The Best Australian Essays 2014 (18 page)

Something else was in the air in the days of Freedom Abbott's birth. The
Australian
had received a fresh cache of documents about Bruce Wilson, the crooked former Australian Workers Union official who was once Julia Gillard's lover. Earlier attempts to smear her with Wilson's crimes had damaged Gillard badly. But she fought back hard and saw Bolt silenced, Glenn Milne dumped by the
Australian
and shock jock Michael Smith ousted from Sydney radio station 2UE. Now after a year's lull, the story had returned. It was gold for Abbott, but, inside and outside the government, News Ltd was being accused of a vicious beat-up. The
Australian
on Saturday, 4 August 2012 had the story everywhere: on page one, ‘Cops wanted Gillard's ex charged'; on page two: ‘Coalition wants alleged bagman investigated'; on page twenty-three, Cut and Paste: ‘Fifty shades of nay, or how the real Dr No of politics keeps Labor from getting tied up'; and on the same page an editorial: ‘AWU scandal questions linger'.

Two days later, Freedom Abbott materialised in the ballroom of the Amora Hotel, electrifying a crowd of 300. His rhetoric was wonderful. Again and again, he was stopped by applause. He was so forgiving about the press. No journalist could fail to be pleased by his promise to protect speech that wasn't always accurate and wasn't always fair: ‘The price of free speech … is that offence will be given, facts will be misrepresented, and sometimes lies will be told. Truth, after all, only emerges from such a process. But thanks to free speech, error can be exposed, corruption revealed, arrogance deflated, mistakes corrected, the right upheld and truth flaunted in the face of power.'

Then his focus narrowed: ‘This is not a government that argues its case. Mostly, it simply howls down its critics using the megaphone of incumbency … Late last year, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy accused the Sydney
Daily Telegraph
of a deliberate campaign to ‘bring the government down'. The prime minister had a screaming match with former News Ltd boss John Hartigan over an article about her prior-to-entering-parliament dealings with a union official … The prime minister personally insisted that News Ltd in Australia had ‘questions to answer' in the wake of the UK phone-hacking scandal even though she was not able to specify what these might be. It seems obvious that her real concern was not Fleet Street–style illegality but News Ltd's coverage of her government and its various broken promises, new taxes and botched program.'

News Ltd was facing a distant threat on another flank. The former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein had delivered his report on media regulation. Controversy had been raging for months. All the proprietors were furious, but at the Amora Hotel Abbott leapt only to the defence of News Ltd, claiming Finkelstein's proposed News Media Council ‘looks like an attempt to warn off News Ltd from pursuing anti-government stories'.

Freedom Abbott drew his first breaths speaking the language of a News Ltd executive. Hardly anyone noticed at the time. Abbott's commitment to fight the Freedom Wars made the headlines. He nominated Brandis as his consigliore in the Coalition campaign for liberty. An agenda of sorts emerged: 18C would be slashed, anti-discrimination laws wound back and a ‘freedom audit' conducted of all Commonwealth laws to identify those that violated traditional rights and freedoms. Asked if he had what it took to achieve these reforms, Brandis replied: ‘I was born for it.'

Abbott's calls for fresh candour and vigour in public debate were pitch perfect. The week before polling day he told the
Australian:

Australians frustrated by Canberra's old indifference to liberty could cast their vote on 7 September 2013 with reason to hope. Even on the Left there were signs of goodwill. Think tanks were cautiously delighted. But on victory night, something odd happened. I was there at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney in a throng of excited Liberals, drooling lobbyists and exhausted journalists. Flanked by his wife and daughters, the new prime minister declared Australia open for business. All the old mantras about boats and waste and carbon tax had a run, but there wasn't a word said about liberty. Freedom Abbott didn't show.

*

The swearing in of a cabinet was once a silent show except for the muttering of oaths. Now there are speeches. In the drawing room of Yarralumla with his cabinet duly sworn, Tony Abbott faced Quentin Bryce. He told Her Excellency: ‘We hope to be judged by what we have done rather than by what we have said we would do.' Fair enough.

10 October 2013: The state and territory attorneys-general meet in Sydney without discussing shield laws. The issue was on the agenda. With the change of government it vanished. It hasn't appeared since. Efforts begun under Gillard to introduce uniform national laws to give effective protection to journalists and their sources have ceased.

25 October: Scott Morrison first utters the phrase ‘on water operations' to justify the unprecedented secrecy that surrounds the Abbott government's blockade of refugee boats. Morrison whittles away the few rights and freedoms left to those caught up in Operation Sovereign Borders.

2 December: Brandis authorises an ASIO raid on the Canberra office of Bernard Collaery, the lawyer representing East Timor in its dispute with Australia over the Timor Sea Treaty. In March this year, the International Court of Justice at The Hague orders Australia to seal the material seized and keep it from all officials involved in the dispute. The order is binding.

3 December: Abbott rages against the ABC and the ‘left-wing'
Guardian
for together reporting that Australian spy agencies had targeted the phones of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife. ‘The ABC seemed to delight in broadcasting allegations by a traitor,' he later told Ray Hadley of the Sydney radio station 2GB. ‘This gentleman Snowden, or this individual Snowden, who has betrayed his country and in the process has badly, badly damaged other countries that are friends of the United States, and of course the ABC didn't just report what he said, they took the lead in advertising what he said.'

11 December: Brandis announces terms of reference for the Australian Law Reform Commission's audit of Commonwealth laws that compromise freedom. The terms' focus is not individual liberty but ‘commercial and corporate regulation; environmental regulation; and workplace relations'. Free speech barely makes the list. Brandis tells the
Australian Financial Review
he is most perturbed by the ‘reversal of the onus of proof, the creation of strict liability offences, the removal of lawyer–client privilege and removal of rights against self-incrimination'. It reads like a list of everything tax evaders loathe about the law.

17 December: Brandis appoints the policy director of the IPA, Tim Wilson, to the Australian Human Rights Commission. Wilson's mission is to restore balance to a body which the attorney-general believes ‘has become increasingly narrow and selective in its view of human rights' under Labor. This is code for the culture war complaint that the Left is manipulating anti-discrimination laws to impose its moral agenda on a reluctant society. The Bolt case is a particular focus of the fear that protecting blacks, gays, foreigners and cripples from discrimination is stripping the rest of us of our freedom.

29 January 2014: Abbott blasts the ABC for reporting claims that Australian military personnel have punished asylum seekers by burning their hands. ‘I think it dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone's side but our own,' says the prime minister. ‘You shouldn't leap to be critical of your own country.' News Ltd joins the attack. The ABC falters. Its managing director, Mark Scott, apologises for imprecise wording in the original report, but three days later, Fairfax's man in Indonesia, Michael Bachelard, finds asylum seeker Yousif Ibrahim Fasher: ‘He says he has no doubt that what he saw at close quarters on about January 3 was three people's hands being deliberately held to a hot exhaust pipe by Australian naval personnel to punish them for protesting, and to deter others from doing one simple thing: going to the toilet too often.'

6 March: Abbott threatens to cut the ABC's budget if it doesn't cave in to Chris Kenny. The Chaser team had crudely photoshopped the head of the News Ltd pundit onto a man with his pants down mounting a labradoodle. Kenny sued for $90,000. Missing in action is Abbott's defence of lively debate where ‘offence will be given, facts will be misrepresented'. He tells 2GB's Ben Fordham the ABC should settle the case or else: ‘Government money should be spent sensibly and defending the indefensible is not a very good way to spend government money. Next time the ABC comes to the government looking for more money, this is the kind of thing that we would want to ask questions about.' The ABC buckles. Kenny gets an apology and cash.

13 March: Brandis decrees artists who refuse private sponsorship on political grounds may be stripped of public funding. Troubled by Transfield's links to offshore detention centres, a handful of artists had pressured the company to withdraw sponsorship from the Sydney Biennale. Brandis asks: ‘If the Sydney Biennale doesn't need Transfield's money, why should they be asking for ours?' He directs the Australia Council to find a formula for deciding when public funding will be withdrawn because private sponsorship has been ‘unreasonably' rejected. He does not rule out compelling arts organisations to take tobacco money. Months later, the council is still labouring over the words. However it's done, Brandis wants artists to know they will pay a price for embarrassing the government. This threatens direct political intervention for the first time in the allocation of Australia Council funds.

24 March: Brandis tells Senator Nova Peris: ‘People do have a right to be bigots, you know.' The next day, he releases draft legislation to gut sections 18C and 18D of the
Racial Discrimination Act.
Abbott backs him. The proposal – drafted by Brandis himself – would allow almost unrestrained racist abuse in the name of freedom. Ethnic community leaders lobby for the act to be left as it is. Polls swiftly show nine out of ten Australians disapprove of the changes. Three-quarters of the 4100 submissions received by Brandis's department are hostile. The department blocks their release.

23 May: Morrison strips the Refugee Council of Australia of half a million dollars allocated in the budget only ten days before. The minister explains: ‘It's not my view, or the government's view, that taxpayer funding should be there for what is effectively an advocacy group.' The CEO of the council, Paul Power, calls the cuts petty and vindictive. ‘This in many ways illustrates the state of the relationship between the non-government sector – particularly organisations working on asylum issues – and the government at the moment.'

1 July: Community legal centres across Australia are also forbidden to use Commonwealth money for advocacy or to campaign for law reform. During the Labor years, funding for NGOs had come with the guarantee that they were free ‘to enter into public debate or criticism of the Commonwealth, its agencies, employees, servants or agents'. Under Abbott, the guarantee disappears. So do many sources of independent advice. The budgets of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, the Environmental Defender's Offices and the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples are slashed. Axed are the Social Inclusion Board, the National Housing Supply Council, the National Policy Commission on Indigenous Housing, the National Children and Family Roundtable, the Advisory Panel on Positive Ageing, and the committee of independent medicos advising the refugee detention network, the Immigration Health Advisory Group.

16 July: Brandis threatens laws to double the sentence for reporting ‘special intelligence operations' by ASIO. Whistleblowers would not be protected, and journalists would not even need to know the operations were ‘special' to find themselves in prison for up to a decade. No public interest defence would be available. The shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, says: ‘We will not tolerate legislation which exposes journalists to criminal sanction for doing their important work, work that is vital to upholding the public's right to know.'

4 August: Twenty-two-year-old student Freya Newman, a former part-time librarian at the Whitehouse Institute of Design, is charged with unauthorised access to restricted data following reports of Frances Abbott's scholarship, after complaints to the police by the institute. The chair of the institute is Liberal Party donor and friend of the prime minister Les Taylor.

5 August: Abbott announces the metadata of all Australians is to be kept by internet service providers for two years and made available to ASIO and police. That trawl will, of course, include the metadata of whistleblowers and journalists. He abandons at the same time his two-year crusade to amend the
Racial Discrimination Act.
Both moves he justifies in the light of terrorist outrages by Australian nationals in Syria. ‘When it comes to counterterrorism, everyone needs to be part of ‘Team Australia',' he says, ‘and I have to say that the government's proposals to change 18C of the
Racial Discrimination Act
have become a complication in that respect. I don't want to do anything that puts our national unity at risk at this time, and so those proposals are now off the table.'

*

Freedom Abbott had outlived his purpose. He was useful in Opposition. That's when phony contests like the Culture Wars can wreak havoc on your opponents. But to keep the banner of freedom flying in office was always going to be hard. No Australian government has ever managed the feat. And Abbott is proving no political pioneer. Nothing done in his first year advances the cause he championed in Opposition. His rhetoric has proved threadbare. Poor old Values Abbott died on budget night when an ordinary Liberal Party agenda was served up to the nation. A couple of months later, Freedom Abbott followed him to the grave.