A lunchtime rally organised by the Stop The War Collective was held today (Thursday July 19) in support of Dr Haneef at the Department of Immigration Offices in Adelaide St, Brisbane to condemn the federal government’s use of the Migration Act to detain Dr Haneef, and the undemocratic nature of the recently introduced “terror” laws.
About 120 people were in attendance plus a large media contingent generated by the sudden detention of Dr Haneef by the immigration minister yesterday.
The Building where the demonstration was held was placed in lock down by police some people were denied entry and workers in the building were kept inside during the protest.
Workers in the QANTAS call centre wanted to know why the police paddy wagons were outside their place of
work. One worker said it was the normal police over-reaction.
Another looking out the window of the call centre asked what is the meaning of the placard that read “Reckless with a Sim Card — Arrest Shane Warne.“
An Australian Services Union delegate in the call centre said later: “It makes you wonder how clueless some people are about (the Dr Haneef matter)”.
The speakers included Rob Nicholson who spoke on behalf of the Stop the War Collective, Dr Emad Soliman (Australian Democrats and Muslim community); Shabari Nair, Indian community; Peter Russo (Dr Haneef’s solicitor). Others on the speakers’ list were Ciaron O’Reilly (Christian Peace Activist), Jim McIlroy (Socialist Alliance and candidate for Griffith [Rudd’s seat]), and Stop the War representative, Paul Benedek who chaired the meeting.
For details of who said what see the excellent report by the Spring Hill Voice
Dr Haneef’s lawyer, Peter Russo said that the case presents a lesson for all of us. “The question now is, how do we treat people who come to the attention of authorities?” he said. “That’s the crux of the matter.”
The use of such laws is not new.
The report below titled Lest We Forget speaks of 27 crew members of the Pong Su who were released by the Court, only to be scooped up by the Immigration department (then DIMA-now DIAC).
Down the years both extra-judicial and judicial detention has been used against Aboriginal people, trade unionists, socialists and workers. In the early 1990s the Goss Labour Government redefined a detention centre for Aboriginal kids to frustrate an order for their release.
Secrecy
The use of such tactics can be compared with the use by Labor and Liberal Governments since the Second World War. These attacks on democratic rights have often been policed by secret government organisations like ASIO or Special Branches set up by various governments.
In Queensland the Special Branch worked for years using secret targetting of union members. Student activists were also detained unlawfully by various police acting with support of the Bjelke Petersen goverment.
Response
The message is that this is nothing new. And the response may develop in various ways.
I have addressed three types of response below.
I have ignored the legalistic or liberal response demonstrated by conservative judges arguing ‘due process’ and government ministers.
The idealist response where people protest only to be ignored as happened in the large mobilisations against the Iraq war. Academics, chuch leaders and peace activists often participate in this way.
The opportunist (electoralist) response is demonstrated by people who push candidates for election to parliament on the back of such opposition. As one refugee activist, Freddy Stein, put it. ‘I am not running for parliament so I do not need to speak for more than 2 minutes.’
Freddy Stein spoke well but put much emphasis on a parliamentary solution which has many risks for democratic rights advocates — not the least of which is the parliament is essentially undemocratic.
Parliament means rule for the rich not the poor. It is the executive of the parliament that has the power to detain people summarily.
On a strategic level, the opportunist response has been ineffective.
This is partly because the racists and war mongers on both sides of the house control the federal senate and will continue to do so after the 2007 federal election.
For example, only the minor parties have supported the release of Dr Haneef. Rudd has been silent. His spokeperson, Lindsay Tanner, has been an apologist for inaction.
The class or collective response.
We see little of this today. The workers are quiet. The organised labour movement want to get the ALP elected. At the rally today there was not one trade union leader or organiser who spoke. Yet it is workers who have the power to prevent the abuse of democratic rights.
This is a failing of the anti-war movement as much as it is of the organised labour movement.
We should not forget that this is very difficult to reach ordinary workers through the media. The rally focussed on the media so it was an attempt to get into the lounge rooms in the same way that party political advertisements do.
Also the police told one organiser of the rally that they would arrest anyone entering the building for trespass. For whatever reason this was not conveyed to the rally. I think it is important to let people know what the police have told you. It makes the rally more democratic. However we do live in times of fear, where people screen this kind of information out for one reason or another.
I told people at the rally about it but I was not on the speaking list so could not tell all present.
There are very real limits to protest. Protest does not engage in a challenge for power or, if it does, it is confined to a similar approach as parliamentary parties that ignores the class nature of society.
The power of the executive over courts
Recently a judge of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory fined four Pine Gap activists for entering the US spybase there. Nevertheless Minister Ruddock has authorised the DPP to seek jail terms against these people who were charge under Cold War legislation (Defence Special Undertakings Act 1952).
Punitive Detention
Today Dr Haneef is in punitive detention in Wolston Correctional Centre, at Richlands in Brisbane’s south-west. These means that he cannot speak to other prisioners.
Lest We Forget
The following is a report from Pamela Curr, Campaign Coordinator, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre ASRC, www.asrc.org.au
As the detention of Doctor Haneef once more highlights the seemingly limitless power of the Immigration Act, it is worth remembering other cases where people have been released by the Courts and the Immigration Minister has then turned gaoler under his own powers.
When charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, the 27 crew members of the Pong Su were released by the Court, only to be scooped up by the
Immigration department (then DIMA-now DIAC) and taken out to Baxter detention centre. There they languished in secret in a formerly, unused compound until the day that other detainees became aware of their presence.
Policy changes in the Baxter hellhole allowed detainees to be escorted on foot between compounds instead of in locked vans. On one such occasion, detainees attention was called to this never used compound by cries and eyes peering over the compound walls.
Detainee contacted advocates with their concern for these people. “We don’t know who they are but they are crying for help and we can only see their eyes. We don’t think that they are Chinese- we can’t understand their language.” The guard asked them to disregard what they had seen because “you will get me in trouble”.
Subsequent investigations revealed that they might be the crew of the ‘Pong Su’. This was confirmed when a list of names was produced. The list indicated the likelihood that many of these sailors were most likely fathers and sons. They were not seeking asylum. They desperately wanted to go home to their families but DIMA were holding them for their own purposes. It was only after it was revealed how distressed they were at being held incommunicado that they were finally granted their wish to leave- 13 weeks after the Courts had found them not guilty of any crime.
Technically the power to detain under the Migration act is so that persons can be removed from Australia, however as we have witnessed in the case of long term detainees, this power in reality allows the Australian government to hold a person for their entire lives without charge or judicial oversight.
To contact Pamela Curr about this article visit http://justfreedom.org.au
OR at ASRC, 12 Batman St West Melbourne 3003, ph 03 93266066 fax 03 93265199
See also on BushTelegraph The Sweet Life
Hey I had spent some time in there just wondering if you meet any good people…
We are all dismayed at the injustice of your situation.
As Gold Coasters and workers in the GC Hospital we wish you well and strength in this difficult time.
This is just like the David Hicks case all over again – Less politics and more justice required please……
To
Mohamed Haneef
Wolston Correctional Centre
Wacol, Brisbane 4076
Queensland
Australia
Dear Dr. Haneef
I would like to thank you for coming to Queensland and practising medicine.
From all reports your work at the Gold Coast hospital was exemplary and without doctors coming from abroad we would be in dire straights.
We would also like to congratulate you and your wife, Firdous Arshiya, on the recent birth of your baby.
We wish to apologise for the lack of hospitality and due process you have experienced from our government.
Know that the government has acted cynically, against my wishes and against the best of Australian legal traditions and sense of a “fair go”. We keep you and your family in our thoughts and prayers.
We know that your present incarceration is unjust and that peace always rests on justice.
Yours sincerely
If you agree with the above sentiments, please sign the letter in the space provided below to show Dr Haneef the support he has from the wider community
Brief Comments may be added if you wish.
Something concise and on topic I wrote,
“The Politicisation of the Police and the Policification of Politics. (A Queenslandish perspective.)”
http://www.deadroo.com/index.php/the-politicisation-of-the-police-and-the-policification-of-politics-a-queenslandish-perspective/
And this is something more vague and rambling.
I am curious about your 3 caregories of response to these matters. While I share your skepticism regarding the idealist and opportunist modes, however I would tend to put the class mode in the same basket, having similarly failed to find a response that is relevent and affective. Ideologies aside, it seems to me a historic fact that the ALP is in the final stages of destroying a union movement that has any capacity at all to act collectively on industrial issues, let alone broader social issues such as Dr. Haneef. I wish I had a correct line to point to, shining on the horizon by which to dismiss idealism, opportunism and class but I don’t – I have no alternative better than what the ids, ops and class modes offer. So it seems to me what may be more relevent to our current predicament is the need to explore for a mode, a system of organisation, action and education of these times rather than trying to revive the expired corpse of the workers movement that created the unions – and the ALP, its final conquerer.. The ALP are driving the nails into the coffin at present but the decline began with the collapse of the C.P.A. And S.P.A. who did indeed have significant influence in the union movement, to the point that they could mobilise industrial power on a particular strategic focus. But, despite the many trot imitation parties and their elitist interventionism (ooh!) the capacity for a class mode began slipping away years ago and has shown no sign of a recovery.
There’s got to be something new.
Environmentalism is often given credit as being the evolution of 60s,70s,80s radicalism and held up us the new paradigm to replace class. This is bullshit! The green movement, including the green party have abandoned campaigns for social justice of all sorts, from indigenous issues right through to workers rights. They put out platitudinous and obscure media releases on a range of issues in a most tokenistic way but never have they concentrated their energy towards a social justice objective as they have for, for example Tasmanian forests.
So its not a transition from red to green, the green movement has overlaps with the justice movement but is a different beast alltogether.
Whatever the new mode is, it has to incorporate Murries who have not fitted a class analysis to date, except to weld the class analysis with an analysis of racism. At the same time and same place in N.W. Qld where the Shearers were getting organised to form the first unions and the ALP the native police were mopping up the remnant Aboriginal resistance and all the survivors were being rounded up into reserves in the area. The slogan of the early AWU was “Australia for the white man”. This class stuff did not seem to be able to incorporate the needs of the invaded colonised and empoverished Aboriginal people of the time.
Even at the peak of worker support for AboriginalAustralia – the Gurindji strike – the left imposed the notion of worker onto Aboriginal people and its concomitant equal wage, which was the major cause of their dispossession from their land and ending up in refugee camps such as the Alice Spring town camps. I am not at all defending the master/slave nature of their land tenure up until that point. What I am saying is that the class solution was not the appropriate solution to an Aboriginal situation and has resulted in more deaths and misery in N.T.
It is no longer appropriate to understand Aboriginal people as the lumpen proletariet and fit within the traditional class mode. A philosophical example is land rights means Aboriginal people were and should be the owners of the means of production such as land, they are capitalists who got their wealth by inheritence and their children will be priveledged because of it. Aboriginal land modes do not fit within a socialist class mode. Aboriginal distribution systems indeed resemble communism, but within the family or camp. The economy was/is run through trade.
If our points of class solidarity cannot or do not accommodate Aboriginal aspirations (in their own terms, not our ideological interpretations of them) then it is a bit irrelevent in Australia. We, the working class, then take up our ruling class appointed role of primary occupation force for imperialism and colonisation. Why were their workers in N.W. Qld.? Why were workers brought to Australia? Not for anything to do with the needs of workers.
And the sad truth is many working class people are in harmony with Pauline Hanson’s pontifications because racism, while being a tool of imperialism and global capitalism, is an interclass common denominator reflecting Australian culture and character in the same way as racism was an ever present but invisible sub-agenda of white South Africans of all classes.