Category: General Interest

We get the government we tolerate. If we want a better government we need to not allow what we do not want.

From a Citizens Party email to me:

Something funny happened on the way to a police state…

Unprecedented scrutiny from people pressure has delayed the ASIO bill.

The bill expanding ASIO’s secret police powers is still tied up in the Senate, months after it was set to be waved through by the major parties.

With Parliament now risen for the winter recess, the next opportunity to debate the bill is when Parliament resumes in mid-August.

Concerned Australians who lobbied against this bill should appreciate that their efforts have had a major impact, upsetting the usually smooth process by which the major parties have colluded for decades to march Australia down the path to a police state.

Production line

At last count more than 100 security laws have passed Parliament since 2002, when the Howard government first put up seven bills in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack that severely undermined civil liberties in the name of “security”.

At first all of Howard’s bills were going to be waved through, over the protests of Constitutional experts, because too many politicians are cowards when it comes to responding to “threat” narratives, going along with enacting draconian powers so as not to be accused of being “weak” on the ostensible threat.

At the time, the Citizens Party intervened and mobilised opposition all across Australia from organisations and individuals who didn’t accept that the “threat” justified cancelling the people’s civil rights.

This opposition, directed at Parliament through phone calls and emails, empowered previously timid politicians to speak up, which stopped the bills from being waved through and instead sparked a huge debate that lasted more than 18 months.

Even Liberal Party Senator David Jull broke with his party, writing in his chairman’s foreword to a report on Howard’s ASIO bill (which originally enacted the powers that the current ASIO bill seeks to expand) that “The Bill, in its original form, would undermine key legal rights and erode the civil liberties that make Australia a leading democracy.”

Labor leader Simon Crean decided to take a stand, accusing Howard of trying to establish a “police state”; Labor’s Member for Grayndler Anthony Albanese went further in a fiery speech in 2003, quoting Hitler’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering and likening the proposed ASIO powers to the Nazis.

However, Howard and the Murdoch media relentlessly attacked Labor as weak on national security, especially as Crean-led Labor also opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion, so eventually Labor relented and passed the laws, but only after insisting on a sunset clause for the ASIO powers.

Once Labor capitulated, and especially after Crean was toppled as leader, the party put up no more fights against such laws; the most they did was complain about the erosion of civil liberties and say they would improve them when they were in government, but they never did.

This is how more than 100 draconian security laws have been enacted since 2002, including powers for intelligence agencies to spy on all Australians online, and a sinister 2014 law that jails journalists for ten years for reporting on an ASIO operation.

It’s become a smooth production line—until this year.

People pressure

Because of a lack of media scrutiny, the Citizens Party only discovered the ASIO bill in January, at the same time as Albanese called a special sitting of Parliament to ram through his hate crimes bill.

Albanese’s hate crimes bill sparked unprecedented opposition for its assault on free speech and due process, however, because for the first time in two decades a security bill received real scrutiny. Albanese only passed a version of it through a dirty deal with the Liberals that split the Coalition and cost Sussan Ley her job.

In the climate of extra awareness, the Citizens Party was also able to draw unprecedented attention to ASIO’s powers, including the bizarre fact that Albanese originally likened the powers to the Nazis, but now as prime minister is pushing to expand them.

Pressure from the people directed at Parliament has forced the major parties on to the back foot, upsetting the smooth production line: in April they backflipped on their original intent to remove the sunset clause to “normalise” the powers; and they still haven’t been able to pass the bill.

The next opportunity for the Senate to debate the ASIO Bill No. 2 will be the mid-August setting, so keep calling and emailing your Senators to insist they oppose this bill. Click here for their contact details. https://citizensparty.org.au/campaign/repeal-asio-powers#contact-senators