The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, has announced an exemption to the alcohol bans in 70 remote indigenous communities in the NT that were announced as a core component of the government’s Indigenous Emergency Plan to combat the sexual abuse of indigenous minors. The exemption applies to rivers being used for recreational fishing on or adjacent to Aboriginal land.
Why is such a core measure being undermined?
The professor of indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, Marcia Langton, said yesterday that relaxing the bans would open the floodgates for alcohol to be smuggled into the 70 communities where it was banned.
“It will allow illegal grog runners to sell grog into the communities,” she said.
“It’s the kind of loophole that can bring the whole system undone, by giving the big tick-off to the grog runners. It’s not going to work.”
What could be more important than protecting the children who are the whole justification for the sweeping authoritian emergency plan in the first place? Read the rest of this entry »
Meanwhile, reports in a section of the Australian media that a dossier prepared by the Bangalore police on Mohammed Haneef on his alleged links with the Al-Qaeda have come as a surprise to the police here.
Bangalore Police Commissioner Neelam Achuta Rao told The Hindu on Wednesday that they had not prepared any such dossier.
So where has the alleged Haneef dossier actually come from?
And the police state lurches ever closer, with the SMH today reporting on proposed legislation for “New secret search powers”.
The proposed powers would give police the right to execute search, seizure and surveillance under so-called “delayed notification warrants”, without judicial oversight, and including the assumption of false identities by police to gain access. The subject can be denied notice of the s/s/s for up to six months, with extensions available on Ministerial approval, again with no judicial involvement:
The lack of judicial oversight was justified by the Minister for Justice and Customs, David Johnston, on the grounds that a court or judicial officer might leak news of the warrant.
“I don’t want to impugn anyone, but the security of these operations has to be pristine,” Senator Johnston told the Herald.
The article continues:
The position of the Labor Opposition is unknown. The party did not return calls yesterday.
In response to Dr Mohammed Haneef’s interview last night on 60 minutes:
Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?
He was only inconvenienced for 4 weeks.
Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s all been corrected now.
Sure he was incarcerated, but he was fed and safe and he must have known that if he was innocent he’d eventually be set free.
He shouldn’t have been traumatised by that, he should be happy to be contributing to the safety of society by being thoroughly investigated.
The attempts by partisans to game talkback shows are becoming more and more obvious.
The last two lpoints strike me as particularly disingenuous. They’re trying to imply that only a person with some guilty secrets would be traumatised by being investigated. As if anybody who’s been paying attention to justice narratives (both fact and fiction) at any time in their life ever doesn’t know that innocent people get persecuted all the time for cynical political gain. Why on earth should Haneef’s pofessed innocence have made him unafraid of the investigation’s intensity?
So many half-arsed assumptions and incompetent deductions.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard would not comment on the investigation or how the mistake was made. He would not say how the British-Australian operation was conducted, but the British source said he believed the federal police were blaming geographical and time differences for the bungle.
“It deserves a public inquiry, that kind of mess-up,” the source said. He also said police involved in searching Sabeel Ahmed in Liverpool were appalled at what he said was political pressure on the federal police by the Federal Government.
So far the Immigration Minister is holding firm on his decision to revoke Haneef’s visa, so it is likely that Haneef will be deported as soon as he’s released.
I have succumbed to the July lurgy, so today: an invitation to join me in Stuff I Have Been Reading. Don’t miss the stuff below the cut. Jane Simpson is amazing.
Aboriginal Poets
We are tired of the benches, our beds in the park,
We welcome the sundown that heralds the dark.
White Lady Methylate!
Keep us warm and from crying.
Hold back the hate
And hasten the dying.
The tribes are all gone,
The spears are all broken:
Once we had bread here,
You gave us stone
See plain the promise,
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over,
And though long the climb,
New rights will greet us,
New mateship meet us,
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.
To our father’s fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children’s children
The glad tomorrow.
At least he was charged with a crime in front of a judge before the executive arm got involved. Since the latest Presidential Executive Order has been signed and sent to Congress, someone in Haneef’s situation in the USA could be made a homeless dumpster-diver without ever being interviewed by the police, let alone being charged with a crime.
…all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,
(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:
(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or
(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;
So far typically authoritarian, but following a certain valid logic.
(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or
(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
All assets of any suspect can be frozen, with no notice (Section 5 of the order), by the Treasury without even having to get a court order. Anyone associated with them in all sorts of normal social or business transactions can potentially be treated likewise. And to put the icing on the top: Read the rest of this entry »
Curmudgeon of the Day goes to the caller I heard on ABC702 talkback radio this morning (paraphrased from memory):
What a ridiculous charge?…How do you even do that? Tie it to a brick and chuck it at someone?
He’s talking of course of Dr Mohammed Haneef, who was yesterday granted conditional bail by a Queensland magistrate on charges laid against him of recklessly supplying resources (said SIM card) to a terrorist organisation (what other people would describe as passing on a UK SIM card he could not use in Australia to his cousin when he left the UK).
The call was in response to news of the decision by Federal Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews last night to preempt judicial due process and the presumption of innocence. Andrews used his ministerial oversight powers to revoke Haneef’s visa and consign him to the Villawood Detention Centre pending further investigations and the resolution of his court case.
Indiscriminate repression is totally incompatible with the liberal values of humanity, liberty and justice. It is a dangerous illusion to believe one can ‘protect’ liberal democracy by suspending liberal rights and forms of government.
NT Attorney-General [and Member for Nhulunbuy] Syd Stirling said Aboriginal communities territory-wide were angry, confused and talking of legal action. He said the territory government was seeking advice from the Justice Department about what shape the commonwealth’s proposed amendment to the Land Rights Act might take “and then what we as a government might do”.
The Central Land Council and Northern Land Council (NLC) were expected to support any legal action and “present a united front”, he said. “If your rights are taken away there is generally a legal recourse and a legal challenge. This is critical to indigenous people in these communities… that permit is a signal to everybody else that they own that land. If that is taken away, and the views are that this is the first step, then you are beginning to unwind Aboriginal land rights.“
LIVING BLACK
But on to the meat of this post – SBS’s Living Black last night was a special on the Federal government’s Northern Territory “emergency plan”. I made a few notes, in case you missed it (or are following along from overseas). The “quotes” are paraphrase – I hope I have represented people’s statements accurately. I have added bits ‘n’ pieces ‘n’ links from the Web. My own comments and extra snippets not from the show are in italics. Bits I found particularly head-explodey are in bold.
Maningrida
First, a snapshot of the self-governing Maningrida community in Arnhem Land, home to 2600 people and a “high profile” abuse case. Their system for alcohol rationing is said to be working well, with everyone rationed two cartons of beer per fortnight. People worry that by banning alcohol completely, more people will go to Darwin to drink, leaving their children behind. The community is working on alcohol-related problems, with community “strong women” having started their own night patrol, getting children off the streets.
