By Graham Macafee
Canberra, Australia
6 March 2004
Laws such as mandatory or administrative detention
that
abolish the rule of
law are not laws at all - theyıre the antithesis of law
- the destruction
of law - a malignant, evil cancer consuming the body
politic.
John Winston Howard's contribution to history is
even
more spectacular than
poorly armed Al Queda operatives bringing down New
York's
twin towers of
commerce.
Armed only with confidence tricks, John Howard and
his
operatives have
brought to ruin nothing less than the twin towers of
Western civilisation -
Magna Carta liberty and Habeas Corpus justice.
Where liberty and justice once flourished, they have
created,
not one, but
two unjust Australias - a nation where the rule of law
is drawing its last
breath and excised areas where the rule of law was
aborted
before it could
draw breath.
Underpinning it all is a gulag of privatised human
filing
cabinets where
people deemed 'undesirable' rot until they agree to
sign
over their human
rights - to John Howard.
In offering to better manage John Howard's private
human
zoo, not abolish
it, the Labor Party is offering voters diversity WITHIN
totalitarian
thinking not diversity FROM totalitarian thinking.
The problem with such thinking is it accords total
power
and freedom to the
nation-state of Australia and no power, no freedom and
no presumption of
innocence to human beings in desperate need of a little
dignity, freedom
and self-determination.
Like a malignant cancer, totalitarian thinking is
spreading
from John
Howard's prison camps for unwanted children into every
nook and cranny of
Australian life. It even hoodwinked the High Court into
accepting a process
that abolishes the rule of law - administrative
detention
of refugees.
If Parliament is hoodwinked into massively extending
ASIO's
powers of
arrest and secret detention to other people John Howard
dislikes, even
public servants and cartoonists could soon be hiring
dodgy travel agents to
get them to New Zealand.