Australian concerns

At the time when I was enthusiastic about the ‘whistles and bells’ site last year I started commenting on the political situation here. To be more precise, on the growing mood of authoritarianism. The things I wrote about have slipped a bit into the past, and it’s not worth recreating the whole structure of articles, so here is the main text of most of those things in one lump. From most recent to oldest. Some of this is from the Sydney Morning Herald, where you should be able to search for and find the original articles.

Even bystanders feel building watchdog’s bite

Thursday, 15 November 2007

He was an innocent witness to a minor scuffle, but he was interrogated for hours. The law forbids him from telling his story, and we cannot name him nor show his face. This is happening in Australia. Andrew West reports.

THE bystander was a mild-mannered academic from the University of Melbourne. Passing a building site on the Yarra’s south bank, he witnessed a confrontation between a union official and a building manager. No punches were thrown but the two men pushed each other and grabbed at each other’s shirts.

But agents of the federal building industry watchdog soon tracked the witness down and hauled him in for several hours of secret questioning, under powers that rival those of Australia’s national security services.

The man cannot be named and cannot discuss the details of his interrogation for fear of imprisonment. Building unions say the innocent citizen’s experience proves the Australian Building and Construction Commission is out of control, wielding powers greater than the police and equal to those of anti-terrorism bodies such as ASIO.

A spokeswoman for the commission confirmed it was the first time a bystander, not connected with a building company or a union, has been subjected to these powers. The legislation gives the commission the authority to question people – with or without a lawyer present – and overrides the right to silence. Witnesses cannot reveal the contents of the interview, even to their spouses, and risk up to six months in jail if they breach the law.

When contacted by the Herald, the witness declined to answer questions about his experience, saying only: “The laws governing the building industry are not part of a country I want to live in. The powers are not in line with community expectations.”

Professor Andrew Stewart, a former dean of Flinders University’s law school and international expert in labour law, called the commission’s powers “extraordinary, analogous to those of ASIO”. “Ordinarily, under our laws, you have certain rights not to answer questions,” he said. “You have privileges against self-incrimination. But these rights do not exist when you are being interviewed by the ABCC. That an innocent member of the public can get caught up in these powers simply increases the concerns.”

Another legal expert, Professor Ron McCallum of the University of Sydney, calls some of the commission’s powers “similar to aspects of the terrorism laws”.

The commission’s chief, John Lloyd, prefers to liken his agency’s powers to those of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission or the Tax Office. He would not comment on this case but confirmed: “The legislation makes it clear that any person can be asked to attend to answer questions. We have to believe there is reasonable grounds for the witness to have either evidence or documents relevant to the investigation. But, yes, there is no restriction on the person or people we can issue a notice against.”

Mr Lloyd initially insisted that co-operation with the commission was voluntary but conceded his agency could compel witnesses to attend interviews. He also defended the secrecy provisions for interviews. “The person who conducts the interview is entitled to give direction about the private nature of the process,” he said.

The Howard government set up the commission after the 2001 Cole inquiry heard claims of corruption and violence in the building industry. No charges were ever brought against any union official as a result of the inquiry. Labor has agreed to scrap the commission by 2010, but the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union wants the Rudd Government to immediately trim its powers. Its national secretary, Dave Noonan, said: “The ABCC’s star chamber represents the worst excesses of the current industrial laws, which the Australian people voted against. We don’t think the Government should wait two more years to do something about this.”

The commission’s 2007 annual report says its 135 investigators questioned 52 people, including 16 without legal representation, in the previous 12 months. Of those interrogated, 47 were union officials or employees.

In the Melbourne case the witness saw the scuffle between a manager from Bovis Lend Lease and a union organiser. Mr Noonan says the manager had tried to interfere in an offsite meeting of workers. The organiser and the manager shoved each other but did not exchange blows. Almost four months later, police are yet to lay charges against either man.

Dictatorial Papal Powers for NSW

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

This is the report from the Sydney Morning Herald. You can read it at the SMH site, or read the full text below:

SYDNEY residents will again be forced to live under emergency laws, when the Pope leads thousands of pilgrims to the city next year.

Authorities will have powers to conduct body searches, confiscate vehicles and evict people from World Youth Day events.

State Parliament has invoked powers similar to those introduced during the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum this year and the Olympics in 2000, giving police and other officials control over a range of issues, from air space to unauthorised advertising.

The World Youth Day Amendment Bill was passed last week to smooth the way for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI during the Catholic Church’s six-day youth pilgrimage in July.

It grants the Catholic Church unrestricted access to Randwick Racecourse for the closing papal Mass, which the church estimates will be attended by up to 500,000 international and Australian Catholic pilgrims.

The bill goes beyond access guarantees, with the inclusion of a controversial clause that can delegate power from Parliament to the Government. It allows the State Government to introduce regulations that permit police and private security guards to conduct searches of pilgrims and their bags, and any cars at World Youth Day sites, and bar entry to anyone.

Airspace around events is to be restricted to all but emergency, police and military aircraft to protect the Pope.

The new laws protect commercial agreements between the church and its sponsors by restricting advertising around buildings and structures at World Youth Day venues.

Similar restrictions to prevent rogue marketing were in place during the Olympics, and the Grand Prix in Victoria.

Volunteers from the State Emergency Service and Rural Fire Service will be able to be brought in for crowd control and traffic management.

Private buses will be permitted to be commandeered to transport Mass-goers.

Because of the tight timetable for preparing the racecourse and restoring it for the 2008 spring carnival, it is to be an offence – carrying a penalty of up to $55,000 – to delay or obstruct any person lawfully entering Randwick Racecourse or carrying out works, and to damage the site without “lawful excuse”.

The new laws are to be administered by the specially enacted World Youth Day Co-ordination Authority. The authority of this body and the minister – the Deputy Premier, John Watkins – is supreme and cannot be “challenged, reviewed quashed or called into question” in court.

Parliament’s Legislative Review Committee has warned that the removal of judicial review of the actions of Mr Watkins and the authority has the potential to deny people natural justice. It has called the regulations governing body and property searches an “inappropriate delegation of legislative power”.

The Greens MP Lee Rhiannon voted for the bill but expressed reservations that it was “a step too far”. It was “staggering” that the Government was prepared to impose advertising bans to help the church fulfil arrangements with commercial sponsors.

A spokesman for the World Youth Day Co-ordination Authority said: “A decision about who will be provided with this authority has not yet been determined but [those officials] will be kept to a minimum and be fully disclosed by regulation.”

The story of Leentje McDonald

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

From the Sydney Morning Herald – currently you can read it at the SMH site; however, the full text is below:

TWO police officers handcuffed a 64-year-old pensioner, threw her to the ground and then searched inside her bra and underpants on a busy suburban road in the mistaken belief she was a drug dealer.

The ordeal left an ailing Leentje McDonald, of Maroubra, in hospital and severely traumatised. But she did not receive an apology from police. Rather, she has been charged with assaulting an officer.

While it is unusual for a pensioner to be mistaken for a 40-year-old drug dealer, as was the case here, civil libertarians say such aggressive searches, and the charging of people for assault or resisting arrest if no drugs are found, are a common and disturbing feature of modern policing.

In her case, Ms McDonald resisted the intrusive search because longstanding nerve damage in her right shoulder meant she was in excruciating pain when the two police officers handcuffed her during the full body search on Maroubra Road.

“I started screaming, screaming so loud because it was extremely painful. It was so painful I could feel it in my spine. I had a blackout. I thought I was going to die from a heart attack,” Ms McDonald told the Herald at her small Department of Housing flat, where she lives alone.

October 18 had began like any other pension day. Ms McDonald went to the shops to buy some ingredients for a “nice dinner” and stepped into the Maroubra Junction Hotel to play the pokies for a few minutes while she waited for her bus.

As she left the hotel, two plainclothes police officers, a man and a woman, approached.

“They said, ‘Are you dealing drugs.’ I said, ‘No, never in my life. I don’t even like smoking,’ ” she said. Ms McDonald says the two officers said they were looking for an Asian woman in her 40s.

“I said, ‘You must have a mistaken identity. I have never done this in my life. I’m 64, a grandmother of six, please.’ I said, ‘You can’t search me like this on a busy road. I beg your pardon, no.’ “

The police grabbed her bag, finding only her wallet, some bills and two cans of coconut cream. But they were not satisfied. While Maroubra police station was directly across the road, about 20 metres away, the officers moved to handcuff and search her on the street.

“I said, ‘Please don’t do this, I have a frozen shoulder,’ ” Ms McDonald said.

In terrible pain, she lashed out, scratching one of the officers. They finished handcuffing her and threw her to the ground.

“They did a full body search. They put their hands inside my bra, inside my pants. I said, ‘My God. Why is this happening to me?’ Then the officer, she says to me, ‘Stand up.’ But I couldn’t stand up. I was crying. Then they said, ‘Put your shoes on.’ My handbag was everywhere, my glasses, my coconut cream.

“They had no drugs, no nothing. But they arrested me and put me in the truck. They take me to Maroubra police station. That’s just across the road!”

The commotion drew a large crowd of onlookers, intensifying Ms McDonald’s humiliation. One witness, Josephine Chen, who worked at a nearby photo studio, said: “Everybody stopped to look.

“She kept screaming ‘My shoulder, my shoulder’ but the police kept ignoring it. She was struggling to free her arm. She wasn’t trying to hit anyone.”

In the past 10 years, NSW police have been granted increased powers to search people, culminating in the decision last month of the Premier, Morris Iemma, to extend indefinitely the powers given to police to deal with the aftermath of the Cronulla riots.

These powers mean police need only have a “suspicion” of illegality before they undertake an intrusive body search in an authorised area.

Cameron Murphy, of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, said: “We get hundreds of complaints about this, more than any other issue, particularly when it involves police sniffer dogs at train stations or outside nightclubs.

“If you get upset about what is often a degrading and humiliating experience and they don’t find drugs, the police charge you. Some people get what we call the trifecta: disobeying a lawful direction, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.”

A police spokesman from Eastern Beaches command, Chief Inspector David McBeath, would not comment before Ms McDonald’s scheduled appearance at Waverley Local Court on December 19.

However, he said police would take into account any comments from the magistrate before determining if any action would be taken against the officers.

Did I say “drift” towards a police state? It’s a slide.

Thursday, 13 December 2007

I was too cautious. Slide, or even “slither” would be a better word.

For background, see the “Story of Leentje McDonald” and the “Dictatorial Papal Powers for NSW” articles, where I give the links to the newspaper articles and also the full text (as I’m not sure how long those links stay valid).

Note particularly the point in the second article explaining that:

The new laws are to be administered by the specially enacted World Youth Day Co-ordination Authority. The authority of this body and the minister – the Deputy Premier, John Watkins – is supreme and cannot be “challenged, reviewed quashed or called into question” in court.

That is dictatorship, isn’t it? The statute puts John Watkins’ officially above the law – any law! It wouldn’t happen in Germany, that’s for sure! Anybody who tried it would be dragged in front of the Verfassungsgericht before you could say “Hallo Seemann”. But then the Germans know how dangerous it is to give up constitutional protections and put total authority into the hands of those at the top “to get the job done”, don’t they?

What was that about a drift towards a police state?

Monday, 12 November 2007

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

In a scathing judgment, NSW Supreme Court Justice Michael Adams found that two ASIO officers had broken the law in a deliberate attempt to coerce answers from Mr ul-Haque.

“I am satisfied that B15 and B16 [the ASIO officers] committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping at common law and also an offence under section 86 of the Crimes Act,” the judge said.

(snip)

“This is reminiscent of Kafka,” Justice Adams said in a lengthy judgment in which he derided the misconduct of both ASIO and Australian Federal Police officers.

He detailed how ASIO officers had confronted Mr ul-Haque, forced him into a car and then taken him to a park where he was threatened with serious consequences if he did not co-operate fully.

Comments (1)by Keith Bloomfield, December 01, 2007

Lying, arrogant politicians again

Monday, 05 November 2007

I’m not sure how many of you in the UK will be familiar with the Haneef case, so I will briefly summarise: Dr Haneef, working here until a few months ago, had been in England a couple of years back. He had bought a SIM card, and this card still had money on it, so he gave it to a relative rather than waste it. That relative was later involved with the attempted Manchester Airport bombing, and the SIM card was found in due course. Now there has been very little by way of terrorism in Australia, but the Howard government has been scaremongering as much as the American government has, bringing in new laws and giving new powers to the “security” forces. The personnel in those forces are, naturally, totally gung-ho about catching somebody, and are looking forward to chases, shootings, intensive secret interrogations and all the rest of it, so they got very excited. Desperate as they were to get involved, they stretched the truth wildly, for instance saying that the SIM card concerned had been in the car with the bomb, and developed an equally stupid and convoluted theory as to how, in that case, it proved that Dr Haneef had been supporting terrorism.

In spite of detaining him without charge for a long time and repeated interrogations they got nowhere, and it became clear that at the next application to a magistrate required to keep him for yet longer, the magistrate was likely to tell the “security” forces that they needed more than untruths and wild speculations to hold the doctor in continued solitary confinement. That was exactly what happened, and he was released but lo: within hours he was rearrested, as his visa to work in Australia had been cancelled by the responsible minister, Kevin Andrews.

Now it seemed pretty likely that Kevin Andrews, who had been prevaricating and refusing to answer questions all along, had simply decided that there was no way that he wanted to release Haneef. He denied this, saying that it was a ministerial decision made under different regulations for different reasons. Legal authorities pointed out that such a decision was highly dubious, but be that as it may, the cancellation remained.

And now what happens? Intelligent readers will already have guessed. In fact there are two things. One is that the number of overseas doctors seeking to work in Australia has fallen by 90 per cent because of the federal government’s handling of the Haneef case, according to the Overseas and Australian Medical Graduates Association (OAMGA), in a joint statement with the United Indian Associations (UIA) group. The Australian medical system is desperately overstretched as it is – oops!

The other thing is that emails between the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and an adviser to Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, talking of a “contingency” plan to use immigration law to keep Dr Haneef in custody, have now emerged. Oops!

There are people here in Australia, as in other parts of the “free” world, who would be a lot happier if they could turn this place into a police state. The country may still be democratic, but it is no shining light of democracy all the same.

It’s Viscount Linley, if you didn’t know!

Wednesday, 31 October 2007

Bizarre, isn’t it? The whole world except Britain – with anyone who knows their way around the internet being an exception to that exception – knows who the “royal” at the centre of the gay sex video blackmail affair is. But newspapers and broadcasters in the UK can’t say so!

Ermm… why?

President Bush, now you too!

Thursday, 11 October 2007

It seems that I even have to say “well done President Bush!” He is going to attend the ceremony next week at which Nancy Pelosi will award the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor the American legislature can bestow, to the Dalai Lama.

China, of course, is furious, but it seems to be becoming a trend, what with not only the Merkel meeting, but the Dalai Lama also meeting Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer last month, John Howard (Australian Prime Minister) in June, and being scheduled to meet Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper later this month. On the one hand, of course, gestures are just gestures and don’t necessarily mean that much. On the other hand, perhaps people are at last realising that it is the nature of the Chinese government to storm, stamp, and fume, but they are as two-faced as anybody else when it comes to trade. On the other hand, with China being set to perhaps be the world’s biggest power in coming decades, the time might be right to remember how they have walked over the Tibetans, amongst others, and will have no qualms about walking over anybody else.

Well done Angela Merkel!

Tuesday, 25 September 2007

As the Dalai Lama himself has said, most politicians want to meet him until they are actually in power.

Once they are in power, they adopt a “yes sir, no sir” in response to Chinese posturing. So well done to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for doing the really very simple and uncontroversial thing of meeting His Holiness. The Chinese are jumping up and down with rage, while commentators who are more in awe of China are accusing her of being irresponsible. There are hints that diplomatic steps may be taken.

But I do not think she has to worry – in the end it will make very little difference. Politicians who are upset by China’s human rights policies, environmental policies and so on start to smile and shake hands when they see that trade trumps compassion. China, equally, will not want to risk access to German industrial skill. There may be some theatrics, but a formula will soon be found by which the Chinese government will continue to show disapproval but without risking trade.

Am I right?