Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Big Kim back on top

The great abortion debate (that's not a debate)

Those of us who do not trust the Howard government (as opposed to those with IQs below room temperature) are becoming very nervous about what might be called the Clayton's abortion debate - the debate you have when you're not having a debate.

It can't be a real debate, because John Howard, his eyebrows bristling with sincerity, assures us that the government has absolutely no plans to change the law. He did not add "never, ever," so we can't be completely sure that he is lying; but both his record and fine print would suggest that, once again, we would be very silly to take his words at face value.

For starters, there is the reasoning; he has no plans to change the law, not because he agrees that it is a good law, or because he believes it is what majority of voters want; it is just that, at present, there are not the numbers in Parliament for a change. If there were, the position might be very different.

And in the meantime, of course, he can't stop people talking, or even moving private members' bills on the subject - after all, it's a democracy. This from the man who has instituted a reign of terror within his own party under the slogan "Disunity is Death," by which he means that anyone who disagrees with him will have his political career terminated on the spot.

Dissidents dare not even mutter in the corridors, much less propose private members bills. But the holy alliance of selected churchmen and their parliamentary allies are, of course, not really dissidents. While what they are proposing may not actually be government policy, it may well be what Howard would like to make government policy if he thought he could get away with it.

In this sense their situation is much like that of Pauline Hanson in 1996. Officially Howard's position is a distant tut-tutting at their extremism. Unofficially it is an encouraging wink wink, nudge nudge; good on them for breaking the ground and softening up the public for the draconian measures Howard, in the darkest recesses of his soul, really supports.

It should be noted that those making the running - Ron Boswell, Tony Abbott and the various lesser lights - also pursue the fiction that really, the argument is not about changing the law; why, it can't be - the prime minister himself has said that's not on. No, it's just about collecting information so that the public debate can proceed on a rational basis.

The public debate? There is no public debate. As poll after poll has shown, the vast majority of the public is perfectly satisfied with the laws as they stand. The public debate was won and lost many years ago. What we are looking at now is a fanatical pressure group who will not accept the public's verdict, a group of manic authoritarians hell bent (they would probably say heaven bent) on imposing their own paranoid views on society whether society agrees with them or not.

It is another symptom of the increasing political confidence of the religious right, a tyrannical minority bluff, bully and blackmail mainstream politicians into accepting preposterous demands they know would never even be contemplated if put directly to the public. And the signs are that they are having some success; as in America, surveys confirm that conservative politicians profess attitudes on the so-called "moral" issues (abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, etc) which are far, far to the right of the voters they claim to represent.

This is especially true of Howard himself, whose self styled conservatism has become increasingly totalitarian as his grip on government has tightened. When he approves a campaign for further repression as an example of democracy, it is time to head for the hills.

Nothing much disturbs the complacency of our pitiless Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock (after all, how can you trouble the undead?) but it was still depressing to hear him ignore the strictures of his legal peers and repeat the same old accusations against Mamdouh Habib last week.

As we all know now, those accusations are based on "confessions" extracted from Habib under torture or something very like it; confessions the United States legal system regarded as dangerous, unreliable and inadmissable as evidence. But as we also know from the days of the children overboard affair, Ruddock has never worried too much about technicalities such as the presumption of innocence or the burden of proof.

If Habib thinks the law that freed him from Guantanamo Bay will now protect him in Australia, he should realise our first law officer has other ideas, and they are very, very nasty ones - as always.

The silliest line of the year so far comes from Education Minister Brendan Nelson, who blames the decline in university enrolments not on his own government for raising HECS fees, but on the Labor opposition for talking about the increases.

This is almost, but not quite, up there with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer's wonderful pre-election claim that Australia's support for the invasion of Iraq had not in anyway increased the terrorist threat to our shores, but that Labor's promise to bring the troops home had made us an inevitable target.

But then, Downer has always been in a class of his own. We'll know Nelson is really trying when he appears in the fishnet stockings.