There is a consensus among educated Australians that Preventive Detention is inimical to the democratic evolution of our country. Many are those who argue that given the standards of our time preventive detention is an unnecessary evil.

This group is made up mostly of community groups, academics and lawyers who sincerely subscribe to the belief that to resort to such a draconian law to safeguard not only their person but also, the country at large is itself dangerous. They argue passionately that the exigencies do not warrant such offensive and repressive Act. To this school of thought the Act would be a sword in the hand of a budding autocrat who wielded it ruthlessly and indiscriminately to stifle all genuine opposition.

In Australia there is freedom of expression and freedom of association. There are many media outlets and the government and the media giants have the morning, mid-day and evening news, as the governments mouth piece.

The media giants though not officially part of the government machinery; unabashedly and blatantly champion the cause of the government funded by government advertising. Given these attributes of democracy, one would not need to ask why the media giants never asked questions in relation to the illegality of the war on sovereign nations like Afghanistan and Iraq. Or who was responsible, and or what that inference would lead to down the track in terms of our national security. Especially if they could not win that illegal and degrading war or it could take years. Now those questions have been left unanswered. So to keep the terrible lie alive they need to restrict our liberty to combat their fear of reprisal which undermines the communities common laws, human rights, civil rights, democratic rights and their liberties at home or abroad.

The proposition that certitude leads to violence has its easy application in such dynamic environment and in a landscape swarming with political parties and some who are intent on justifying illegal and degrading war whilst living in a multicultural freer society. The easy application is ideologies, dogmatists and bullies--people who think that their rightness justified them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. Because their conviction of rightness is powerful enough and any resistance to it will be met sooner by force. When one gets profiled then persecution comes easy. Mamdouh Habib was kidnapped, persecution inexorably followed.

If Preventive Detention or Control Orders are enacted for dissent or suspected people the law will empower the government to detain anybody without trial. The law is renewable and represents indefinite detention and other waves of detention will follow unabated.

Yet there are no bombs being thrown any where in the country. If anything, it was only the 'smoking gun memo' and troops off to wage war that occasionally pervaded the atmosphere in Australia.

The opposition party has been bought and dissolved into extinction or used merely to sustain the notion of a liberal democracy. Well-paid losers!

In conclusion, there has been no bomb thrown thus, we don't need a shield to protect us. As a matter of fact, the government were culprits in the war and the opposition was complicit in not preventing the war and one needs to look there for the real answer in preventing violence in our community down the track.

In my opinion the sole objective of the governments Anti-Terrorism legislation is a diabolic weapon to stifle and strangulate the budding opposition because of the mounting frustration of the opponents to illegal and degrading war which, they declare is an adequate justification for engaging in bomb throwing and on that basis then one can be sure Howard is not a visionary but a nationalistic autocrat and it goes without saying.

Like all autocrats, Howard cannot tolerate any opposition.

Related:

How's this for sedition?

The latest legislative threat to our freedoms is worthy of contempt, writes Chas Savage.

Edmund Burke, who declared the tyranny of bad laws, was a deep political thinker and a ferocious polemicist. In 1777, he wrote to the Sheriffs of Bristol that the true danger to freedom was when liberty was nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

We should wish that 1777 is now, and that Burke was writing to our prime minister. Perhaps then John Howard would be less reckless in his pursuit of additional security powers and more concerned about the damage his legislation will do to important traditions of free association, opinion and debate.

I declare, therefore, that I write the following with open, seditious intention.

More:  http://www.sydney.indymedia.org.au/front.php3?article_id=60518&group=webcast