Page 1356 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2006
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actors seek to distract public attention and garner support by using fear of “the other” as a rallying point for identification with their own projected reality. I wonder to what extent is there a conscious effort on the part of the federal government, business or security organisations to create a deployable image of “the other” out of religious extremists—stereotypical figures who deserve no sympathy in the public eye and in much of the media, with whom we can have no empathy and whose purported presence threatens our very existence. Even their children are somehow demonised.
Again, I am not denying the existence or possibility of there being violent extremist people in Australia. What I query is whether the spectre of such people is not being exaggerated and exploited, both by those who seek to obtain greater coercive resources and by those who seek to focus attention away from areas such as income inequalities, education, health care, industrial relations, indigenous rights, environmental concerns and the war in Iraq. Such allegations would have appeared preposterous only a decade or so ago. But the incontrovertible evidence has been mounting that there is an agenda of control, a willingness to use fear as a political tool, and a psychology that fears criticism and is setting up a range of measures to silence dissent.
In the absence of imminent and catastrophic threats, except perhaps the “natural” ones which governments of all stripes are in denial about, the damage to society and our democratic freedoms from unnecessarily draconian policing powers is too great. By weakening our respect for the social contract we run a real risk of creating the very evils that coercive laws ostensibly aim to prevent. I echo the views of virtually every independent or non-government legal and human rights expert who has given evidence or published an opinion on this matter in stating once again that I have seen no evidence that such imminent and catastrophic threats exist in Australia today, except environmental ones, extreme weather events and the like.
In the deafening silence of support for these laws outside of government, the opposition has been forced to rely almost entirely on the evidence of Commissioner Keelty. I am interested to know what they make of the fears of the Pentagon and of the Australian Federal Police Association itself that their respective governments are not giving similar attention to the now generally accepted high level of threat posed by human-induced climate change.
No doubt there are people who are willing to use indiscriminate violence to further their particular personal, political or superstitious beliefs, and I suspect that some of them may now be in police custody. I also agree with the analysis implicit in what Mr Keelty said before he was nobbled by the federal government: it would be surprising if such sentiments did not crop up in Australia, given our uncritical and foolhardy participation in an illegal and unjustifiable wars that support the aims of allies and do damage to our own internal security.
The time for good people to defend liberty is now. Some of you may feel that the way to do that is to pass these laws. I disagree. I hope I am wrong. Unfortunately, I have heard no-one address and refute the arguments and concerns that I am putting here today, which I have heard as a member of the legal affairs committee and which I hear and read as a member of the public. I fear that we may be on a slippery slope to fascism, and with this legislation the ACT is playing its part to assist us in slipping a little further down that slope.
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