Counterproductive ASIO Bill will foment civil disorder
Harold Hark
27 June 2003

There will be innocent people who have their lives ruined by this legislation without any gain to the country. They'll be taken under information which is false, they'll be deprived of all their rights, strip-searched, interrogated, without the reach of legal assistance and without recourse to the normal checks and balances of the justice system in our country, and then it'll be found that they had no information which is going to help anybody.
Bob Brown, AM 26/6/03

Simon Crean's role as Australia's potential saviour of democracy has been short-lived. The leadership spill behind him, he was free to champion all that humanity desires and John Howard despises, yet almost his first act was to allow his party to pass Howard's ASIO Bill.

Sorry Simon, but you don't become a national treasure by allowing the creation of a secret police with powers to detain citizens as young as 16 for a week (with the possibility of rearrest the minute they step out the door) on what amounts to hearsay. Goodbye Labor (once again), hello despair (yet again).

The ASIO Bill was passed Wednesday night. Thursday's Australian carried five short paragraphs on page eight, while The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald gave a little more coverage buried inside. The Herald Sun said nothing.

Melbourne ABC's John Faine talked to political commentator Barry Cassidy on Thursday morning, but the subject was not raised.

Friday's papers said nothing save for an opinion piece (in favour) in The Australian, a report in the Sydney Morning Herald on the Bill's possible unconstitutionality, and a few letters in The Age.

Saturday's newspapers contained an opinion piece by Alan Ramsay, the following two letters to The Australian...

Time and time again we've gone to the other side of the world to fight in other people's wars, but now, on Australian soil, our elected leaders pass a Bill that drastically reduces our freedom, and there's barely a whimper from the masses.

What is wrong with us?

And next Anzac Day, the PM, and others responsible for this disgraceful ASIO Bill, will have the gall to make speeches about the defence of freedom.

Lloyd Swanton, Watsons Bay, NSW

CITIZENS can be arrested in secret without charges being laid, their phones tapped, mail intercepted and neighbours are encouraged to spy on one another.

Is this East Germany in 1953 or Australia 2003?

Ian Semmel, Elaman Creek, Qld

...and this astounding editorial from The Australian: (Bracketed comments by Hark.)

ASIO can now keep the peace [That's what they think!]

Parliament finally acted in the national interest this week and passed the ASIO legislation. [Nothing has yet occurred to require a Stazi/Securitaté to run amok on behalf of Australia's "national interest".] Both Labor and the Coalition played politics with the Bill for the 15 months it took to pass, but in the end they combined to provide Australia with an additional line of protection against terror attack. The new law allows people 16 years and over, who may have information on terrorist plans, to be held and questioned by ASIO for a week. For a nation with strong traditions of civil as well as political liberty this is tough stuff - but sadly suited to the way we live now. [Thanks to Little Lord Downer's and John Howard's treasonable mismanagement of foreign affairs.] The Bali bombing last year demonstrated that religious zealots wish innocent Australians harm. We now know that the ASIO raids in October - criticised as heavy-handed at the time - broke up groups of Muslim extremists plotting in the peace of Australian suburbia. The grim truth is that there are people who want to harm Australians, both at home and away. The new ASIO powers are designed to stop them, and the infringement of the civil liberties of a handful of people is a regrettable price we must pay to defeat these schemes.

In the parallel universe inhabited by the Greens and the Democrats ­ and their fellow-travellers [i.e., the usual dirty rotten commie bastards.] ­ the ASIO law starts Australia down the totalitarian track. Yes, it is possible to paint an Orwellian picture of how these laws could be applied to unfairly target racial groups or to bring the power of the state to force journalists to reveal their sources. But opponents of the act do not say how many deaths in terror attacks would be an acceptable price to pay to protect the liberty of the friends of terrorists.

Whatever the opponents of the legislation think, this is no thin edge of the wedge opening the door to political prisons. ASIO can only hold people with the approval of a federal judge or magistrate, and must interrogate them in the presence of a retired judge. [The Coalition can call on any number of hanging judges and anti-social magistrates the likes of reactionary high court judge Ian Callinan.] Anybody held for questioning may have their lawyer present, as long as that person is not considered a security risk. [That will effectively disallow any lawyer deemed a dissenter, no matter how high his or her profile.] People can only be held for a week on each matter, and all questioning will be videotaped and subject to the scrutiny of the Inspector-General of Intelligence, the security service ombudsman. Importantly, ASIO's new powers only apply for three years and will be reviewed by a parliamentary committee six months before that. By then, we will have a better idea of how the terrorist threat can best be fought and whether ASIO's new laws have been abused.

Of course, none of these protections are good enough for the civil libertarian inhabitants of the parallel universe, where perfect peace prevails. But here in the real world, where too many Australians have already died at the hands of terrorists, the ASIO legislation is a necessary addition to our national security. [Heil Howard!]

The Pravda inspired editorialist got it right about parallel universes.

Beyond this embarrassing example of atavistic ignorance, the media is not talking about the most insidious Bill to be passed in Australia's history. Yet this is a Bill that will severely hinder investigations into terrorism by journalists. They will be subject to detention and interrogation based on the possibility that they might have information gleaned from normally protected sources. Such restrictions will cause whistleblowers and others with information held to be in the national interest to keep quiet. And investigative journalism will die. Which is just what the government wants. That is, it doesn't give a damn about terrorism, but only the power it has been allowed to have by its masters in Washington.

Those who are satisfied with the amendments to the Bill cite its vast improvement over the original Orwellian submission, which allowed children as young as 10 to be arrested and detained. (No problem for a government that thinks it proper to incarcerate children for years behind razor wire for having done nothing more than to flee from the tyrannies for which this Bill is supposed to offer protection.)

In this, the apologists appear to have been born yesterday. They uniformly believe that the government will not take advantage of its police state powers to arrest and detain people on the vaguest of suspicions. What folly! The government's relentless attacks on the ABC are a dead give-away: dissent is not wanted. Soon it will not be allowed. The point here is that a government that would not take such liberties would be a government that did not need such a Bill in the first place. Every government in history with such powers has routinely abused them.

Let's get one thing straight. The threat of terrorism is a construct of the insane Bush junta. Every action on that regime's behalf since September 11 (the anniversary of the US backed overthrow of Allende and installation of Pinochet in Chile) has been to incite more terrorism in order to gain total control of its own people and to extend its hegemony over the entire world. There is ample evidence that the Bush Government did nothing to stop the attack on the World Trade Center. They could have but they didn't. Why? Furthermore, even a chook with its head chopped off could reason that the bombings were a direct result of United States foreign policy over decades. You can only treat peoples and nations like shit for so long before suffering retaliation.

Instead of calling on the leaders of the world to sit down together and find the causes for such terrifying hatred, Bush chose to pursue his nation's militaristic hegemony with a vengeance.

Australia under Howard is following Bush's orders by doing its best to outrage South-East Asia while simultaneously conning Australians into fearful submission by lying to them with every fetid breath. Like Bush, Howard and Downer pick and choose from their "intelligence" in order to scare the bejesus out of the poor shmucks who still believe they have credibility.

The problem for Bush and Howard, comfortable temporarily as the dullard lackeys of a world wide corporate takeover, is that they are fomenting revolution among their own people. Before long, the Muslim fanatics will not be the only ones fighting back. Protests have been staged all over the world and will continue to occur. Following the inevitable clampdowns on these protestations, there will be a resurgence of the likes of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, the Weathermen, and the Red Brigades. It needn't have come to this, but, like the people of poor nations, the people in developed nations can only be pushed so far.

Enter John Howard's traitorous ASIO Bill.

Anyone who, in the eyes of the Howard Government, is deemed to be a threat to its authoritarianism will be ripe for a 5 AM raid. That's how it has always been in countries with such governments, and that's how it will now be in Howard's Australia.

Yours truly is a bit player in all this, and I'm not overly worried. But as the saying goes: just because you're not paranoid is no reason to think they're not out to get you. And, lest we forget, there were millions of Jews who boarded trains in WW II who could not bring themselves to believe that the gas chambers were at the end of the line. There is no historical reason for those of us who dissent to believe that we are safe from this government.

John Howard is no longer just the deputy sheriff in this region. Emulating his true love in Washington to the best of his ability, he must now be called the deputy emperor. His Napoleonic delusions of grandeur are becoming truly psychopathic. The boy emperor went into Iraq, so the deputy emperor will go into the Solomon's. Forget the United Nations, John Howard's militaristic Australia no longer needs them. Before we know it, conscription will be back on the table.

Only someone as small-time as a suburban solicitor, given a taste of power, could so mindlessly and relentlessly ruin his nation. One thing John Howard has never had is a concept of the big picture. It doesn't exist for him. Beyond the flattery he receives from his master in Washington, and the incestuous advice received from his sycophantic cabinet, he is a rube on the world stage, a genuinely immature greenhorn who has no idea what he is getting himself into.

That is the mentality behind the ASIO Bill. In the end, it is a mentality that is truly Australia's. The average age of Americans over thirty may be sixteen, but here in Australia it is barely pubertal.

(At this writing, a poll taken on Friday by the SMH has 83 per cent opposed to the ASIO Bill. But these are people who can think for themselves. The kind of people that Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, Mao Tze Tung, Joseph Stalin, Rafael Trujillo, to name just a few of the dictators who had such powers, routinely imprisoned or killed.)

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• Labor gives ASIO powers green light
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