Can't Be Said Enough
Pleiades has sent in this link to the Margo Kingston Web Diary where a person has written in a substantial letter of plea that she sent to the government committee. It was penned by one Olga Ohanessian of Panton Hill Victoria. She says she was born to parents who were refugees from Europe.
The recent very public raids against alleged terrorists (who may have been pre-judged in the media circus, paraded in American style orange jump suits, shackled like the convicts at Port Arthur must have been) was done so under the existing laws. The present laws are demonstrably adequate and do not need to be amended. The alleged terrorists will, (we hope) have their cases publicly tested in a court of law under the existing laws. If the amendments to the terrorist laws are passed, we won't even know who has been "disappeared", or what various tortures are being applied to them, or even if they are still in the country, or if their human rights are being abused. The veil of secrecy inevitably leads to abuses of power.
The amendments propose a draconian curtailment on the right of free speech. We already have our own camps with razor wire a la Siberia, far away from prying eyes. Will they be filled with Australian citizens whisked away in the dead of night on the basis of a suspicious or "subversive" comment? If these thoughts appear far-fetched, please do not dismiss them. In the Ukraine voices of dissent, be they poets, musicians, journalists, ordinary citizens, disappeared in their thousands. Some of their graves are now monuments of pilgrimage in the new emerging democracy. Others simply disappeared, but all over the Ukraine, the sites of the incarcerations and executions are known and publically acknowledged.
Generations of fearing secret police leaves a nasty legacy where people do not trust their neigbour. The consequences of this proposed legislation on changing the cheerful, happy, caring Australian culture into a fearful suspicious one will be longlasting.
She's right. How can we be championing freedom to the Middle East countries while we busily dismantle our own out of fear?
What did Yoda say? Fear turns to anger and anger turns to hate? Better believe it. :)
Jokes aside, the refrain I keep thinking about is the one where terrorists weren't going to change the way we live, and here we are busily changing the way we live to accommodate politicians who get so much mileage out of fear and ignorance. This, combined with the dismantling of an education system means they want more fear and ignorance out there so that they themselves don't have to be so darned clever. I would remind them of Abraham Lincoln's old adage about foolin' people: "You can fool some people all the time and you can fool all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Some Thoughts On Politics On A Monday
You can't say this stuff in the public press. So I'm putting it here.
There's an old cartoon that dates to about 1984 on Sydney University in Honi Soit where somebody drew a cartoon wherein it portrayed dogs licking balls.
Frame 1: Dogs may lick their balls.
Frame 2: Dogs may lick each others' balls.
Frame 3: But one thing that dogs don't do is STUDENT POLITICS!!!
That's the way I feel about all politics - The best minds of any generation just don't do politics. they might do Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll, indulge in frat-house orgies in their wayward youth, but they just don't do this stuff called politics.
They do science and art and music and law and perhaps Medicine (though I have personal experience of the fallacy of this notion that medicos are somehow intelligentzia) they just don't do politics.
So no matter how clever these plucky little self-promoters called politicians claim they are, you can bet your bottom dollar they're not the brightest sparks. The awful truth is that in their pursuit of excellence, all the people in the arts, sciences, and law (though probably not medicine) wake up one day and go "Holy Smokes! We've left the running of the ship to morons and we're about to hit the iceberg at full speed."
It's a shock, and damn right so it should be. The kid who they beat through out high school and University has somehow transformed him/herself into a suited demagogue harranguing for votes, running the damn country to ruination come, passing asinine laws, filling their pockets with ungodly Superannuation sums, and collecting accolades in pages of history that land on them because out of a process of elimination. Somebody was PM, you see...
Seriously folks, John Howard's intellect hasn't a patch on say, literary critic Don Anderson or author David Malouf.
Peter Costello's intellect hasn't got a patch on Nick Cave or Paul Kelly or Peter Carey.
Philip Ruddock is no intellectual match for David Helfgott, or a Peter Weir or even the awful, awful, Philip Noyce.
Even on her best day, Amanda Vanstone is about as ineffectual an intellectual as Nicole Kidman, known-High-School-dropout, and that's saying a lot. Yet there she is, running a ministry!
These untermenschen are running (more like ruining) our country.
The Labor folks aren't much better. Kim Beazley might fancy himself a historian but he's not really doing anything worthy of being called intellectual; he's not a Don Watson let alone a Manning Clarke.
Kevin Rudd is a born-again Flat-earth Creationist as far as we're led to believe. Well, what can you say about an ID-iot.
For all the hooha, nobody in their right mind ever thought Mark Latham was going to be the next Milton Keynes.
John Dawkins couldn't tell the difference between education and vocational training (just look at his so-called 'reforms') and Paul Keating was at best, a witty try-hard but he certainly was not the intellectual equivalent of even the most run-of-the-mill University lecturer in just ab out anything.
It's sickening. Really.
So the question that we all struggle with today is this: how does it feel to live under the second best (and worse) minds of the generation, all of them demagogues who got voted in on the fearful prejudices and stupid behaviour of the aggregate masses? And this is the system we're trying to sell to the Iraqis and Afghanistan. There are days I don't wonder why they keep getting spirited insurgencies, especially when you consider the kind of candidates they get. We're pushing a faulty product. :)
UPDATE
Pleiades sent in this other link that covers the anti-terror laws section regarding 'sedition' and the many objections to it.
Sedition around the world...and so on. There's more and it's worth a look through if you have time.
5.35 Mr Chris Connolly submitted that 'sedition has a long and undignified history', and that important figures in history who have been charged and sometimes imprisoned for sedition, include both Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. He argued that:
...sedition charges are either the last desperate gasp of an authoritarian regime (eg Ghandi) or the extreme and sometimes ludicrous result of a regrettable moment in national history (eg McCarthyism).
5.36 Mr Chris Connolly concluded:
The clear lesson from the history of sedition laws is that they are used routinely by oppressive regimes, or are used by more liberal regimes at times of great national stress. Their use is nearly always the subject of considerable regret at a later date.
5.37 In the same vein, Mr Laurence Maher observed that a survey of the history of sedition demonstrates that (among other matters) 'its only purpose and use has been to throttle political dissent'.
5.38 The committee was told that many other countries have been moving away from crimes of sedition. For example, the Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law submitted that:
The Gibbs review observed that the UK Law Commission found that a crime of sedition was unnecessary, since seditious conduct is already captured by the ordinary offence of incitement to crime. Reviews of criminal law in Canada and New Zealand omitted sedition offences altogether.
5.39 Mr Robert Connolly, representative of the Arts and Creative Industries of Australia, highlighted the application of sedition laws outside Australia, telling the committee that:
The countries that have repealed sedition laws, or made them inactive, are: Canada, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The countries that have active sedition laws that have been used or revised in recent years are: China, Cuba, Hong Kong, Malaysia, North Korea, Singapore, Syria and Zimbabwe. I imagine that it is perfectly clear to the majority of Australians which list we feel Australia should belong to.
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