human rights

Where the fuck do I start? For me, Anzac Day is a tangled mess of emotions and ideas — some about grand themes of global and national politics, others deeply personal.

What pleases me most about Anzac Day is that Australia and New Zealand commemorate the sacrifice of their war dead not through parades of tanks and missiles and a glorification of war but with highly personal ceremonies of remembrance starting before dawn.

We talk not of our nation’s military prowess — though Australia is, by all accounts, capable of fielding professional military forces which make almost everybody else look like disorganised amateurs — but of the personal qualities which have made this nation great.

Those qualities were listed in an Army recruitment advertisement designed by a soldier. They were reiterated this morning by Major General Mark Kelly:

Regardless of religion, racial background, or even place of birth, we gather not to glorify war, but to remind ourselves that we value who we are and the freedoms we possess, and to acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of those who contributed so much in shaping the identity of this proud nation…

The term Anzac has transcended the physical meaning to become a spirit, an inspiration which embodies the qualities of courage, discipline, sacrifice, self reliance, and in Australian terms, mateship, and a fair go. This is what Anzac means to me.

These are the qualities which once gave Australia such a fine reputation overseas — before our foreign policy became one of subservience to American Neocons, and before symbols of military might were perverted into supporting a never-ending War on Abstract Nouns. Before quiet patriotism turned into loud but ignorant flag-draped jingoism. John Birmingham wrote about this in his Quarterly Essay, A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power. But what does it all mean now under Chairman Rudd?

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For various reasons I didn’t have much time to write submissions yesterday. Yet I’ve said so much about still believing the Australia 2020 Summit to be important — despite plentiful shortcomings — that I felt obliged to write something. In 500 words or less. So I wrote from the heart…

What emerged were two pieces:

1. For the governance topic: Managing continual, rapid change with a clear framework of values.
2. For the topic on “the economy”, which is where discussions of broadband policy ended up: Broadband: It’s about symmetry, not speed.

I’m well aware that they don’t really provide a properly-researched, well-argued case. Nevertheless I hope that in some way they’ll help influence debate. Comments appreciated — perhaps over where the submissions themselves are blogged.

I’ve just registered the Internet domain topic9.com.au, where I’ll set up a blog to discuss topic number 9 of the Australia 2020 Summit: “The future of Australian governance: renewed democracy, a more open government (including the role of the media), the structure of the Federation and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.”

I won’t have time to do anything with it until (probably) tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, can you suggest people who might be interesting contributors?

Our defence institutions need a certain amount of healthy paranoia. They have to imagine all the terrible things which might conceivably be done to us, and have plans in place to counter them. But the Pentagon goes too far when it says the Internet is an enemy. Fundamental rights are put at risk.

At GlobalResearch.ca, Brent Jessop says the Pentagon’s Information Operations Roadmap bluntly states that the Internet, with its potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals. The Pentagon reckons the Internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy “weapons system”.

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In today’s Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Ackland has published his “top 10″ list of intrusions on our civil liberties for 2007.

“A year ago we published a list showing how our liberties had been whittled, starting with the sedition laws and ending with David Hicks. Now there is a fresh outcrop of abrasions to our rights, although, sadly, there is an eerie consistency about some of the players.”

His list includes an entire entry just for one man’s efforts:

4. Philip Ruddock. Once again the former attorney-general deserves his own special entry in the human rights hall of infamy. This time for his unique conception that an accused person can have a “fair trial” based on hearsay evidence and evidence extracted by coercion.

As number 1, Ackland mentions just a name: Dr Mohamed Haneef. I’m hoping the forthcoming judicial inquiry gets to the bottom of that debacle!

John Howard, during his time as prime minister, talked a lot about the rule of law. If we are a nation of laws then those laws must, presumably, reflect what we believe about ourselves as a nation. As people. As human beings. As Australians.

Howard, quite correctly, sees a century of the rule of law as one of the great achievements of Australian federation. And yet, under his watch, fundamental legal principles were eroded. Laws made as part of the so-called War on Terror introduced imprisonment without trial, secret evidence, searches without warrant…

With these conflicting thoughts in mind, I opened the pages of Julian Burnside’s book Watching Brief: reflections on human rights, law, and justice while leaving Australia for the first time.

As dusk fell somewhere over the Timor Sea, I imagined the horror of traversing that ocean below in an over-crowded, leaky refugee boat only to be hauled off to a concentration camp a quarter of the world away. Meanwhile, I ordered another brandy and Mr Burnside provided me with a concise, clearly-written explanation of just why I’d been so angry with the Howard government, and so angry with a weak and ineffectual opposition for allowing it to happen.

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Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson reckons Australia needs a Bill of Rights. I reckon he’s right about rights. And that’s because the central issue reminds me of when we were running The Core magazine…

The Core’s sole source of income was advertising, and most of it came from nightclubs. Nightclub managers are [coughs] the most honourable and [chokes] reliable [gargles] businessmen and women who can be found. Their integ… [coughs] [chokes] … sorry, I seem to have something caught in my throat.

They’d brag about how their new club night would be the biggest, brightest thing ever. “It’ll be huge,” they’d say. They’d want to book a heap of advertising — on credit, of course — and wanted discount.

“Sure,” I’d say, showing them our rate card and the discounts on offer.

“We’ll book a full page for 8 weeks then, for that 25% discount,” or whatever it was.

“Sure,” I’d say again. “Just sign here.”

And then they’d freeze.

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I’ve had this sitting on the back burner for a while but I think it’s worth publishing today — given John Howard’s outrageous War on Indigenous Unpleasantness. Please read (or at least skim) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the newly-formed United Nations in 1948. After the bloodshed of the Second World War, virtually every nation on the planet understood that these values were What It Was All About.

To emphasize the key themes, I’ve used TagCrowd to make a tag cloud of the Declaration. Note, Gentle Reader, the most-repeated word of all: everyone.

Now you can perhaps argue about the details. P J O’Rourke, for example, reckons:

All men are created equal. We hold this truth to the self-evident, which on the face of it is so wildly untrue. Equality is the foundation of liberal democracy, rule of law, a free society, and everything that the reader, if he or she is sane, cherishes. But are we all equal because we all showed up? It does not work that way at weddings or funerals. Are we all equal because it says so in the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Each of these documents contains plenty of half-truths and nontruths as well. The UN proclaims, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours.” I’ll have my wife inform the baby.

High-minded screeds cobbled together by unrepresentative and, in some cases, slightly deranged members of the intelligentsia are not scripture. Anyway, to see what a scripture-based polity gets for a social system we have only to look at the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Puritans in Massachusetts.

But the core words stand out so brightly in that TagCloud. And those core words are being ignored by John Howard’s cynical intervention.

Perhaps you should ask your local MP why so few of them have been enshrined in Australian law and what they, personally, have done about that.

If they’re a Coalition MP, perhaps you should ask them why they’re being party to such a disgusting, heavy-handed approach to what is, yes, a major problem — but a problem which has been sitting there for the entire time they’ve been in government.

Production Note

TagCrowd has already removed common stop words like “the” and “of”. I’ve added a few more so the focus is on the content not the structure: “against”, “article”, “declaration”, “forth”, “held”, “including”, “nor”, “proclaimed”, “promote”, “shall” and “whereas”.

I’ve added a bunch of words to that list to remove things which are about the structure of the Declaration rather than the content, such as “whereas”.

The New York Times has just published, as their editorial, a list of things that need to be done to “reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.”

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Call yourself an Australian? Cool. Does the name Vincent Lingiari mean anything? No? Well, OK, doesn’t to me either.

But, you know, I just heard Archie Roach and Sara Storer singing his story on RockWiz. And bugger me, it turns out he’s one of the country’s most important human rights activists.

Bloody embarrassing not to know that, eh?

I mean, you’re probably more likely to remember, oh, that nigger woman on a bus, who was she again?

You probably missed it, but last week Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty actually proposed forcibly “reprogramming” people’s political beliefs.

Speaking on ABC TV’s Lateline on 8 March, Keelty says we should look at techniques which have been used “successfully” in such bastions of human rights as Indonesia, Singapore and Pakistan — even referring to it as “best practice”.

Keelty equates reprogramming people to convincing an informer to give evidence, and says this is the next step… to re-program somebody who has a belief or holds a belief. It has already been discussed with the government in the context of anti-terrorism control orders.

Commissioner Keelty, just in case you’ve forgotten Articles 18 and 19 of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, here’s a refresher…

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