Keelty

Keelty

 

Gone at long last

 

How much time should one spend on this slug?
We don’t even feel like woo-hoo. Just “at last” and “good riddance” and “what took you so long”.

One of the things we really dislike about (not exclusively-) Australian culture is the way we rail against awful people and the moment they die or resign we politely say ever such nice things about them. It’s hypocritical and weak and cowardly. We think. We have no such qualms. Keelty in our view was a bad man, morally weak, a disastrous Commissioner who willingly ran over the basics of human rights and legal traditions like habeas corpus in order to pursue a flawed and misguided agenda.

He was a willing and irretrievably politicised Liberal Party stooge, and concerned more with appearance than with the truth.


His most egregious failures are well-known – the obscene treatment of young Australians in the Bali Nine affair, Haneef, the onanistic display of muscle at APEC, and the Ul-Haque farce.

Speaking of Ul-Haque we once asked,

“ Justice Adams said ASIO officers ‘committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping.’ When do they go to prison? Have they been arrested and charged yet? Where are they being detained? Are they being pursued and prosecuted by the AFP with the same vigour and determination that it showed against…oh, I don’t know…Mohamed Haneef, say?”

Good question still.

Elsewhere we said:

“ It’s time for Mick Keelty to resign. Or be sacked. Keelty has to go because of how he thinks about the law. He has to go because everything points to his being utterly politicised and his making decisions on political, not legal, grounds as directed by his [then] masters, the Howard ministry. Keelty made, cleverly he probably thought, a Faustian pact with the Devil of Realpolitik. Now he’s been caught out yet again and so we say, yet again:

Do the decent thing at long last, Mick.

And we said this:

“ Sack [him] for misfeasance. Malfeasance. Non-feasance. Abuse of power by a public official. Criminal stupidity. Any of those will do.
Federal Police yesterday released a statement saying the former Gold Coast doctor [Haneef] is no longer a person of interest to them, and they have found there are no grounds to proceed against him. [SBS News]

Well fuck me dead – I’m Foreskin Fred! Yes, after all this time. After all the waste. After all the harm. After all the stupidity and incompetence. After Scotland Yard laughed at the AFP; months after the Queensland Police Service and ASIO both said there were no grounds. After all the subversion of democracy, the courts and the rule of law.

Sack them.

Everything about the carriage of the Haneef affair by the AFP and the government suggests that it never was about public safety; that it always was a political stunt; that it was in fact a considered and calculated decision by the AFP to use the Haneef matter for political ends. As we know from another case, the AFP sought every possible opportunity to test the envelope of the terrorism laws. Keelty, in particular, clearly operates a political agenda, having capitulated under pressure from John Howard years ago. He learned his lesson well and in the Haneef case hung his hat on the re-election of the Howard government. This means that he has lost sight of his actual role, his constitutional – and certainly his moral – obligation to the people of Australia and the democracy they own.

Nothing has happened to cause us to resile from these opinions. Keelty appalls us because he respects neither democracy nor the rule of law, the law being not a tool for repression and control but a safeguard of a vibrant civil society.

Keelty cheerfully acquiesced in the subversion of such safeguards.

  

‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

‘I’m Sir Roger and I’m Fucked’

 

This is not for you

 

Really. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and we want to record them.
So this is a stocktake for posterity, if you like, that marks a moment, a milestone.

Yes, ValuesAustralia is two years old. This is our 712th post. Singlehanded, eh, Clubtroppo, Larvatus Prodeo, RoadtoSurfdom etc. etc.? That’s almost one a day. (There used to be a billboard for One A Day vitamin pills at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rowntree Street at Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. There was a picture of a man and a woman. The woman was saying, “I’m Jenny and I give John One A Day.” Soon a graffiti artist had added, “I’m John and I’m fucked!”)

And, yes, we’re just about fucked, ourselves. We’ve got a rotator cuff from all the typing and mouse clicking, especially during October and November last year.

(We went to the radiologist. “What seems to be the problem?” “I’ve got a sore shoulder.” “Hmm…we’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray…… Hmm…. Hmmmmmm, our expert analysis of the ultrasound and x-ray indicates you have a sore shoulder. You’ll have to stop using it for a while.” “Thanks….What?)

We’ve never paid for any advertising. We’ve never submitted ValuesAustralia to any search engine. Nevertheless, we got ourselves listed on Google within 24 hours of launching the site. We tried to register the site with dmoz.org (The Open Source Directory) – as you do – but it wasn’t taking orders, and by the time it came back on line months later, ValuesAustralia was already magically listed!

We’ve been #1 for “Australian Values” on Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask most of the time for more than a year and a half. We’re #12 for “values” on Google worldwide, out of 314,000,000 results and on google.com.au we’re #2 for “values” out of 307,000,000. We’re #1 on google worldwide and Australia for “Australian political values” out of about 400,000 results.

Our Google Page Rank is 4 (used to be 5 but they changed the algorithm) which is respectable but we’d prefer a 5 or a 6.

We’ve had over 300,000 aggregate visitors and more than 75,000 spam messages (thank you, Akismet).

Earlier this year we were consistently getting more than 1000 visitors a day – over 30,000 a month, which is okay, although nothing like the big guys.

We’ve made friends all over the world and especially in Australia. We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. We are popular in Saudi Arabia – amongst the top 42,000 favourite sites for Saudis. (That worries us just a bit…Say hullo to Al for us…) We appreciate our readers and those who choose to comment from time to time. We thought a scarcity of comments was a Bad Thing, a Failure, but we noticed that one of the most popular, most entertaining bloggers we know of, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, doesn’t get heaps, either – a few, but not tens like Possum or hundreds and thousands like William the PollBludger.

In May 2007 ValuesAustralia was picked up by the “Stay In Touch” column at the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing us of “rhetoric”.

One of Sir Roger’s posts was selected by ClubTroppo and On Line Opinion in January 2008 as one of the top 40 posts in Australia for 2007. We’re very proud of that.

But it’s a post we made early in 2007 that we are still most proud of. Ken Parish at ClubTroppo called it

“quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence… ”

Yes, Troppo has been good to us and we mourn the passing of Missing Link and Ken’s prolonged work-induced(?) absence. We were also congratulated by Richard Neville (HomePageDaily) and Steven Poole whose Unspeak blog is our benchmark for economy, clarity, style and wit.

We have enjoyed the journey so far and we have no intention at this stage of stopping, although we have slowed down (work, you know).

Bobbo the Clown

Our favourite person in the world, of course, is the clown, Bob Correll (above), Deputy Secretary of DIC, OPM, because he wrote us the letter which inspired our outburst. As we discovered he was (and appears still to be) the person who had taken over departmental responsibility for “Borders, Compliance, Detention and Technology”, or in other words, perhaps, for keeping innocent kiddies locked up in the desert, deporting Australian citizens, supporting the failed state of Nauru, making the lives of genuine refugees a misery, doing it to please the Minister, and all at the touch of a computer key. Previously he had been the driving force behind developing and implementing Job Network, or “how to design exquisite, personalised punishment for people who are already struggling with the stress of being unemployed”. Godluvvya, Bob! How’s the Volvo? How’s the kids? How do you sleep at night?

One of the most satisfying things is how we always beat the Immigration Department on Google.

Our second favourite person is Mick Keelty, just for being such a hopeless buffoon and continually making appalling stuff-ups for us to make fun of. G’bye, Mick.

Anyway, just for the record.

(And a special “hi!” to Lang!)

Not a Civil Society Just Yet

Not a Civil Society Just Yet

 

 

We have a new hero at Values Australia (no, not Manning Clark).
His name is Julian Burnside QC. Not that we didn’t respect him before and agree with him and all like that. But, well…see it’s like this:

We got an mp3 player, for the train or whatever, and to fill it up we scoured ABC Radio National for podcasts.

Science Show, All in the Mind, Philosopher’s Zone, By Design, Ockham’s Razor.

You know the stuff. And of course there’s Big Ideas.

So we downloaded a likely lump about a Manning Clark Lecture:

“Citizens’ rights and the rule of law in a civil society: not just yet”.

It was by Julian Burnside, on the 10th of March this year.

Thought it might be a bit dry but we were so wrong about that!.

We were astonished.

He covers everything we had been trying to say but with such authority and knowledge. So we recommend you have a listen, too.

In his lecture he covered the Sorry statement and the appalling case of an aboriginal man called Bruce Trevorrow.

In the end we were far more inclined to agree with Burnside that some sort of compensation for the stolen generations is appropriate, rather than just the more nebulous idea of an improvement of aborigines’ lot, generally, over time.

“ In the first sitting of the new parliament, the Government said ‘sorry’ to the stolen generations. It seemed almost too good to be true: the apology so many had waited so long to hear. And it was astonishing and uplifting to hear some of the noblest and most dignified sentiments ever uttered in that place on the hill.
[ … ]
The apology was significant not only for marking a significant step in the process of reconciling ourselves with our past: it cast a new light on the former government. It set a new tone. And I think it reminded us of something we had lost: a sense of decency.

 

Most of the worst aspects of the Howard years can be explained by the lack of decency which infected their approach to government:

 

they could not acknowledge the wrong that was done to the stolen generations;

 

they failed to help David Hicks when it was a moral imperative – they waited until his rescue became a political imperative;

they never quite understood the wickedness of imprisoning children who were fleeing persecution;

they abandoned ministerial responsibility;

they attacked the courts scandalously but unblushing;

they argued for the right to detain innocent people for life;

they introduced laws which prevent fair trials;

they bribed the impoverished Republic of Nauru to warehouse refugees for us.

It seemed that they did not understand just how badly they were behaving, or perhaps they just did not care.

He also spoke about the rule of law, incommunicado detention, control orders and preventative detention, the right of the State (and its secret agencies) to withhold evidence, civil rights, erosion of rights, a Bill of Rights and more.

His lecture went further than the ABC podcast includes. Nevertheless the podcast is excellent.

Here’s a transcript of part of his speech which is on the podcast:

“ In 2005 further anti-terror legislation was introduced. The Commonwealth Criminal Code was amended to provide that a member of the Federal Police may apply for a preventative detention order in relation to a person. A preventative detention order will result in a person being jailed for up to 14 days in circumstances where they have not been charged with, much less convicted of, any offence. The order is obtained in the absence of the person concerned, and authorises that the person be taken into custody. When the person is taken into custody, they must not be told the evidence on which the order was obtained.

Thus, a preventative detention order can be made not only without a trial of any sort, but in circumstances where the subject of the order will not be allowed to know the evidence which was used to secure the order, even after the event.

We believe that few Australians are aware of just how far John Howard and his morally-neutered hired guns like Ruddock, Andrews, Vanstone and Mick Keelty went, in the name of “security” to tear down their legal rights and liberties.

Australians generally, we think, are unclear how little of what they believe they have they really have left. Perhaps, as Burnside suggests, they don’t want to know, as long as they’re doing all right and it’s not affecting them. But of course it does affect them and it will.

Habeas corpus is dead and stinking not only in the US but now here in Australia as well. Dwight D. Eisenhower must be rolling in his grave over what John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, with Dick Cheney and George Bush and the supine American Senate, did to habeas corpus in the US:

Here are Ike’s Remarks Upon Receiving the America’s Democratic Legacy Award at B’nai B’rith:

“ Why are we proud?

We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend – or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus Act, and we respect it.”

With this lecture Julian Burnside — for standing up and saying what is so — has for us moved from “respected” to “hero”.

Here is the recording  of Burnside’s Manning Clark Lecture from ABC’s Big Ideas:

The Ancient Marinara

The Ancient Marinara

 

He’s a Legend, and our friend

 

We wish he wouldn’t describe himself as “ancient”. That tends to put us at the edge of a category we fiercely resist.

Richard Neville, one of the founders of homepagedaily.com, was the infamous, notorious publisher and editor of Oz Magazine.and author of Hippie Hippie ShakePlay Power, amongst many others. Unrehabilitated 60s icon, iconoclast and futurist. And our friend, or at least our supporter and adviser, in the earlier and more threatened days of the Ministry of Mateship and Fair Dinkum Values, aka ‘ValuesAustralia’.

Here he is with chilling news on the grim future for the globally-heated rich:

A Man’s a Man

A Man’s a Man

Robert Burns statue in Writers Museum Edinburgh

Within the first five seconds we were hooked

 

We were on the way to work, tuned in to Radio National’s Book Show, a replay of the opening address by Andrew O’Hagan from last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival .

Sudden fauvist swathes and splashes of bright primary colours, seduced by the promise of intrigue and adventure and of amazing stories.

Andrew O’Hagan: Sydney Writers’ Festival Opening (Excerpt):

“ In our house we didn’t have many books, but there was a large yellow kitchen table where my mother sat at the centre of all her evidence.

 

I grant you she wasn’t the Norton Anthology of Literature, but she knew every song that was ever sung in Glasgow. And my father, when he was there, would appear from his adventures with a crimson face and stories you wouldn’t believe. Except of course I would believe all of them, being sick in the head and the youngest of four.

 

Between them my parents barely read a book in their lives, but I’ve come to feel there was literature in everything they said. “I had a book once,” my father once told me in a moment of pride. “It was green. Do you remember that book, Nancy? It was up on top of the fridge. Green it was. Stood there for ages. Greeny-coloured.”

 

“Away ye go ya daft pig,” my mother said. “That was the telephone book, that manky battered old thing.”

 

She turned to me.

 

“He only uses it to get the numbers of people he can go and buy dogs off. Bringing them in here: as if I don’t have enough to clean.”

 

“The book was definitely green,” said my da. “Green as a pound note. And don’t listen to her: it wasn’t a phone book or anything like it. It had a story in it and everybody died, I remember that sure enough.”

 

…a large yellow kitchen table where his mother sat at the centre of all her evidence…

We were intrigued. What evidence? Evidence of what? What an opening line!

So we knew this was a writer worth listening to. And then he said the other things. The inspiring things; the dark things.

He talked of the old world and of new worlds – new worlds known only in imagination and exotic stories, in dreams. Dreams that can come true through the power of literature to pave new paths to possibility. 

“ But who were we? For me, it was the less legendary granda, the one who sailed to Sydney and came back, I heard, with packets of dates and chocolates and large foreign dolls for my mother. The memory of him was the one that described us better, for the journey to Australia was an excursion into the blue heaven of our imagination.

 

I have to tell you, I grew up to believe there is no other nation but the one you can build and honour in your head, and for kids growing up that way, in a Scotland filled with faded songs about the grandness of our destiny, the thought of new beginnings in virgin lands became a beautiful dream.

 

To travel over the sea to a place free from the torpor of national attributes – not one without its own historical controversies, and one with its own deep traditions – but nevertheless a country that seemed built to be filled with high hopes.

 

In the cold winter nights outside Glasgow, I often lay and imagined my grandfather Charlie having a hot Christmas somewhere near the Great Barrier Reef, eating strange fruits, surrounded by coloured fish, and hearing talk we’d never known. Australia was the dream state of our working class childhoods, the Xanadu of the wee small hours, and that dead old sailor was to my unquiet mind a great engineer of imagined worlds, a crown prince of enchantment, the ultimate wizard of Oz.

 

It didn’t matter what reality had to say on the matter. Australia was the place to start again. I remember families going off from Scotland never to return. They were … emigrating. And to my mind those small friends of mine are kind of legendary because of their early engagement with open possibility. It never occurred to me that they Australia would stop them from growing, but I see now that they were infantilized in the minds of those they left behind. They grew Down Under, but not for us, who would always remember those emigrating heroes as boys we waved off in the knowledge we would probably never see them again. They were the high-flying flamingoes, those boys and girls who had followed my grandfather past the Cape of Good Hope, to a place that appeared, despite its own dark shadows, to make a virtue of BECOMING rather than a prison of BELONGING.

 

I remember watching a programme with my father in the 1970s about people in Adelaide who were trying to build a community of whitewashed houses. They were drinking pink wine and smiling. I’ll never forget it. The pink wine. The smiles on them. “In this part of the world,” said the presenter, “the idea is to be all you can be.”

 

The line seemed to me at the time like a thing out of Shakespeare. I’d never heard such a concept before &mdash Be All You Can Be. The white houses. The pink wine. The smiles on them. It was like Keats, I tell you. Like Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or F. Scott Fitgerald — all those people in their beautiful clothes at Jay Gatsby’s party, drinking this stuff — what was it called? — WINE.

 

Be All you Can Be. It was like an ancient Chinese proverb. A kind of haiku. A word from the lips of the great and bottomless pool of belief across the world.

 

“What did he say?” asked my father.

 

“Be All You Can Be,” I said.

 

He crushed a can of McEwan’s Export and threw it down by our two-bar fire.

 

“What?”

 

“Be All You Can Be.”

 

“What a load of shite,” he said.

 

Of course, it wasn’t really Australia. It was the thought of it. It was the imagining of it. And the great vehicle of such powerful imagining, says O’Hagan, is literature.

“ If we are truly alive, we have a duty to connect with the planet we inherited and that others will inherit in their turn. If we are truly alive, we have a role to play — every one of us — in the realization of peace and tolerance in our time.

 

If we are truly alive, and if we know what the imagination can do, it will not be in us to sit dormant whilst the planet is ruined by unfettered commerce or whilst thousands are killed by the pre-emptive and ruinous urges of Christian or Islamic fundamentalisms.

 

If we are civilized, we imagine our way past political coercion or selfish pride.

 

We speak truth to power.

We question our media.

We spring to the defense of liberty.

We take care of the world’s resources.

We interrogate corporations and we upbraid ourselves and our hungers and our needs.

We listen to the past.

We question our feelings of superiority.

We teach our children the truth of our culture and what it has done and what it has failed to do.

We keep a close watch on this heart of mine – yours and yours and yours.

And we never forget that we are moral beings and not machines.

This is what we do if we are truly alive. This is what we do if we live close to our imaginations.

[ … ]

I believe it is a failure of the imagination that allows famine or terror to reign in the world.

A man who throws half the contents of his fridge into the trash on a Monday morning fails to imagine, next time he visits the supermarket, that whole villages in Eritrea have children gasping for a droplet of milk. The politician or the general who orders a soldier to release cruise missiles from 5000 feet does not imagine the innocent men playing cards in the teashop below. He does not imagine their loss or the grief of their loved ones. The terrorist[/tag] at the controls of a plane cannot imagine the dreams of the secretary on the 102nd floor, planning her wedding and making a bid for life.

 

Failures of the imagination are behind the conduct of our woes — and so we as we gather here to salute literature and the imagination we also come to denounce those failures of the imagination that harm and betray and destroy life.

O’Hagan finished his speech by quoting his countryman, Robbie Burns.

“ Burns was a poor man who came at last to enrich the world — and I finish with these words I seem to have known since birth, his “Marsellaise” to the human spirit. 

A Man’s A Man For A’ That

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that;
The coward slave – we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that.
Our toils obscure an’ a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that. 

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that. 

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;
But an honest man’s abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities an’ a’ that;
The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that. 

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a’ that,)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

 

So Burns was part of the struggle for equality and rights and democracy, the Scottish Enlightenment. “A piece of defiant uppityness such as ‘A Man’s A Man’ could get a man hanged, or transported to a life of hard labour in Australia. Burns had seen this happen to free thinkers like Thomas Muir,” says the BBC.

A-hah! Had “A Man’s A Man” (or more correctly, “Is there for honest Poverty”) not been as overwhelmingly successful as it was, Burns himself could have been transported to Botany Bay, as fellow Scots Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer and William Skirving were in 1794. Muir escaped in 1796 on an American ship which had been sent to rescue him. He fled to France, still in the midst of its Revolution.

America had only recently won its own independence from Britain. In France Muir worked with the famous Thomas Paine who agitated for American Independence. Paine famously wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man – a guide to the ideas of the Enlightenment. (Muir had been a student of John Millar, Scottish philosopher and historian and author of The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society [1771]).

It is extraordinary to realise with what sacrifice, and courage, and how recently, people fought – and often died – for ideals which now seem so obvious and which we take for granted, and the ferocity with which the establishment opposed those ideals.

It is also salutary to note the patience with which corporations, religious zealots and governments are winding back these obvious rights and freedoms.

And it is important to understand the central role that writers played in gaining those rights and will continue to play in protecting them.

PS: If you would like to see what Andrew O’Hagan’s writing space looks like, you can visit the amazing Writers’ Rooms section at the Guardian. Other authors include Raymond Briggs (The Elephant and the Bad Baby), Caryl Phillips, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Margaret Drabble, John Mortimer, Will Self, Antonia Fraser, David Hare, Michael Frayn, and on and on — the list is much longer than this.