The hypocrisy of many high-profile anti-lockdown advocates is easy to spot.
Craig Kelly — for the moment allied with Clive Palmer on an anti-lockdown platform — says “the freedoms that were once the birthright of every Australian” have been “stolen”. But Kelly’s concern about “endless authoritarian lockdowns, the emergence of a police state” is recent indeed. To this day his website boasts of the government’s expansion of surveillance laws and greater powers for the government for biosecurity and border control.
Kelly has also repeatedly attacked the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia by arguing that Indigenous prisoners die at lower rates than non-Indigenous prisoners, refusing to acknowledge they are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated in the first place.
George Christensen, another dogged advocate of freedom and supporter of anti-lockdown protests/superspreader events, attacked Black Lives Matter protests, linking them to terrorists, calling them “race-baiting” and claiming they were “a slap in the face to our Diggers”.
“This disrespect for public health and the Australian community is most certainly not welcome here,” he piously pronounced.
He also wants to ban forms of Islamic dress and opposes marriage equality.
Or there’s failed Queensland premier Campbell Newman, who has abandoned the LNP in disgust over its failure to support freedom, its support for lockdowns, and criticisms by Coalition politicians of anti-lockdown protesters. He was less concerned with freedom when as premier he introduced draconian “VLAD” laws against motorcyclists — they were later abandoned. Newman has also complained about BLM protests being allowed and the failure of Labor to oppose them.
Right-wingers being hypocrites on freedom is pretty standard fare — most of the loudest conservative voices on free speech are completely silent when the speech rights of their critics or opponents are stifled. But it provides a valuable insight into their thinking.
For Kelly, Christensen and Newman and other right-wingers, freedom clearly isn’t a fundamental aspect of civil society, otherwise they’d be consistent in supporting it whenever it was abridged, no matter who the victims were. They might even understand that once you start curbing the rights of unpopular groups or minorities it becomes easier to curb those of everyone else.
That’s an exercise in complex thinking that’s evidently beyond them, or at least presents implications they’re uncomfortable with.
Instead, they evidently regard freedom is conditional. Not conditional in accepted senses, like “no freedom to yell fire in a crowded theatre” or “no freedom to undermine the freedom of others”, but conditional on some form of status in society. For Kelly and Christensen, it seems curbing freedom is fine for Black people, Muslims or LGBTI+ people — just don’t use it against white Australians.
In Newman’s case, curbing the rule of law to target motorcycle riders in a quest to look tough on crime is perfectly consistent with more broadly supporting freedom — they don’t get freedom, but “ordinary” people should.
Underpinning this — no doubt unconsciously on the part of these men — is a clear racial basis for ideas of citizenship.
In colonial settler societies, citizenship is always racially based. Early thinking about citizenship in the United States had to deal with the problem of women, Native Americans and slaves, with democratic rights being limited to white men.
Philosophies of citizenship and democracy in the US were heavily racialised and gendered, with a strain of blood purity running through them, including the idea that US democracy owed its lineage as much to ancient Germanic legal forms (transmitted to the US via Magna Carta and 17th century Puritans, and so reliably Protestant) as to the slave-holding city-states of Rome and Athens.
The sovereign citizen movement, which migrated to Australia along with many other right-wing conspiracy theories, was founded by racists and anti-Semites in the US and draws on fantasy history lessons and bizarre legal theories that endlessly cite Magna Carta.
From this perspective, freedom must be limited to certain types of citizens who claim to be able to trace a kind of blood-borne right back to the 13th century and, for that matter, far further back through the Anglo-Saxon occupation of eastern England and into the dark forests of Thuringia before the Romans arrived.
Freedom is a status marker not merely of whiteness but a certain kind of whiteness (and maleness, though graciously extended partially to women). Indigenous Australians, Muslims, LGBTI+ people don’t get to share in the blood-borne legal magic, which is a status marker reserved for the Kellys, Christensens and Newmans of the state.
It’s interesting how the greatest anger at the loss of “freedom” seems to be expressed by men – certainly if the riotous behaviour we saw in Melbourne recently is anything to go by. In some ways this should not surprise us since some men will experience the restrictions from our public health measures more keenly than many others in the community. For example, most men will think nothing of walking alone down a dark street at night. Every adult enjoys the “freedom” to do this – in theory. In practice, a great many people who aren’t men do not feel “free” to do this.
The “freedom” which Kelly, Christensen et al talk about is not freedom at all but entitlement.
Very well said!
Bernard points out what fantasists Kelly, Christensen and Newman are about freedom and where it’s fundamental principles might come from. This is depressingly in line with the US fantasists who think that being forced to wear a face mask to protect freedom from infection with Covid is denial of a basic freedom, derived no doubt from their holy national constitution as they misinterpret it.
I find the most depressing thing about these hypocritical champions of freedom for some but not for others is their utter failure to know anything at all about freedom. First of all, freedom is not some homogenous things. We have different freedoms, some trifling, which no society could reasonably enforce, and some basic to living together as freely cooperating citizens from one generation to the next, which are so important that any truly just society would enforce them.
An example of an unimportant freedom is the freedom to walk down the left side of a footpath on some street. When many people are using the footpath, this freedom might not be enjoyed all the way down the street, as people sort out how they will pass one another. This is not an issue that anyone needs to take up. In normal times, the freedom to wear or not to wear a mask will also not be an issue.
When a deadly virus is being passed on from some people to others, we no longer have normal times. Wearing or not wearing a mask can preserve or undermine a person’s freedom to live without others without undue risk to their lives. That freedom is one of basic importance. Its protection is behind laws outlawing physical assault occasioning actual bodily harm. It is also behind laws setting speed limits and forcing people to wear seat belts, so that their freedom from threats to their life is lessened from what it would be if drivers could simply drive how they want to.
That important freedoms can clash, so that each must be limited so that everyone enjoys as much of each liberty as possible, is not understood by these people. Nor do they understand that allowing some people the freedom to show how stupid they are by protesting against mask wearing and lockdowns, while denying others the freedom to protest against discrimination with serious consequences, shows how stupid they are or, at least, how stupid they think their audience is.
If you have a repugnant agenda, it’s important that you sell it well. You need to find an uncontroversial talisman to promote your message. Hence, the word “freedom” is a popular choice amongst racist rabble. It’s a lovely concept, freedom, but its bastardisation by assorted nasty types means it’s now almost unusable in a positive sense. Already, the word “patriot” (as well as the use of national flags) has been co-opted beyond repair by those who would tear our country apart. Unfortunately, the word “freedom” is heading the same way.
Great to see Andrew Hastie spruiking ‘freedom’. I thought when you were a member of the military you obeyed rules and orders. There is not a lot of room for freedom in the military. He is now a lawmaker, and that seems to be a contradiction.
Freedom to do as you please?
The Liberal MP for Canning, Andrew Hastie, has spoken out after being sacked from the army reserve for using images of himself in uniform in election campaign material.
“Defence contacted [Andrew] Hastie, a member of the standby army reserve, and requested he remove imagery of himself in uniform from election campaign material.
“Regrettably, Hastie did not comply with this request. Accordingly, the army issued Hastie with a notice indicating the intention to terminate his service because he had failed to comply with directions and defence policy.
“Hastie’s service has since been terminated.”
The Guardian
My warrant officer trainers in the army when confronted with “But i thought sir that” was a very definite ” You are not here to think, you are here to obey orders!”
Except of course, if you actually got to be a warrant officer. It would be a very ‘courageous’ officer not to take notice of a seasoned professional if push came to shove.
And speaking of that, give me a bunch of ADF NCOs any day over some docile accounting company in organising our vaccine rollout! What the hell was Scomo thinking!
Amen that.
Or you could just get professional public servants to dit it, Bref, in half the time anda tenth of the cost.
Failing that, you then bring in the army. Preferably to shoot all the consultants.
Spell check, Stat!
no need for either in fact all we needed was a public service that had not been routed to death by the Joyce Abbott Morrison Howard Turnbull team
I recall witnessing my CO (Colonel) giving a Captain the best bollocking I have ever heard, to this day, for failing to follow the directions of the RSM!
It was common knowledge in Vietnam that ‘fraggin’ was almost always of preppy 1st lieutenants.
Andrew Hastie and Ian Goodenough held a “brief meeting” with the convicted criminal who espouses extreme right-wing views online, and who has been banned from both Twitter and Facebook.
Hastie was asked on Tuesday if he had ever held “secret” meetings with Erikson, who is widely considered one of the figureheads of the far right movement in Australia.
The MP for the safe seat of Canning said he would not answer “defamatory” questions.
Erikson and Cottrell were among three members of the United Patriots Front who were convicted of inciting contempt for Muslims after staging a mock beheading in protest at plans to build a mosque in Bendigo…TG 2017
Hastie and Goodenough are 2 of the 11 WA liberals in the Federal lower house. They are pretty much going against the landslide-winning state McGowan government with respect to lockdowns (and treating people decently). I can only assume that they don’t wish to be re-elected in the forthcoming Federal election, given the unprecedented endorsement of McGowan at this year’s state election?
Handy Hastie apparently was circling somewhere in a helicopter when members of his squad were hacking off the hands of those they had killed, a regular practice apparently, to obtain fingerprints so it is said.
Hastie denied any knowledge of this, the man is a coward , liar, and a far-right extremist, who comes from a creationist family and has similar beliefs.
When I was in the armed services yonks ago, you were expected to obey orders, but you had the freedom not to obey an unlawful command, which is as it should be.
It takes great courage, physically, morally and psychologically to stand by one’s conscience – viz the COs of the Vietnam era.
The worst contumely comes from those who, cravenly, kow-tow, because they hate knowing that they do wrong and, thus, those who make them confront this knowledge.
Unconsciously? Each is, or has been, a member of the LNP, only Australia’s most successful and prominent white supremacist organisation.