A chilling step closer to Australian secret police

Date

April 22, 2015 The Age

Jonathan Holmes

Foreign journalists are falling off their chairs in shock at the brutality of our data retention law, yet we hardly blink an eye.

Illustration: John Spooner
For days, we've been scaring ourselves silly, because a few Melbourne teenagers might have planned to attack police officers with knives on Anzac Day. Good on the cops for nabbing them, but hardly an existential threat to our society.
Meanwhile, nine days ago, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 became law, after passing through both houses of Parliament with Labor support.
The more power you give any organisation, the more light needs to be shone on how it uses its power.
A record of your electronic communications – who you call, or text, or email, or message, when you do so, and where you are at the time – must now be kept by your service provider for a minimum of two years. And more than 20 law enforcement agencies will have access to those records without the need for a warrant, and without (needless to say) anyone informing you.
Well, Attorney-General George Brandis​ asks, how worrisome is that? After all, before this law was passed, your metadata was available to 85 agencies. 
"The only change that this bill makes to the relationship between the state and the citizen," he told the Senate, "is to introduce safeguards in relation to the access of law enforcement agencies to metadata, which were not there before."
In particular, Senator Brandis addressed the so-called "chilling effect" on investigative journalism that the media feared would result from the authorities' ability to scour reporters' metadata in search of their confidential sources. That's been fixed, he assured us. The new act contains "a large and detailed architecture for the protection of journalists ... which forms no part of the existing law".
So it does. And I've been brooding about that architecture for the past two weeks, as I sat for many hours on aeroplanes, courtesy of the ABC's Foreign Correspondent. I've talked about it to journalists in Paris, Washington and New York, specialists in reporting on terrorism and counter-terrorism. And when I described one particular facet of the act to them – one that has received minimal comment here in Australia – they nearly fell off their chairs.
Division 4C of the amended act lays down that if a law enforcement agency wants to search a professional journalist's metadata in pursuit of his or her source, it first has to get a "journalist information warrant" from an "issuing authority" - usually a judge or magistrate - or in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation's case, from the Attorney-General.
The authority should only issue the warrant, the act says, if the public interest in doing so outweighs various other public interests, including the source's right to privacy. The authority must also weigh in the balance any arguments made by a public interest advocate.
This curious person – a senior lawyer (of course) with the necessary security clearances – will be appointed by the Prime Minister, no less. And, in the soothing words of the opposition defence spokesman, Labor's Stephen Conroy, "the PIA will be empowered to stand in the shoes of the journalist and argue why it is contrary to the public interest to issue the warrant".
Well fine. Except there's a Kafkaesque catch-22. The public interest advocate will not be able to inform the journalist or news organisation that a warrant has been sought, so the advocate cannot be briefed on any public interest aspect of the story, or any particular reason why the source should remain confidential, that is not already blindingly obvious.
Indeed, this public interest advocacy will not be public. It will be utterly private: one lawyer secretly trying to persuade another lawyer why a spook or a copper should not get access to a reporter's source, while the reporter – and, of course, the source – remain in blissful ignorance.
And here comes the kicker: the clause that had those foreign reporters falling off their chairs, but was barely mentioned by anyone, so far as I can see, in the parliamentary debates about the bill.
Section 182A of the new act says anyone who "discloses or uses" information about a journalist information warrant – about whether one has been applied for, or has been granted, or exists, or even does not exist - can be sent to prison for two years. Think about that.
What possible justification can there be for this extraordinary provision? After all, these warrants need have nothing whatever to do with terrorism or national security. They can be issued to any agency that is investigating pretty much any crime (including, presumably, the crime committed by any Commonwealth public servant who leaks official information to the media – see section 70 of the Crimes Act).
Section 182A is of a piece with the increasingly draconian enforcement of secrecy that Australians have blithely accepted since 9/11.
The 2003 act, for example, authorises ASIO to detain and question people for up to seven days, even if they are not suspected of complicity in a terrorist act, and prevents them from telling anybody that it has happened. The 2014 act says anyone who discloses information about a "special intelligence operation" can be imprisoned for up to 10 years. And there are many more such examples.
In the course of the debate on the new Data Retention Act, Conroy made this extraordinary statement: "Labor is determined to ensure that our national security and law enforcement agencies absolutely have the powers that are necessary to keep Australians safe."
"Absolutely" – what a dangerous word. Absolutism has no place in a democracy, especially not when it is applied to national security agencies. The more power you give any organisation, the more light needs to be shone on how it uses its power. To meet the terrorist "threat", we have been granting our security agencies and police forces more and more power, protected by ever more obsessive secrecy: more power, and more secrecy, than any comparable democracy in the world.
It is no exaggeration to say Australia is on the way to creating a secret police. What a triumph that is for the terrorists.
Jonathan Holmes is a Fairfax columnist and a former presenter of the ABC's Media Watch program.

The Australian government and the Opposition are trying to outdo each other in their appalling attitudes to people fleeing desperate situation in their countries, much of it imposed by Australia's military intervention in those countries and its support of regimes in other countries which treat minority groups as criminals and incarcerate and abuse them, denying them accepted human rights, which are purported to be their democratic rights as granted under the UNited Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Stop Australian Demonisation of Asylum Seekers

• author: Mannie De Saxe, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity, Melbourne
• target: Australians and International communities
• signatures: 86

86

1,000

we've got 86 signatures, help us get to 1,000

Australia has negotiated off-shore solutions to Asylum Seekers attempting to come to Australia in boats which are not seaworthy, and which have already been responsible for many drownings offshore. The latest human rights abuses are the so-called Papua New Guinea and Nauru solutions involving Australia sending asylum seekers to those countries never permitting them to enter Australia and become citizens here.

Both the Australian Government and its parliamentary Opposition are demonising people fleeing desperate situations in their countries of origin, mainly because of Australian military intervention in those countries.

The total numbers of asylum seekers trying to enter Australia is a miniscule number in terms of refugees and asylum seekers around the world, and most of the people in Australia illegally have arrived by plane!

Australia is signatory to United Nations conventions on refugees but is ignoring these UN documents in its political attempts to stop the demonised "boat people" ever setting foot in Australia.
Help to obtain justice for Asylum Seekers in desperate situations. Stop sending them to Papua New Guinea and Nauru and process them in Australia.

The situation has worsened with the federal government reopening the concentration camps on Nauru and Manus Island.
Get the government to close these camps now.

Please sign the updated petition and ask others to sign as well.

Stop Australian Demonisation Of Asylum Seekers

STOP AUSTRALIAN INCARCERATION OF ASYLUM SEEKERS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS - SIGN THE PETITION!

I started this petition some time ago when the federal government and its friendly opposition were vying with each other to see who could torture people who had already been traumatised by their persecution due to wars which Australia had been busy fighting in countries with which it had no right to be involved in.

People quickly lost interest in the issue because of other scandals blowing up around that time and subsequently the two concentration camps used by the Howard government were found to be useful for incarcerating those managing to get to Australia alive!

It is time to resurrect the petition and ask you to get your friends to sign it too. Thanks for your assistance in this humanitarian crisis.

care2 petitionsite

Stop Australian Incarceration of Asylum Seekers

Digg StumbleUpon Reddit Print E-Mail signatures: 86 signature goal: 1,000 post to facebook tweet this email your friends get the widget

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/13/stop-australian-incarceration-of-asylum-seekers/

Target: Australians and International communities
Sponsored by: Mannie De Saxe, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity, Melbourne

Australia is trying to negotiate an off-shore solution to Asylum Seekers coming to Australia in boats which are not seaworthy, and which have already been responsible for many drownings offshore. The latest attempt is the so-called Malaysian solution involving Australia sending 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia in exchange for 2000 refugees in Malaysia. Both the Australian Government and its parliamentary Opposition are demonising people fleeing desperate situations in their countries of origin, mainly because of Australian military intervention in those countries.

The total numbers of asylum seekers trying to enter Australia is a miniscule number in terms of refugees and asylum seekers around the world, and most of the people in Australia illegally have arrived by plane!

Australia is signatory to United Nations conventions on refugees but is ignoring these UN documents in its political attempts to stop the demonised "boat people" ever setting foot in Australia.

Help to obtain justice for Asylum Seekers in desperate situations.

The situation has worsened with the federal government reopening the concentration camps on Nauru and Manus Island.

Get the government to close these camps now.

ASYLUM SEEKERS - AUSTRALIA'S DISGUSTING, DISGRACEFUL BEHAVIOUR!!

It is difficult to know where to start with the issue of asylum seekers trying to come to Australia - politicians are trying to outdo each other in their appalling behaviour and each is getting worse than the other! In the end, are they any different from John Howard and his Tampa and his Peter Reith??

The trouble with it all is that most people who live in Australia have been asylum seekers of one sort or another over the past 200 years. It makes one shudder to imagine what would have happened to many of our ancestors if they had arrived here to be treated like this current crop of desperate people.

What makes it so much worse is that Australia, the pathetic lackey of imperialist USA, is involved in all the nefarious exercises with that country which makes so many millions of people in various countries need to flee the terror in their homelands.

I personally needed to flee my homeland because of the police-state nature of the world in which I was living, and am in the nature of an asylum seeker. I was lucky on several counts. I am white, speak English, have a tertiary education, and had a father who happened to have been born in Australia, although he only lived here for the first 8 years of his life - enough for me to qualify for Australian citizenship by descent!!!

What if??? There were enough people wanting to flee the terror of apartheid South Africa who were none of the above and so were not able to get out of that benighted country when they were desperate.

There are many people in this country who are very unhappy about the behaviour of the politicians who are running the show. Not enough of them are raising their voices to protest at "man's inhumanity to man".

The following article in The Age of 15 June 2011 is one of too few by those who have access to the media - which I do not have - who could make a difference, but don't.

The only way I have of making my small voice heard is by putting such items on my blog and on my web pages, both of which the mass media have no control over - fortunately!!

So read the article and raise your voices, loud and clear!!

Rescue us from this madness

David Day


June 15, 2011

Illustration: Andrew Dyson.

Neither side of politics has the courage to restore decent Australian values to the debate over asylum seekers.

WHEN future historians sit down to write our history, they will be puzzled and doubtless dismayed at the increasingly harsh treatment meted out to asylum seekers who fetch up on our shores after enduring hazardous voyages in small boats. Instead of receiving our sympathy and succour, they are thrown behind razor wire for long periods of mind-destroying detention. How did it come to this?

Back in early 1990, when I was writing a history of the Australian Customs Service, I flew along the Kimberley coastline in a small Coastwatch aircraft looking mainly for Indonesian fishermen. There was also the possibility of sighting a refugee boat, following the arrival weeks earlier of such a boat from Cambodia, the first to have come all the way from that war-racked place.

Looking through the Customs records in Broome, I came across the correspondence relating to that first boat, which had brought an extended family of 26 people. They had come ashore and been reported by the local Aboriginal people, who thought the people were Indonesians.

Even when their true origins became known, there was none of the hysterical hullabaloo that now infects the political debate. Instead, matter-of-fact newspaper reports showed pictures of grinning women and children relieved that their month-long journey was over, while headlines noted their ''amazing 5000 km voyage''. In that more innocent age, a Broome tourist operator even offered to house the whole group and employ its adult members.

Such an outcome would have been ideal. The refugees would have had immediate livelihoods, while Broome's labour shortage would have been eased. Alternatively, they could have been taken to a reception centre elsewhere, where their needs could have been assessed and housing and jobs organised. Instead, a posse of immigration officials escorted the refugees into months of detention in Sydney.

The bureaucratic reception was in marked contrast to the humane treatment of other refugee arrivals, whether it was Jews fleeing Hitler, displaced Europeans after the Second World War, Hungarians in 1956, Vietnamese fleeing their homeland or Chinese students seeking refuge after the Tiananmen Square massacre. And it had the unfortunate effect of locking both sides of politics into an approach that would get increasingly harsh as populist politicians and radio shock jocks began to bang away at the drums of fear and suspicion.

To his eternal discredit, John Howard took the drum-banging to new heights over the Tampa, when shipwrecked asylum seekers were met by gun-toting members of the SAS. This extreme response was a chance for then Labor leader Kim Beazley to show his mettle and remind Australians of their humanitarian obligations. But he funked his chance. There was an election in the offing and there was no time for talk of values or principles. Labor has been boxed in by the debate ever since and recently pushed into ever more extreme positions of its own desperate devising.

Now Australians are presented with the bizarre solution of sending 800 asylum seekers into the harsh clutches of the Malaysian government in return for 4000 of their refugees. The best that Tony Abbott can offer in response to this exercise in human trafficking is to suggest reopening the failed Nauru detention centre.

Back in the Howard years, when the Woomera detention centre was a byword for infamy, I suggested that it be kept as a historical monument to remind passing tourists of the moment of madness that had gripped us back then. Perhaps because of my suggestion, when the detention centre was closed, the site was bulldozed. Although there are no reminders at Woomera, every state now has a monument to our continuing madness.

Neither side of politics can take pride in the stands they have taken, the fears they have evoked and the damage they have caused to the most vulnerable of people. There is a solution, but it will take political courage. Political leaders on both sides have to restore decent Australian values and principles to the debate, which demand that people be treated with dignity, respect and humanity. Why should that be so hard, and why have political leaders of the major parties lacked the courage to do so?

Kim Beazley failed to display ticker over the Tampa, choosing short-term political results over long-term reputation, and was punished for being a tin man. Julia Gillard follows that sorry example as she thinks up ever more extreme ''solutions''. Labor has allowed Tony Abbott to portray himself as offering a more humane solution on Nauru than Labor offers in Malaysia or on Manus Island. And so Labor continues to be boxed in by John Howard's cruel political trap.

In the 21 years since that first Cambodian boat, while the politics have become increasingly fraught to the point of obscenity, the practical problem of dealing with asylum seekers has remained just as manageable as it was in 1989. There was no need to use detention centres back then and there is no need now.

Instead of fortified camps for mandatory and indefinite detention, we need reception centres where new arrivals can be briefly housed and processed, before being moved quickly into one of the many Australian communities that would welcome them. We also need a staff of immigration officers in Jakarta to process refugee applications, with preference for family reunion to deter desperate people heading here by boat. It just requires a leader with the courage to reframe the debate in terms of decent principles and values. Only then will the arguments of the fearmongers be neutralised once and for all.

David Day is the biographer of three Labor prime ministers. His most recent book is Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others.

ABORIGINAL DEATHS IN CUSTODY - MAYBE SOME JUSTICE AT LAST??

This article is from The Age newspaper:

Charges laid over death in prison van

January 20, 2011

THE wife of an Aboriginal elder who died of heatstroke in the back of a prison van says she is ''happy and relieved'' that Western Australia's work safety watchdog will lay charges over his death.

WorkSafe WA has laid four charges under the Occupational Safety and Health Act against the state government, the transport company and the two staff involved.

Mr Ward, 46, who cannot be fully named for cultural reasons, died of heatstroke in the prison van in January 2008. He was being transported from Laverton to Kalgoorlie on a drink-driving charge.
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WorkSafe charged the Department of Corrective Services with failing to ensure non-employees were not exposed to hazards. Transport contractor G4S was charged with failing to ensure the safety and health of a non-employee for the transportation of people in custody.

Drivers Nina Stokoe and Graham Powell were charged with failing to take reasonable care to avoid affecting the safety or health of the person in custody.

Mr Ward's wife said the charges had been ''a long time coming''.

CENSORSHIP - ONE OF AUSTRALIA'S BIGGEST GROWTH INDUSTRIES!

The following two articles were reports in The Age newspaper about the forthcoming Melbourne International Film Festival. Once again our censors make a laughing stock of their adult population!

Gay zombie porn gets festival flick

By PAUL KALINA

July 21, 2010


THE Australian censor has banned a film from screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival for the first time in seven years - a work described as ''gay zombie porn''.

Festival director Richard Moore received a letter yesterday from the Film Classification Board director Donald McDonald, stating that L.A. Zombie, the latest offering from Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce, could not be screened as it would in his opinion be refused classification.

The festival is not generally required to submit films for classification, but after reading a synopsis of the plot of L.A. Zombie, which features wound penetration and implied sex with corpses, the Classification Board requested a DVD to watch, and then refused to issue an exemption. It is the first film to be banned from the Melbourne International Film Festival since Larry Clark's Ken Park in 2003.

McDonald's letter says the decision to ban the film is based ''on information submitted by MIFF, inspection of the film and the classification history of the director''.

Described by Moore as a ''video art zombie film'', L.A. Zombie is to have its world premiere next week at Locarno, Switzerland. The Melbourne film festival would have been its second-only public screening.

The MIFF program describes the film as ''an adventure in cinema's most unmarketable subgenre - gay zombie porn'' and points out the ''schlock'' nature of LaBruce's deliberately B-grade and arty approach. The program also carries a warning about offensive content.

The film follows an alien zombie who roams the streets of Los Angeles in search of dead bodies and gay sex - an activity that reveals a gift of ''shagging'' the deceased back to life.

There are full-frontal nude scenes and erect penises. The zombies have cucumber-shaped penises which are clearly prosthetic.

Moore yesterday told The Age: ''Bruce LaBruce's blend of sex and violence can be confronting, but I would argue that within the context of the festival, it is nonsensical and patronising to not allow people to decide what they want to see.''

The film was scheduled for two screenings during the festival's closing weekend.

Moore said that the festival had yet to decide if it would appeal the decision, which he estimated would cost $2000.

The Classification Board director was unavailable for comment on the matter.

Bruce LaBruce's previous film, Otto; Or, Up With Dead People, screened at MIFF two years ago and many of his other films have screened at festivals in Australia.

He was a guest of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2004 with The Raspberry Reich.

An early LaBruce film, Hustler White, was refused classification in 1997, but was later given an R rating after a scene was cut.

In a media release marking the start of production on L.A. Zombies in May last year, LaBruce said: ''Not unpretentiously, I consider myself not so much a pornographer, as an artist who works in porn.''

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Zombie porn director 'delighted' by ban

By MICHELLE GRIFFIN

July 21, 2010


The director of gay zombie porn film LA Zombie says he is delighted his movie was banned.

‘‘My first thought was ‘Eureka!’’’ director Bruce LaBruce said, speaking from his home in Toronto.

‘‘I’ll never understand how censors don’t see that the more they try to suppress a film, the more people will want to see it. It gives me a profile I didn’t have yesterday.’’
'Eureka!' ... LA Zombie director Bruce LaBruce has thanked the censorship authority.

Mr LaBruce says the Australian classification board should have allowed LA Zombie to screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival because of its ‘‘artistic merit’’.

Festival director Richard Moore received a letter yesterday from the Film Classification Board director Donald McDonald, stating that L.A. Zombie could not be screened as it would in his opinion be refused classification.

‘‘My film is debuting at Locarno in competition, it’s a prestigious festival. So it’s self evident it has artistic merit and most censorship boards take that into account. I’m surprised [the Australian classification board] didn’t take it into consideration, if they knew.’’

'Positive message' ... LaBruce says his film is a metaphor for healing because people are brought back to life.

Made for ‘‘less than $US100,000’’ in Los Angeles last year, LA Zombie was devised as ‘‘a reaction against torture porn’’ says La Bruce. ‘‘People come back to life [in my film], it’s a metaphor for healing.’’

He called the classification board ‘‘hypocritical’’ for banning his film while ‘‘they pass so many mainstream films that have the most extreme violence, with brutal treatment towards women, and torture and dismemberment, but because they didn’t show a penis, they can be screened with impunity.’’

LaBruce admitted that his film did have explicit scenes of sex and violence, but said the version that was banned from the festival was a ‘‘soft core’’ version, where ‘‘it’s obviously a fake prosthetic. It’s a bizarre-looking thing with a scorpion’s stinger, it’s clearly not a human penis.’’

Film festival director Richard Moore said the festival has not yet decided if it will appeal against the ban, but LaBruce has already started a twitter and Facebook campaign urging Australians to protest the classification board’s decision. It is not yet known if the board’s decision to refuse to give LA Zombie an exemption from classification (so that it could be shown at festivals) will automatically mean that it will be refused classification as an R 18+ or X18+ DVD.

This is not the first time LaBruce’s films have been banned. Singapore has blocked several attempts by film festivals to screen his films, the British censors have insisted on the removal of scenes and segments from several of his films over the past two decades, before they could be released on DVD, and in Japan, his DVDs are distributed with a black dot hovering over the more graphic sex scenes.

The director denied he’d deliberately sought censorship when making LA Zombie, which features gaping wounds, corpses, and several [faked] body fluids in close-up detail.

‘‘I wasn’t expecting it with this one,’’ he said. ‘‘My film Otto screened in Melbourne and that also had a zombie penetrating another zombie.’’

MURDER IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA IN 2008, MURDER IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA IN 1977

28 and 29 JUNE 2010

I sent the following letter to the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP)(Australian) Bulletin, and they published it in September 2009. I am still outraged by the murder of Mr Ward in Western Australia in 2008 by boiling him in the back of a police van and the murder of Steve Biko in South Africa in 1977 (he had already been virtually bashed to death) in the back of a police van, naked and practically freezing to death.

The only difference between boiling to death in the back of a police van and freezing to death in the back of a police van is that the second one occurred in apartheid South Africa in 1977 and the first one 30 years later in 2008 happened because indigenous people in Australia continue to be treated as non-people at a time when human rights are a major issue in so many countries around the world..

Not only should it never have been allowed to happen in 2008, but the criminality of refusing to lay charges only makes the offence so much worse. Australia's ongoing disgraceful treatment of its minority indigenous communities is a stain on all governments in this country and one wonders when there will be politicians elected to the country's local, state and federal governments who will manage to stop the horrors of abject poverty, child deaths, malnutrition, lack of education, poor health, lack of employment opportunities - the list is endless!

Steve Biko was murdered by the South African government by being first bashed to near death on 6 September 1977, then transported naked in the back of a police van from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria, a distance of 1200km. He died 6 days later.

He had been taken on 6 September 1977 by South African Security Police to the 6th floor of a building in Port Elizabeth (a large southern port city) hand-cuffed, then put into leg -irons, chained to a grille and subjected to 22 hours of interrogation, torture and beating. He received between 2 and 4 blows to the head, fatally damaging his brain. He died on 12 September 1977.

South Africa in 1977, and now still in Australia in 2009, to quote from the report you (FSP) sent:
* The West Australian coroner will ask the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider laying charges over the death of a man who effectively baked to death in the back of a prison van.
* The Aboriginal elder known as Mr Ward was being driven in the van through searing temperatures of the Goldfields last January.
* The air conditioning unit wasn't working and the temperature inside the van reached more than 50 degrees.
* The 46-year-old man suffered third degree burns when his body came into contact with the hot metal floor of the van.
* The coroner said the Corrective Services Department, the contracting company GSL, and the two officers who drove the man were all responsible for his death.
* The company, now called G4S, has told Saturday AM that the two guards have now been suspended and could be sacked.
* But the family wants to see charges laid.

It would seem that the savagery of the South African government continues in Australia, courtesy of the Rudd and state and territory governments, and that deaths in custody, far from diminishing since the Royal Commission continue in an upward spiral which will not be stopped until there is such a huge national and international outcry that the governments in this country will be forced to take notice.

Unfortunately no country with indigenous people subjected to the control of the ruling classes have their hands clean, and it is difficult to ascertain which countries are worse than each other.

The stain of Steve Biko's execution will long live on in the memory of those of us South Africans who were aware of what the apartheid government was doing but felt powerless to do anything about it. Living in a police state was a very intimidating place to be a political activist, and I fled to Australia in 1978 with my family, escaping from the worst excesses of the police state which were still to come in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto riots.

To know that we live in a country where the excesses of our governments continue in the face of Royal Commissions and their recommendations is to be aware that we await our revolution but know it will still be a while arriving while capitalism goes from crisis to crisis taking us all along for the ride.

I personally feel horror when I think of the case which is now before the public gaze, and remember Steve Biko. How can one ever forget??
Mannie De Saxe

Prosecutor angers Aborigines by ruling out charges in prison van death during Outback journey

The Associated Press Jun 28, 2010


PERTH, Australia - A state prosecutor on Monday ruled out criminal charges in the death of an indigenous elder in a prison van with no air conditioning on a scorching summer day in Australia's Outback — a decision that angered Aborigines.

Western Australia Director of Public Prosecutions Joe McGrath said there was no reasonable prospect of a jury convicting the two prison guards who transported the 46-year-old prisoner on the fatal four-hour journey in 2008.

"I'm acutely aware that the death was tragic, avoidable and rightly creates outrage in the wider Australian community," McGrath told reporters.

The prisoner, now known only by his family name Ward because of a cultural prohibition on using the given name of a dead Aborigine, died of heat stroke in the back of the van where the temperature soared to 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius).

The two prison officers, who were in a separate front compartment of the van, did not check on Ward and were unaware that the air conditioner in the rear compartment was broken.

Ward suffered a third-degree burn to his stomach after collapsing on the van's metal floor.

A state coroner who investigated the tragedy last year found that the two guards had contributed to the "terrible death" and recommended that prosecutors consider bringing criminal charges.

Aboriginal elder Ben Taylor criticized McGrath's refusal to lay charges and warned that protests would continue until Ward received justice.

"They are killing our people off," Taylor said. "The poor man was cooked alive."

Aboriginal lawyer Dennis Eggington blamed the outcome on a flawed police investigation that deserved further scrutiny.

Aborigines are an impoverished minority of 500,000 in Australia's 22 million population who are imprisoned far more frequently than other Australians.

Ward was being taken from his desert home town of Laverton to the larger Outback centre of Kalgoorlie to face court on a drunk driving charge when he died.

The state government responded to the tragedy with plans to roll out a new fleet of 40 prison vans.

-----------------------------------

Outrage at van death ruling

Article in The Age

June 29, 2010


A DECISION not to charge two security guards over the heat-stroke death of a West Australian Aboriginal elder in a prison van has been greeted with anger and disbelief.

Mr Ward, an elder whose full name cannot be used for cultural reasons, died of heat stroke in the back of the van on a four-hour trip from Laverton to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia's Goldfields region in January 2008.

WA Director of Public Prosecutions Joe McGrath visited Mr Ward's widow Nancy at Warburton in the Central Desert at the weekend to tell her charges would not be laid.

He told her there was no reasonable prospect of conviction against the two security guards employed by the security firm GSL, now known as G4S.

Mr Ward's family were said to be distraught over the decision.

A broken air conditioner in the back of the van meant Mr Ward endured temperatures of more than 50 degrees during the non-stop journey.

He was being driven to Kalgoorlie to face a drink-driving charge.

Last year, WA Coroner Alastair Hope found the Department of Corrective Services and security officers Graham Powell and Nina Stokoe and their employer, had all contributed to Mr Ward's death.

Mr Hope referred the case to the DPP because he believed a criminal offence had been committed, he said.

Mr McGrath defended his decision not to prosecute yesterday, saying a thorough investigation had found nobody criminally negligent. He said Sydney lawyer John Agius had endorsed his decision.

The WA Deaths in Custody Watch Committee is seeking an independent review of the case.

WA shadow attorney-general John Quigley said it was inconceivable no one would face charges.

The WA government is finalising an ex-gratia payment to Mr Ward's family.
AAP

CONROY CENSORS GOOGLE!!!!!!

SENATOR CONROY HAS CENSORED GOOGLE IN AUSTRALIA!!!!!

Try this in you search engine:

Google

and see what comes up - you will probably have Google Australia

This is filtering out content that Conroy doesn't like!

And this is probably only just the beginning!!

RUDD, HOWARD - IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE?

Rudd announced a clampdown on Afghan and Tamil asylum seekers trying to get into Australia by saying they will no longer be allowed in for processing or refugee status.

In other words those people who have fled from regimes of terror in their home countries because of the policies of governments like Howard's and now Rudd's in their foreign policies and who are now refugees will be returned to the brutal regimes which persecuted them in the first place.

Rudd has been attempting to trump Abbott who has just taken over Howard's "We will decide who comes to this country and the manner of their arrival".

When I left South Africa for Australia in 1978 I really thought I was going to a country whose politics were so much more humane and progressive than the apartheid regime I was fleeing from, but how wrong can one be?

30 years later and Rudd's Australia has sunk to the lowest depths imaginable - with a government that brooks no argument or dissent of any sort and intends to silence what dissent there is by its internet censorship. They may think they will have shut people up, but as has been shown elsewhere - Thailand at the moment comes to mind - despite the shootings and killings having occurred there, people are still prepared to stay in the streets until they get what they want - free and fair elections.

In that sense we may still have the small semblance of democracy remaining because we still have elections, but when one examines how this democracy works to demolish opposition of all sorts by way of those elections, one really has to wonder where this government is heading!

BRUMBY GOVERNMENT LOSES THE PLOT AND HOPEFULLY THE NEXT ELECTION

There are people in the community who care very deeply about issues such as the Wonthaggi desalination plant. Unfortunately there are newspapers such as The Age which refuse to publish our letters - we are too bolshie for them and they kowtow to their editors and owners. Because the media is so pathetic, blogs have become a popular form of protest at what is going on in the world around us.

There is absolutely no reason in the world why Melbourne, as well as other cities around Australia can't use recycled water. Melbourne does not need to have water pumped from Tasmania, does not need the north-south pipeline, does not need a desalination plant.

Melbourne needs to have a recycling system! Just stand on any street corner when we have one of those rare events in Melbourne these days - a downpour with water falling from the skies. Look at the gutters and watch the amount of water flowing - to where?

Underground reservoirs built at low-lying positions to collect all this run-off and think of the millions saved by Victorians and the country using recycled water - not just from rare rain but from everything else we use water for and it gets flushed down our sewers and drains.

One day people will see the light and rebel against their capitalist-controlled governments and realise how they have been fooled for decades. Maybe then something realistic will be done, not just about water but about all those other things our governments do in our names!!!

Desal plant figures don't hold water

December 7, 2009

Comments 24

In the modern democratic state, the durability of the big policy lie is prolonged by secrecy, and where this is no longer tenable, by creating an artificial maze to make the relevant information as difficult as possible to find, and once found, almost impossible to interpret.

Take the case of the Wonthaggi desalination plant. Last month Premier John Brumby's office released a media statement based on a ''project summary'' that shows that the net present cost (NPC) of the 30-year project as a public-private partnership was $5.7 billion compared with $6.7 billion if the Government did the job. This is based on the public sector comparator (PSC), which is a government creation that purports to show the true cost to taxpayers if the Government undertook the project. Ergo, a saving of a billion dollars, which was duly reported in the media.

But even based on the figures the Government grudgingly includes in its summary, the PSC shows no such thing. A reasonable interpretation of the document shows that over the 30-year period, Victorians will pay $650 million a year for the water supplied by the PPP (Macquarie Bank, the French multi-national, Suez and the builder, Theiss). This compares to $425 million a year it would cost as a government project. The difference of $225 million a year is the rent that will accrue to the PPP groups and their financiers.

Public or private, the 150-gigalitre desal plant is not needed. The additional water could be produced at a sixth to a quarter of the cost by a judicious mixture of conservation, recycling and diversion dams.

The Government asked itself the wrong question and is offering as an answer a cover-up. Implicitly the project summary recognises that the construction and operating costs are the same for both the PPP and the PSC. The Government, like the PPP, AquaSure, would contract out construction and buy the stainless steel pipes and reverse osmosis filters from comparable sources and the main operating cost - electricity - would be bought from the National Electricity Market Management Company grid.

The main difference between the two NPCs postulated by the Government is the risk that is purported to be transferred from the Government to AquaSure. The PSC calculated that AquaSure would take on risks worth $782 million NPC, which translates to an annual burden equal to $82 million a year.

The main risks of operating a desal plant are many. For example, at some time in the next 30 years a future government might not want to take all the 150 gigalitres of desalinated water available; there could be interruptions to power supply; likely changes to the price of power and the exchange rate risk at the time when the foreign debt in the highly geared project needs to be rolled over.

The monthly service payments incorporate ''a security element that is paid to the extent that the project delivers water that is ordered or is capable of delivering 150 gl per annum'', which amounts to a ''take or pay'' contract, plus an unspecified usage payment depending on the water ordered each month, which probably amounts to a bonus.

Electricity prices will skyrocket because some form of carbon tax will be imposed on electricity generators, but the cost of this will be passed on to water consumers irrespective of who owns the desal plant.

All this does is simply underline the madness of using electricity to produce water when non-electric alternatives are available.

The project only got off the ground because AquaSure got a government guarantee for its borrowings. It was flooded with offers of loan money because the generous deal it got from the Government meant it could offer an interest rate slightly above the risk-free, long-term bond rate and a government guarantee at the same time.

In other words, the ''risk'' transfer that purports to make the PPP the superior proposal is a fiction. But the most egregious element in the PSC is to apply a discount rate of 7.3 per cent (real) to the comparator. This, after taking into account an underlying inflation rate of 2.5 per cent, implies the Government alternative had to earn a rate of return equal to 10 per cent to put it on a level playing field with the PPP bid even though the Government can borrow all it needs for a nominal interest rate 5.5 per cent interest.

The difference adds up to a colossal financial burden for the state. The difference between a return at current prices of 10 per cent apparently required by AquaSure and the 5.5 per cent needed to cover the costs of a publicly owned desal plant is an annual average extra payment of $225 million a year over 28 operating years based on an NPC of $5.7 billion.

To buy the approval of powerful local and global financial interests, the Government has mortgaged the future of this state to the hilt. The consequences of this are not yet even dimly perceived by those charged with the duty of providing good government.

Kenneth Davidson is an Age senior columnist:

kdavidson@dissent.com.au

We're dudded on water but no one rebels

KENNNETH DAVIDSON
December 21, 2009

Comments 32

It is tempting for governments to reward most the people who can keep them in power. They do it with tax cuts and subsidies. It is clear that this has increasingly become the modus operandi of the Brumby Government.

The question now is whether the Government is, in effect, becoming a kleptocracy with the passive co-operation of the Opposition, as all sides of politics refuse to justify or criticise my calculation that the cost of the Wonthaggi desalination plant will be $650 million a year over the next 30 years or $225 million a year more than if the project was financed with public debt.

Victoria's politicians, whatever their motives, show by their silence that they have more to gain politically by serving the interests of AquaSure and by keeping quiet rather than addressing the public interest concerns about the contract - which still hasn't been made public.

Both sides want to shut down debate. Yet Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu is in a win-win situation unless he is also part of the game.

The public-private partnership game depends on secrecy, embellished by complexity, which turns away all but the most curious and most obsessed about protecting the public interest. Complexity, which reinforces public apathy, is the favoured tool of rent-seekers of all types.

The most notorious example of rent-seeking throughout the 1970s was tax avoidance, tacitly promoted by the federal treasurer, John Howard, and sanctified by the Barwick High Court.

It blew up when the Painters and Dockers Royal Commission stumbled into a far bigger scandal in the form of ''bottom of the harbour'' tax schemes that ''deep-sixed'' companies after they had been stripped of all their money, including tax liabilities. This captured public imagination and tax avoidance became a significant factor in the defeat of the Fraser government in 1982.

The public waste, the failure to follow proper process and the continued secrecy about the desal contract between the government and Aquasure should also capture the public imagination.

I can't believe the scale on which Victorians are being dudded. The prospect of $20 billion over 30 years to undertake a project that isn't necessary, but could have been done for $12 billion, is financial turpitude on a scale hard to imagine - even in Third World countries that don't have or don't respect institutional checks and balances to keep executive government honest.

Since the election of the Kennett government in 1992 Victoria has progressively lost a professional public service capable of producing independent advice and an independent auditor-general with the confidence to write relevant reports in plain language, while FOI legislation has been reduced to a joke and parliamentary committees have seen their reports hijacked to reflect the executive agenda.

Brumby's silence in the face of the facts that have been gleaned from the limited information that has been made public is understandable.

Baillieu's silence is inexplicable - unless he has made the political judgment that the interests behind AquaSure can do his party more damage than the votes he would gain by articulating the public interest. A responsible Opposition could offer a way back from the financial precipice. Has Victoria now no defence against bad government?

There is one slim chance. Like public opinion when its attention to tax avoidance rorts was stirred by the ''bottom of the harbour'' evasion racket, unwelcome attention has been drawn to the desalination plant by the outrageous decision of the police to hand over files on peaceful demonstrators to AquaSure. It is a clear signal to public opinion about who really pulls the strings in this state.

Governments should be absolutely scrupulous in entering multibillion-dollar contracts, especially involving private partners such at the Macquarie Group and Suez. Macquarie gave us CityLink and tolls at least twice the level that would have been required to finance the project by public borrowings. The French multinational Suez has a record of corrupt dealings with governments over water contracts, with directors sent to jail as a result.

The Brumby Government cannot continue to be silent for long. The amounts wasted are too big to hide. Misleading statements won't wash.

For instance, the project summary tabled in Parliament states that the plant will produce water at a cost of $1370 per megalitre. Rubbish. Simple arithmetic based on the production of 150 gigalitres a year suggests revenue of $205 million a year would not even cover the plant's operating costs.

At the Dubai annual international desalination power conference last month it was stated that the best price for water produced by the best desal technology in the world was $5100 per megalitre - three times the cost of water from Tasmania and more than five times the cost from aquifer injection and conservation.

Victoria is going down a privatisation path that France began in 1985 but is now rolling back in favour of management contracts where government retains strategic control of water.

Kennneth Davidson is an Age senior columnist. His column will return in February.

kdavidson@theage.com.au