2015-09-15
Ben Moroney and Eliza June (Australian Young Greens Co-Convenors)
While the outcry from the Australian public, and the actions of the people of Melbourne in particular, prevented Operation Fortitude from going ahead, it was the first step in a series of worryingly fascistic moves from the Abbott Government. However, it also revealed some key cracks in this Liberal dam, and may represent an opportunity for progressive politics.
In hindsight, it fit. “National security” is always a vote-winner for the conservative side of politics, and when things are going badly in the polls it's always worthwhile for a Liberal cabinet to beat the khaki drum. However, one of the key features of a muscular show of state force is that, as much as possible, the effects should be invisible to the people you are trying to impress. Up until this point, the Coalition had mostly been attempting this — buoyed on by the unflinching support of their surveillance-state-loving Labor Party lackeys, Abbott's government had been instrumental in expanding the powers of the police and other semi-police bodies over the Australian people — expanding the reach of warrants, expanding the discretionary powers of Ministers, increasing defence and security budgets massively and instituting a comprehensive regime of metadata retention that effectively pre-criminalises every Australian citizen who makes use of an Internet Service Provider.
However, all of these actions are reasonably “invisible” to the average person. The exact definitions of the powers of ASIO and the relevant Ministers, metadata retention — none of these flag as issues to people until it is your metadata being seized on spurious grounds or your house being raided by warrantless spooks. Out of sight, out of mind. Militarised police on street corners, demanding papers from passers-by, however? People tend to notice when they are stopped by police. Even if you restrict their actions to just those the officer has a “reasonable suspicion” of, the average Australian will still notice a shakedown by armed police happening. It's a very loud, visible declaration of the trajectory of the government. People particularly tend to notice when government departments announce their plans across all available media in official releases.
For young people, of course, these extensions of state power can be even more frightening. Young people, particularly people of colour or LGBTIQ+ people, are highly exposed to police violence and intimidation, very often digitally involved (meaning we have a far longer metadata trail than most) and more often involved in alternative or radical politics, setting ourselves up as targets for surveillance. We have more to lose, too — when we protest for the environment or for social justice and civil rights, it's the world we're going to inherit that we're trying to protect.
It's important that, picking up the pieces after the Border Farce, we examine what facts we can about the situation.
- The Labor Party is going to do nothing in the face of fascism. Bill Shorten's only response to the announcement was to question whether Abbott was going to take the exercise “seriously,” and the party has been a willing partner in any of the Coalition's violations of privacy and personal liberty to date. We cannot in any way rely on the Labor Party as allies in this fight.
- The Abbott Government was getting desperate. We already knew the Cabinet had requested an issue of national security to campaign on every week. We knew Abbott lobbied the US to request we go to war in Syria. With their polling in a slump, they were looking for every campaign they can possibly get.
- The Abbott Government severely overestimated the public appetite for this exercise. Their reaction was such thorough capitulation and backtracking that one can reasonably divine they had no contingency for this eventuality. Not only were they trying to confect a khaki election, they were doing it badly.
What can we do? It's clear that, as the situation in Syria unfolds, we are going to be drawn into yet another of the Coalition's wars — that hasn't changed. We need to be at the forefront of the inevitable push back against this, taking a leading role in again saying NO WAR and BOOKS NOT BOMBS. More than that, we need to tie this into the ongoing narrative of the Coalition Government — this isn't just something that happened, this was an intended path, a skirmish in an ongoing campaign. The war in Syria, just like the war on refugees and the war on civil liberties, are all reflections of the same ongoing lust for authoritarian power, the same cavalier attitude to human life and the same contempt for the law.
It's going to be a hard fight, but if the Australian people keep responding like they did in Melbourne, it might just be one we win.
Image supplied by Jake Wishart. Note that the video is intended as parody, was not created by the Greens or anyone connected to the Greens and is part of a widely copied Internet meme.