 Political
Corrections
with Margo Kingston
Democracy not a spectator sport
Well-known political commentator Margo Kingston will be keeping the bastards
honest while regular columnist Mungo McCallum is away in the Middle East. Mungo
will return in six weeks. Until then... enjoy.
Telling it like it is isn't done in the American mainstream now. It's too risky.
It's the same in Australia. If you have a go telling it bluntly, and with moral
force, you're condemned as a Howard Hater by the media's dominant band of Howard
Lovers. And to be condemned as a Howard Hater means you're, well, unAustralian.
I mean, democracy is about finding a school to vote at every three years, right?
We did that, the people have spoken, and the minority who didn't want this government
have to shut up or leave Australia, right? Otherwise they're anti-democratic.
I've copped these arguments constantly on Webdiary since the October 2004 election.
Many Australians seem to have forgotten what democracy means, or never worked
it out in the first place. The rule of law - huh? Protection of minorities from
the tyranny of the majority - are you a socialist? The citizen's duty to defend
our democracy - get off the streets you dole bludgers so we can get to work.
It's us versus them stuff, and the "us", it seems, doesn't seem to
notice that their ranks are getting smaller by the day.
Tampa. To me, that was the event which saw Australians accept that it was okay
for our government to treat some human beings as less than human. As long as they're
not us. But who is us? Australian citizens?
The government will treat all us Australian citizens as worthy of their duty
of care, won't it?
Down the slippery slope we went. We now know that the government locked a mentally
ill Australian permanent resident in jail and at Baxter for 11 months. We now
know that an incapacitated Australian citizen was deported to a Philippine hospice.
We now know that DIMIA (the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous
Affairs) locked up an Australian citizen known only as "Howard" for
two days, despite him producing credit cards and a driver's licence - until his
lawyer brought his passport to DIMIA.
Let's tell it like it is, shall we? Australia has its own "disappeared",
and its own "disappear them squad". Our Parliament, to its everlasting
shame, made an exception to the basic principle of Westminster-style democracies
- that no citizen is ever deprived of his or her liberty by the State without
access to a lawyer and recourse to the courts.
Parliament did this by voting for a law which gave junior DIMIA officers the
absolute power to detain anyone they liked if they "suspected" that
person of being an "unlawful non-citizen". The detention can last a
lifetime.
This law must be abolished now. Where is Labor's private members bill? Not
game. Too scared. What do the Howard Lovers say? Why I still get shocked, I don't
know, but I was when more than one of Webdiary's right-wing commentators pronounced
that Rau and Alvarez were to blame.
But, perhaps, the government has gone too far this time. There is a prima facie
case of terrible abuse of power here. Yet there would be no inquiry, no commissioner
with legal powers to get to the truth and bring any perpetrators of crimes before
the courts. There would instead be a cosy closed-door investigation by a former
police officer relying on the cooperation of those in the frame for possible crimes,
criminal negligence, and just plain negligence.
This up-yours response and the abandonment of any pretence that Australian
citizens had the right to know what the government did to fellow citizens was
too much even for a media cowered by threats and intimidation (the ABC) or whose
commercial interests directed pro-Howard coverage (News Limited). When Vanstone
refused to give any details of who, when, how and why an Australian citizen was
deported, the media did the job, and is still doing it. Webdiary began "a
people's inquiry" to help get the truth.
Palmer has become irrelevant. As I write this on the eve of Senate Estimates
committee interrogations of Vanstone and DIMIA, former immigration minister Philip
Ruddock has publicly rejected Vanstone's claim that there's something rotten in
DIMIA's culture. Vanstone makes regular announcements changing DIMIA's lock-em-up
guidelines after demanding that the people wait until her little cover up played
itself out.
It's not yet four years since Tampa and S11 (which Howard and Co jumped on
to falsely assert that terrorists were using leaky boats to come to Australia),
and Australians are starting to realise that Australian citizenship doesn't keep
them in the "us club" any more.
Australian citizenship doesn't matter much to this government. Unlike just
about every other nation whose citizens were incarcerated and tortured in Guantanamo
Bay, we've let the Americans do what they will with Hicks and Habib. Until the
public screamed too loud, it was also happy for Corby to be thrown to the wolves
for the sake of friendly relations with Indonesia.
The "them" is getting bigger every day. First they came for the interlopers,
then they came for the undesirables, then they came for the mentally ill, then
they came for...
So let's tell it like it is. Let's feel proud to do so, and let's see the vitriol
rained down on us for what it is, the scream of the fascists and their yes people
now dominating the "governance" of this nation.
No more pussyfooting around with these people, okay? Yes, it is us versus them,
but the them are the destroyers of our values. The us are the ever-growing numbers
of Australian citizens who've decided that democracy in Australia can no longer
be a spectator sport.
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