of National Assessments. But I have no doubt that he was under police/spook observation at the ISAA conference in 2006…and therefore, so were we.

I often wonder why the secret police and the spooks don’t spend more time at the offices of big business in Australia: I suspect there are more criminal and anti-society acts conceived, planned and committed in such offices than at all the meetings like those of ISAA and similar groups throughout Australia each year.

Returning to one of Australia’s chief fearmongers, Attorney-General McClelland:
in the same speech, Mr McClelland said:

“The recent July 2011 attacks in Norway remind us that terrorism is an international crime and that no country is immune from this threat.”

On that basis, Martin Bryant at Port Arthur in 1996 was a terrorist when he killed 35 people. The Anders Breivik killings in Norway have more in common with Bryant in Port Arthur than an Al Qaeda terrorist attack. But that’s what happens sometimes when, as the nation’s first law officer, you try to ramp up fear: the hyperbolic language gets away from you.

Then you have the Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, weighing in on 11 September at the National War Memorial, with French counterpart Alain Juppe:

“September 11 could easily have happened in Paris, it could easily have happened in Sydney and it could still happen, which is why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Forgetting the banality of such a trite statement, it is worth looking at the original quote from which Mr Rudd’s pearlish words come. The quote stems from Irish orator John Philpot Curran in 1790, who said:

?”It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

…in other words, the original quotation warns people to be vigilant AGAINST politicians and the “active”, including those actively?proselytising fear…like Rudd, McClelland and Gillard (and Downer, Ruddock and Howard before them.)

The reality of the past 10 years, and the lesson of the decade, is that:

What we most have to be fearful of is being made to be fearful.

It’s useful to look back over about 10 years at the how business and government, agents and agent provocateurs, scientists and seers, police and politicians have worked together to inculcate fear in the community. Note that some of the fears have been, and are, real…but real or not, they add to the depressing of the populace and the dumbing down of public debate. For example:

• 2000: and 3-4 years leading up to New Year’s Day: Millenium bug
• 2001: Twin Tower/etc attacks in USA, Tampa refugees, Afghanistan war
• 2002: Bali bombings
• 2003: Iraq War; plot to attack Sydney grid
• 2004: Bomb blast, Aust. Embassy, Jakarta
• 2005: Sydney 9 arrests re terror plot, Melbourne 13 arrests, London bombings
• 2006: US housing bubble bursts: Global Financial Crisis starts
• 2007: Australian Climate Taskforce report, APEC meeting in Sydney
• 2008: Garnaut Climate Change Review, global economic recession
• 2009: H1N1 swine flu world epidemic, Holsworthy terrorist plot arrests
• 2010: Refugee boat disaster Christmas Island, European financial crisis swells

Remember APEC in Sydney? The entire city centre was locked down. It always strikes me as strange that when our national government invites important visitors from overseas, it locks its own citizens out of their own city for the period the supposedly important people are here. Who counts in Australia? Australians, or fly-by-nighters here for a day or two, the vast majority of whom have appalling human rights records…and that includes the US visitors.

So, while these scares listed above have proliferated, what effect has it had on our day-to-day lives? Here’s a small list, to which you can add your own minor or major inconveniences:

• air travel: intimate scans, ban on bottles,
• phone taps, email intercepts
• data compilation/storage: tracking your online payments/etc
• financial: reporting by banks on what you do with your money
• secret home searches, planting devices
• secret arrest, detention without court appearance
• evidence by police agents in false names
• surveillance: govt, councils, stores, etc using CCTV
• national DNA database being built up
• cybercrime laws/bodies: London early November 2011 escalation
• censorship changes to come in from 2012
• e-health records to come in from July 2012, without proper safeguards
• Australia Card to be revisited?
• DNA/biometric ID to become mandatory?

what other restrictive, fear-based changes will follow?

What can we do about all this? Very, very little. But we can be far less accepting of politicians, not take them at face value, and look at what lies behind their weasel words. We can speak or write to them, we can write to newspapers, we can speak out in the media, we can say we don’t accept their fearmongering behaviour. We need to be specially wary of future fear-based pronouncements, to identify them for what they area, alarmist statements by politicians wanting to keep us, the people of Australia, “under control”.

We need to be wary of even more laws that are “anti-terror” or “just in case” or “we’ll give the police these powers, but in reality they’ll never use them”. We need to fight against strict liability laws, under which you have to prove you are innocent rather than the state proving you are guilty. We have to avoid “nanny” legislation, where the government takes away our freedom of choice and decides what’s good for us. And we have to start getting rid of the bad laws that are now on the statute books.

In the next few years, we have to extra careful of appeals to patriotism. We have to be especially cautious about jingoism in the lead-up to the 2015 anniversary of the Anzacs at Gallipoli. The problem is that promotion of fear and hiding behind patriotic slogans are the new-speak of politicians who no longer base their appeals for public support on principle or party policy.

And who made that statement which opened this address:

‘…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country…‘ – HERMANN GOERING

That’s right. Our politicians follow the principles of National Socialism, as practised in Germany in the 1930s, which led to World War Two.

 
Address by Bill Rowlings, CEO of Civil Liberties Australia, to the annual conference of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia, National Library of Australia, 3 November 2011. Re-printed with the authors permission.