editorial | Nathan Hollier

THE NEW AUTHORITARIANISM

IN THE PREVIOUS ISSUE of Overland, Joel Deane wrote: “Like it or not, a nation’s political culture is a reflection of its national culture. As such, no two political cultures – particularly democratic ones – are the same, because each democracy cannot help but reflect its past and present social and economic circumstances.” The same point could be made of a nation’s legal culture. As David Nelken writes in a recent issue of the Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy, “Law may be remade by wider national culture; but it can also itself help mould that culture”.
    A cultural and political struggle is currently taking place over the proper nature and function of the law. For over ten years the Howard Government has systematically mounted populist attacks on laws or judgements that have either restricted its power or that it has disagreed with. Over the same period, this Government and its legal officers have sought to use the law to create popular support for itself and its policies, most obviously by categorising an ever-growing list of people as ‘criminals’ – from striking unionists to political activists to asylum seekers (the “illegals”) to members of organisations it has unilaterally ‘proscribed’, to the ‘seditious’. Worryingly, as many commentators have noted, the ‘seditious’ is potentially a very large grouping. For Brian Walters, in his lead article for this issue: “The law should be powerful so that it may curb the abuse of power. But the law is all too often about reinforcing power rather than controlling it.” “When that happens”, he suggests, “there is something drastically wrong”.
    But as Walters also points out:

At the federal level, the Labor Party has largely lost the sense of principle that once gave it purpose. The party which fought so hard, on sound principle, to prevent the banning of the Communist Party fifty years ago has now meekly acquiesced in handing to the Attorney-General the power to ban organisations, a power he should not have and which he has misused. Faced with issues like Tampa, SIEV-X, Guantanamo Bay, Scott Parkin, and the hasty scrapping of the centuries’ old right to liberty without criminal charge, Labor has not taken a stand.

As the major political parties steadfastly resist criticising powerful individuals and organisations, such as George W. Bush and the Business Council of Australia, they also compete with each other over who really hates the ‘evildoers’ in society the most, today’s ‘terrorists’, yesterday’s ‘people smugglers’, the ‘drug pushers’ of the day before that, etc. At the state level, particularly, a shameless chasing after established and potential corporate investors goes hand in hand with a desire to be seen as the strongest party on ‘law and order’ issues. “Despite repeated assertions to the contrary”, writes Peter Norden in a recent publication of the Bridge Foundation, set up to support prisoners on release, “and occasional misleading figures being presented by groups with a clear partisan agenda, it is apparent from the most reliable sources available that there has not been a significant increase in serious crime across Australia” (Out of Sight, Out of Mind). The past decade, however, has reportedly seen an increase of over 50 per cent in the nation’s prison population.
    In summary, Walters writes: “When it comes to corporate power, and economic matters, our political leaders are libertarian. They want small government . . . But when it comes to the rights of citizens, our political leaders are authoritarian.” In our society the owners and managers of big business are increasingly free, while the rest of us are increasingly unfree. The implication of this state of affairs is, firstly, that our political leaders are or believe themselves to be beholden to big business, and so are generally acquiescent to the desire of big business to do what it wants without any restrictions being placed on it, democratically, by society; and secondly that both big business and government have an interest in keeping the wider society both fearful and obedient (total corporate freedom being incompatible with any other set of social conditions).
    In this issue we examine the new authoritarianism in Australian culture and the important, contested role of the law within this culture. Walters provides an overview of the ideal relationship between the law and power and compares this to the present reality. David Ritter looks at how the ‘war on terror’ has been justified in Australia, by our political leaders, via a radical re-writing or drastic over-simplification of history. Robyn Walton seeks to counteract this failure of historical memory by providing a survey of earlier terrorist acts and organisations. She suggests that “the Australian electorate has been bluffed by those who represent terrorism as a new and exceptionally evil phenomenon into acquiescing to ‘tough on terror’ innovations which go beyond rational utility”.
    George Williams finds that “over the past decade there have been clear signals that when it comes to speech Australians are not as free as we like to think”. Unlike other nations, such as New Zealand, the US, Canada and Britain, he points out, Australia does not have a bill or charter of rights in which freedom of speech is protected. Those charged with sedition, he notes (a law which had until recently been discredited), include Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Peter Lalor, after the Eureka Stockade. New electoral laws, moreover, “aim to prevent or handicap ballot challenges to the mainstream political parties”, according to Michael Head. And Stan Winford draws attention to new Government moves to sabotage the already severely under-funded and limited legal services provided to ‘the poor’ (like ‘the seditious’, a group on the increase) by community legal aid centres.
    Elsewhere in the issue, Jason Bainbridge looks at the representation of Australian law in film and on television, Debra Dudek discusses the portrayal of asylum seekers in new fiction for children and young adults, and Anne Fairbairn draws on her personal history and long connection with the Middle East to identify possible reasons for anger in that region and elsewhere, seeking, as she says, to make the ‘leap’ to the Other mind.
    We are also especially pleased to publish Ian Kraitzer’s evocative memoir of pre-war Melbourne and the pre-war Left. Sadly, the Left stalwart Wendy Lowenstein, who I last saw at an anti-Iraq War demonstration, passed away shortly before we went to press. A tribute to Wendy will appear in the next issue.

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