Today obliterated the new givens in Australian politics. With one decision, Simon Crean has set the political clock back to the Tampa and decided to go to war with John Howard on Australian values
Our values: Crean -v- Howard and Carr
by Margo Kingston
Today obliterated the new givens in Australian politics. With one decision, Simon Crean has set the political clock back to the Tampa and decided to go to war with John Howard on Australian values.
Simon Crean is transformed from grey shadow to crazy brave warrior. John Howard set the same trap for him as he set for Beazley last year and Simon Crean said no. Kim Beazley backs him in spades.
After Tampa, Howard rushed into Parliament the most vicious, anti-democratic legislation ever brought before it. It removed any accountability for anything the government and its officials did in dealing with boat people. As an enraged Beazley pointed out, it would have allowed officials to murder boat people without redress.
Kim Beazley said no. John Howard cleaned up the bill a little, and Beazley – in fear of losing the imminent election on a wave of anti-boat people sentiment – said yes to the Pacific Solution. He became an uncomfortable me-too boy, giving Howard permission to lurch further and further out of control, culminating in the false election claims that children were thrown overboard, that SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters, and that terrorists were on board the boats.
Labor has been running scared ever since, culminating last week in Crean’s decision to reaffirm the Pacific Solution despite the certainty that it would split the ALP.
But this morning, after an endless night of frantic negotiations, Crean called Howard’s bluff.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002 would allow detention without arrest of any Australian the government thinks might have any information about terrorism. Innocence of any crime is irrelevant. The debate this year has been about safeguards to this extraordinary new power – a power which is traditionally the hallmark of a police-state.
There have been many inquiries, and Liberals on them inquiries have sharply criticised the bill’s excesses and forced amendments, only to see the Government go even further after the Bali bombing.
Last night the Senate passed its version of the bill, adding safeguards to protect the innocent. Overnight, Howard accepted a couple of its amendments and rejected the rest. He sent it back to the Senate, which rejected it, and the House of Representatives rejected the Senate again.
Howard thus fulfilled the first half of the Constitution’s requirements to force a double dissolution election in three months. He will send the bill back in the exact form in which the Senate last rejected it and if Crean holds his nerve and rejects it again, Australia will go to a civil liberties election in the context of the war on terror.
The last time John Howard threatened a double dissolution election was on the eve of Christmas 1997, when the Senate rejected his Wik bill. There were four sticking points. That time round, the Senate called his bluff around Easter 1998, and Howard backed off on a race election only after Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party won eleven seats at the Queensland election in June.
This time there are three sticking points:
* Howard wants children as young as 14 to be subject to the new law, Labor wants people under 18 exempted,
* Howard wants detention for up to seven days, Labor detention for up to 20 hours, and
* Howard wants no lawyer allowed to sit in on the interrogation for the first 48 hours of detention, then a lawyer chosen from a pool chosen by the government; Labor wants legal representation from the beginning of detention, chosen by the detainee.
The detail will soon get lost. At the double dissolution election Howard would run the populist themes which won him the 2002 election. He would feed people’s fear to argue that drastic curtailment of our liberties is necessary in a time of war, and feed fear of other Australians who don’t look like the majority. The assumption on which his campaign would rest is that Australians can and must trust the government to do the right thing in these dark times.
Crean, just like Beazley would have had he not succumbed to Howard on Tampa, would have a herculean task., He must convince the Australian people that our terrorist enemies will have won the war if in fighting it we lose the very freedoms we are fighting to maintain. He would argue that John Howard cannot be trusted with these powers. One of the weapons he could use – if he dared – if that the government lied to the Australian people about children overboard to win power, and would do anything to maintain it.
Crean would have to explain to the Australian people that the essence of our way of life is the rule of law – that the certainty of abuse of State power against the innocent, proved over and over again by history, is addressed by insisting that we are ruled by laws, not men. The judiciary – independent of government and owing its duties to the law and the citizen, not government – are the bulwark of the rule of law. The right to legal representation when detained by police or other instruments of state power is essential to our freedom.
These are complex arguments, easily overrun by scare campaigns, false propaganda, appeals to prejudice and the screams of shock jocks.
And Crean must, in the end, convince Australians that he can be trusted to lead the nation in this time of crisis – to fight the war on terror as hard as Howard, but to do it in a way that enhances our trust in him by fiercely protecting as far as is possible our liberties and freedoms.
The risks are so high they are almost incomprehensible. If, God forbid, terrorism strikes in our country over summer, John Howard is almost certain to claim – regardless of truth – that it’s all because he didn’t have his ASIO bill the way he wanted it. Crean’s answer will be that he could have had his bill, with proper safeguards, but chose to endanger Australian lives to win an election.
If the challenge was not great enough already, Crean carries a crippling burden inflicted by the most senior Labor Premier in Australia. Bob Carr has just rushed through draconian new police powers with no safeguards whatsoever to protect citizens against their abuse, and justified them on the basis that anything goes in the war on terror.
John Howard – who can rightly say that his bill contains some safeguards – was super-quick to taunt Crean with Carr’s betrayal of core Labor principle. “Under the Labor bill, passed in NSW, the NSW police have the power to stripsearch children between the age of 10 and 18 years without a warrant … (but) with the authority of Michael Costa, the police minister,” he said. “If the Labor Party were really serious and consistent, why didn’t it attack and disown the Carr government – that happened in NSW without a murmur.”
Carr wants to win an election in March with fear and loathing. So might Howard. Crean must fight on two fronts.
It is almost unimaginable that Simon Crean would cave in before February 4, when Parliament resumes. If he did, it would be the end of his leadership. Get set for the most important, high-stakes election in the lifetime of most Australians.
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By the way, an election next Easter would mean that Howard, if he won, would have to put off his retirement decision for at least one more year. For the sake of the country, of course.