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Freerange spooks threaten freedoms
Volume 29 #18
October 14, 2014
Resignation please The position of Cr Rose Wanchap has become increasingly controversial since she publicly split from Byron Council’s Greens faction in May. No doubt her voting decisions arise from the highest motives, but they have been uncannily similar to those of the councillors whose allegiances, informally if not officially, belong to the National Party and big developers. She claims that by endorsing a right-wing program in Council she is merely exercising her judgment, which has matured since she accepted nomination for the Greens in 2012. The 31 people who voted directly for her might tolerate her change of direction, but thousands of others supported her specifically as a Green and have been disenfranchised by her actions. ‘Ratting’ on political colleagues is not unusual, and it would be unreasonable to expect elected representatives always to act the way they promised voters they would. Circumstances change, issues develop, policies evolve. Everyone has the right of dissent, and in large governing bodies occasionally crossing party lines should not be seen as necessarily dishonourable. But voters do not expect the candidates they support to make permanent political u-turns. Cr Wanchap has done this, and the consequences in a small local council chamber are significant. How significant can be seen from our front page story. With Wanchap now voting with the right wing there is a majority available in Byron Shire Council for projects which will degrade the natural environment for financial gain. Until the next election the two remaining Greens councillors, Simon Richardson and Duncan Dey, along with Labor’s Paul Spooner and independent Basil Cameron, will be in a permanent minority. The extent of the damage caused by Cr Wanchap’s defection is hard to overestimate. Despite the widespread impression that Byron Shire has a Green council, there were only three Greens elected in 2012. To carry a contentious motion they needed the support of the independent (now Labor) Spooner and Cameron from the Sustainable Future group. Nevertheless, this political balance favoured progressive policies and was a fair outcome from the election, where progressive outnumbered reactive forces by 57 to 43 per cent. With her voting pattern Cr Wanchap is altering the result of that election and handing the balance of power to those who did not win our collective vote in 2012. She may not have realised that this would be the consequence of her switch of allegiance, so her most ethical course now would be to resign. Councillors who resist doing the right thing sometimes point to the cost. This is not a good argument here, however, as elections are not due until 2016 and two years of the right-wing faction waving through inappropriate development will cost the community far more than a by-election. David Lovejoy
I
t is hardly news that Australians aren’t too keen on their politicians; after all, bagging the pollies has long been a national sport. Bludgers, layabouts, only in it for the perks – the opinion polls usually show our elected representatives fall somewhere between used car salesmen and journalists down in the national hit parade. But even so, the extent of the disaffection revealed last week is both alarming and depressing. The Australian reports that a national survey from Griffith University shows that only a bare majority – just 52.9 per cent of the populace – have any faith in the federal government at all and 46.5 believe it to be untrustworthy to a greater or lesser degree. Worse, 28.6, more than a quarter, say that democracy itself does not work, although they appear to have no alternative, falling back to the Churchillian position that democracy is undoubtedly the worst possible system of government – except for all the others. But wait, there’s more. The federal government is now seen as the bottom of the barrel, less trusted by state and local counterparts. That includes the NSW mob, exposed by ICAC as serially corrupt on both sides of politics; the rest might be less on the nose, but in the past they have often been regarded as less than salubrious. And the local council chambers sometimes appear to be no more than venues for developers running in and out with brown paper bags. The feds, by and large, were at least thought to be cleanskins. So what has gone wrong? Tony Abbott, ever the wishful thinker, says that the survey is what he calls a lagging indicator: it only reflected the previous government, and now he is in charge everything
will be alright again. If only it was so simple. True, the Rudd-Gillard years started the decline. Kevin Rudd’s ascension was, for a while, seen as something of a renaissance; his popularity soared to undreamt of heights. But then came December 2009, when Abbott replaced the well-regarded Malcolm Turnbull and while he was limbering up his wrecking ball, the Copenhagen summit on climate change, which Rudd had regarded as crucial, failed to deliver. The then prime minster went into a decline: he squibbed the opportunity for a double dissolution election and then shelved
According to a survey by Morgan, only 11 per cent of the voters regard terrorism as their top priority
by Mungo MacCallum the whole climate change issue. While the voters were still trying to come to terms with that tergiversation, he was unexpectedly and inexplicably, it appeared, deposed. Julia Gillard, unannounced and unprepared, went onto lead a minority government which was never considered either functional or acceptable by its vociferous opponents, and a bewildered and disillusioned public eventually agreed. So Abbott was somewhat reluctantly given his chance. He was not loved, but he could have been respected as the man who cleaned up the mess. Instead, he brought in a budget that broke a raft of promises which were deemed to be unfair and unreasonable – a conclusion last week confirmed by a NATSEM report that found almost all the pain went to the poor and hardly any to the rich, including – especially – the constituents of Abbott
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10 October 14, 2014 The Byron Shire Echo
and his cabinet cronies. To put it mildly, trust was not restored. The war (which Abbott refuses to call a war) has helped a bit; wars always do, in their early stages. Both the aims and the strategies are muddled, but while the actual action involves no more that dropping a handful of bombs from a safe altitude, the majority is willing to sign up to Team Australia. Certainly Bill Shorten has on behalf of the opposition, a bipartisan commitment which has left the dissenters at the fringes. But while terrorism may be – indeed, is – Abbott’s main game, it is not that of the voters. According to another survey, this
time by Morgan, only 11 per cent of the voters regard terrorism as their top priority. More than three times as many gave the nod to another form of security altogether – economic security. Treasurer Joe Hockey seems to realise that; but his ham-fisted attempt to conflate the war with Labor’s opposition to the unpopular budget measures only produced a public backlash and an applied rebuke from his bellicose leader. But Abbott himself may also have overreached: the massive escalation on security has produced some unexpected and unwelcome critics from his most faithful followers. Last week in The Australian the libertarian Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm wrote a piece warning that the new legislation was both unnecessary and dangerous. And amazingly, in a companion piece the paper’s foreign editor,
Greg Sheridan, agreed. Breaking the habit of a lifetime of creaming his jeans over the spooks, he inveighed against the very idea of special intelligence operations – SIOs. These may not only be left unexamined and unanalysed by the media – they cannot even be mentioned. So if our trigger happy spooks may carelessly harm or even kill a suspect while confiscating a plastic sword, for instance, they will be totally unaccountable. Sheridan hurriedly explains that such a misadventure could only happen by accident; he has not entirely abandoned his naive faith in spookdom. But it is a worry, because the accident could never be reported – forever; the legislation has no sunset clause. Clearly this is asking an already mistrustful electorate a step into the unknown they are unlikely to take. It is not the first time Abbott and his gung-ho attorney-general George Brandis have had to retreat: Leyonhjelm has already insisted on legislation to specifically ensure that the spooks reject torture as a security measure. Only physical torture of course; psychological torture, as inflicted by Scott Morrison and his agents with the indefinite incarceration of asylum seekers in the hell holes of Nauru and Manus Island, is not only tolerated but encouraged. But once again the message is blunt, even from such apparatchiks as Greg Sheridan: you can’t trust the government. From which, as the Griffith survey indicates, it is a small progression to rejecting the system of democracy altogether. We cannot, must not afford that. And Abbott, rather than incessantly blaming his predecessors, needs to do something about it. A sincere, if belated, mea culpa would be a good start to restoring a least some of the lost trust.
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