Bob McMahon
The Police Commissioner may say something like: “only this far and no farther – we don’t intend to target the rest of you” but few except the partisan and the gullible would take that at face value. It is said in Tasmania today that if you are not a conspiracy theorist you are out of touch with reality, but you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to divine the direction our law makers in the logging industry and their parliamentary puppets are heading. Is the ground being prepared to target the anti-pulp mill protesters in the Tamar, where size and seriousness of protests are set to escalate should the proposed pulp mill go ahead? Outlawing of blockades? Massive fines and costs? Invoking of the terrorism laws? Laws against assembly? Telephone bugging?
How often is the solution to a ‘problem’ the start of a much bigger one?
So let’s examine Police Commissioner McCreadie’s insistence, with cabinet agreeing to have a look at it, that a law be made allowing police to charge protesters for the cost of policing. He doesn’t want to be reimbursed for the cost of policing heinous crime like murder, rape, corruption and paedophilia mind you, but wants the law book thrown at the Weld Angel and similar threats to the business order.
Putting aside for the time being the obvious inference that someone, the Tasmanian version of the ‘engineer of human souls’ for instance, might be whispering in McCreadie’s ear, what are the implications of the Commissioner’s plan?
The most obvious implication is that this projected action against protesters is likely to invoke the mother of all protests, a grand unifying protest you might say, of just about every imaginable group in this island: civil libertarian, union (except the logging arm of the CFMEU), political, legal, environmental, religious and community groups of all persuasions. Why? I will look at some reasons though there are many.
First came the occupation of the Saar and the Rhinelands. Then came the Anschluss with Austria followed by the occupation of the Sudetenlands. Poland next, then France. The historical paradigm is well accepted. Once the lid of Pandora’s box is opened it is very difficult to slam it shut again, especially if the person or people who opened it don’t want it shut too soon.
The Police Commissioner may say something like: “only this far and no farther – we don’t intend to target the rest of you” but few except the partisan and the gullible would take that at face value. It is said in Tasmania today that if you are not a conspiracy theorist you are out of touch with reality, but you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to divine the direction our law makers in the logging industry and their parliamentary puppets are heading. Is the ground being prepared to target the anti-pulp mill protesters in the Tamar, where size and seriousness of protests are set to escalate should the proposed pulp mill go ahead? Outlawing of blockades? Massive fines and costs? Invoking of the terrorism laws? Laws against assembly? Telephone bugging?
Because the projected law is so blatantly unjust, and so blatantly the baseborn product of a base bed shared by the logging industry, its sympathisers and its kept government, the people will not stand for it. The Tasmanian (and Australian) population is already dangerously outraged by the hijacking of Tasmania and its parliament by the logging industry during the scandalous pulp mill process, that this next step, while logically consistent and nowhere near as tyrannical as bad laws go on a universal scale, might well be one of those straws that breaks the camel’s back. The law could, and most likely would, function as an incitement to civil unrest. This may be deliberate. Most obviously many would see this projected targeting of certain protesters as an ill-considered, unbalanced and immature response by the Commissioner to a minor social irritant – an angel poised atop an A-frame of sticks interrupting the sort of logging operation that revolts the civilized world.
But if this projected law sees the light of day then Tasmanians and Australians will need to be reminded of the principle derived from the post war Nuremberg trials. When confronted by an unjust law, the principle states, it is not the citizen’s right or privilege to disobey. It is the citizen’s duty to disobey, because failure to do so renders the citizen complicit in that injustice.
Bob McMahon
Tasmanians Against the Pulpmill
