Secret trials, damning silence, abuse — welcome to Australia

TWITTER is much maligned, but sometimes someone captures, in a phrase or two, the essence of something. Last week it was Kellie Tranter, a lawyer and indefatigable pursuer of exposing government secrets in the defence and foreign policy space.

On Thursday Ms Tranter tweeted this: “AG orders secret trials. Dutton threatened with contempt of court. Silence/indifference to Israel’s annexation of West Bank, US sanctions against the ICC, Assange incarceration & pursuit of ABC journos whistle blowers. Resistance to Fed

ICAC. This is Australia.” Yes that is Australia today — the slide into authoritarianism and cuddling up to the prosecutors of apartheid and war crimes. A pithy and sadly accurate account of what this nation has become.

Let’s take each of Ms Tranter’s statements in turn and then add some more to the mix to, one is sorry to say, complete the bleak landscape.

First, the scandalous legal proceedings against Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery, who has exposed the conduct of the Howard government in bugging the East Timorese Cabinet room early in the last decade so Canberra could take advantage of the world’s poorest nation in negotiations over oil and gas rights shared by the two countries. This case against Mr Collaery should never have been brought by the Commonwealth DPP and that former West Australian prosecutor, now AttorneyGeneral, Christian Porter. There are lawyers acting for the Australian Government who are arguing for a secret trial. Even the preliminary proceedings could not be reported openly. All to protect the security agencies and their political masters.

This is not the only example of the Coalition Government’s enthusiastic dismantling of the rule of law. Last week yet another minister was threatened with contempt of court. Joining his colleagues Greg Hunt, Alan Tudge and Michael Sukkar who were lucky to escape jail when they made comments seen as pressuring the Victorian Court of Appeal in 2017, last week Peter Dutton, the Immigration Minister, was warned by experienced Federal Court judge Geoffrey Flick that he faced a fine or jail for contempt if Mr Dutton did not, by June 26, end the agony of an Iranian asylum-seeker who has been waiting for a decision on his future for seven years.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Prime Minister Scott Morrison, happy to beat up on Russia and China in a heartbeat, remained silent while the world condemned the apartheid regime in Israel for its illegal annexation of the West Bank.

And nothing has been said about US President Donald Trump’s order to impose sanctions on International Criminal Court employees who are investigating alleged war crimes committed by US troops in Afghanistan.

But then Senator Payne and Mr Morrison refused to be interviewed for a 60 Minutes program last night on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s partner and small children who wish only that

Sometimes a few words can capture our slide into authoritarianism, writes Greg Barns

their family member could be released from prison and not sent to a show trial in the US for exposing that nation’s war crimes in Iraq.

The authoritarian bent of the Coalition Government is seen in its decidedly nasty Department of Home Affairs and thoroughly politicised Australian Federal Police obsession with hunting down journalists who dare to publish inconvenient stories.

And as independent MP for Denison Andrew Wilkie said, again on Twitter last week, the Coalition Government gagged debate 25 times in Parliament and of course runs a mile at the mention of a federal anticorruption body.

So yes Ms Tranter, that’s Australia. But wait, there is more.

The media obsesses over something which that Italian observer of life Niccolo Machiavelli would have merely chuckled and shrugged his shoulders. That is, the industrial-scale branch stacking and associated activities, if one could use that euphemism to describe some colourful text messages by members of the Victorian ALP. “Why the surprise?”, Nic Mac might have exclaimed. They all do it. Politics attracts obsessives, cranks and narcissists. Why wouldn’t they see the political party that they join as an extension of their personality?

Meanwhile, nothing has been done to reduce the scandalous state of indigenous imprisonment. Police are found hurling racial abuse at an African woman in South Australia, and the response from politicians to the much-deserved disfiguring and damaging of some statues of the third-rate colonials who invaded this country is to threaten individuals with criminal sanctions.

And last but not least, anti-China fetishist Clive Hamilton has another reds-under-the-bed book out, while the Australian Government denies the reality that if you are Chinese and living in this far-flung part of the Washington empire then the chances of being racially abused are seriously high.

Yep, that’s Australia today, a land which for a brief time promised to be a better place, but which is now in decline like its American owner.