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Using bogeymen to crack down on civil liberties/human rights

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Sat Jul 05, 2014 9:33 pm
Post subject: Using bogeymen to crack down on civil liberties/human rightsReply with quote

This is the Coalition's favourite sport, and they've grabbed the first opportunity to kick it off again.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/04/coalition-crackdown-alleged-jihadists

What's happening in Iraq and Syria right now is terrifying, but it's about as likely to spread here as it is for me to convert to Mormonism and knock on your door at 10am next Saturday. Individual radical Islamists could certainly cause problems if they're planning, say, terrorist attacks; but that's not the massive national security threat that Brandis and Bishop make it out to be, and certainly not worth the draconian response they're proposing.

As for getting a 25 year sentence for fighting in another country's civil war, give me a break. Many decent people have found themselves between a rock and a hard place in both Syria and Iraq over the past few years, and if the lives of my friends and family were at risk while I was over there I might well take up arms too. The idea that that would automatically make me a Jihadist and a danger to Australia's national security is an absurdly reductionist conclusion and seems like little more than a means of restricting 'undesirable' Muslim immigration.

And this isn't even just about stopping people who have borne arms overseas at the border. Brandis has a much more sinister agenda here.

Quote:
“if it is demonstrated that an Australian has returned from that region, there can be a presumption that they were there for no good purpose,” Brandis told 2GB radio on Friday.

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AN_Inkling 



Joined: 06 Oct 2007


PostPosted: Sat Jul 05, 2014 10:20 pm
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I'm not saying that these people should not be given some fairly hefty punishment on returning to Australia, however, there's no doubt the Government are playing it up for their own political purposes. Howard was a master at this type of dog whistling. Tony seems to have it confused with wolf-whistling at the moment.
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:15 pm
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David, Your point is valid that one may fight for friends and family in such a place, but anyone who fights for Isis or its ilk is a homicidal threat to Western values, and we need to be very vigilant and active in combating that. Unlike the fictional bogeyman, they're all too real, and they are our avowed enemy. A small sacrifice to liberty (and there is a line to be drawn here) is a price worth paying if we judge that it may avoid the mass indiscriminate homicides that have taken place in Madrid, London, New York, Nigeria and Kenya by the Islamic ultras. There are many wonderful and truly pious Islamic people, but there is a large virus in Islam at this time, and we need to be heavily protected against its effects.
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HAL 

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PostPosted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:17 pm
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How small are you talking here?
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David Libra

I dare you to try


Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:51 pm
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I definitely agree, Mugwump, but there were far more factions involved in Syria than simply ISIS and Assad. Rather than Abbott's "baddies fighting baddies", it was more like—if we are to borrow his embarrassingly simplified terminology—"baddies fighting baddies, goodies, people who're a bit of both and pretty much everyone else". Brandis seems to want to tar everyone with the same brush.

Furthermore, are any hardcore ISIS psychos really going to be ditching their guns and missiles for a holiday down under right now? Wouldn't they be all be in Western Iraq fighting their holy war? Am I missing some obvious imminent threat? Perhaps, as I mentioned, a few might be looking to cause some small-scale mayhem—and, right or wrong, everyone who comes back from that part of the world is already going to be closely monitored—but otherwise I can't help but feel we're talking about a slightly tangential threat in our region. Personally, I don't think this government is motivated by genuine concern; rather, just looking for another tenuous excuse to invoke war powers and keep the population fearful and uncritical.

By the way, I also think the law Brandis is calling upon is extremely dubious. How can someone get 25 years in prison for doing something unrelated to this country's welfare in another jurisdiction?

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1061 



Joined: 06 Sep 2013


PostPosted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 9:12 pm
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David wrote:
I definitely agree, Mugwump, but there were far more factions involved in Syria than simply ISIS and Assad. Rather than Abbott's "baddies fighting baddies", it was more like—if we are to borrow his embarrassingly simplified terminology—"baddies fighting baddies, goodies, people who're a bit of both and pretty much everyone else". Brandis seems to want to tar everyone with the same brush.

Furthermore, are any hardcore ISIS psychos really going to be ditching their guns and missiles for a holiday down under right now? Wouldn't they be all be in Western Iraq fighting their holy war? Am I missing some obvious imminent threat? Perhaps, as I mentioned, a few might be looking to cause some small-scale mayhem—and, right or wrong, everyone who comes back from that part of the world is already going to be closely monitored—but otherwise I can't help but feel we're talking about a slightly tangential threat in our region. Personally, I don't think this government is motivated by genuine concern; rather, just looking for another tenuous excuse to invoke war powers and keep the population fearful and uncritical.

By the way, I also think the law Brandis is calling upon is extremely dubious. How can someone get 25 years in prison for doing something unrelated to this country's welfare in another jurisdiction?


I brought a car last year from a car yard owned by a man who rather proudly boasts he fights and funds others to fight in Syria.
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 9:13 pm
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You may be right about the unlikelihood of them returning to Australia - over here in the Uk we have enacted similar laws to the Brandis ones, because a significant number of our psychos have moved over to Syria in recent months to fight for the black flag, for Assad, and others. Now, while some might be fighting for home and hearth and hot cocoa, I suspect they are very few in number and I think their cause is secondary to our need to protect ourselves from these battle-hardened jihadis, especially as we'll never know who the hell they were foghting for. So a law that, withtout being retrospective, says "the present context is so dangerous, and this conflict is so opaque, scaly and scabrous, that we extraterritorially forbid our citizens from fighting in it", does not seem to me bad policy, subject to it being enforceable. Whilst the war on terror was a stupid concept when used to justify invasion of a Muslim land, it is not a daft concept when it comes to our protection of homeland security. There are a lot of people out there who want to kill us, indiscriminately. We need to adapt our domestic liberties to recognise that fact,and this one seems to me a minor, targeted curtailment of domestic liberty in term of potential benefit vs cost.
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 9:36 pm
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1061 wrote:
I brought a car last year from a car yard owned by a man who rather proudly boasts he fights and funds others to fight in Syria.


If he was funding pro-democracy protestors against the Assad regime, then good on him. I'd probably have done the same. Of course, you'd want to know exactly where those funds are going to, and he might well be horrified if they ended up in the hands of ISIS. But that doesn't stop the fact that the Assad regime is horrifically brutal and that many decent people have died over there for nothing more than wanting basic freedom and dignity and being willing to fight for it.

You might be surprised to find that our allies in the US, if not Australia itself, also provided substantial funding to some of these anti-Assad groups. Was this guy's name Barack Obama by any chance? Wink

Mugwump wrote:
There are a lot of people out there who want to kill us, indiscriminately. We need to adapt our domestic liberties to recognise that fact,and this one seems to me a minor, targeted curtailment of domestic liberty in term of potential benefit vs cost.


You might well be right, but if there's anything the Howard/Bush years have taught me, it's that we need to be very, very vigilant about these 'minor curtailments of domestic liberty', because they sometimes turn out to be not so minor. Pretty much all of the NSA's activities revealed by Snowden, for instance, were Bush-era 'special powers' instituted ostensibly to defend national security. Of course, their scope proved far broader.

We see the same thing in other areas. Child pornographers are the chief bogeymen called upon by politicians trying to censor the internet, despite the fact that everybody worth listening to keeps telling us that internet censorship won't really do anything to stop them. The clearest example of this was Thailand about a decade ago, I think, where an internet censorship policy was put in place ostensibly to battle child pornography. 12 months later, it turned out that something like 90% of websites being censored were political sites critical of the royal family, while child pornography remains as prevalent as ever. Who woulda thunk?

I'm not saying that we need to take a hardcore libertarian 'freedom or death' approach where we reject all incursions on civil liberty out of hand. There are probably times and places where 'minor curtailments of domestic liberty' are wise and necessary. But we cannot ever afford to let them go without close critical scrutiny, because it's always when we're at our weakest or most fearful that the most draconian policies meet the least resistance.

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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 10:07 pm
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I don't disagree with you ; legislative scrutiny is suposed to check that a bill will achieve its purpose, and to explore how it might be used other than as intended. Now all we need to do is to get our parliamentary system to do the work it is designed for.... A lot does depend on the drafting, but if drafted aright, I have few qualms about barring our citizens from fighting in Syria. Then again, I live in the Uk, and I think our problem may be qualitatively different to Australia's.
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pietillidie 



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PostPosted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 6:02 pm
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^As long as that literally does mean barring all citizens from fighting in Syria, including those citizens in the British Armed Forces Wink
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 5:42 am
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pietillidie wrote:
^As long as that literally does mean barring all citizens from fighting in Syria, including those citizens in the British Armed Forces Wink


Well, it's not likely to happen after the Iraq fiasco ; Cameron flirted with the idea, then parliament took one look at the people's artillery in the form of opinion polls, and fled ! Whether that is to anyone's advantage other than the British kids who might have lost their lives in a filthy internecine war is a subject for historians.

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swoop42 Virgo

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Joined: 02 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 26, 2014 8:06 pm
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http://www.9news.com.au/world/2014/07/26/14/44/australian-jihadist-posts-decapitation-picture
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 11:26 am
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Next item on the agenda to 'protect us from terrorists' (read: cynically exploit public fear in order to increase government power) is data retention:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/11/australias-national-security-proposals-will-criminalise-journalists-says-union

The most hilarious/f___ed up thing about this is that, this time last year, our country's most-read newspapers were running pictures of Conroy and Rudd in Soviet garb. Because they wanted to mildly regulate the ACMA. Where are the Daily Telegraph photoshoppers now?

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stui magpie Gemini

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Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 8:43 pm
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I think that union is on drugs. The data retention already happens, this is old news it was out last week, all the government is trying to do is make it a set time across the board.

How that will suddenly criminalise journalists beats the sh1t out of me.

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