By Graham Macafee
Canberra, Australia
1 March 2004

Al Quedaπs contribution to history is blowing up New Yorkπs twin towers of commerce. The Australian Liberal Partyπs contribution is even MORE spectacular. It blew up nothing less than the twin towers of Western civilisation - Magna Carta (the ågreat charterπ of liberty signed in 1215) and the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679.

In setting up a system of 'administrative' detention, drug-induced stupification and forced exile for terror-fleeing refugees, Prime Minister Howard has duplicated on Australian soil what he claims to despise elsewhere - åAxis of Evilπ tyranny.

Law by law, regulation by regulation, clause by clause, line by totalitarian line, the Howard regime has systematically destroyed 800 years of Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus protection from the ådivine rightπ of rulers to do as they please with human life.

Magna Carta states that everybody shall have access to courts and money shall not be an issue. It also states that nobody shall be imprisoned without first going through an impartial legal system.

With childish insolence common to all tyrants, John Howard also smashed the British Parliamentπs Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 - afterwards copied into Australian law. Edmund Burke called habeas corpus and English common law the "sole securities either for liberty or justice".

Known through history as the "great bulwark against tyranny", habeas corpus requires government officials (upon demand) to promptly produce a prisoner before an impartial court to review the legality of their capture and incarceration.

John Howardπs privatised prisons (chock-full of kidnapped, terrified families) canπt extinguish liberty and justice for refugees without also extinguishing it for you and me. Mandatory or 'administrative' detention (without court authority) is illegal detention.

The Liberal Party giving asylum seekers a number and putting them in human filing cabinets (like so many musty files) until a govenment clerk can get around to dealing with them, is callous beyond all human understanding.

Policies don't feel pain and get heart broken - but people do - especially when robbed of their human dignity, autonony and self-determination by a po-faced government clerk. So let's devise policies that serve people - not cram them into redneck filing cabinets.

In offering to better manage 'administrative' detention, not abolish it, the Australian Labor Party is offering voters diversity within redneck thinking - not diversity from redneck thinking.

Diversity from redneck thinking would occur if the government had ten working days to offer evidence to a court that an asylum seeker posed a danger to society - otherwise they must be released from detention on a six-month entry permit or expelled (but only with court approval) or charged with a crime - other than seeking asylum which would no longer BE a crime.

Diversity from redneck thinking would occur if the government (during the six-month permit period) could present the court with no evidence the permit holder presented a danger to society, their entry permit would automatically become a citizenship certificate - unless the permit-holder preferred a permit extension to a change of citizenship.

Diversity from redneck thinking would occur if the government had to present evidence of social danger to a court before an expulsion could occur during the 10 day detention or six-month permit periods - the absence of evidence or documents being taken as proof of innocence - not proof of malignant intentions.

Diversity from redneck thinking would occur when an Australian citizenship certificate had equal standing to an Australian birth certificate as regards deportation.

The problem with the current wickedly cruel system is it accords total power and freedom of action (plus a presumption of innocence) to the all-powerful nation-state of Australia and NONE to human beings in desperate need of a little dignity, autonomy and self-determination.

In these days of 'globalisation', capital moves freely across Australia's borders without government let or hindrance. With 'free trade' agreements proliferating, goods flow either way in abundance and services are outsourced or insourced with government action mainly confined to recording (not controlling or crushing) cross-border movements - with no loss of 'sovereignity'.

Would the sky fall and civilization collapse if HUMAN BEINGS were accorded the same cross-border autonomy as cash, coal and call centres? I doubt it. From space, no borders can be seen on Planet Earth - and neither can racial bigotry.

Like a malignant cancer, detention attitudes are spreading from John Howard's concentration camps for unwanted children into every aspect of Australian life. If Parliament agrees to extend ASIO's powers of arrest and secret detention to anyone it deems 'undesirable', God help us all!

As so many other countries have discovered, when 'protectors of the constitution' demand more and more power over human destiny, it's not a big step from 'administrative' detention to 'administrative' disappearances. As William Shakespeare noted: "Beggars mounted soon ride their horse to death!"

Itπs time Parliament awoke from its long slumber and excised Australiaπs most dangerous and competent white-collar terrorist in living memory - John Winston Howard.

Itπs time Parliament removed truckloads of his human rights abuses from the stature books and painstakingly rebuilt Australiaπs twin towers of Magna Carta liberty and Habeas Corpus justice.

It's time a memorial was built in Canberra to remind visiting school children how precious Western civilisation is - warning them (when they grow up) to remain ever vigilant for white-collar terrorists trying to sneak into Parliament under cover of an election.