Security Bill Goes Too Far

Editorial - Canberra Times

John Howard's dummy spit when faced with Senate insistence on its amendments to the ASIO legislation marks a new low in his willingness to politicise anything, and seriously discredits the Government's case for the urgency and the novelty of the legislation. The Bill, even in its amended form, was the most draconian legislation ever to go through the Parliament, without anything much being done in the way of effort to explain why it had to go further than any security legislation in the Western world. In significant respects, it gave government greater security powers with less public accountability than government invested itself with at the beginnings of World War I and II. The legislation, it was said, was urgently needed to give the authorities power to cope with a new and terrifying evil. If long-held balances between liberty, personal rights and freedom from arbitrary detention had to suffer in the interests of the threat, that was the measure of the danger the nation faced.

If Labor, the Democrats and the Greens combined to narrow a few of the powers for the security services, they did not alter its broad substance. Yet Mr Howard's response to amendment was to withdraw the legislation altogether, or at least until Parliament resumes in February, muttering darkly that he would hold Labor responsible for leaving people unprotected over Christmas. And he extended a charge he had made with some justice over last year's election, when he exploited the Tampa issue. Now Labor is not only "soft" on border protection, but it is soft on national security: "We do not accept Labor's amendments on this because they will destroy the Bill," he said. "Labor is weak on this issue, just as it is weak on border protection. [Mr Crean] is weak on this issue; he doesn't have the courage to tell his party what is in the national interest on this issue. Australia's interests require that we need a strong Bill. What the Senate has done to this Bill is nothing short of security vandalism."

What is amazing about this is not Mr Howard's willingness to plummet the depths of reasonable political debate. Not because he has done this before, just as have his opponents done it to him, but because he could seriously claim that the amendments made any great difference. One set excluded children - not actual terror suspects - from arbitrary arrest and compulsory interrogation. Another ensured rights to legal representation to people accused of no offence. Another put limits on how long a person accused of no offence could be "disappeared". At the same time, the broader powers conferred on ASIO - to detain, interrogate and require answers from people accused of nothing but thought to have information the security service might be interested in - would have remained and with remarkably few controls given the way in which this turns established rights on its head.

ASIO has presumably persuaded the Government, or Government has persuaded itself, that such powers are necessary, possibly needing to be invoked over the next few months. If the risk is there, John Howard has now walked away from his primary duty of protecting Australians, perhaps in the hope that some disaster will give the Coalition a stick to beat Labor with.

Perhaps the danger is such that ASIO needs such powers, at least in reserve. There is certainly evidence enough of a changed security environment, though the alert citizen could be forgiven for wondering whether even such powers would make the critical difference in stopping determined enemies of Australia. The Government, however, has hardly made a public case for destroying long-established rights and it can hardly complain if Labor, like many commentators, suspect that the measures go too far, and with insufficient accountability. The accountability for that, however, rests with John Howard, not a Parliament he could not persuade.

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