Time after time, since 2001, Australia has lengthened its roll call of repressive national security laws. And time after time, Bill Shorten has worn his party’s craven willingness to sign up to every piece of half-cooked law the Coalition throws out as a badge of honour.
Over the past week, of course, it’s been all about encryption. Both major parties covered themselves in glory on the last day of Parliament by passing an extremely complex law neither of them have read, understand or give a crap about. But, ignored in the rush to Christmas has been another potentially even worse bit of bipartisan law-making.
Slipped through Parliament on November 27 with not so much as a whimper from the media: the Defence Amendment (Call Out of the Australian Defence Force) Act 2018.
Call in the troops
This law is about the circumstances in which the federal government can take the drastic step of sending troops into the streets of an Australian city. (Bear in mind the fundamental difference between a police officer and a soldier: the latter is trained to kill, as their first resort).
It’s also, importantly, not the first of its kind. We already had a call-out law, which was passed in a rush before the Sydney Olympics, that’s never been used. In the wash-up of the Lindt Café siege, Peter Dutton spotted the opportunity to ramp thing up. Although the army could have been called in to assist, and was ready to do so, it wasn’t. The logical response would have been to explore better coordination between state and Commonwealth under the existing law; instead, we got urgent demands to change the law.
What’s different with this new law, and why should we care? There are several critical changes:
- The trigger conditions which will allow the federal government to send in the army. Under the old law, soldiers would be deployed if the state or territory government was not, or was unlikely to be, able to do what was needed. Now, all that is required is that the military’s involvement will be likely to “enhance” the ability of the police to handle the situation. How could it not? So, there is now no effective threshold at all.
- The feds now have a “contingent” call-out order, which is a pre-emptive declaration of circumstances in which they can send in the army, notwithstanding that those circumstances haven’t actually happened at all. Call it the Minority Report power.
- The federal government can invoke a call-out whether or not the relevant state or territory agreement wants it. The troops, once called out, will have extremely wide search and seizure powers over people and property, way beyond those of the police. And, of course, all indemnified.
- Finally, Dutton has added himself to the authorising power, previously exercisable by only the Prime Minister, or the Attorney-General and Defence Minister acting together. Under the changes, the Defence Minister is sidelined, and it’s now a triumvirate call by the PM, AG and the Minister for Home Affairs.
Interesting, when you think about it, given that the defence forces have nothing to do with the Home Affairs portfolio, and nor do the state and territory police forces. Properly, this should be none of Dutton’s business.
Is this a police state in action?
Hypothesis: one day there is a running series of increasingly out-of-control riots in a beachside suburb, as large gangs of drunk men hunt for members of a minority group and bash the shit out of them. The state police are doing their best, but it is a difficult situation to control. People’s safety is potentially at risk. These are all the conditions necessary for the federal government to step in, unasked, and unleash the armour.
Pause before you conclude that this is the society we want. This is not about repelling foreign invaders, and it’s not just about dealing with terrorism as we typically understand it. While the Attorney-General has said it’s “inconceivable” that the army would ever be sent in to the streets in response to a non-terrorist threat to civil order, that is 100% not what the law they just made says.
Our only remaining protection, from being turned into the police state we seem to be heading towards is that our governments will continue their practice of making laws but not actually using them. Thin hope.
The banality of evil. Dutton is our Eichmann.
Not really, Eichmann was just a functionary non-entity – as per Arendt’s “banality of evil”.
Our very own Gestapotato is a player, a combination of Goebbells as propagandist & Himmler, head of the SS.
And he’d be happy to own such comparisons.
Dutton is he of whom it may well be said in, say, 80-100 years from now, “Nurk is our Dutton.”
The defense force could respond quicker to ‘support’ civilian emergency services in times of natural disaster, to resume services to communities and restore normality.
Otherwise there is no reason for the military to be deployed in Australia.
The idea that the defense forces would be quicker than the police, fire, and ambulance is very doubtful. They don’t have local knowledge, they don’t have community relationships and would in the main require direction and intelligence from the normal emergency services. That said the defense forces, particularly the army could certainly make worthwhile contributions to civil catastrophes. But they don’t require the new call-out laws for this. When the fires threatened Melbourne’s water supply I believe army engineers with bull dozers and other earthmoving gear were deployed to assist the CFA and the Department of Scorched Earth with dam protection.
They didn’t have to rush through legislation in this case.
Not “have community relationships” is desirable for suppression of dissent. Goons with guns may enjoy killing, but more so if they’ve no connection with those disposed of by their bullets.
Maybe they could be called out to fix up the bastards who passed these laws.
And then they could turn on themselves, and we’ll have reached peak Argentina.
Absolutely gobsmacked. Lindt Cafe siege was a nice opportunity for Tony Abbott to refuse to speak with Man Haron Monis. He knew this would likely end up as a “terrorist incident” that he could milk for advantage, when it was actually a “mental health problem”. And so it goes.
If Labor does not unwind all this rubbish in due course, we will be in serious strife.
“If Labor does not unwind all this rubbish in due course, we will be in serious strife.”
you’re kidding me….right?
I don’t think the ALP supporters around these parts are thinking through their support of the ALP’s ‘do whatever the Liberals do’ strategy for electoral success. As the brilliant ALP strategists continue on this I expect the partisans to double down and tell us it is all 4d chess. Follow #theplan !
Labour will not unwind this rubbish until that silly Get Up mob start to deal with core issues instead of marginal feel-good issues like gun laws, sexual discrimination, etc etc.
Shorten is a conservative, autocratic, Catholic, union apparatchik. And he is middle class. Such people believe intrinsically in power and the strategic development of it. They do not believe in democracy they pay lip service to it. They are extremely tribal such that anyone outside the tribe is seen as a potential enemy. As part of a tribe they carry tribal obligations that the tribe never lets them forget.
The fact that he is middle class and as such has never suffered at the hands of the rich leaves him open to the temptation to believe that if he ever makes it to high office he will have made it into the upper class. He will be wooed by the rich and not being one of them he will probably “go native” as they all have with the exception of Whitlam. Look at how Hawke swooned over Bond and his America’s Cup win. Hawke gave us university student debt, privatisation of anything that moved, deregulation of the financial system and the neutering of the union movement. All the things the rich of Australia wanted. It didn’t stop with him, Keating, Rudd, and Gillard were no different.
Look at Gillard and how she treated Assange. Assange doesn’t rat on the poor people; he rats on the rich elites and they despise him for it. What did Gillard do, she sided with the Yanks and the rich who want people like Assange to be hung, drawn and quartered. It’s pathetic.
Whitlam had the advantage of his upbringing by a father, a crown solicitor, who was involved in pushing civil rights. Whitlam’s extreme intellect and the fact that he felt superior to everyone including Australia’s rich, the US President and probably God as I think he was an atheist, inoculated him from class betrayal when he became Prime Minister. He paid the price for his failure to smooge up to them with his job.
I am going to write to Shorten and complain bitterly about the callout law the surveillance laws and the TPP. If 100,000 other people did the same he might think about repealing them.
If this all sound like I’m a believer in the ongoing struggle of the class war damn right I am. And if any sort of revolutionary change that will make our society less unequal it will come from Australia’s middle class. Revolutions invariably do. However, it will only happen when our middle class lives begin to crumble under the strain of inequality and the injustices of neo-liberal economics that has brought us the high levels of inequality we have today.
Such inequality and the marginalisation of the middle class is happening right under our noses in the US and they got Trump.
Who will we get? Mr Potato Head with his military callout legislation, his surveillance apparatus and an omnibus crime law copied from Bill Clinton’s 1994 version as the icing on his cake?
Be very afraid!!!
Some sort of public inventory of vulnerable and/or obvious targets would have been useful..this would have required that someone / somewhere would have todo some actual work
You might have missed it. I didn’t. I was horrified. For the first time ever military force can be exercised against the public at the behest of the government. That used to be a point of delinearisation between police force and military. Military to defend against external threat and to assist in emergencies. Police to enforce law against civilians.
Now there is literally nothing to prevent military force to be employed against the Australian public, including lethal force.
Was puzzled about the riots at Cronulla so went to have a look no blocked roads ,plenty of parking .wondered how the ?? Terrorists got there they seemed a bit young .then the penny dropped whoever it was that was created the panic came on the train – too young to drive..what a waste of time but useful to peter.t
There was a taste of the natural tendency to overreach when BruderFarce in their spiffy black SS uniforms were going to be deployed in Melbourne demanding papers.
BTW, didn’t Mr Shouty a couple of days ago proclaim – after ‘Labor’ caved on encryption – that he would use any means at his disposal to prevent a change of government?
He’s just increased the ‘meanness’ at his disposal. Again with ‘Labor’ clueless.