Doug Lorimer
In an opinion piece in the November 14 Sydney Morning Herald, federal Attorney General Philip Ruddock made an attempt to defend his government's new sedition laws. These have been included as a series of proposed amendments to the federal Crimes Act (1914) and the federal Criminal Code (1995) within the government's draconian Anti-Terrorism Bill (2005), currently before the Senate.
Ruddock claimed that the government is simply "seeking to codify the main provisions and modernise the existing offence of sedition by removing outdated terminology ... The revised provisions are drafted in a way that is less complicated and more suited to be used to counter the incitement of terrorism."
However, neither the existing nor the proposed new sedition laws are aimed at countering "incitement" to carry out terrorist or any other acts of violence. The sedition laws are aimed at criminalising political dissent.
The existing sedition provision in the Crimes Act makes it a criminal offence, punishable by three years' imprisonment, to cause a "public disturbance" (undefined) with "seditious intention", defined as to "excite disaffection against the government or constitution" of Australia or "against either house of the parliament", or to "promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of Her Majesty's subjects so as to endanger the peace, order or good government" of Australia.
The Anti-Terrorism Bill proposes to amend the sedition law in the Crimes Act to define "seditious intention" as an "intention to ... urge disaffection" with the federal government, constitution, or either house of parliament or to "promote feelings of ill-will or hostility between different groups so as to threaten the peace, order and good government" of Australia.
Writing in the November 15 Melbourne Age, Bruce Wolpe, director of corporate affairs for the Fairfax press, which owns the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, explained that under the "draft bill, with a maximum term of imprisonment of seven years, proof of an intention to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility is no longer required". He added: "There is a real risk that a comment, letter, advertisement, wire service story, videotape footage, or editorial opinion might by reason of its subject matter be held by a jury to amount to urging within the meaning of sedition."
Wolpe described the proposed "modernised" sedition law in the federal Crimes Act as "the gravest threat to publication imposed by the government" in Australia's history. Further, he argued that "it is essential that the protections under law that the media in Australia enjoy today be specifically reaffirmed under any sedition regime".
Fairfax and other news media corporations — News Ltd, Western Australian Newspapers and Australian Associated Press — have joined together to lobby the government for changes in the bill. But they are not opposed to the existence of "anti-sedition" laws. They merely want the government to include "protections" for the corporate media from these laws.
This is why the corporate media has raised no objections to the bill's proposal to add a new sedition offence to the federal Criminal Code (1995). This would make it an offence for any person to engage in or urge another person "to engage in conduct to assist, by any means whatever", other than assistance of a purely humanitarian nature, "an organisation or country" that "is engaged in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force" whether or not a state of war has been declared.
In his Sydney Morning Herald article, Ruddock dishonestly claimed that the "sedition laws are designed to capture activity which goes beyond criticising, but encourages the use of force or violence or other unlawful means to achieve a particular outcome ... The measures deal with those who seek to urge the naive and impressionable to carry out violence against their fellow citizens."
The proposed new sedition law in the Criminal Code (1995), however, has nothing to do with discouraging anyone to "carry out violence" against their "fellow citizens" within Australia. Rather, it is aimed at giving the government the legal power to prosecute peaceful, non-violent dissent within Australia against the ADF's participation in illegal US-led wars against countries, such as Iraq, that Washington deems targets of its global "war on terror".
US officials have indicated that if they succeed in consolidating "regime change" in Iraq, then Iran and Syria, then Venezuela and Cuba, will be their next targets.
During the US-Australian war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were numerous statements of sympathy for the Vietnamese resistance fighters made by Australian anti-war campaigners, including by such prominent Labor Party figures as Jim Cairns (later to become deputy prime minister in the Whitlam Labor government).
In his 1968 John Curtin lecture, Cairns declared that "the main force of the revolutionary war" being led by the National Liberation Front against the US-backed Saigon regime and the US and Australian military forces in South Vietnam "has always been made up of South Vietnamese people who have been motivated substantially by legitimate aims". Such a statement was not illegal under the then existing sedition law, but it would have been if the Howard government's proposed new sedition provision had been the law.
From Green Left Weekly, November 23, 2005.
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