How much security can you buy for $250 million these days? Thugs
acting as agents of the state and not much else it would seem.
The incredibly audacious stunt by the ABC’s Chaser comedy team
showed just how ridiculous the whole “war on terror”
scaremongering is. A dozen people dressed up as security guards,
driving or running beside black limos containing, among others,
someone dressed up as Osama bin Laden, kind of really tells us
who the joke is on.
With passes that read, “APEC 2007 Chaser’s War”, “It’s pretty
obvious this isn’t a real Pass”, “Insecurity” and “Joke”, one
really has to question the effectiveness of our government’s
commitment to our ‘security’ and the ability of the people paid
by our taxes to protect us. In short, the martial law declared,
for the first time, in our country, failed.
Having been given police permission at two check points to
proceed, I think the Chaser team’s defence that they had no idea
they had entered a ‘security zone’ has great merit. After all
they had gone to great lengths to clearly and obviously state
they were fakes. Nonetheless it just goes to show how much
authority a card on a lanyard conveys when it has a photo and a
few words on it.
The Herald Sun wrote, “The stunt exposed an embarrassing and
potentially dangerous flaw in the $250 million security measures
put in place to protect 21 world leaders …” So, lets see, even
with my bad maths, 250 divided by 21 equals more than enough to
have fixed up many of our schools, hospitals or public transport
problems. However, as Danny DiVito once said in a movie, “its
other people’s money”. Ours!
The real issue that emerges from the Chaser stunt and the other
so called ‘security’ measures put in place for APEC is that we
allowed ourselves, regardless of whether you live in Sydney or
not, to become the victims of martial law. That is, our
governments imposed, on all Australians and foreigners here
during APEC, conditions under which our civil liberties and our
lives could be removed by an agent of the state.
You may recall that last Friday a minibus was stopped just
inside the New South Wales border. The people on the bus were
detained, searched, interrogated and a number of them refused
entry into the state. These people were on a ‘black list’ of
individuals who our government deemed unfit to attend public
events. The only crime these people committed was their
commitment to a political ideology that challenges the currently
prevailing hegemon.
The police who were deployed, along with the military, were
troops marshalled by the state not protect us from each other
but to ensure that we did not interact the people whose
decisions affect every aspect of our lives. The steel and
concrete barricades were not erected to keep out terrorists (or
even pretend ones) but to ensure the real rulers of the world
could go about carving up the planet, uninterrupted by small
inconveniences such as we, the people.
What is interesting about the situation in which we find
ourselves is that, paradoxically, the very need of the rulers of
the world to barricade themselves from us, turns on it’s head
the notion that we, the people, need to barricade ourselves in
to protect us from the excesses of the state. The exercise in
Sydney showed that they are afraid of us. This should give us
great confidence to proceed with our dreams of restoring
justice, real law and order and peace to a world being torn
apart by those who are nothing more than greedy masters of the
universe.
Nonetheless, the sweeping powers introduced in various pieces of
legislation passed by the New South Wales and Federal
governments in the lead up to APEC, were about the most
effective ways of preventing us from exercising our right to not
only dissent but also, as was the case with so many Sydney
businesses, earn an income, ply our trade or provide services
for a fee.
The $250 million price tag for another crass and failed attempt
at preventing us from going about our business doesn’t include
the millions of dollars of trade and income lost in Sydney while
APEC was on. In fact, this should be another lesson to take from
the ‘economic’ summit. The fact is the summit is not about
raising the poor from their squalor but is all about how to
capture or steal more wealth from the average person. After all,
the poor have nothing to take. It is also worth pointing out the
imposition of martial law has little impact on the poor and
marginalised anyway.
Another question arising out of the Chaser stunt is why so many
officials were so quick to point out they could have been
killed. From Ruddock in the past to Iemma recently to the Police
chief Scipioni on the day, all said there was no ‘lethal force’
clause in the police and military briefings. But Scipioni was
forced to admit the truth, that our police / military would
shoot to kill anyone they thought was a threat. This is what
martial law is all about.
The agents of the state are briefed by the state as to what
behaviour is or isn’t acceptable. They are then told to use
their best judgement in enacting the will of the state in the
context of their orders, the situation facing them and their
duty to obey. It truly is a shoot first, ask questions later
scenario. To draw a not too long a bow, if we compare how wrong
agents of the state got the treatment of people like the falsely
imprisoned and then deported Vivian Alvarez Solon and the
falsely imprisoned Cornelia Rau and 200 other Australia or
foreign nationals and we amplify that by the pressure being
exerted on ‘our boys in blue’ during APEC, we find that Scipioni
was right. The Chaser team probably were lucky they didn’t get
shot.
While we cant go back and undo history, the most pressing
questions for us today, even more pressing than whether John
Howard or Kevin Rudd is the next PM, are “do we really want to
have our rights stripped from us and then guns pointed at our
heads if we resist?” This is exactly what happened in Sydney
last week. No attempts were made to cover it up. We saw endless
TV news shots of snipers on buildings, circling helicopters
carrying snipers and war planes circling overhead. This was a
full military exercise with the civilian reserve army – the
police – called in not to protect us but to potentially kill us.
This is not hyperbole. This is the fact, confirmed by Scipioni,
Alexander Downer and John Howard. These men knew what laws they
were signing into power and we allowed them to get away with it.
This time the ‘laws designed to protect us’ would have only,
perhaps if the aim was right, protect us from a slow and painful
death. But what about the next time? What about the time,
somewhere in the future, when your sons or daughters say, ‘we’ve
had enough and we want our rights back’. These ‘respectable’
adults, who are far removed from the so called ‘femo-nazis’ or
‘rabble’ or ‘filth’ who were supposedly in Sydney last week, may
well want to take to the streets in numbers to claim back what
is rightfully theirs. The question then will be, did $250
million of security protect them from an over zealous agent of
the state?