By Michael Bradley Tuesday 23 Jun 2015
Photo: Zaky Mallah was acquitted of terrorism charges. (ABC Q&A)
The Prime Minister was already doing a great job of whipping up fear before the ABC gave him the Q&A episode of his dreams, in which one of his ministers was pitted against a man acquitted of terrorism charges, writes Michael Bradley.
Scared and angry enough yet? Sufficiently distracted from climate change, from the stalled economy, from the 45 women violently killed by men in Australia so far this year? Is your attention entirely fixed on terror (that existential threat which in 2015 has killed precisely zero Australians)?
Fear, as Dee Madigan succinctly put it on Q&A last night, sells. It particularly sells for governments, because people don't like to change governments when they're scared. And how is it sold to us? By the constant turning of the screw.
You can feel the turning of the screw in the events of recent days. Let's play them out.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott ambushes Cabinet with a proposal that the Immigration Minister be given the power to revoke the citizenship of Australians who hold dual citizenship or may be eligible for foreign citizenship, if he considers them a threat to national security. The proposal is leaked to the Murdoch press.
Somebody leaks the Cabinet discussion, identifying all the ministers who weren't consulted and raised objections. As for who leaked, well, who gains most from the narrative of "courageous PM stands up against terror"?
The PM takes to his favoured forum for reasoned policy debate, talk-back radio. Lawyers froth at the mouth about the presumption of innocence, separation of powers, the constitution, Magna Carta, habeas corpus, just like the PM knew they would.
Meanwhile, the PM makes noise about the inconveniences of the legal system's insistence on not calling people criminals until they've been convicted of a crime. "We all know the perils of that," he says, referring to the courts. As for a criminal conviction being a precondition to cancelling citizenship, "What if they get off?" he asks. Great question! Perhaps the Immigration Minister should be empowered to revoke the citizenship of any judge or juror who fails to convict someone the Minister has already deemed guilty.
Does Abbott really think it's a good idea to trash 1,000 years of carefully crafted criminal law and its assurances that nobody but the guilty should lose their freedom? Actually, one suspects, he doesn't care either way.
What Abbott does understand is the politics of distraction, and he's giving a master class. So, back to the narrative. Come Monday, the Murdoch press is again preparing the ground: the PM has wedged Labor as far as he can by saying Bill Shorten wants to roll out the red carpet for terrorists, so now it's time to bring them back into Team Australia with a law they will have to support in line with their mindless commitment to giving the Government whatever national security laws it wants so long as the High Court won't throw them out.
The law we're going to get will be an amendment to section 35 of the Australian Citizenship Act, which currently automatically revokes the citizenship of anyone who is a national or citizen of a foreign country and who serves in the armed forces of a country at war with Australia. This will be extended to include foreign nationals who fight for terrorist organisations overseas such as Islamic State. It's potentially workable, not that controversial, and unlikely to have any practical effect. It's purely politics as theatre, and it gives the PM an excuse for a 10-flag press conference where he can put on his serious face.
Meanwhile, as we're all focused on foreign fighters and the risk of their return, the news drops that the two most prominent of them, IS poster boys Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf, have been killed in Iraq. Such a handy and timely reminder of the reality of the threat.
To cap off a week of excellent politics for the PM, the ABC gives him the perfect parable of modern politics with the Q&A episode of his dreams. The ABC has formed the habit of including in its Q&A audience people who have a story to tell, and last night it was Zaky Mallah. It starts off well enough. Government Minister Steve Ciobo is explaining how he'd like to revoke the citizenship of all the "terrorists", here and overseas. Throw to Mallah, who explains how he spent two years in Goulburn SuperMax prison awaiting trial on terrorism charges of which he was acquitted. He acknowledges that he pleaded guilty to the crime of threatening to kill ASIO officers. His question is, would he have lost his citizenship under the proposed new law?
After all, as Ciobo explains, Mallah had only got off on a technicality. Ah yeah, the technicality that a jury found Mallah not guilty of the terrorism charges against him. The law was later changed to broaden the ambit of these terrorism offences, but criminal laws don't apply retrospectively. Not a problem for Ciobo though, who knows a bad guy when he sees one, just like his boss.
Back to Mallah, who then drops this:
The Liberals have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the Australian community tonight to leave and go to Syria and fight for ISIL because of ministers like him.
Awkward silence. Tony Jones rules the comment "totally out of order" and says he's sorry. Today, the ABC admits it made an "error of judgement" in allowing Zaky into the audience at all. The entire right wing of Australia goes ballistic, possibly orgasmic, in its calls for a jihad against the jihadists.
But wait, excuse me? Jones and the ABC are sorry about what exactly? Allowing a free Australian citizen into the audience and to express his opinion?
So Zaky Mallah isn't a good guy by most Australians' lights, including mine. He has some incendiary opinions which offend many people. Then again, I'm really offended by Steve Ciobo's desire to deport Australian citizens on the basis of his personal opinion that they are terrorists, whether or not they've committed a crime.
And here we are, all talking about terror again and in varying states of outrage at each other. Feeling scared and angry enough? Not nearly enough for Abbott. More turns of the screw to come.
Michael Bradley is the managing partner of Marque Lawyers, a Sydney law firm.
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