Scott Morrison’s improper intervention in the NSW Police investigation of the growing Angus Taylor scandal is yet another example of the police state that has been created in this country, by this government.
Overstatement? This week alone has served up plenty of evidence. On Tuesday, the Federal Court confirmed that police raids on the Australian Workers Union in 2017 were unlawful. The raids had been carried out at the request of the government’s bespoke anti-union body, the Registered Organisations Commission, in an investigation initiated by Michaelia Cash with the help of News Corp, targeting Bill Shorten.
Cash’s staff tipped off the media about the raids. Cash and her staff subsequently refused to talk to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) when that tip-off was investigated. The AFP and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) declined to charge anyone in relation to the leak.
The lack of interest by the AFP and the DPP in ever charging anyone if it embarrasses the government is a recurring theme. The AFP, so gung-ho to raid journalist Annika Smethurst and subject her to hours of intimidation, strangely couldn’t summon the energy to pursue a leak relating to Medevac advice — very similar to the one over which Smethurst was raided — which served the interests of the government rather than embarrassing it.
Illegal AFP raids are also a recurring theme: during the 2016 election campaign, the AFP raided the homes and offices of a Labor senator and his staff, including in Parliament House, at the behest of NBN Co over leaks that had embarrassed the discredited infrastructure company.
Astonishingly, an NBN Co official accompanied the AFP to help direct them. That raid, too, proved improper, and the police were forced to hand the material back.
Meantime, someone within the government has forged what purports to be an official document of another government body — Sydney council — to serve the agenda of the Coalition. That no one within the Coalition appears to think this is in any way inappropriate says much for the overall ethical standards of those men and women, and particularly the prime minister.
Worse, the Prime Minister took it upon himself to call a person with whom he was personally acquainted — the NSW Police commissioner — to discuss a NSW Police investigation of the matter and politically justify his failure to take any action about the forgery.
Both Scott Morrison and Commissioner Mick Fuller, who is otherwise best known as an enthusiastic advocate for strip searching children, deny the conversation was inappropriate, but — typically — no records are available of the exchange.
This is how police are used in a police state — to go after one’s opponents and defend oneself and one’s allies.
Simultaneously, the attorney-general had his lawyers in court in Canberra this week delaying the trial of Bernard Collaery in relation to the exposure of illegal actions by the Howard government, as part of Porter’s strategy of dragging out the case as long as possible and to punish Collaery and pressure Witness K. Even the government’s hand-picked Director of Public Prosecutions has refused to support Porter’s repeated efforts to prevent the trial from getting underway.
The AWU raids. The Fuller call. The Collaery delays. Not one-offs or coincidence, but part of the pattern of what happens in a police state, where the government exercises arbitrary power using the police, and other state apparatus, in its own interests.
Each of them has individual significance, though, because each normalises or establishes a precedent for the abuse of law enforcement in the interests of the ruling party.
Politically initiated raids on journalists and unions and vexatious prosecutions and procedural harassment are now established as tools to pursue opponents or those who have embarrassed the government. A prime minister calling his friend the police commissioner about an investigation of his own minister is now defended as entirely appropriate.
The opposition opportunistically attacks the government on some of these, but is silent on others. Many of the laws now being used to pursue whistleblowers and government critics were passed with Labor support.
Labor approved the surveillance of Witness K and Bernard Collaery in government and has said nothing on their prosecution or Porter’s legal harassment of them. Its role is not of opposition but of co-conspirator.
The road to a police state tends to be a one-way street. Damaged institutions, forgotten ethics and abandoned standards don’t magically restore themselves without a fundamental commitment of political will or fundamental change in political structures.
Unlike other countries, Australia doesn’t even have a constitutional framework to protect its citizens from their own government. Instead, the momentum to keep on abusing power persists. It will open the way to new, worse forms of abuse.
Do you think Australia is slipping further into a police state? Let us know your thoughts at boss@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be included for publication.
And it’s not just Australia that has become immune to political acts that once would have been inconceivable. Leading world democracies (UK, US, Australia) seemingly now routinely hide the truth from their own people. Are governments now so scared that their own citizens might want to rise up (or if because it doesn’t directly affect them keep their head in the sand)
Don’t forget Dutton’s over-chummy relationship with the AFP, whom he regularly extols in public as his boys who share that odious us-and-them siege attitude unique to ex- and current-cops — them, in this case, being us (the Australian public). Dictatorship 1.01: get the secret police onside.
I never understood the “us and them mentality”, until just recently, when visiting in Canberra and caught up for dinner, with a friends’ adult son, who happens to be a member of the alphabets.
Whilst talking in a more than general way about Queensland, what happening and such, I mentioned the shocking case of a police officer being prosecuted, after being accused of leaking a recording of a beating, other police officers had given a chef in the underground car park of a gold coast police station, which required them to hose the blood out the back of the paddy wagon.
First I got a general, there must be other explanations……. !
After a few more minutes of another conversation topic, I realized that I was being assessed.
I had said in passing, that, the Gold Coast police appeared to be going feral, which was the first sign that there was corruption in the police force, last time.
He immediately came to the defense of both the police force ( difficult job, violence and domestic violence, drugs and mental health patients) and the police commissioner. I personally think that the layer of management taken out by Campbell should be put back in and the new commissioner may have some effect.
I asked him, if, he had any knowledge of how corrupt the Queensland police had been in the Joh era.
Minor old history, that was then and we are now.
When I described a circumstance that I had knowledge of personally, whereby a good friend of mine”s father had testified in camera and then warned us all, in case of repercussions from his colleagues. A number of the police force had been running a child prostitution racket, out of a watch house and he reported it to the Fitzgerald inquiry in secret. There were lots more, and that is why the files are sealed for at least the next 30 years.
He appeared horrified, and then I could see him looking perplexed because these things can’t happen now.
Perhaps, we currently have alphabets, generating officers with no history training and no ethics training.
If they don’t know what has been before, then they are destined to repeat the same mistake over and over.
“Both Scott Morrison and Commissioner Mick Fuller, who is otherwise best known as an enthusiastic advocate for strip searching children, deny the conversation was inappropriate, but — typically — no records are available of the exchange.”
The fact that he made the call is inappropriate.
I’m surprised he hasn’t said it was a ‘perfect call’
Has Putin learned from us or did we learn from Putin?
Those pesky Russians have a President with a PhD in International Law.
We have a guy from ‘maaaaaaaaaaaarketing’.
We repeatedly find ourselves willing participants in ‘coalitions’ that smash international law to bits. Start with the Korean War, and work forward from there.
And, we actively encourage the ‘privatisation’ of trashing international law, with an example being the head of the UAE ‘security’ pinnacle, the “Presidential Guard”, being a former SAS Chief from the ADF, and him having created ‘pathways’ for around 100 other ex-ADF personnel to assist him in furthering what the UN has consistently called; ‘the greatest humanitarian crisis today’ – that would be Yemen, where the UAE have run the ‘ground campaign’, alongside the Saudis ‘air campaign’.
Further, as Scott Ritter, former Lead Weapons Inspector in Iraq, wrote recently;
“Russia isn’t getting the credit it deserves on Syria”
“………….Unheralded Peacemaker………..
Over time, international historians will come to appreciate what Russia accomplished in Syria, potentially ending a sectarian conflict that could easily have served as the foundation for a decades-long conflagration with regional and global consequences.
Whether American historians will ever be capable of doing the same is unknown. But this much is true: In the years to come, children will be born of parents whose lives were not terminated or otherwise destroyed by a larger Syrian conflict that almost assuredly would have transpired if not for the honest broker services provided by Russia. Intentionally or not, Russian diplomacy prevented the United States from embarking on a foreign policy disaster of its own making. While it is highly doubtful that Americans will ever muster the moral fortitude to say so publicly, those who know the truth should find the time to whisper, “Thanks, Putin,” between the barrage of anti-Russian propaganda that floods the American mainstream media today.
Like it or not, in Syria, the Russians saved us from ourselves.”
Truthdigdotcom, 30/10.
Oh, and BTW, if you search ‘Amnesty Raqqa Julie Bishop’ you’ll find further evidence of the Australian love of illegal death and destruction, and an unwillingness to even respond to reasoned questions about their compliance to international law.
And, that was after being peeved they weren’t given what Bishop felt was ‘due credit’ for having participated, alongside the US, UK and France, in the destruction of Raqqa, and numerous of its civilians. They flew out of the base in the UAE to participate.
Not, that Amnesty went on with the job, of course.
Pointing at Putin is nothing but a distraction from what is going on, here.
First they came for the communists, and I said nothing, becuse I was not a communist.Then they etc.etc.
My thoughts exactly, Malcolm.