Here’s the likely outcome of the AFP raids on Annika Smethurst and the ABC: after a couple of days of jumping up and down, the media will move on. News Corp will go back to supporting any increase in security agency powers proposed by the Coalition. Nothing will change. And security bureaucrats and politicians know that. There will be more raids, in the future, and the same cycle will play out.
Some journalists and commentators might grumble that Labor has failed to do its job in opposing the endless extensions of security powers and the readiness of the government to call in the flatfoots when embarrassed. Just so, but as Crikey noted yesterday, the moment Labor actually tries to play the role of opposition on such matters, it cops “soft on terrorism” from the media. There are no votes, and not even any nebulous goodwill, for Labor in doing its job properly.
And if the media, distracted by the next shiny thing, loses interest in depredations of the police state, Australia has few civil society bodies to pursue the issue. Digital Rights Watch, EFA, civil liberties bodies and lawyers’ groups will complain. But we lack a body like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the US that will proactively litigate against governments suspected of breaching basic rights. Moreover, we lack the legal framework for such challenges: there are no mechanisms that can be used to restrain the powers of government against its citizens, beyond the “implied freedom of political communication” invented by the High Court to protect TV station revenues in the 1990s.
Is there anything the media could do, now that it has realised that we’ve turned into a police state that will attack the media if it plays its role of holding the powerful to account? Even if outraged media executives extracted from the government a commitment that there would be no more raids, or that leak investigations would no longer target journalists, or that senior bureaucrats would lose their power to sool the coppers onto media organisations, that wouldn’t address the problem, which is that there is no structural restraint on national security laws and agencies.
In Australia, we’re reliant on the goodwill of security bureaucrats and their ministers not to abuse their massive powers. Unlike in other Anglophone countries, there is no real oversight of them by parliament — not while the Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security remains unreformed. They can hide behind “national security” and “that’s an operational matter” to block Senate committee probing. And remember, these raids are the result of senior bureaucrats and government ministers responding to being embarrassed. Imagine what it would be like if someone genuinely malicious, with an agenda of corruption or other criminal intent, had access to such power? A system that relies on the goodwill of its operators to not inflict damage on society is a disaster waiting to happen.
What’s needed is a constitutional, or entrenched, bill of rights that would provide a systemic protection — one that would enable the media and civil society groups to litigate against government agencies to prevent them from abusing basic rights, or obtain redress if they do.
For people like me who’ve long opposed a bill of rights, this is something of a bitter pill to swallow. But the refusal of our major parties to protect basic rights demonstrates that our existing system has failed. And yes, it’s problematic that a bill of rights is — wrongly — automatically associated with the left and identity politics. In fact, a bill of rights, in acting as a check on government, is as much a libertarian and conservative mechanism as a progressive one. And it is about protecting not merely individual rights but the institutions that play a key role in our democracy. The media is a crucial element of any healthy democracy; a bill of rights that protects the workings of a free press would be a fundamentally conservative document, one aimed at protecting the institutions that have served our democracy well over the last century. As the example of the United States demonstrates, a bill of rights is not merely compatible with a deeply conservative polity that champions freedom; it is crucial to it.
A concerted media effort to change the debate around a bill of rights in Australia, and shift it from the political margins, where it is the plaything of leftwingers determined to push identity politics, to the political centre where it can protect us against our governments in ways that our major party politicians refuse to, would represent a real chance of curbing the police state that we have developed in Australia. It just needs some clear thinking and focus from journalists, editors and producers.
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Peter Fray
Editor-in-chief of Crikey
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And or a new AFP commissioner.
Bernard, why on earth were you opposed to a bill of rights in the first place? Please explain?
Bernie must have had a “senior moment” as he made that declaration. Trawl the archives from 2015-2017 and you’ll discover for yourself : otherwise! The (idiotic) topic is a Crikey fetish.
Kyle ,it may be an idiotic topic according your overbearing omniscient intelligent self bearings but mere sentient idiots do sometimes need protections from their own idiocy ,and what’s more , they sometimes acquire the smarts to understand it …
Good luck with the project Ruby but I’ll warrant what earthy goods I possess that even with such an august document the “sentient idiots” will be winging about the same [insert noun of choice relating to metaphor here] thereafter with whatever hue of government conducts their affairs!
A Bill of Rights, like a verbal contract, is not worth the paper it’s written on.
Samuel Goldwyn was a man who had few equals in accurately comprehending human nature and anticipating the consequences thereof.
Quoting the 20th century American philosopher Robert Nozick as to a rather severe rejoinder to Locke : “its NOT worth the paper that it is NOT written upon” (in the case of Australia)
I was quoting that Great Amerikan filosofer, Sam Goldwyn.
It depends on what the “Bill of Rights” is meant to include.
While the US Bill of Rights includes the famed First Amendment right to free speech, that absolute right to free speech makes it almost impossible for them to block hate speech.
The US Bill of Rights includes the right to bear arms, and we’ve all seen how that has turned out.
What are we actually proposing here, a constitutional right for the media to publish anything they want? It doesn’t take long to imagine how that could be abused by an unscrupulous media, and we HAVE an unscrupulous media.
No right in the US Bill of Rights is absolute.
Except, apparently, the right to bear arms.
So called ‘hate speech’ Arky, is, in point of fact, free speech. In a mature society the ‘hate speech’ is dismissed with the indifference it deserves.
Only in a society where the inhabitants have to be contained in a glorified play pen is ‘hate speech’ given any credence at all and for which the inhabitants require laws.
Your point about unscrupulous media wafts to all corners of the play-pen in the masquerade of ‘hate speech’ : as Voltaire observed.
Very interested to hear your change of mind on Bill of Rights Bernard. Do you think that you are alone or are other Journalists rethinking previous positions?
After 20 years of face to face experience of Governments of both persuasions treatment of non-citizens in this country, I am naturally a supporter of a Bill of Rights. I know many think that our law provides an adequate protection against excess.
Perhaps few have faced the brute reality of AFP officers on their doorstep? They might review their belief if they had experienced search powers, detention powers etc.
The ABC and Smethurst raids are a shock to all. However do we have the imagination to realise that Liberty Freedom and Rights can be eaten away so easily. Years of working with refugees has taught me how precious and fragile these are.
Will the media maintain their rage and do something with it? Will all of us?
So what advantages are there to “(news) media” – complicit in such governmental abuse?
Surely the media falls under freedom of speech, something that conservative types have been talking about for years.
If we truly have freedom of speech, as they assert, then it must protect media outlets.
As we don’t have our own Bill of Rights, such rights must originate in the UK’s bill of rights. From Wikipedia:
“Along with the Act of Settlement 1701, the Bill of Rights is still in effect in all Commonwealth realms. Following the Perth Agreement in 2011, legislation amending both of them came into effect across the Commonwealth realms on 26 March 2015.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
Wiki isn’t the most reliable source. So here’e one from the Parliament of Australia
“Bill of Rights
A Bill of Rights is a law that sets out the rights of a country’s citizens. The term derives from the United Kingdom Bill of Rights 1688 which asserted the rights of parliament in relation to the monarch (in particular establishing freedom of speech in parliament), and included rights affecting the individual, such as the prohibition of excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment. In the context of the rule of law an important provision was that laws should not be executed, dispensed with or suspended without parliament’s consent.
While the UK Bill of Rights 1688 is part of Australian law, when people talk about a bill of rights for Australia they generally mean a more substantial document which would comprehensively set out the rights of Australian citizens and protect them from infringement by the government or by other legislation. Australia does not have a specifically Australian bill or charter of rights at the Federal level but it is a party to international ‘foundation’ rights documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).”
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/00_-_Infosheets/Infosheet_23_-_Basic_legal_expressions
From my non-legal perspective it seems that our rights are covered in the UK Bill of Rights and/or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.