June, 2005

So now there will be no Royal Commission into the kidnapping, confinement, abuse and wrongful banishment to dangerous places of 200 people, or perhaps only 100 people, or perhaps only 50 people, and no debate in the House of Representatives about it. 200 -- or perhaps only 10 -- Dreyfus-like 'detainees' in our various far-flung Devil's Islands will not be shown to have suffered unjustly and their suffering covered up by timorous dills, and perhaps the whole thing will soon go away. And with Murdoch's bias and Fairfax's cowardice and the ABC's brow-beaten havering perhaps it will.

There is one thing the Labor Party can do now, and it's a good idea, though John Faulkner looked at me with rigid alarm when I suggested it, and it's what Reg Withers would if so placed, or Lynton Crosby if so placed, and working for Labor, do. It's to use the numbers they now have in the Senate and the numbers the Greens and Democrats would gladly add to them to suspend from the Senate for, say, nine months or a year both Hill and Vanstone pending an inquiry into their criminality.

This criminality is a fair bet. They seem, on the face of it, to have lied to Parliament and colluded in the torment and slaughter of children here, in the Pacific and in Iraq to an extent that might make them persons of interest to the ICC and suitable for trial for crimes against humanity, and possibly war crimes, before that body. This would give the Opposition the numbers to reject the new Howard legislation, the cruel sacking laws and the selling of Telstra, for a month or two at least -- till Hill and Vanstone could be persuaded to resign their Senate seats and be replaced by a better class of person (fat chance), or till Howard, beset by Costello, in panicked frustration calls for a snap election (possibility).

This is an election he just might lose to the poor-old-Kim's-turn vote or the 65-is-old-enough vote or even, heaven help us, the locking-up-children-at-birth-is-wrong vote, which may have increased in the last few weeks among young and older women. Would the Greens and Democrats be in it? I have some private, nose-tapping evidence they would that I cannot, comrade, talk about here. Would Labor be in it? Nah. Don't think so. They believe, as a rule, in playing fair. They err in this. The Liberals usually win by impugning, slagging, sliming and shaming their opponents' character, and they win in no other way. Keating the arrogant bully. Kernot the sexual molester. Evans the stormy adulterous typewriter-thrower. Beazley the tickerless blithering endomorph. Carmen Lawrence the suicide-tainted serial forgetter. Latham the two-fisted foul-mouthed economic incompetent. Barlett the drunken harasser. Brown the divisive closet Marxist. Hanson the shrieking embezzler. Fraser the addled, bitter has-been history has passed by. And so on.

And if Labor could call Ruddock and Vanstone abusers of children, and Hill and Downer and Howard colluders in the torture and slaughter, for insufficient reasons, of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, it might do the cause of the parliamentary Left some good. It doesn't hurt, comrades, that it's all true. Take your thoughts back to the SIEV-X and the mother of the three dead little girls they wouldn't let see her husband in Sydney, not even for a week, not even for a day. Recall Roqia Bakhtiyari, now pregnant, diabetic, smashed of soul and longing for death in murderous, riotous, unstable Afghanistan, not Pakistan where Vanstone says she came from, and wrongly sent her back to. Think of the suicide bombers Ruddock bred in Woomera by the wrecking of their childhoods. Probably no more than 50. Or 10. The Liberals are bad people, and the Senate numbers, for five more weeks, permit us to bring them down, or do them harm, or at least to shame them before world history. It's time.