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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 460 ..

What strange people some Australians are. Despite Mamdouh Habib’s acknowledged fanaticism and openly expressed hatred of infidel Australians, and despite his wife’s open expression of the same attitude, she was feted by being brought to Federal Parliament by one of its senators to be present for the visit of the President of the United States and to witness the infantile antics of that same senator, and for her son from the same position of privilege to then join in with a bit of his own strident commentary to the President. She was being used as a tool to try to embarrass the hated Australia. She had been well schooled in handling the media, as had her son. When interviewed by the press after the occasion, Maha Habib told how her son “nearly had the shirt ripped off his back” by security personnel. I would like to see how “nearly ripped off his back” that shirt really was. Just a few weeks after his parliamentary debut, this same son was arrested in Sydney on a charge of unlawfully seizing, tying up and detaining a young woman, the 18-year-old twin sister of a friend of his, and then along with the friend and another young man, cutting off her long hair and then shaving her head. It seems that she had left the family home a little while back. It is an interesting episode with three brave young Australian males seizing the hapless young woman and tying her up like a beast, with her brother initially wanting to stuff her in the boot of the car. It seems that Mamdouh Habib has done a damned good job of raising his son.

It will be interesting, in this rights-rampant society, to see who will get the prize of being accorded the status of victim in this incident. Of course, under the law that reflects the values we live by, a blatantly criminal act has been committed and given that the perpetrators were adults, it should be punished by the full force of the law. I hope that is what happens, as it is very clear who is the victim in this case of disgusting conduct. But stranger things have happened. I have no doubt there will be those who try to wrap our new young celebrity, our very own model of a young Australian male, in a mantle of victimhood. We’ll wait and see whether some creative lawyer comes up with the excuse that the young Habib was upset because his daddy ran away to play with assassins.

Matters to do with rights are bigger than wringing the hands over cases where non-innocent individuals have been entirely responsible for their choices in, say, going off to run around the hills with al Qaeda or popping back to the old country to pick up a batch of drugs to smuggle into Australia and poison a few more of the weaker members of our community, or breaking into someone’s home yet subsequently being rewarded by the community through its courts for some bruising inflicted by the homeowner who probably, and maybe justifiably, feared for his or her life, or going about defacing the property of individuals and the community as some sort of expression of their individual right to express themselves in a uniquely expressive manner. A majority of members of this Assembly have already affirmed that people in the ACT have no legal rights to protect their property against being defaced and vandalised, yet only recently the Chief Minister publicly stated that he abhorred vandalism. How can the Chief Minister sit between such opposing positions? I confess it beats me.

When I think of rights I think of something like the performance over the past 50 years of the United Nations, an organisation that was originally established primarily as a security organisation. Its security council has only twice authorised military action: first for the Korean War—and then only because the Soviet Union walked out and lost its right to veto—and secondly for the 1991 Gulf War to drive Saddam Hussein’s rapacious and brutal invading and occupying forces out of Kuwait. That is its shining record. Yet

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