For Adbusters, October, 2005

Since gaining control of the Senate on July 1, John Howard has been quick to push through, none too tidily, a big, scary swag of neo-fascist laws in Australia. The right to remain silent, to phone your lawyer, to phone a loved one, to be questioned only if a lawyer is present, and only for a day, is gone.

Now you can be held for two weeks and 'vigorously interrogated'. If after that you tell anyone what happened to you (if they enquire, say, where you got that black eye and those broken fingers) you can go gaol for five years. If your wife reports your absence (in fearful frenzy, say, to the police), she can go to gaol for five years and so can your teenage daughter. Muslim preachers can be gaoled for 'advocating violence' and so, if the letter of the law is followed, can Christian preachers who promise hellfire to sodomites or Catholics.

You can be body-searched at random when entering any theatre or sports ground. You phone can be bugged, your house searched, your name blackened, your job lost, your children impoverished if you write or speak at any time from the Muslim perspective of, say, the American empire in any public place including a bar. Both Government and Opposition think this is a good idea and so is spending billions on their 'war on terrorism'. Airports meanwhile remain easy penetrable. On October 11, for instance, I went to a launch party at the new Adelaide airport with a large purple bag, dressed shabbily. I was let in without an invitation, and the bag sat for hours amid a noisy crowd of politicians and celebrities unremarked and unsearched.

New laws, meanwhile, are about to be passed preventing people who are unjustly sacked -- for, say, not supplying the requested blow jobs to the boss -- from complaining about it. Previous laws that let you take to court a boss who unfairly sacked you, or sacked you for complaining about an unsafe workplace, or seeking to organise a strike, will be, after Christmas, abolished. A hundred million dollars of taxpayers' money has been spent on ads that praise this legislation, legislation eighty percent of the people do not want. The biggest telephone company, Telstra, is being sold off, though ninety percent of the people want it kept in government hands, because the Liberal-National coalition now control the Senate outright, and can do what they like.

This means they can keep troops in Iraq, send more to Afghanistan, refuse to sign Kyoto and behave with grovelling cravenness to every other country on the map. To Japan, which lawlessly hunts whales in South Pacific waters, and whose engineers our troops protect in Iraq. To Indonesia, which gaoled for cannabis possession Shapelle Corby, a beautiful young Australian woman, for fifteen years. To Turkey, which bulldozed Australia's most sacred site, the heights above Gallipoli beach where our bloodiest battle was fought and lost, for a carpark. To the United States, which continues to hold and torture in Guantanamo Bay David Hicks, a young Australian innocent under the Geneva Convention of any crime.

The only people the Howard government does not behave cravenly towards are the sobbing refugees it hauls off leaky boats and locks up in Baxter Detention Centre or Nauru. One of these families, the Bakhtiyaris, when lately found to be innocent of fabricating their nationality after five years of imprisonment, torment, educational deprivation and eventual deportation, have been told they must pay a million dollars if they want to come back 'for the expense of their accommodation' while they were here.

Both major parties have suffered big leadership scandals. The NSW State Liberal leader, John Brogden, attempted suicide after confessing he had fondled and propositioned some women at a party and insulted the Premier Bob Carr's Malaysian wife Helena whom he called 'a mail order bride'. This allowed the Labor Party to consider the slogan, This is a party that drove their own leader to suicide. Why will they be any nicer to you?

The Liberals' prospects were looking dodgy for a few days, till the stormy former Labor leader Mark Latham, for a year Federal Opposition Leader, published diaries defaming everyone he knew, including his first wife, whom he called a lesbian, and complaining his predecessor and successor Kim Beazley kept a 'filth file' on him, though his whole book could be seen as a filth file on everyone. This unusual act of self-immolation by a Labor figure whose party had fed and sheltered and schooled him since his teenage years was widely compared to Samson pushing down the pillars of the Temple.

Australia will never be the same after Howard and Latham, and it is getting, daily, sillier, darker, and worse.