Really, there's no choice but to post the whole article.
Brown pricks, PM deflates
By�Alan Ramsey
December 14 2002
It was Bob Brown who did it. He might well be the most impractical political leader in the business. But he sticks. Likewise his party, the Greens. They do not roll over on a policy decision. Usually that decision is as principled as it can be impolitic and implausible. The Greens live in the forests, with all the other elves and goblins. But you have to admire their resolution and their values. And increasing numbers of voters, sick to death of debauched major party behaviour and slick, prostituted political values, look to the Greens as the conscience of political life.
So what was it Brown did?
He made a speech. Parliament had been up all night, locked in a contest of wills with John Howard. The Senate sat for 25 hours straight, from 9.30am Thursday to 10.30am Friday. The last time anything like that happened was during the second Senate debate on the Telstra sale a few years ago. This time it was the new ASIO powers bill.
Now there aren't going to be any new powers. Twice the Senate sent the ASIO bill back to the House, insisting the Government accept its amendments, the great majority of them Labor's. Twice Labor, the Democrats and the Greens combined to frustrate the Government's insistent demands there be no amendments. The second time, at 10.30 yesterday morning, the Government folded.
Howard killed the bill - at least for now.
The Prime Minister decided if he couldn't have his ASIO bill, he wouldn't have any bill at all. If ASIO couldn't have the unfettered right to pick up, on special warrant, people as young as 14, anywhere, any time, detain them in secret, tell nobody, question them for as long as a week, charged with nothing, suspected of nothing, with no legal right of silence under threat of five years' jail, guilty of nothing except maybe - maybe - having information they didn't even realise they possessed, then ASIO would have no new powers at all. John Howard took his bill and went home for Christmas.
Yes, but what about Bob Brown?
The ASIO legislation has been before Parliament most of this year. The companion legislation, a package of five security bills, deals with actual acts of terrorism and suspected terrorists. This package went through the Parliament some time ago after extensive amendment by the Government itself and by the Senate opposition parties. But the ASIO bill - the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002 - has been jammed by controversy all year. The Government wouldn't give ground. Neither would the Senate.
The crunch came this week. The Senate adopted 35 amendments, 34 of them Labor's. The Government stridently opposed them all. The Greens and the Democrats voted with Labor for the amendments. And the key changes? 1) That the proposed new ASIO investigative powers automatically lapse after three years unless Parliament re-endorses the legislation; 2) That nobody under the age of 18 be subject to the legislation; 3) That denial of the right to silence be accompanied by specific civil rights protections, including protection against self-incrimination in any future charge; 4) That detention be only for the purpose of questioning and not for the purpose of detention without charge; 5) That a single detention period, under a single warrant, last no longer than a total of 20 hours of questioning, broken into three periods of four hours, eight hours and eight hours; 6) That questioning be carried out only in the presence of a "prescribed authority", ie, a judge or retired judge; 7) That any person detained under investigative warrant have the right to immediate legal representation of his or her own choice, and 8) no person can be subject to more than one session of 20 hours of questioning in a seven-day period, and only after seven days can a second warrant be sought to continue questioning. In the meantime, no person already subject to 20 hours of questioning can be held in continuous detention.
The Senate passed the amended ASIO bill, finally, at 4.33pm two days ago. It had first come before Parliament on March 21. And when at last it got through the Senate nine months later, heavily amended, the combined support of 12 hardy souls - the Greens, the Democrats and One Nation's Len Harris (Qld) - voted no, they wanted no truck of any kind with "police state" legislation. They'd supported all Labor's amendments to water down the bill. But then, to make their attitude crystal clear, they voted against the bill as a whole. Thus, ironically, the Government was left to vote with Labor to get its bill through in its highly modified form. It was a far cry from the legislation the Government had first come up with nine months earlier, under which children as young as 10 would have been strip searched and detained indefinitely.
And Bob Brown, what?
The House bounced the bill straight back to the Senate overnight. The Government made two concessions, reluctantly. One was to adopt Labor's three-year sunset clause lapsing the legislation. But it wouldn't budge on the new detention powers. And neither would the Senate be stood over.
The Liberals' Ian Campbell read out a long list of the amendments the House was refusing to accept. But the Government's bloody-mindedness did no more than incite some of the best speeches of the months of debate. Labor's Senate leader, John Faulkner, was resolute in not buckling to the Government's threats and blame game.
Then Bob Brown spoke. John Howard had just gone on early morning radio to damn the Senate for what he professed was the Senate's threat to Australian lives. Brown was appalled. He went after Howard with a baseball bat. Part of what he said: "When the Prime Minister damned the safety of Australians, he reached a new low in debate. What is uncovered here, coming from the Prime Minister's office, is a new political correctness which says, if you don't agree with the Prime Minister of this country, you're some way on the side of those who are anti-Australian or would create terror here. This is no way to facilitate a debate in a great Parliament like this.
"There is no doubt this is a very, very complex and difficult piece of legislation which demands resolution. It demands resolution today. Therefore it demands both sides listen to each other. We have the Senate leader [Defence Minister Robert Hill] saying he has been horrified by the de facto government that the Labor Party presents itself to be. In fact, what he's saying is that this Parliament does not have a role in scrutinising legislation from the executive. This idea that anything the Prime Minister puts forward in these increasingly tense and dangerous days cannot be countermanded, even by the elected Parliament of Australia, is a very dangerous mistake ...
"When legislation is brought into this Parliament by the Executive and Parliament determines there should be amendments, then the Government should listen. And when the Prime Minister and the Government won't brook amendments, then it is democracy itself that is being questioned by the Prime Minister.
"The Greens have said this is draconian legislation which we oppose. We have nevertheless, with the Democrats, supported the Labor amendments. That is proper process. Even Labor says it has come up with a tough 'compulsory, coercive, questioning regime' for ASIO to deal with terrorism. And whatever else the Government might say, that regime gives ASIO unprecedented power to take people off the street, to question them, in the first instance without legal representation, without other people knowing where they are, effectively held secretly, their usual rights taken away, and these are people not suspected of terrorism, or knowledge of terrorism, or potential involvement in terrorism. These are innocents that ASIO suspects may have information ...
"It is incumbent on the Prime Minister, if he believes there should be greater powers given to ASIO, to accept what the negotiations with the Labor Party have given him. I'm talking here about bringing this out of the Prime Minister's realm of his ownership of democracy in this country and having him accept that this is a Parliament working in the national interest. How dare he or his ministers say that the workings of this Senate is to damn the safety of Australians. How dare he say that about representatives in this place. That is the new political correctness trying to silence critics. And the Prime Minister is now in the dock on that.
"I've watched in this Senate for 18 months as the Labor Party sided up with the Government on Tampa, on legislation to bring in the army against peaceful protests before the Olympics, on a series of laws which have eaten into civil liberties and political rights in this country. But we've seen something different here today. The Labor Party has said, 'We are going to stand for something different, and we do recognise this is a difficult decision between our political rights, our democracy, on the one hand and the threat of terrorism on the other hand.' And the Prime Minister and his Government feels that in that situation where an Opposition is, for once, acting as an Opposition, as a real Opposition, they can't accept it.
"Well, they're going to have to accept that this is a democracy where the Parliament ultimately makes the decision. And if the Prime Minister walks away from that, be it on his head. It is his responsibility that where he believes there must be strong laws, he opts instead for no laws."
And that is exactly what Howard did. He behaved like an arrogant booby more interested in exploiting a political outcome where he can blame Labor than a legislative outcome to meet a threat he insists is real. And the Green Brown nailed him exquisitely.
He did not miss Labor, either.
Sydney Morning Herald
More to come...
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