Sept. 2004

'In a healthy society,' Andrew Bolt said last Sunday in the Herald-Sun, 'a lout like Ellis would be thrown out on his ear.' I suppose he means by this I should be suddenly arrested and sent into exile, in New Zealand maybe, or Nauru, or Guantanamo. Sacked from my job, unable therefore to pay my mortgage, keep the suburban block I've dwelt on for thirty years, visit my grown children, walk my dogs Alfie and Oompa in the park. Thrown out. Because of some opinions I have, some thoughts I lately toyed with in a book. Punished for what Orwell called my Thoughtcrimes, in freedom's name.

How quickly freedom goes. Three years ago I had an uncontested right to my opinions, because of the hard-fought democracy I lived in. I could vote Communist if I wanted to, or convert like David Hicks to Islam, or buy shares in Enron or British Tobacco, or enlist like Rambo in the Taliban, because this was what freedom meant, the base and bedrock of our system.

How quickly freedom goes. It is only one thousand and one hundred days since 9/11 and already we are asking is it right that David Hicks be tortured into a false confession and held without charge, or a phone call to his family, for nine hundred days? Is it right that as part of his torture the clinical depressive Mamdouh Habib be deprived of his medication and falsely told that his wife and his children are dead? Is it right that as part of her torture Roqia Baktiyari, whose only crime was not to recognise Northern Alliance currency, a currency not in use in her part of the world, be brought by harassment to the point of miscarrying, lest she have a son that was born in Australia? Is it right that Montezar Baktiyari, a brilliant student whose only crime was to go with his family on a journey, should be deprived of an education for two and a half years and thereafter policed wherever he goes?

How quickly freedom goes, and how keen Andrew Bolt is that it goes. Because Andrew Bolt is himself not free, to vary even an inch from what Rupert Murdoch wants him to say. And he wants to share his slavery around.

Andrew won't debate me I know, because this might give oxygen to the terrorist Ellis and Andrew's opinions would expose him as a fool. But if I did I'd ask him to name one thing John Howard got wrong in his thirty years of public life. And Andrew, because he is not free, would be unable to name one thing John Howard got wrong, or George Bush got wrong, or Donald Rumsfeld, or Philip Ruddock, or Peter Reith.

How quickly freedom goes. And how bitterly slaves resent the freedom of the free. Andrew Bolt is a slave, and a cauldron of such resentment, festering nightly in his rusty chains. He knows John Howard gets things wrong sometimes and he dare not say so lest he lose his job, and his mortgage, and his house. His mind is as enslaved as any Sunni bureaucrat in Saddam's Iraq, as any apparatchik under Stalin. He dare not speak his mind. How quickly freedom goes.