Defending Freedom

Over the past 10 years or so, we (Australia) have seen a steady decrease in personal liberties in the name of protecting individual freedom.

This is to me is a little like fighting for peace, ( I would have used the other analogy, but I do need to keep this clean).

The one single issue that has amazed me is that of David Hicks and his internment for 5 years without charge with the complicity of the Australian Government. In the end he will server a few more months and be released.

At no stage in the process did we ever know exactly what he was supposed to have done - other than glib comments about him being a “terrorist” - a catch-all to shut up anyone that has the audacity to question the current administration.

To me the treatment of David Hicks means that no one can actually rely on the accepted notion of innocent until proven guilty, something most of us assumed was our unaliable right as Asutralian citizens. My understandning is that it is this one principal that defines our ‘freedom’. By stripping this from Hicks the current Austrlian Government has set a precident that severly impacts anyone’s freedom to disagree with the authorities. There is no guarantee that you or I won’t be treated in the same disgusting way.
We afford legal process to mass killers (Martin Bryant, Ivan Milat, the Snow Town crowd), who have commited crimes that dwarf the Hicks invovlement in ethnic struggle, but add the word ‘terrorist’ and its OK to treat someone any way you please. We didn’t even insist on application of the Geneva convention.

I wholeheartedly support moves to charge and try anyone that seeks to break the laws of the land, particularly if that includes violence. If Hicks broke the law, he shoud be punished, in accordance with the law. But that did not happen. He was punished first with a detailed and coordinated media assault on his character, but no charges for 5 YEARS!!! When,finally, our Government was embarrassed into ‘managing the situation’ (not through due process), we get the spectacle of a forced confession and a custodial sentence, politically determined to minimise the adverse impact on the government’s polling results.

This government, and particularly the PM and Attorney General should hang their heads in shame, as far as I know they are first to subvert justice in the name of trying to defend it.

As an elector and citizen of Austrlia, I demand a full explanation of why this was allowed to happen, and further :

• What crimes are so bad that a citizen of Australia can expect to forego due process because someone from another country thinks so?
• What third party countries are able to kidnap our citizens, hold and torture them without providing legal representation?
• What is the difference between what the Australian and US Administrations have done to Habib, Hicks and others and the Hezbollah, PLO, Iran have done when they kidnap innocent (remember under our laws, Hick and co were innocent until the court case ended, if they got one) people, hold and torture them? From my reading these folk make the same claims of right that the US and Austrlian Governments did.

I guess the old guy I met when I was young was right when he said “There are no good guys in this“.