Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

DECEMBER 2 UPDATE 2 PM: Gerard quits - will this save Costello? Should it? Costello tried to save himself by abandoning Gerard via the Oz today - see Costello rejects Gerard's defence. ATO did soft settlement with Gerard Co. after appointment - see Gerard's $75 million to settle tax 'sham'.

"I am not sure any of the commentary about Robert Gerard, in the media or parliament, has come to grips with the central issue. It's not the question of how Mr Gerard came to be appointed to the Reserve Bank board. It's not the question of whether he was guilty of tax evasion. The real issue is how the ATO arrived at a settlement with Mr Gerard and his companies. Peter Costello, even on the most generous view, can never be seen to have done the right thing when he sits at both ends of two obscure processes, the appointment of a new member to the Reserve Bank board and the out-of-court settlement of tax matters involving the same person." John Miner

"Why did the Treasurer still appoint this man to the Reserve Bank board? It is crystal clear—Mr Gerard had bought it, and the going price was more than a million dollars. Mr Gerard had bought it. This government is so arrogant, so conceited and so disregarding of the ordinary standards of public life that, if you front up to the Liberal Party with $1 million-odd, you can get yourself anything. Despite a track record of dishonesty, you can get yourself anything. What this man got himself was a position on the Reserve Bank board. That is the allegation the Treasurer should have answered in the 10 minutes he had to speak on this matter in this parliament. That is the allegation he refused to answer, and he will not answer it because it is true." Julia Gillard

"A progressively increasing share of Australia’s aid effort has been devoted to supporting improved governance over recent years, not only promoting democratic government and combating fraud and corruption, but more fundamentally building professional public administration and ensuring an independent legal system. Yet I sometimes feel we in Australia are not as conscious as we should be about what makes our institutional arrangements as good as they are. At times, we seem to be promoting in other countries governance arrangements we are not protecting carefully enough at home." Andrew Podger

"I felt on 11 November 1975 that my value as a citizen was nil - when I had been implicitly told, when the officer at Charlestown handed me the two ballot papers on that Saturday morning in May, 1974, that my country considered me sufficiently mature and important to the community to have a say in the election of its government. ... If, as is commonly said, people don't trust politicians, it could be the fault of many politicians; but if, as is equally apparent, they don't trust the political system, nobody bears more of the blame than the late John Kerr." John Miner

"Howard's step-by-step desensitisation of Australians to our traditional democratic values is being aided by powerful media organisations that have lost sight of their duty to speak truth to the people and to power. And by ambitious men and women who lead public service and national security organisations, and are similarly negligent of their public duty to offer fearless advice on the rule of law and on the social consequences of government policies and actions that transgress the rule of law. And the desperately opportunistic federal Opposition leader must share the blame too, for his cowardly me-tooism on all national security issues." Tony Kevin

"It cannot be said too often that democracy and the rule of law are not the same thing. There are lawless democracies and undemocratic "states of law" (Rechtsstaat). The constitution of liberty requires both, and the rule of law is the more difficult of the two to establish and maintain, for it requires not just a constitution but, almost more importantly, an independent judiciary that is sensitive to violations of constitutional and other legitimate rules." Ralf Dahrendorf

"What has happened to my old factional colleague Bronwyn Bishop? She used to be such a solid citizen, a centre-right MP with good sense. I remember the days when she used to be committed to all her constituents regardless of their colour or faith ... So what has happened to this wonderful centre-right heroine? Why has she suddenly become so feral about Aussie Mossies? Which mossie bit her recently? Why does she insist Australians spray themselves with ethno-religious aerogard when it comes to Muslims?" Irfan Yusuf

"We want the land we battled for
  To be a land worth while.
We're sick uv greed, an' 'ate, an' strife,
An' all the mess that's made uv life."...
  'E stopped a bit to smile.
"I got these thoughts Out There becos
We learned wot mateship reely was."

CJ Dennis

"Perhaps now more than ever in recent history, 'political fear' is being employed in the pursuit of specific political goals and to legitimise the moral and political beliefs of those in power or those seeking to achieve it.  It is a potent device for managing dissent and silencing those who seek a greater share of power and resources. While the government claims to be bringing democracy to the Iraq, at home the spirit and the practice of genuine democracy are more threatened than at any time since Federation. Too much power is concentrated in too few hands. Fear has become the dominant currency of modern public life. Politicians and media populists are already expert at the use of fear to exercise control and ratchet up their approval ratings. Those who raise these fears hope that, by concocting and exaggerating threats to our survival, by pushing the panic button, they can control us. Such fear is functional. It is needed to justify such policies and distract from policy failures." - Carmen Lawrence

"Ours is a time in which the politics of fear is in full flight, although it may be argued that exploitation of fear is the politicians' normal 'stock in trade'. Fear is the most powerful tool of manipulation available to our leaders and such manipulation is a form of abuse. Pressed into the employ of the current Government's narrow interpretation of Australia's "national interest" such techniques can, as Burke puts it, "break and dissolve the bonds which linked individuals with broader social obligations and forms of collective social organisation". They poison our relationships with one another and create a "more selfish and atomised" citizenship attuned to self-interest and suspicious of the claims of others. As many authoritarian leaders have well understood, a populace is best controlled when it's afraid - controlled and diverted. The survival of our democracies depends not on our capacity to hit back at the terrorists, but on our capacity to think for ourselves." Carmen Lawrence

"One of the reasons offered for adopting democracy as a system of government is people's desire to be protected from state-sponsored fear - fear of persecution and death, arbitrary theft of property and discrimination. Democracy has been described as a "fear-less" or "fear-resolving" system and one of the recurrent themes in the evolution of democracies is that government by fear is inherently illegitimate. Most democracies limit the use of fear as a political weapon by developing institutions which ensure basic freedoms and civil liberties." Carmen Lawrence

"Under totalitarian regimes, be it Stalinism, Hitlerism or whatever -ism, the code for blind obedience tends to rule. So when my sister Margita failed to follow the code of blind obedience and attended church services in 1979 she was sacked from her teaching post and forced to work in a railway yard. What is perplexing about the communist experience is how so many well-intentioned and apparently decent people could have participated in and defended a movement that directly led to the deaths of millions, and suffering, hardship and lack of freedom for many millions more. It is, in a sense, the key issue of our sad 20th century." Jozef Imrich

"ICAN is all about returning Australian parliaments to the people and putting representation back into politics in this country. The best way to do this is to encourage people to stand as true independents who will represent their electorates free of the vested interest of a party. Parties are about getting and keeping power for themselves. Representation and the voters come second." Peter Andren

"I come to this forum as a consumer of media and as someone who’s been fortunate enough to sit a little on the inside and observe aspects of how it appears to work. At my first real job at the Small Arms Factory in Lithgow I bought the Daily Mirror every afternoon on my way home. I used to savour the football and cricket think pieces from the likes of Phil Tressider and Ian Heads and Geoff Prenter and they brought me up to speed with the notion of cliché. At the time I had no idea that this would be my career-making preparation ... " John Doyle

"The Senate inquiry into the administration of the Regional Partnerships Program (RPP) and Sustainable Regions Program (SRP) has concluded and now it is time for the spin." Craig Rowley

"If you think the whole ‘rotten, infested’ lump of politics can’t be changed, read a little history. I suggest you catch up on the victory of the suffragettes, the abolition of slavery, or the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. None of those breakthroughs came from giving up or copping out of politics. All of them involved committed people, just like us, getting involved in and transforming the hopelessly unfair, rotten, stinking politics of their day." Bob Brown

"It is a common query: they're collecting all that money, stamp duty, land tax, payroll tax, fines, duties, registration fees, licence fees, etc; where is it all going? I suspect the answer is that an enormous amount is going in patching up infrastructure that is past its use-by date and should simply be abandoned. Far too much of it is going on the Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong corridor and not enough on regional and rural NSW. My proposal is that we stop band-aiding and start rebuilding from the edges in." Malcolm B Duncan

"Two RAAF helicopters, one about 300 metres behind the other, were flying circuits around central Canberra... They each appeared to be mounted with two large lethal-looking missile launchers, slung beneath the cabin. As the helicopters flew maybe 100 metres above my head, I saw these four launchers clearly. I wondered if the loaded missiles were armed, and I wondered what would happen if one of these helicopters were accidentally to crash over populated central Canberra." Tony Kevin

"The news of Murdoch's grand plans to dominate the Internet and China's cyberspace crackdown has got me thinking about the future of the Internet and e-democracy once again. I think about the millions of ordinary people using the World Wide Web to connect with each other and see this as an essential tool for power dispersal.  The age of the Internet has brought with it exciting, fresh ideas about the disintermediation of power and peer accountability. But who is responsible for the standards and functions of the network itself? I came across this recent article by Bill Thompson on openDemocracy.net in which he charts the history of Internet governance, reflects on what has been lost as accountability passes from the hands of the geeks to those of the politicians and lawyers, and offers his proposal for redressing the democratic deficit." Craig Rowley

"What message is sent to Australian activists by Parkin's incarceration? As someone who has sensed unethicality in the company's activities both abroad and within Australia I feel vindicated in my beliefs.  To remove a person who might promote information implies a desire of the democratic actor, in this case Australia's Federal Government, to obscure and conceal what this man could portray and reveal, and what he could make us think." Richard Tonkin

There has been a view among political reporters that the private can be separated from the political. It’s the same as the view – once dominant and still prevalent - among sports reporters that what happens on tour stays on tour. As various cases of the past two or three years have shown in sport, that’s not really tenable. Perhaps it was the remorseful recognition that they had failed which prompted Sydney’s media to respond with the throttles wide open when they were upstaged from Canberra. It’s a question worth further examination because our democracy depends not only on the behaviour of politicians. The media have a proper role, too.

"Finally, I will have the last swipe. It will be a swipe at my government. Up it comes: date of birth, mother's maiden name, nationality, last date of entry into Australia, flight number, colour of my eyes, known medical condition, started smoking when I was fifteen, was blacklisted and arrested pending self-removal from the USA in 1997 for overstaying my visa for 48 hours. And on it goes. I expect a big amount of crunching to go on inside my old computer. Never mind, I'll boil the kettle for another coffee, dream of an Australian Bill of Rights and wait. Then, Mr Howard, Mr Ruddock, Mrs Vanstone, I'll Select All, and I'll press delete. Because all the information, Prime Minister, all of it, is mine. It always was mine - and it certainly is not yours to hold or behold." Jack H Smit

"The Sydney Morning Herald's Gerard Ryle and Lisa Pryor have provided a series of reports in recent weeks detailing the Howard Government's deafening silence to calls from anyone outside the Party Room to do anything about many things that matter to many ordinary Australians. Ryle and Pryor's investigation into democracy denied was published just prior to the end of the old balance of power. They found that the Federal Government had not replied on time to a single public inquiry out of the 62 it has ordered in the House of Representatives since December 1998. It has given no reply at all to almost half of them." Craig Rowley

"It's individual human beings standing up in public on behalf of their fellows and urging us all to make the world the best possible place we can. Embracing their better angels openly and unashamedly in their public lives so that maybe we'll try to do the same in our private ones. It's called 'leadership', and the only kind that ever worked is leadership-by-example." Jack Robertson applauds our parliamentarians.

"[Harry] Evans asks: 'Can there be deliberation in cyberspace?' Then he answers: 'The Discussion Paper refers to the point that debate requires rules to make it orderly and thereby effective. Cyberspace has no rules of debate, and probably cannot have any such rules if the process is open to everyone with a computer. It is like an assembly in which everyone can shout at once, and does.'" Craig Rowley ponders an electronic future for democratic participation.

In an advertisement in the Canberra Times, Professor Gavin Mooney suggested that people in DIMIA should examine their consciences. A letter to the editor from DIMIA's First Assistant Secretary (Parliamentary and Legal) Des Storer dubbed it "a personal attack on the integrity of public servants”, then took advantage of his position to publish his response on DIMIA's website, a resource Professor Mooney doesn’t have. I and many like me would never have known about Professor Mooney’s idea if Des hadn’t used the website to defend his troops against a suggestion that might have been good for their souls. John Miner reports.

"If Australia does not call for the Geneva Convention to be applied to its citizens now, then it is possible that countries involved in conflict with Australia in the future will disregard the Geneva Convention. History has shown us that this will result in the unnecessary ill-treatment and no doubt deaths of Australian service men and women. It has always been a mystery to me why General Cosgrove was not pounding on the Prime Minister’s door advising that Australia should insist that all those captured in Afghanistan be dealt with under the Geneva Convention to ensure the future protection of our own forces. Unfortunately for our Defence personnel... it is now only the United States and Australia who are publicly committed to supporting the Military Commissions in Guantanamo Bay." Stephen Kenny

Want to know how a man with a passion and a computer can help hold a government to account? Webdiarist Jack H Smit began 'Project Safecom' after Tampa. He is now one of Australia's most respected and effective refugee advocates. Here is his story.

"If you’ve ever had much to do with contracts you’ve probably heard of a sunset clause. If you’ve ever negotiated hard for a contract you may have burnt the candle from sundown to sunrise. Upon a successful outcome, you may have basked in the sun and scored the bonus that will pay for some time on the beach. Of course, in all likelihood the contract will never be so exposed to the clear light of day. Commercial-in-confidence. These three words are such an effective shield; they’re as good as sunscreen. Governments these days use these three words often. Too often we are treated like mushrooms rather than citizens, and it stinks." Craig Rowley

"We need to revive our commitment to the principle that lies at the heart of our Western, liberal tradition - that every person has the right to be free; a right that is second only to the right to life itself. The right that is embodied in the common law principle that only courts after proper charge and trial - and not government - should decide who is deprived of their liberty." Carmen Lawrence