not the motorcycle diaries

Thursday November 3rd, the Guardian international edition. A brief column, the last in a pedestrian triptych of ‘international news’ items on page ten. Titled Terrorism alert leads Australia to toughen law, I was still tossing and turning about it at six o-clock the next morning, asssailed by flashbacks to my Year 11 Modern European History class (I was the nerdy one up the front, furiously taking notes during Schindler’s List).

[Australias] spy agencies received specific details about a terrorist attack on home soil. The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to give details of the threat yesterday, but said he was concerned about the information.The government has received specific intelligence and police information this week which gives cause for serious concern about a potential terrorist threat, Mr Howard said, in his most explicit warning ever to Australians.

Right so the words ‘potential terrorist threat’ are ‘explicit’ enough - no further information, questioning or debate is required to justify any action that is carried out in response.

The threat was credible enough to prompt Mr Howard to rush an urgent amendment to the country’s anti-terror laws through parliament to give authorities increased powers.

We are not told who made the threat or what it was. We are not allowed to judge for ourselves as to its credibility and what might be done in response. Instead, John Howard tells us that it is credible enough (his standards for judging this we also are not informed of) and therefore justifies his ‘urgent action’.

The senate will be recalled today so the change can immediately become law.

This is dictatorship. The Lower House of Parliament has become a tool to officialize the will of the Prime Minister, who decides when it shall sit and what it shall decide. It is a far cry from one of the more basic representative democratic notions, i.e. that there shall be a house of review which deliberates upon how proposed laws might affect the population according to a publically advertised timetable.

The amendment will change one word in a series of clauses, replacing ‘the’ with ‘a’ when referring to terrorist attacks.

Any unionist out there (if there are any left) will tell you that the most lethal clause in a job description is the one saying ‘and other duties as directed’. It is there so that your boss can make you do whatever they want under the guise of you consenting to it when you signed the contract. It gives them infinite power over you in the work relationship. This amendment works in a similar way - ensuring that anything vaguely disturbing to the governmental order can be designated as a terrorist act, and therefore prosecuted without recourse to any of the usual civil liberties of people under arrest and trial. Rushing through increased governmental powers in the context of ‘emergency’ is such a typical strategy for consolidating dictatorial power that it would be utterly boring if it wasn’t so threatening.

‘I know that sounds pedantic but in order to prosecute people you’ve got to do it legally and you’ve got to have the law on your side, Mr Howard said. The change means prosecutors would not have to identify a specific terrorist act, allowing them to make a case against people in the early stages of planning an attack.

Clearly, in Howard’s view of the world, if a law doesn’t allow you to do what you want, then just change it. The law is only there to serve your dictatorial ends and continue to make them appear popularly agreed upon. This is not democracy. It is just pretending.

That such a classic smoke-and-mirrors trick as this is able to go completely unquestioned (including by the ALP, who as far as I’m concerned might as well just amalgamate with the Coalition and save all of us the trouble of having to mark them separately on the ballot paper) attests to the frightening extent of manufactured consent (a la Chomsky) in Australia. Howard and co have gotten themselves consecutively elected by exploiting and amplifying xenophobic fears of mythical security threats. In so doing, and with full co-operation from the corporate media, they have installed the dictionary of understood words (a la Kundera)* into the popular vocabulary. They have gained full control of the legislative assembly, effectively allowing them to make whatever law they like, whenever they please and you can bet that they will all conform to an uncompromisingly neo-conservative, racist, narrow-minded agenda. As the Prime Minister, the only thing that Howard has to do is make his actions appear democratic = like a magic password, he just has to use the understood words to set the mechanics of democracy in motion (i.e. drafting legislation, amending legislation, recalling Parliament). Are Australians so comfortable and/or so disempowered that they’re just going to keep on letting it happen? Where will it end up?

Ah yes. I’m back in that stuffy classroom with an exam question before me. “The Nazi party was elected by democratic vote. Discuss.”

* like ‘terrorist’, ‘terrorist threat’, ‘border security’, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, ‘boat people’, ‘children overboard’ …