Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

I can just see a bill of rights referendum, as presented by the lib/lab coalition.

1. Do you want a bill of rights, as proposed by your elected representatives.

2. Do you want a bill or rights, determined by plebiscite that parliament determines.

3. Do you want the status quo to prevail, so your rights can continue to be protected.

4. Do you want the parliament to continue to work in your best interests, using current and future legislation, the parliament may determine, is needed, to protect national, or personal rights.

Earlier in the year before David Hicks was returned to Australia, the Prime Minister asserted that just because David Hicks is an Australian does not mean that he has a right to come to Australia.

Most Australians would presume Australian citizens have a right to live in this country and are rightly outraged at the idea that an Australian citizen may not have a right to enter Australia. Yet, in constitutional law terms, it is not clear whether Australians have a right to enter and live in Australia. Doesn't that sound preposterous? But it reflects on the failings of our current Constitution and the lack of clarity in this area in the law.

We have no rights to enter Australia, even if we are Australian Citizens.  This is outrageous, we can only return from our overseas trips if Howard says so? We desperately need a bill of rights.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2007/40.html

Two of the stupidest and most strident planks of the anti-refugee policy were the claim that even though a Russian Jewish family were refugees they could have gone to Israel and this one where it was claimed that the people could were refugees but could have moved to another part of the country.

The whole idea of the refugee convention is that if people are refugees in your territory according to law then they are refugees in your country and you don't get to parcel them out to other countries.

Thank goodness a bit more sanity will now be imposed on the laws.

But it is another headache for Andrews because others of his arbitrary 501 visa cancellations are being overturned as well, and these are for people who have actually committed crimes and spent some time in prison.

In the News Of The World many many years ago..they confused me with a chap with the same name who was porn film producer..I was working on music film and when our press release went out that simply wrote up the others history as mine.

This was great news..a case of mistaken identity..lawyers queued to sue but the NoTW stumped up with 25K within a week. Got a nice new mini.

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22314918-5005962,00.html

All the smearing of Therese Rein has forced her to sell her business and lay off staff but the lies were just that - lies.

 I bet the Murdoch stable don't apologise though.

See you have yourselves in tied up in knots of vituperative sardonicism if exchange between  Richard and  Alga is typical. No, can't stop laughing, self-  will come back later...

Richard: What have I done now ?  Hey Paul, we should catch up for a chin-wag.

Tony Kevin has paid me tribute in his book "A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEVX" so does that mean I co-authored it?     I did do my share of research over the many years of the investigation as regular diarists and sievx.com readers know, but I would not more claim co-authorship than fly to the moon.

David Corlett spent about 8 hours interviewing me and using the copious amount of notes and files I gave him for the first chapter of his book "Following them Home" which covers some of what happened to the Bakhtiyari family.

Am I the co-author?    I don't think so.

For Andrews to contribute a small article to each of three books and call himself the co-author is a joke.   No wonder he is called the Maxwell Smart of national security.

I doubt any politician would pass a character test involving their veracity, especially the ones holding law degrees. Andrew's fails miserably with his false claims of authorship. You don't even have to do any digging, to see the evidence supporting they are all liars and can't be trusted in anyway whatsoever. Until we have accountability in government, bureaucracy and corporations, nothing will change, only get worse as we are seeing.

Richard:  Let's see... Ministerial Character Test #1:  Have you ever knowingly deceived the Australian public?  There goes at least half of them.

Australians could be developing a mass anxiety disorder as the level of fear in the community rises, and it is the Muslim community that feels it most, new research shows.

Macquarie University psychologist Dr Doris McIlwain has addressed the issue of fear as part of National Science Week in Canberra.

With the constant reporting of terrorist attacks, natural disasters and climate change it was little wonder that people were more fearful now than in the past, she said.

11 years of Howard's fear mongering has us turned us into nervous wrecks. We really need a change of government to break out of this mentality of fear. We can face the challenges ahead with courage and strength but we need true leaders, not small minded bigots. 

The draft guide lists 10 essential Australian values every citizen must embrace - focusing on "mateship and a fair go" and including tolerance, compassion, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and secular government, equality of men and women and peacefulness.

It describes Australia as "a nation at ease with the world and itself", but it expects potential citizens to respect Australia's core values.

"Australia has a strong tradition of mateship in which people help and receive help from others voluntarily, especially in times of adversity," it says.

"A mate can be a spouse, partner, brother, sister, daughter, son or friend. A mate can be a stranger."

The formulation caused controversy in 1999 when voters rejected an attempt by Prime Minister John Howard to have the concept written into the preamble to the constitution.

It was criticised as too sexist, or inappropriate for a formal document.

Now we are being told the values Australians must embrace.

Fair Go ..... Did we give the Asylum Seekers on the Tampa a fair go? 

Freedom of speech....“The government has failed to justify its decision to merge the Classification Board into the Attorney-General’s office and explicitly rejected any community consultation on the decision.”

“Government censorship of political material is not only impractical and contrary to Australia’s long history of free speech, but serves to legitimate the material in question.” 

A nation that is at ease with the World... that is why we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And why we have a record of wanting to be part of nearly every war that has been called in the last 100 years or so. 

About mates, you know what birds do with their mates, well, one mate is enough for me?

It seems most of the Howard government would fail the Citizen test. 

The problem is, which country would have them? Howard might be able to go the US being on first name terms with Bush and all. Bush is his mate, now that is a horrible thought.

 Richard:  Perhaps a Webdiarist could start up a list of "Ministerial Character Tests?' and see who passes?

IF YOU have been following the coverage of the detention of Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef and feeling a sense of deja vu, you are not alone.

Many aspects of Haneef's case bear strong similarities with those of my clients, deported United States peace activist Scott Parkin and Iraqi refugees Mohammed Sagar and Mohammad Faisal. The cases also provide similar illustrations of the Australian Government's willingness to undermine civil rights in the name of national security and to use the migration system with political intent..................

Thankfully, both Sagar and Faisal have been released from detention on Nauru. Sagar has now been resettled in a Scandinavian country. After arriving in Australia for medical treatment, five years after his first refugee application, Faisal was reassessed by ASIO and this time it decided he was not a threat to our national security.

Along with Parkin, their case to discover why they were considered threats to Australia by ASIO in the first place continues. Like Haneef, Faisal, Sagar and Parkin are all alleging they have done nothing that would warrant their being subjected to the draconian consequences of such assessments.

ASIO has so far refused to produce even a list of documents for the court case in relation to my clients' detention. Like the assumption of innocence, it is a fundamental principal of the rule of law that people are entitled to face their accusers and defend themselves. You can't do that if you don't know what you are alleged to have done.

The Haneef case shows the important role that the courts play in ensuring that people's rights are protected. In the case I'm running, ASIO's view is that this should not occur. However, it is in the interests of foreign nationals and all Australians that the principles of justice prevail for my clients and Haneef alike.

Anne Gooley is a principal with Maurice Blackburn Cashman lawyers.

Howard and his gestapo (ASIO) have shown their contempt for justice. Australia was under much more threat during both world wars, but still we prided ourselves on our judicial systems. Our fathers fought and died for them. Now we stand by and watch these very systems being eroded. We are on a slippery slope to dictatorship. It is time to stand up and fight for justice.

The ALP really have scored a victory with Rudd's hospital announcements, no matter how it pans out in the end. It's pleasing to see Howard blind-sided by his own tactics

The one thing Aussies will not give up is Medicare. The persistent tinkering around the edges by the Coalition has always gone down badly but talk about painting themselves into a corner with the Tasmanian hospital announcement – it’s rather delicious to watch the Howard government in meltdown.

Who knows what Rudd will be like as PM – but I think we will have a more pragmatic leader who will need at least ten years to clear out the garbage of the Howard years.

Naturally we are now seeing the current government at its most dangerous, thrashing wildly at anything that moves. The life or reputation of one Indian doctor means nothing. We should all be on high alert.

I don't think Andrews' decision was incompetent so much as avaricious.

The Minister argued for the widest possible interpretation of his discretion under the Act – so that in effect an innocent familial or professional relationship could suffice for disqualification.

The foreshadowed appeals tell us that the government continues to seek the greatest possible powers, and continues to believe such a position is politically saleable.

It seems to me that KRudd occupies much the same political ground.

In this case incompetence flows from the AFP. Justice Spender said that "facts" placed before the Minister by the AFP were fully capable of supporting a disqualification under the character test, but were not employed by the Minister and he made a jurisdictional error.

If any of the "facts" remained true today, then Minister Andrews can simply make a new decision cancelling Haneef's visa. A new AFP and ASIO report could clarify the situation. Or at least it could if AFP were a police force as distinct from political servants of the neo-regime.

Richard: Good to see you around the place again, Bryan. Anybody from up your way making the trek to Sydney?

 Subtitle: how dare they?

-=*=-

Defence blocks staff's Wikipedia access
Posted August 24, 2007 08:10:00
Updated August 24, 2007 08:57:00
The Defence Department is blocking staff from editing public encyclopedia Wikipedia amid revelations they had made more than 5,000 changes.

PM 'not behind Wikipedia edits'
Posted August 24, 2007 11:25:00
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet says Prime Minister John Howard did not ask any of his staff to edit online public encyclopedia Wikipedia.

There is a whole whack of stuff of similar flavour continuing over this in the newspapers, latest including Richard Ackland and Sushi Das from Fairfax.

This week was to be rollback, the long-awaited counter-attack set up by the stagey presentation of the so called surplus, to be dashed around via big-end tax cuts and porkbarrelling. But first the Spender decision and a sulky response from Andrews, like a spoilt little boy having a maimed insect taken away from him just when he was pulling the legs off, blunted the impact.

Then, Kostakidis' loss of patience with SBS reminded everyone of the damage done to media over the last decade and how suspicious the rationale for the harm has been. This angry and most public denouement was reinforced by some suspicious stuff from Costello showing his true colours, concerning more quasi-legal censorship along the lines of what happened a while back with the Greens tied up in court by Gunns. Meanwhile, Howard, perhaps blinded by the dazzle of the failure to neutralise Rudd with the club outing smear, stumbled on, reminding people of how morally-bankrupt he was, arrogantly renewing his relationship with the obnoxious and serially-slanderous Brethren.

All of which did nicely to set up another breathtakingly beautiful flanking manoeuvre from Labor and Rudd, this time reversing the seemingly impregnable Health debate. The coalition redoubtably outsmarted themselves, reminiscint of inept Ralph Willis and Costello's phoney letter in the '96 campaign, in this most significant of pre-election weeks.

We saw Philip Ruddock do his nudge, nudge, wink, wink job over the cases of Shayan Badraei, the Bakhtiyaris, and thousands of others as he tried to convince us they are bad people who don't deserve a skerrick of respect.

One such family was Fatima's.   She is an Afghan who came to Australia in early 2000 when she was 15 years old, with her parents and five younger brothers.   Another brother had been taken by the Taliban, their shop had been destroyed and the grand fathers had both been slaughtered.    They spent everything they had from their shop, travelled across country for three months in trucks, vans, on donkeys and finally a boat to Australia.

Fatima had dysentry caught in Indonesia as did her one year old brother and instead of medical care the family of 8 got to share a one room donga with three bunks in it for the next five months in Port Hedland before being dumped like stray rats in Adelaide in August 2000.   They were in Port Hedland with Ali Bakhtiyari actually and released as Afghan refugees on the same day.

I met the family at a new years eve party on 31 December 2001 and discovered that this government had given all the Afghans a birthdate of either 1/1 or 31/12 just to make things easier and I met about 130 Afghans along with some wonderful aborigines and a crazy catholic priest.

Lowitja O'Donohue was the host along with Stephen Watkins of ABC fame and a couple of other stolen children - their hearts broke into small pieces over the idea of locking the children up in Woomera - it was close to a concentration camp they had been forced to live in as kids.

Anyway Fatima and her family are citizens, are planning to vote ALP and she is going to be a lawyer.

The moral of the story is that not only does Andrews come across like a clown, he comes across as an ill-informed clown.

Mr. Andrews has shown disdain for due process in Dr. Haneef's case; he cannot now be expected to make good decisions in any potential future case where terrorism is alleged. It will be a good day if at the next election Mr. Andrews is superseded: Australia needs better decision makers than Mr. Andrews.