Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State, Brian Toohey, A Sense of Place Magazine, 11 September, 2019.

Step by step, a succession of new laws and policies have provided the building blocks for Australia to become a country in which secretive officials and ministers wield unprecedented levels of peacetime power. Secrecy, ignorance and fear are being used to deprive Australians of basic liberties and increase the risk of being dragged into a devastating war that could escalate into a full-scale nuclear catastrophe.

As a measure of just how far Australia has changed in recent decades, there are now seventy-five new laws to deal with terrorists who murder someone. Terrorists murdered people in earlier eras, but special laws were not considered necessary to cover those crimes.

Secret shows how the tough provisions of these new laws have been extended to areas not remotely connected to terrorism.

The national security juggernaut has reached the point where Australia is now chained to the chariot wheels of the Pentagon at a time when America has become an increasingly dangerous ally. The US-run bases in Australia secretly lock the nation into participating in the Pentagon’s plans for ‘full spectrum’ warfare ranging from outer space to the ocean depths.

Australia’s leaders have let the US control so many critical components of the nation’s weapons systems that it would not be possible for Australia to defend itself, for example, in a future conflict with Indonesia against America’s wishes.

No major political party is offering to restore the values of an earlier era in which habeas corpus prevailed; the onus of proof was on the prosecution; the accused was allowed to see the evidence relied on by the Crown; and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation officials could not legally kidnap people or raid a lawyer’s offices and seize documents in a commercial case directly involving the government on the other side.

No major party seems bothered by the use of new surveillance technology that allows governments to detect contact between journalists and their sources, effectively denying whistleblowers the opportunity to reveal abuses of power and criminal behaviour.

My role in this has been as the editor of A Sense of Place Magazine. 

To read the full story go here: 

https://medium.com/a-sense-of-place/secret-the-making-of-australias-security-state-956c1ee3dedc