Our values define us not our race or religion

Our values define us not our race or religion

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September 30, 2014 - 12:00AM

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Tim Soutphommasane

Political philosopher and regular columnist

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Illustration: Jim Pavlidis.

It is said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Today we have many reasons to be watchful. All of us are rightly
disturbed by the prospect of terrorist acts on Australian soil.
Counter-terror raids in Sydney and Brisbane, and the shooting of
teenager Numan Haider in Melbourne, have heightened community concern.



Yet we must also be vigilant on more than one front. We must
be united in countering terror. We must not allow fear and suspicion to
triumph.




Unfortunately, there are elements that would like to see
nothing more than social division. Nothing would please ISIL extremists
more than to see Muslim Australians being alienated or ostracised. Were
this to happen, ISIL's job becomes easier – it would help them recruit
disaffected Muslims to their heinous cause.

Race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane.

At the same time, there are xenophobic factions that see an
opportunity to spread their messages of hate. Muslim communities have
reported an increase in hate attacks. There has been abuse of Muslims on
streets and graffiti on mosques. There have been violent threats: last
week a man armed with a knife entered an Islamic college in south-west
Sydney.

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Anti-Muslim bigotry is now contaminating community harmony at
large. For example, Sikh Australians say they are becoming targets of
racial abuse because people are linking turbans to terrorism.



Bigotry has no place in our society. There is no right to be a
bigot. Every person in Australia should be free to live without being
subjected to harassment or humiliation. As a liberal democracy we uphold
the freedom to practise your religion.



These tenets of our public life usually require no repeating.
They are simple expressions of fairness and decency. But at times of
community anxiety we should remind ourselves of our most basic values.



In the weeks and months to come, there will be further debate
about national security. Already we have seen some ill-judged
statements that have inflamed sentiments about Muslims and Islam.



There is a special responsibility for our elected
representatives to set an example. No one benefits from ignorant
rabble-rousing. Social cohesion mustn't be sacrificed for soundbites.



The tone of leadership matters. One message in particular
must get through: Let's not judge entire communities by the actions of
extremist minorities. ISIL and its supporters are not representative of
Islam.



Indeed, while a small number subscribe to their abhorrent ideology, the overwhelming majority of Muslim Australians do not.



Why would they? Of those lives claimed by ISIL's cultish
aggression in Iraq and Syria, the majority have been Muslim. More to the
point, ISIL's aims are incompatible with Muslim Australians getting on
with their lives. Why would they support a group whose actions are
certain to make their life more difficult?



It makes little sense to define the many by the actions of a
fanatical few. It's not only misguided, it's also deeply unhelpful. It
does nothing to aid the efforts of moderate Muslim community leaders to
stamp out the embers of radicalism. 



Muslim Australians are entitled to a fair go. The vast
majority are law-abiding citizens who are committed to this country.
Earlier this month in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba I attended a
community barbecue organised by Lebanese community leader Dr Jamal Rifi.
Thousands from the community attended under the banner of "Muslims Love
Australia". They are evidently patriotic.



The patriotism I saw in Lakemba was a particular kind. It's
the patriotism of migrants, a love of country that comes not from
ancestry but from citizenship. I know it well as a first-generation
Australian who arrived as a child of migrants. For those who seek to
make a new life here, there is no stronger aspiration than to become an
Australian – for their children to become Australian.



Such patriotism is typically a pride that lies within. But
it's the right kind of pride for a multicultural Australia – a modern
Australia that has been built on immigration. We are a country that is
today defined by our values, and not by race or religion. 



Multicultural Australia involves a compact. Everyone should
feel relaxed and comfortable in their own skin. Everyone should enjoy
the right to express their heritage or practise their faith.



But multicultural Australia has its limits, too. Rights come
with responsibilities. Everyone should be committed to parliamentary
democracy, the rule of law and an Australian national identity. Where
religion or culture clashes with any of these things, the demands of
citizenship must prevail. Our civic identity is paramount.



This bargain is written in the oath that every migrant takes
when they become a citizen: "I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its
people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I
respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey."



These are terms all Australians can abide by. At a time when
our liberties and security are being rightly debated, it is only right
that we return to our social contract.



Most of all, we must remember that national security can
never be divorced from cultural harmony and social cohesion. And we are
always better placed to combat threats when we are united rather than
divided.



Tim Soutphommasane is Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/our-values-define-us-not-our-race-or-religion-20140929-10ndch.html#ixzz3EmXrn6gE

George Brandis's political crusades win him no fans | The Saturday Paper

George Brandis's political crusades win him no fans | The Saturday Paper

George Brandis's political crusades win him no fans

Sophie Morris

An outsider during the Howard years, George Brandis is at the centre of this government, and at the centre of its follies.

AAPIMAGE

George Brandis and Tony Abbott on Tuesday.

Let it not be said that George Brandis, QC,
abandons an unpopular brief. The attorney-general persisted in making
the case for a dilution of the Racial Discrimination Act, to allow
bigots the freedom to insult and offend, right up until Monday night.

At a cabinet meeting just hours later, Prime Minister Tony Abbott
jettisoned Brandis’s free speech crusade, in the interests of uniting
“Team Australia” behind new national security laws.


Brandis was forced to take one for the team and switch abruptly from
championing individual liberty to curbing it, from Voltaire to Orwell in
the space of one awkward day.


“You win some, you lose some,” he ruefully observed the following day.


As attention swung to the ill-defined counterterrorism measures, the
government also began to show signs of pragmatism elsewhere, flagging a
willingness to compromise to secure senate passage of contentious budget
measures, starting with university changes.


Now Brandis has another unpopular brief to prosecute. Already, he has
stumbled in trying to explain what data about Australians’ internet use
intelligence agencies want telecommunications companies to retain.


And that’s just one in a raft of new counterterrorism measures,
including a proposal that anyone visiting a region that the government
has declared a no-go zone could face charges and have to prove their
intent was innocent.


His critics are having a field day.


“If Tony Abbott and the cabinet don’t trust George Brandis with
social policy why should Australia trust George Brandis with national
security matters?” says shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus, helpfully
suggesting that Abbott replace him with Malcolm Turnbull.


Acting Greens leader Adam Bandt urged him to consider falling on his
sword after he struggled to define metadata in an awkward interview on
Sky News. “George Brandis is a hopeless minister with a dangerous
policy,” he says.


Even Liberal MPs say privately that Brandis botched the case for changes to the Racial Discrimination Act.

Whatever qualms Brandis once held about Abbott’s views, he is now in the prime minister’s inner circle.

Never were the internal contradictions of the nation’s chief law
officer more apparent. He is a devotee of J.S. Mill, yet he is proposing
to expand the powers of the state, encroaching on individual liberties.
He is a moderate Liberal who has become the Coalition’s leading
cultural warrior. Long excluded from the Howard cabinet, he is now in
the government’s inner sanctum and intent on staying there.


He has the ear of the prime minister. Indeed, he was doing Abbott’s
bidding by pursuing the removal of section 18C from the Racial
Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to “insult or offend” on
racial or other grounds. In opposition, Abbott vowed to overhaul the law
that conservative News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt was found to have
breached in 2011 when he cast aspersions on “light-skinned” indigenous
Australians.


Brandis prosecuted the philosophical case with fervour. When asked by The Australian
last year if he had the tenacity to push through the changes, he
declared he was “born for it”. Yet he failed to grasp the politics. His
ideological certitude seemed to blind him to the inevitable backlash,
not just from ethnic groups but also from the Liberal MPs who represent
culturally diverse seats. 


Although the debate had run already for some months, the first time
many voters twigged to it was on March 24, thanks to Brandis’s
statement, under questioning from Labor’s Nova Peris in the senate,
that: “People do have a right to be bigots, you know.” And, with that
utterance, a blue about bigotry eclipsed all valid arguments about the
importance of free speech in a vibrant democracy.


Not that Brandis regretted saying it. He made this clear a month
later, when he dined at Sydney restaurant, Machiavelli, with the British
editor of Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill, who is variously
described as a Marxist firebrand and a libertarian ideologue. They
enjoyed “too much booze and amazing food”, wrote O’Neill in a 2600 word
tribute to Brandis’s defence of “the Enlightenment-era principle that
the state shouldn’t get to determine what people can think and say”.


Brandis had a receptive audience and was in his element, holding
forth on his philosophy on how the left is stifling debate and
attempting to impose its “secular morality on society at the cost of the
freedom of speech”. 


But he failed to make his case where it mattered, to the ethnic
communities that felt threatened by the dilution of protections against
hate speech.


There can be no doubting Brandis’s sincerity when he waxes lyrical
about individual freedom. It was the guiding theme of his first speech
when he was appointed in 2000 to fill a casual senate vacancy following
the retirement of Queensland Liberal Warwick Parer.


“For as long as I sit in this place I will defend the absolute right
of all citizens to the free expression of their opinions – no matter how
unfashionable, ignorant or offensive those opinions may seem to
others,” he vowed.


Most first speeches give an insight into the personal backstory of a
politician and the relationships that have shaped them. Usually, there
are words of gratitude to friends, family, political allies. Not so for
Brandis. He guards his privacy closely.

Back to top

Disdain for Howard

“Aloof” is one word that comes up frequently when colleagues and
associates are asked to describe the attorney-general, though one does
mention his wry humour.


His first speech was heavy on ideas and light on autobiographical
detail, beyond a reference to the lessons he had learned from Sir Isaiah
Berlin at Oxford University in the 1980s and, as a trade practices
lawyer, horrified at Labor plans to reduce protections for businesses
against industrial disputes.


He was at Oxford, on a Commonwealth Scholarship, at the same time as
Abbott, but they were not close. Abbott was a jock, Brandis was bookish.
He was already deeply interested in politics. Former editor-at-large of
The Age Mark Baker recounted in a profile last year how, at
Oxford, Brandis formed two life-time friendships, with Don Markwell and
Tom Harley. Markwell is now a senior adviser to Education Minister
Christopher Pyne. Harley is a prominent Melbourne businessman and
Liberal Party vice-president.


Later, Brandis and Harley would be involved in founding a forum for
Liberal moderates – including Turnbull – which they dubbed the “Black
Hand”. The group still meets for dinner ahead of party conferences. In
2012, the Black Handers invited a certain mining magnate, Clive Palmer,
to address their dinner during the party’s federal council. Andrew Bolt
spoke at the function for those from the right.


Back in Brisbane, Brandis was admitted to the bar in 1985. He was
practising in commercial law when he entered the senate in 2000. But his
appointment as a Queen’s Counsel six years later raised some eyebrows
among the state’s barristers.


“There’s a process that exists for appointment of silk,” says
immediate past president of the Queensland Bar Association Peter Davis,
QC. “One of the criteria is you generally have to be a practising
barrister. He wasn’t practising as a barrister for about five years
before he made his application for silk in 2006.”


This clearly still rankles with some accomplished lawyers, including
colleagues in federal parliament, who imply that his elevation in the
profession had more to do with politics than merit.


In the senate, Brandis distinguished himself on committees,
vigorously defending the government in 2002 against Labor senator John
Faulkner’s forensic probing of the children overboard affair. But it was
a remark he apparently made in relation to this that would blot his
copybook with the then prime minister, John Howard. 


In 2004, a state party official, Russell Galt, claimed Brandis had
referred to Howard as a “lying rodent” and complained “we’ve got to go
off and over his arse again on this”. No one really believed Brandis’s
denial. He now says the “rodent” moniker was a harmless nickname.


Whether it was this indiscretion or the fact he was firmly in Peter
Costello’s camp, Brandis never made it into Howard’s cabinet, though he
was eventually given a junior ministry, for sports and arts, in 2007.


Again, his disdain for Howard was evident in an erudite and even
courageous speech he gave in 2009, as the Liberal Party struggled with
its identity in opposition. Brandis argued in his Alfred Deakin lecture
that, under Howard, the party had departed from the liberal tradition of
Menzies. 


“John Howard did not see the Liberal Party as simply the custodian of
the liberal cause,” he said. “For Howard, it was as much a conservative
party as a liberal party – indeed, with the passage of time, rather
more the former than the latter. Recently, Howard’s own political
legatee, my friend and colleague Tony Abbott, has taken up the cause of
making the Liberal Party more conservative still.” 


Whatever qualms he then held about Abbott’s views – which had been outlined that year in Battlelines, Abbott’s call to arms for the party – he is now in the prime minister’s inner circle.


On Tuesday, they fronted a press conference to announce the suite of
national counterterrorism laws to deal with the threat of jihadists
returning from Iraq and Syria.


“We’ve approached this, and I, in particular, have approached this
task with a very strong prejudice against expanding the powers of the
state and with a very strong prejudice against winding back traditional
rights and liberties,” Brandis said. 


Apparently, when Brandis served on the parliamentary committee that
has oversight of intelligence matters, he was less hawkish than some
MPs, more willing to question the need for extra powers. 


But it is impossible to judge what protections are in place and
whether he has found the right balance in the proposed national security
changes, given the details are still hazy.


Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull is one of the few cabinet
ministers to grasp the technological issues around the retention of
metadata but was initially not involved in explaining the measures. That
may have had something to do with a speech he gave in 2012, in which he
confessed “very grave misgivings” about metadata retention, which was
being considered by the then Labor government. At the time, Turnbull
characterised it as “the latest effort by the Gillard government to
restrain freedom of speech”.


The Brandis-Turnbull relationship is intriguing, as the
attorney-general seems to side with the prime minister on issues where
the communications minister lets it be known he has different views. The
two have also been at odds over the details of a crackdown on online
piracy. Brandis argues internet service providers should bear some of
the costs, but Turnbull says content owners, such as Village Roadshow,
who are making a loss due to piracy, should foot the bill.

Back to top

Philosophical challenges

Since becoming attorney-general, Brandis has had to confront some
realities that challenge his liberal philosophy. He has admitted as much
himself, saying in a speech in April that “the more intelligence I
read, the more conservative I become”.


He is not the first attorney-general to face this dilemma. Philip
Ruddock was also known as a moderate before his time as immigration
minister and attorney-general. “The present environment is perhaps one
that is more exposed to potential risks than we have had to face before
and that’s what the attorney has to deal with,” Ruddock told The Saturday Paper.
“One of the most important rights we all have is the right to life.
When you know that people use individual liberties to put at risk other
people’s lives, you have to balance that out.”


Explaining the need for the extra powers, intelligence chiefs told
journalists this week that Australia faced a real threat from
radicalised jihadists returning to Australia and the region,
particularly Indonesia. Their activities would need to be closely
monitored for years to come.


Dreyfus says the government should not assume a “blank cheque” from
Labor on national security legislation. He has already questioned some
of the proposed measures, including the removal of sunset clauses on
preventive detention orders that he says have never been used by ASIO.


As Brandis makes the case for new counter-terror measures, it
will test his own beliefs and his ability to mount an argument that will
require more than abstract ideals and scholarly speech-making.


Brandis finds himself at the centre of this government’s more
controversial policies. He’s failed in his first major challenge and his
job is about to get even harder.

Coalition's appointments part of a bigger pattern

Coalition's appointments part of a bigger pattern

The Conversation 1 September 2014, 12:00pm 12

Politics

(Image via theconversation.com)

Unpopular Abbott Government policies have been driven by
an alliance between senior ministers, econocrats and those who stand to
benefit from policy changes, writes Geoffrey Robinson from Deakin University (via The Conversation).



SINCE COMING TO OFFICE, the Abbott Government has initiated a wide range of reviews into policy areas such as the national school curriculum and the Renewable Energy Target. Some commentators have argued
that these appointments demonstrate a distinctive ideological bias that
distinguishes the Abbott government from previous administrations.



This analysis has correctly identified some provocative appointments,
but obscures a broader pattern of a shift to the right among some
mainstream policymakers, particularly in the Treasury and Reserve Bank.

A trek through history

During Robert Menzies' long prime ministership, the conservative
parties defined themselves as part of a governing establishment and
relied heavily on the public service. Menzies disappointed ideologues on
his backbench by his reliance on a public service schooled in the Labor
decade of the 1940s. The white-collar middle class and, in particular,
university graduates were strongly conservative.



But by the late 1960s, the identity of conservatives and
intellectuals began to break down as a new intelligentsia was drawn
towards Gough Whitlam’s reformed Labor Party.



In 1972, Whitlam came to power with clear objectives, but he lacked
faith in the ability of the public service to achieve these goals. His
government installed sympathetic intellectuals in the new role of
ministerial advisers, and as members of bodies such as the Schools Commission and the Woodward inquiry
into Aboriginal land rights. These were areas in which Whitlam knew
what he wanted, but economic policy was more intractable. Here, he
sought broader advice.



In 1974, the government set up an inquiry into the manufacturing industry, chaired by CSR executive Gordon Jackson with
representation from academics, business and unions — the latter
represented by Bob Hawke. The inquiry’s final report supported
structural adjustment and gradual lowering of tariffs.



In 1963, Menzies had set up a similar inquiry into economic policy
but was able to ignore its recommendations due to the economic
prosperity of the mid-1960s. By the 1970s, however, economic growth had
slumped and the Jackson report’s recommendations were taken more
seriously. They set the agenda for the economic restructuring of the
1980s.



Labor’s ascendancy in the 1980s reversed the alignment of the Menzies
years. Labor became the party of the intelligentsia. The collapse of
the socialist project rendered Labor a more efficient facilitator of
change within Australian capitalism than the Coalition, which was tied
to vested business interests.



Labor’s policy agenda was centralised by an elite that united
politicians, unionists, sections of capital and the public service.
Public inquiries and advisory bodies that disagreed with the new
orthodoxy were ignored or abolished.

More recent years

In 1996, John Howard came to power with a suspicion of the close
alignment of public service econocrats to Labor. Despite this, his
Government soon found common ground with the econocrats in support of
the GST, further labour market liberalisation, Reserve Bank independence
and privatisation.



The divergence of the Howard Government from 1980s orthodoxy was more
apparent in social policy issues such as welfare dependence and drug
addiction. This created an opportunity for policy entrepreneurs such as Noel Pearson and Mission Australia’s Patrick McClure.
They claimed an ability to solve “wicked problems”, such as social
exclusion, by a turn towards paternalism. This was evident in policies
such as the Northern Territory intervention.



By 2007, Labor presented itself as the heir of the Hawke-Keating
legacy of rational economic reform and consensual policy formation. Ross Garnaut, Hawke’s former economic adviser, was commissioned to report on climate change policy. Garnaut defined himself as a member of the non-partisan “independent centre”.



Labor hoped for consensus on education policy. Its inquiry into schools funding
was chaired by leading businessman David Gonski. On asylum seeker
policy, Labor sought consensus by enlisting former defence chief Angus Houston to chair an inquiry that defined the objective of policy as saving lives rather than defending the borders.



There were qualifications on Labor’s romance with the independent centre. On automotive industry policy, for example, it sought advice from those mildly divergent from the economic liberal orthodoxy.



In opposition, the Coalition – especially under Tony Abbott – criticised the “independent centre”. Conservatives complained that Treasury had gone soft.



Labor’s biggest problem was the slowdown in economic growth and the
fall in tax revenues. Budget deficits bedevilled Labor and became a vote
winner for the Coalition. The independent centre critique of the later
Howard years had taken economic growth and budget surpluses for granted.

The Abbott Government’s first year

Like Howard in 1996, Abbott came to power with a suspicion of the public service. The government’s clumsy imposition of a retirement date on Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson was a result of this suspicion.



There were nods to cultural warriors. Christopher Pyne appointed outspoken education commentator Kevin Donnelly to co-chair a review of the national curriculum. However, his fellow reviewer Ken Wiltshire is an establishment bureaucrat and academic who has worked for the Labor side of politics in the past.



On economic policy, the best defender
of the government’s agenda has not been its ministers. It has been
Parkinson, whom the Liberals distrusted as too close to Labor. The
slowdown in economic growth and the problem of budget deficits has
pushed some members of the independent centre back to the right.



The Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit
was chaired by a “business mate”, Tony Shepherd, but included included
Peter Boxall – a PhD-qualified econocrat – and Tony Cole, a Treasury
secretary during the Keating years.



Some of the Abbott’s government’s appointments to inquiries do play
to the conservative base, more so than under the Howard government.
Despite this, the most distinctive aspects of its policies – such as
inequitable fiscal consolidation and higher education deregulation –
have been driven by an alliance between senior ministers, econocrats and
those who stand to benefit from policy changes, such as the private
higher education sector.



A future Labor government might resent rather than celebrate economic
constraints, but the Abbott government’s policies are not simply the
result of ideological spite.





This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.