25 August 2007

aspirational justice

The Man of Steel's prime ministerial sermons are gutting increasingly silly and more and more all they do is excuse a group of Australians and banish them beyond the pale. Australians in remote indigenous communities do not get asked about intrusive government measures that will not reduce the incidence of child abuse and are contrary to what the authors of Little children are scared recommended. Australians worried about nuclear power do get asked. Australians worried about local council amalgamations do get asked.

The expanding reach of the Man of Steels passion for talking about anything and everything but his own record has now touched on criminal justice. Australians who protest are clearly not part of the nation either.

More than that, they're guilty of offences they have not yet committed.

22 August 2007

Haneef transcript

The Haneef transcript is in the public domain, where it should always have been. Now we all know that Western civilisation as we know it faces a threat more dire than the invasion of the Mongol hordes under Batu Khan in 1241. So dire a threat that we need an ever-vigilant Federal police to keep us safe in our beds.

That's why I'm a little alarmed to read at least one of our vigilant defenders has a small gap in his technical awareness.

HANEEF: No sometimes I use Skype.

AFP: How does that work?

HANEEF: That's just an Internet calling.

AFP: Okay, I'm unfamiliar with that, that's all. What do you need for that?


I'll read on, as soon as I've carried out my civic duty of telling the AFP about the highly secretive and dangerous Internet technology known as Skype. The highly-trained AFP interrogator also appears not to know what a Yahoo chat is, what years Indians attend school, what a medical intern is, or even the basic geography of Bangalore or the state of Karnataka. In the alternative, the AFP interrogator may know all these things but decided they're so secret they had to be kept from Haneef and his lawyer at any cost.

If this is the best the AFP can do, we should all invest in rubber bed sheets. And while we're at it, we might like to recall the French state was so busy framing Dreyfus they allowed the real spy, Esterhazy to escape.