Let the Masters of Silence claim us All! “I am not a dictator. I have only simplified democracy.” Adolf Hitler 1936
Writing about the Tasmanian forestry legislation ( here ), Andrew McIntosh (an Associate Professor of Law at ANU) said on 10 May 2013 that “arguably the most egregious component of the agreement from a liberal perspective is the “durability” provisions. Freedom of speech and political communication are fundamental to liberal philosophy and an essential part of a representative democracy”. He goes on to argue that the effect of the arrangements legislated under the TFA “is a burden on the freedom of political communication and an affront to basic liberal values”.
It would be interesting to know if there are other examples of statute law in existence in Australia which contain such amazing provisions, effectively giving an unelected group of people the power to determine if the protest action of another group of people can act as a trigger to overthrow the major components of the legislation itself.
Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute suggests ( here ) some interesting analogies, such as a law which stated if a union took strike action it would threaten the whole national wage structure. I’m not sure that Joh Bjelke-Petersen, when premier of Queensland, went to the extent of saying that finding “reds under the bed” in the union movement should lead to the abolition of the whole trade union movement. Nor that Jeff Kennett, when facing opposition from teachers to education cutbacks, decided that all state schools should be closed down if their teachers’ resistance wasn’t “silenced”. Denniss concludes that “it is quite clear why the environment groups involved want to silence protest. They know their deal doesn’t bear scrutiny”.
There is certainly an element of the bizarre – to put it mildly – in legislation which triggers its own chameleon-like transformation into its opposite by such convoluted methods of stifling freedom of speech. No doubt, as Mike Bolan has suggested, it sets a wonderful precedent for all kinds of legislation by those who see its potential for “simplifying democracy” in other areas.
Ben Quin has eloquently said in a recent scathing and effective critique ( here ) that legislation in relation to forestry matters has been disguised as following “democratic processes” since the passage of the Pulp Mill Assessment Act, when it was a corporation, Gunns, which controlled the legislative process. Now, Quin suggests, “this ‘peace agreement’ absolves these corporate sins – sweeps them away without trace in a froth of new legislation. It passes the burden of failure to idealists, striving within the law to map a path towards their different visions of a sustainable future”.
We need to understand that the 2013 legislation, and the means by which it was achieved, is much more destructive of fundamental processes of democratic representation than anything done in 2006 and 2007 to implement the PMAA. Bob Brown, Christine Milne and Kim Booth should have drawn a line in the sand when Nick McKim and David Bartlett embarked on this grand evasion of due process back in 2010, rather than let it all go until now. This is not to absolve Labor from abdicating their responsibilities, and entrusting the framing of legislation to unelected narrow special interest groups, but Labor has long aligned the “labour interest” with the corporate interest in Tasmania, so what they did in May 2010 was just a repetition for them of what they did in 2007 – an attempt to serve the interests of Gunns.
If the legislation of 2007 set a precedent for successful manipulation of the parliament in the corporate interest against the public interest, and effectively closed off legal avenues of redress to people and businesses if they were adversely affected by pulp mill pollution, the 2013 legislation takes this precedent further. To give an example, one pertinent question is how the new legislation could be used against protesters if in the future a way is found to establish the Tamar Valley pulp mill. That’s just one example. We shall have to see how the legislation is used to stifle freedom of speech into the future to judge its ramifications, in broad terms, in attacking the fundamental right of freedom of expression in Tasmania.
It is worth emphasis that one aspect of the way that due process has been subverted by the Tasmanian political system in the last seven years or so has been through deliberate secrecy, deals made between vested interests behind closed doors without any general public participation. That was true in 2006 and 2007 and has been true throughout the period from 2009 until now.
Lack of transparency has been the defining characteristic of Tasmanian politics to do with all matters forestry for years. It is beyond question that from at least 2006 until Gunns collapsed in 2012 information in the public domain about what was going on was dominated by blatant propaganda, misleading information and blatant lies. This was permitted – even grossly encouraged – by a weak media and by supine politicians. The full story of the political shenanigans which occurred throughout these years will never be known, mainly because the precedents established – not only through legislation and process but through transfer of cultural modes of behaviour across all parties –are insuperable obstacles to revealing the truth.
Perhaps the last chance to lift the corner of the carpet to see what was hidden was wiped away when Nick McKim decided to do a deal with Bartlett to stop the Liberals gaining office in the state in early 2010. It was certainly obliterated when McKim and Bartlett decided on establishing the forestry roundtable in May of that year. Since then, of course, the Paul Lennon doctrine of ensuring transparency be kept to an absolute minimum has become even more thoroughly entrenched.
Absence of transparency, as a fundamental principle of political behaviour, requires not only secrecy, or silence, from those inside the tent, but also demands silence be imposed on opposition from within the rest of the community. There’s a warped logic inherent in this, which can be demonstrated by reference to any government, in any type of political system at any time or place in human history. The more secretive a government, the more repressive it is. The more secretive, selective and narrow the processes of decision-making, the more severely critics and dissidents are treated. It’s like a sliding scale – from unrepresentative, to undemocratic, to bad, to ugly to brutal.
When a political system openly applauds silence as a key attribute of the “good citizen”, and openly derides critics, the culture cannot be described as democratic. Silence is regarded as a civic virtue by most Tasmanian politicians – and their supporters – of whatever political persuasion – Labor, Liberal, Green and independent.
This has been well demonstrated in the last few years, especially in relation to the whole forestry roundtable-IGA-TFA process.
In this context, it is very informative how the Tasmanian ENGOs and the Tasmanian Greens ( eg, here ) have gone into hyper-mode against the Richard Flanagan article ( here ). While I do wish that Flanagan had been so inclined to raise his voice earlier than he has, the response of the Greens-ENGOs ( eg, and here ) in these circumstances is a revelation – no, a confirmation – of their contempt for dissenting voices, a contempt for due process, a contempt for public participation, a contempt for inclusivity. Everything that Bayley and O’Connor say in their defence against what Flanagan has written indicates no understanding of democratic principles in any way. It demonstrates the opposite.
It is also most revealing that everything that Flanagan said – which I agree with just about entirely – has been said again and again for several years by others, most of whom have been comprehensively ignored by the Labor Party, the Liberals, the ENGOs and all the Greens, state and federal.
This merely reinforces the conclusion that the mainstream politicians and their associates, wherever they are placed within agencies and NGOs, regard “just citizens” as “irrelevant”, as Lara Giddings says about Bob Brown and Malcolm Fraser. Richard Flanagan is a different matter for the Greens-ENGOs. They have decided they can’t cast him as an “irrelevance” like they can critics with a lower public profile, although Cassy O’Connor comes very close to saying so when she attacks him for writing “from the comfort of (his) desk”.
The general point holds true. The Tasmanian political system promotes silence when it should strive to do the opposite. The current TFA legislation is destined to be a prime example of outright failure on those grounds alone, for, as Frank Nicklason has observed, it has no foundation in truth and justice. But nor does it have a foundation in the requirements for proper reform.
All voices suggesting plan B – that is proper, essential, sustainable reform of the forestry industry in Tasmania, have been ignored, vilified, excluded and rejected. They were placed under an enforced silence. It is hard to say where the most egregious rejection lies, whether in the media, especially ABC radio, which has sadly failed in its most fundamental responsibility to investigate and report the real issues, or in the politicised process of exclusion.
The Tasmanian political culture is both repressive and oppressive as far as it can be in its determination to “silence” all voices which dare to question openly and publicly, and which don’t conform with established caucus-tribal rules of behaviour.
But more than that, and what must be said by all of us designated as invisible, as “irrelevant citizens”, if you like – if we can be bothered – is that we tried within our means to avoid being excluded from having a voice. We tried within our means to have a voice. Our voices are on the public record going back for years. They are on the submissions to the Legislative Council which went unread or were simply dismissed for suggesting proper reforms rather than land-swapping deals, or for not representing the positions of “group think” organisations.
So it comes to pass that both houses of the Tasmanian parliament have given their imprimatur to an undemocratic and unrepresentative process for the last three years, and then taken the final step on the road to perdition by supporting legislation tantamount to eliminating freedom of speech.
They demand silence in the same way that Gunns demanded silence, using the institutions of power and authority to do so. Gunns sued. Gunns dealt directly with the leaders of government to have their goals enshrined in special legislation. Now the politicians seek a more thorough way to ensure silence. For the moment they attack high profile critics like Flanagan with their pens. Will they turn to the law next? We shall probably see soon enough.
In a deeply ironic way the abandonment of due process and the quest for silence from critics runs through the events of 2006-7 to the events of 2009-2013 in an almost seamless way. The notion that silence is golden resonates throughout the halls of power and authority in Tasmania, across all political parties and through the vital processes used to formulate law.
Is silence golden? It is likely that silence will be enforced more strongly and that those who speak out will be dealt with more punitively than is now the case, for the groundwork has been done, the precedents have been set, the processes put in place. Silence might now be a safer option in the current twilight, but plenty of people in plenty of places have learned to their cost that, as Paul Simon said, silence like a cancer grows. — Peter Henning
