The light of human rights is fading in Australia

Posted about 4 hours agoTue 7 Oct 2014, 1:57pm

 Never has an Australian government talked so much about freedom while doing so much to undermine it.When it comes to national security and refugees we are increasingly pathetic, writes Ben Saul.

.The Government’s stocks are rising as it takes advantage of public anxiety about terrorism to ram through new laws. To be sure, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria needs to be combated to protect civilians there. But the threat in Australia is modest and the Government is overcooking it.

Terrorism here is not an existential threat. Nazism, imperial Japan, and nuclear holocaust in the Cold War were existential threats. Terrorism in Australia is a minor irritation. Your own furniture is more likely to kill you.

When our Prime Minister subordinates the magical diversity of what it means to be Australian to some absurdly jingoistic, reductive view of national identity, it is no surprise that others take it further: from hateful graffiti, to calls to halt Muslim immigration or ban the burqa, to Islamophobic attacks on Australian women wearing headscarves.

The new laws also go too far. They criminalise innocent travel to places the Foreign Minister does not want you to go. They criminalise free speech. They criminalise whistleblowers and the media that report them. They allow mass surveillance of innocent Australians on the internet. They deny procedural fairness. They violate the right to social security and therefore potentially leave people destitute.

All of this comes without the binding human rights safeguards that every other self-respecting democracy imposes on its security agencies.

The bill also erases references in our law to the Refugee Convention. The Immigration Minister spat the dummy on international law, saying: “This parliament should decide what our obligations are under these conventions – not those who seek to direct us otherwise from places outside this country”, such as foreign courts or the United Nations. The Minister assured us that Australia would comply with its international obligations – which is presumably not difficult if international law is now simply whatever the Government says it is.

The rest of the miserable story of Australian refugee policy is well known. Protracted and even indefinite, illegal detention. Cruel, inhuman and degrading detention conditions, where refugees suicide, are beaten to death, or die from treatable infections. Detention factories that manufacture mental illness. Naval interceptions and offshore processing based on grand lies about queue jumping, people smuggling, and saving lives at sea. Shifting our burden onto and bribing poor neighbours like Papua New Guinea. Coddling dictators in Cambodia and war criminals and torturers in Sri Lanka. Undermining constitutionalism in Nauru. Our system punishes refugees and tries to stop them coming at whatever the human cost.

Australia receives a few thousand boat people and our politicians – on both sides – some of our media, and many Australians go into meltdown. We have no sense of proportion or perspective, like a child that cannot control itself. Stinginess, selfishness, paranoia, and racism have become defining characteristics of our nation. We are increasingly pathetic.

The major parties are in lock-step on many of these abuses, whether on refugees or terrorism. Many Australian politicians are either hostile towards human rights or indifferent. They prefer to govern by marginal seat focus groups than to show courage or leadership.

Some of the great light of human rights is fading in Australia. It is a cause of sorrow, and shame, that our institutions are incapable of arresting it. Our country has become, in the words of our bush poet Randolph Stow, “a desert of broken quartz”, wracked by the crow.