Tony Abbott opened the regional countering violent extremism summit on Thursday with a customary flourish: “Daesh is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: submit or die.”
To reach the conference’s venue of Sydney in enough numbers to make such demands, Islamic State fighters would need to cross an ocean or two, win a succession of conventional wars, and depart entirely from their stated and manifest objective, which is to create a caliphate by extending their territorial gains in the Middle East.
Even if global domination sneaks occasionally into their wildest fantasies, no world leader needs to take the threat of mass conversion at the point of the sword seriously. To do so would be to misdirect our attention from the threat they pose where they are, and the changing face of terrorism, whose objective is really to divide migrant societies against one another.
But Abbott’s strategy is not military or geopolitical. It’s electoral, and it also aims to authorise the further extension of the security state. As always, Abbott is addressing himself to a domestic audience, brandishing one of the few tools he’s able to competently wield. It’s consistent with a longer term effort – which the Australian government is hardly alone in making – where a sense of insecurity is promoted, so that the government can offer to assuage it with ever more draconian policing, immigration controls, and national security measures.
For a look at the way this rhetoric translates into action, you only need to think back to that fractious cabinet meeting a couple of weeks back. The one whose details leaked, where Abbott and Peter Dutton tried to get up a proposal to strip terror suspects of their citizenship.
Dutton’s response to Barnaby Joyce’s question about the proposal was telling.
When Joyce asked, “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge them in a court, how can you have enough evidence to take away their citizenship?”
Dutton replied: “That’s the point, Barnaby. You don’t need too much evidence. It’s an administrative decision.”
What’s most striking about this exchange is not Dutton’s open derision for evidence and argument. It’s not even that he thinks citizenship might be best subject to his own administrative whim. It’s that in his answer, he doesn’t seem to parse the fact that Joyce’s remark is actually an objection.
For Dutton, making citizenship the gift of a minister is not a bug, but the proposal’s key feature. He’s not only enthusiastic about sidestepping the courts – it’s as if he can’t quite fathom why others wouldn’t be. Why wouldn’t you want to avoid the tiresome insistence on burdens of proof, standards of evidence, and presumptions of innocence? Isn’t that the whole idea?
Dutton started his working life as a Queensland cop. But many politicians without that personal history are happy to submit to what we might call “police logic” in framing and administering policy across a wide range of areas.
From local to federal politics, the imperatives of security and order are wheeled out to justify everything from nightclub lockouts to mass surveillance. Opposition is waved away – by the government and its media cheer squad – as the bleating of do-gooders or even terrorist sympathisers.
In case of Sydney’s lock-out laws, a folk devil – young, roid-raging, drunken men – was the centrepiece of the moral panic breathlessly peddled by ailing newspapers. This in turn justified a late-night curfew, a strange thing in a town with such heavy pretensions as a global city.
In the case of surveillance and terror laws, no specific threat or incident has proved necessary in claiming more and more of our communications data, and more and more draconian measures against those merely suspected of terrorist involvement.
State and national conservative governments have made security crackdowns an integral part of their style. Security and law and order are issues that the right, with some justification, think they own. This is how they have learned to win government, and this is how they have learned to keep it.
Often enough, Labor governments will enthusiastically follow suit. In federal opposition, we find Labor bending over backwards to support “national security” laws, simply in order to avoid presenting any alternative that might be attacked. With Labor now pledging to work through these citizenship follies in a “constructive and bipartisan way” we have perhaps reached a new low, but it’s bound to get worse before the next election.
Where does this momentum towards authoritarian responses come from? And why is there so little apparent opposition to it?
Perhaps it’s true that all nation states try to extend their authority to act unaccountably. Governments have backed away from the kind of social policy that heads off crime, misery, and indeed terrorism, and poured resources into security, policing and incarceration.
It may be that everywhere, as Jacques Ranciere puts it, “as the state tends to unburden itself of its functions of social regulation to give free run to the law of Capital… \[it is]\reduced to the purity of its essence, that is, the police state.”
Even so, in other jurisdictions there is some resistance to these changes at the centre of the political debate. The Republican party’s recent congressional civil war over the extension of surveillance under the Patriot Act, and Hillary Clinton’s recent questioning of mass incarceration together show how the Snowden revelations, the extrajudicial killings of young black men by police, and the movements that these incidents sparked have started to make a difference somewhere near the heart of the American political process.
In this instance we see law enforcement and security in the US encountering certain limits. I’d agree with anyone who said there’s a long way to go on these issues, but in Australia, it’s hard to imagine right now where minimal, effective resistance to such developments would come from.
Without at all minimising the brave work of Australian activists working on deaths in custody, racialised policing, and mass surveillance, it is striking that in Australia’s major parties, there is an effective consensus on the ramping-up of policing and national security measures.
Is it something in our history? We started as a carceral colony whose gaolers were soldiers, government-appointed Native Police colluded with settlers in the dispossession and murder that lies at the root of our entire system of property, and governments of all hues have not hesitated to send out police and security forces against those engaged in labour strikes and social protest.
More recently, the Howard government saw fit to send the army against a putative emergency in remote Indigenous communities, sent federal police into a quasi-colonial policing mission in the Solomon Islands, lampooned state police for not being tougher on striking wharfies, and along with its successors deployed private security guards to watch over incarcerated refugees, some of whom had been put there by a Royal Australian Navy assigned to a grim form of border patrol.
Time and again, there has been a blurring of the lines between the military and the police; between the interests of justice and the interests of capital; and between national security, political expediency and mere order.
But that still leaves us wondering why, now, a more effective resistance to all of this isn’t evident. History doesn’t simply determine the present. Yes, the harnessing and abuse of arbitrary power has happened in the past. But why, now, is it seemingly happening on such a broad, dystopian scale, and why is it the subject of such a broad consensus?
You could reach for quasi-mystical invocations of national character. Perhaps, despite our much-vaunted anti-authoritarian streak, Australia’s penal past has left us with an automatic deference to uniformed authority. But that’s hardly a satisfactory explanation in plural nation which has seen successive waves of immigration.
The best clue to what’s really been happening comes from a piece that George Brandis wrote for the Guardian Australia. Brandis has received plaudits from some for baulking at Dutton’s and Abbott’s proposal to strip people of their citizenship, but we shouldn’t let that obscure the fact that he’s presided over a dramatic extension in Australia’s surveillance regime, and enhanced laws to deal with acts of terrorism that never seem to materialise.
In explaining how he turned from a John Stuart Mill-quoting shadow to a snoop-happy attorney general, Brandis wrote that:
As a lawyer, I have a bred-in-the-bone respect for due process and civil liberties. But I must confess frankly that, as the minister within the Australian system with responsibility for homeland security, the more intelligence I read, the more conservative I become.
In other words, following a path trodden by so many lawyer-politicians before him, Brandis was briefed by security services, and was either rattled into acceding to much of what they asked him for, succumbed to his own recognition of the rich political opportunities that the war on terror presented, or both.
It is in these interactions – the briefings between security services or police and the relevant ministers – that a lot of important policy is made without a lot of serious scrutiny as to its basis. We have to take Brandis’s word for the seriousness of what he has seen, because so much of the content of his briefings is secret.
The problem goes beyond the lack of transparency in the interaction between surveillance, briefing, and the authorisation of more surveillance. In the absence of effective opposition to the general extension of state authority, the demands of the security apparatus and the rhetoric of politicians ratchet each other up.
Warnings and recommendations push governments into making security one of their central concerns, manufactured emergency engenders political success (even in an atmosphere of generalised contempt for politics), and politicians go looking for more insecurity to hawk.
Perhaps it’s time we put aside long-established tendencies in our political debates, and started considering police and security services not as neutral good-faith actors, but as political actors with their own agendas.
When we do, we begin to see that they have had things their way for quite some time. Outside the major police inquiries now receding into the distant past, there hasn’t been a major winding back of the powers of police and security services in a generation. The tide has all been in one direction.
From there, if we also keep in mind the degree of access that senior officers have to ministers, and the lack of transparency that attends their conversations, we might recover the sense that every significant social movement in Australian history has had: police and national security services are a significant pole of power in our society, one that is not especially accountable, not especially hospitable to progressive change, and historically prone to corruption and overreach.
Dutton’s idea was both bad and wrong, and thank goodness his cabinet colleagues saw sense and rebuffed him (for now). Anyone else willing to stop it would not have been able to, and anyone able to would probably not have been willing.
But there’s a more important consideration in a period when Labor is expediently waving national security measures through. Why aren’t we demanding to know more about how these ideas emerge, and who’s pushing them? To what extent are the arguments of security services informing and even framing public policy?
And in the absence of effective parliamentary opposition, what can we do to mitigate the outsized power of cops and spooks?
