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Freedom’s just another word

Mark Colvin

by Mark Colvin

05 Aug 05:50am

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Filed under: Censorship, Democracy, Election 2010

20 comments

‘Vox pops’ are among the staples of daily journalism. Little snippets of public opinion, they don’t prove anything about the way people are thinking, but they can give a flavour. Sometimes they reveal how little the public know about a subject that’s been grabbing the headlines, sometimes their vehemence reveals unsuspected levels of bitterness or anger.

British artist Banksy's take on the takeover of public space.

But ask any TV or radio journalist, and you’ll find that vox pops are in some ways harder to get than they used to be. It’s not because the public are less willing to talk – quite the reverse.

Back in the seventies, almost everyone would hurry past the proffered microphone: nowadays people are much more media-friendly. No, the problem nowadays is often where to ask your questions – because we, as a nation, have allowed so much of our public space to be privatised.

The shopping and other transactions we used to do in town squares and high streets, we have now transferred indoors, to shopping malls. These places are privately owned, and policed by private security forces. They’re generally suspicious of people with microphones, and indeed of anyone who might in any way interfere with the business of selling and buying consumer goods.

Why am I writing about what sounds like a journalistic gripe in the middle of an election campaign? Because one effect of this privatisation of public space is an anti-democratic one.

The same security guards who bundle journalists, skateboarding youths and other undesirables out of our shopping centres, also frequently take a dim view of anyone handing out political leaflets or trying to garner votes. Canvassing – walking around, shaking hands, being willing to take awkward questions from strangers – is by any standards one of the building blocks of electoral democracy, but malls –places where most Australians spend a fair bit of time – are now frequently off limits for election campaigns. 

As Milton Cockburn, the head of the Shopping Centre Council of Australia, told the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘some managers find pestering by candidates can upset shoppers and store-owners’.

We talk glibly about liberties being ‘hard-won’, but with the exception of military coups and revolutions, freedoms can be easily – and silently – lost.

Given how much of their lives most people spend on the web these days, it astonishes me that there hasn’t been more of an outcry about the Australian Government’s secretive plans to make service providers store details of all of our browsing activities. I say ‘secretive’ because when Fairfax newspapers asked for details of the plan, ninety percent of the document was blacked out.
What aren’t we being told? Informed speculation suggests a system similar to that brought in in Europe after the Madrid bombings of 2004.
The technology writer Ben Grubb sums up the European legislation: 

ISPs must retain the user ID of users, email addresses of senders and recipients …  data necessary to trace and identify the source, destination, date, type, time and duration of communications — and even what communication equipment is being used by customers and the location of mobile transmissions. For telephone conversations, this means the number from which calls are placed and the number that received the call…  For mobile phone numbers, geographic location data is also included. The data is retained for periods of not less than six months and not more than two years from the date of the communication.

All that information about who you are where you are, who you talk to, how often and for how long, to be stored in case the Government wants to use it – all without any public debate or even public information.

In a new edition of his book ‘Freedom for Sale’, the British journalist John Kampfner argues that there are patterns emerging here. One is the ease with which we can lose our rights and liberties almost without noticing, another is the way states are picking up and learning the secrets of quiet authoritarianism from each other.


Once you start noticing these patterns, you see them everywhere. There’s a chapter in Kampfner’s book about Britain becoming a surveillance state.

Police and security forces were given greater powers of arrest and detention; all institutions of state were granted increased rights to snoop; individuals were required to hand over unprecedented forms of data … [in 2006] In only nine months, more than 250,000 applications were made to intercept private communications; most were approved.

Local councils were given powers designed to fight serious crime and terrorism, but used them to pursue ratepayers over infringements of the rubbish-bin rules, or in one case to put a couple under intensive surveillance for three weeks for the offence of wanting their child to go to a particular primary school. Only this week has this trend begun to be halted.

You might imagine that China, for example, would be one country with little to learn in this field. But no, it seems that the Chinese have noticed the hundreds of thousands of closed circuit cameras sprouting in democracies like the UK and Australia, and gone one better. In Urumqi, the capital of the restive Xinjiang province, they’re hoping that the presence of 49,000 CCTV cameras will help them quash any riots like those of last year before they get a chance to begin.
And speaking of nipping things in the bud, President Putin’s Russia is about to bring in laws which will make it possible for police to act against people for crimes that haven’t even been committed yet.

The Chinese have no choice about the system they live under: Russian democracy is so distorted, not to say corrupted, that Russians have relatively little say either. And in some countries it’s clear that there is –as John Kampfner’s book describes – a compact between the State and the people: if you control crime and public order and leave us to get on and make money, we will accept remarkably large limitations on our freedom. The classic case is Singapore, which Kampfner describes as the “comfortable model”. It’s clean, orderly and efficient. Everything will be fine, providing you don’t want to do a couple of annoying things – and I don’t just mean spitting in the streets or chewing gum. What will get you into trouble in Singapore is criticising the founder Lee Kuan Yew or his family, their government activities and business interests, the governing party, or the judiciary. Ask the writer Alan Shadrake. His crime? Writing about what he sees as the inequities of the way Singapore administers the death penalty – a matter of legitimate public interest if ever there was one.

In authoritarian states people may have little choice about the loss of their privacy and freedom. Here in Australia, we do, but it often appears that we don’t really seem to care. It seems a pity to me that issues of liberty are among the big topics that neither party really wants to talk about in this election campaign.

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Most commented

429Australia, you have nothing to fear but fear itself
390There's no one Thomson won't burn to save his skin
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313Thomson didn't answer the question everyone is asking
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20 comments

Show oldest | newest first

    • jed says:

      07:27am | 05/08/10

      there’s no doubt we live in one of the biggest nanny states on earth. and right now taxation without representation is huge. 40 odd percent of families pay no net tax and who funds baby bonus and family tax benefits (with newly introduced advances - dear god an advance on your middle class welfare because you can’t get it together enough to save any money) yep the old singles or childless couples. we exist as little more than cows to be milked and our money spirited away, not on infrastructure, but someone else having a kid to stress infrastructure even further.

      i seriously hope someone puts together a credible advance against the nanny state at the next election, because the ldp have proven to be little more then disorganised buffoons.

      Reply

    • DocBud says:

      08:41am | 05/08/10

      Don’t you mean representation without taxation?

    • Daryl says:

      11:04am | 05/08/10

      Jed, not entirely true, I’m a father of three and work in the Sydney CBD an hours commute away. I have the mortgage and childcare, schooling costs etc. I get not one cent from the government for anything, no baby bonus, no childcare, no family tax benefit, no $900 handout, immunisation allowance etc and I am a significant net tax payer. I pay significantly more medicare levy than the average worker and more than the average wage in tax. Yet this government wants to take away my private health tax rebate. I’m not an old single or childless couple yet I’m a massive cash cow too. And I object to my taxes being wasted on stupid schemes like the school halls rorts, the NBN, holding meaningless 2020 summits and repairing the insulation fiasco. The sooner the government does something to address the descrepency between the PAYG tax take and the tax benefits (like income splitting) for corporates the better! I’d love to only pay 30% of my income in tax let alone be able to claim my GST and split my income like corporates do to reduce my tax bill even further! The harder you work, the more you contribute to society, the more tax you pay, the less you get! Regardless of having children or being married. If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul! Socialism is alive and well in Australia, and we have a self confessed Communist as an unelected PM!

    • T.Chong says:

      07:48am | 05/08/10

      Jed : the lefty nanny state may be overbearing, misdirected and cumbersome, but could be argued is at least an attempt to ensure welfare of the citizens.
      The proliferation of CCTVs and similar monitors is somewhat different.
      This type of surveillance is mostly the domain of security services - police forces etc , who are still benefitting from their glory days post sept 11, when we were all encouraged to be afraid, very afraid.
      Uniformed self imprtant nuts actually stopping people taking pix of the harbor bridge etc , hysteria if Muslims are seen praying - these things actually happened.
      Much rather a nanny state, no matter how misguided, than the police state with its paranoia that now dominates so much of public life.

      Reply

    • Peter says:

      04:36pm | 05/08/10

      @ T. Chong. It’s the police that enforce the nanny state.. This nanny state we are creating is leading us to the police state you fear…

    • Ryan says:

      09:59am | 05/08/10

      Ha, freedom, in Australia, you have GOT to be kidding. Go down to your local park and try to fly a kite with your kid.

      Reply

    • hot tub political machine says:

      11:15am | 05/08/10

      Its only a nanny state if you let it be.  Someone tells you to stop flying your kite down the park with your kid? Tell them where to go. If this is (strangely) illegal somehow – then tell the officer he is welcome to arrest you – for enjoying sometime with your child – see if he wants to go through with it. A few calls to the media and you will have damaged the officer and the police department’s reputation so badly they will be forced to change.

      Public service departments are your bitch (pardon the choice of words I just have a hard time thinking of anything else that can convey the meaning I intend), not the other way around – and that comes from the mouth of someone with a fair bit of public service experience.

      Tyranny is not so much of a problem a little imagination and courage cannot overcome.

      Reply

    • The Badger says:

      11:38am | 05/08/10

      Unfortunately, we in Australia do not have a “bill of rights” as they do in America. So rights as basic as freedom of speech are not a given.

      This in spite of the fact that Australia has signed no less than 5 international treaties that make up the international bill of rights. Even though we are signatories to these treaties, they are not legally binding in Australia. In one survey, 70% of those polled want a bill of rights, yet our politicians continue to deny us this.

      How could John Howard support a bill of rights for Iraq, yet continue to deny Australians the same?

      In West Australia, under proposed and existing laws, you can be stopped and searched anywhere, anytime without cause.
      The budgets are being loaded with cash to install new and link existing CCTV cameras to monitor citizens as they go about their daily business despite their abject failure in the UK (where most of the WA policing “innovations” come from) .
      There are mandatory sentencing arrangements which remove any discretion a judge normally has for certain crimes.
      WA have anti association laws that tell you who you can have as mates and share a beer with.

      In West Australia, we are rapidly heading down the slippery slope of fascism. In a society that pretends to have a “law and order” system - that is where the police and the justice system are separate, the politicians have begun the process of ceding the justice part to the police.

      A bill of rights might prevent the further erosion of what should be our civil liberties.

      Reply

    • TheRealDave says:

      03:36pm | 05/08/10

      I am against a Bill of Rights. I will never vote for a Bill of Rights.

      I am for a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities though

      I’d like to see something along the lines of, and paraphrasing badly.

      1. You have the right to Freedom of Speech. But you have the responsibiility for what you say if its derogatory, if it denigrates a people, person, race or religion, if its racist, sexist etc

      2. You have the right to bare arms. You are Responsible for obtaining the proper permits, training, affiliations with registered associations, knowing all laws concerning gun ownership, use, storage, transportation applicable to your State/Territory etc

      and so on, you get the idea.

      Just plain ‘Rights’ is what has screwed up a lot of countries and generations of ‘entitlement’ kids. Responsibilities are just as important as Rights

    • Terry Wright says:

      03:45pm | 05/08/10

      Well said, Badger.

      All the reasons given by the WA government to implement these strategies have no evidence to back up their effectiveness. None! They are purely ideological and pushed onto us by the usual, modern conservative riff-raff.

      Remember, Colin Barnett also turned back the cannabis laws citing outdated and flawed reasons which then fed into the stop and search laws. He blatantly lied to the public by claiming that cannabis was a gateway drug and caused serious mental disorders for all who participated. His solution was to repeal the current cannabis laws that had actually proven successful and revert back to the old policies using harsher penalties - that had never proven successful. He established that cannabis was a dangerous drug and since drugs were causing much of the street violence, then police would be able to stop and search anyone for these dangerous drugs, oh and weapons ... without a need for cause.

      The old “Tough on Drugs” rhetoric was wheeled out to remove our civil liberties. The problem is that his reasons have been completely debunked by science and research. PerthNow ran an article about it and recorded the most comments ever for a web article with most readers pointing out his lies and many others providing links to research that clearly contradicted Barnett’s claims. It made no difference to the government’s agenda.

      Under the guise of making the streets safe, Barnett has ramped up drug laws, increased military style police dog raids in public, introduced intrusive stop and search powers and other Neocon type strategies. This was despite our own governments research that said alcohol was responsible for 97% of the street violence, not drugs.

      When governments start ignoring the evidence and lying to the public just to get more police powers, increase surveillance, introduce mandatory sentences and to stomp out our civil liberties, it’s time to question their motives ... and boot them out.

    • Ian says:

      11:48am | 05/08/10

      Is that the same Milton Cockburn that used to edit the SMH? A little ironic that.

      Reply

    • DocBud says:

      03:17pm | 05/08/10

      Amen to that, Davo

    • SR says:

      01:29pm | 05/08/10

      “ISPs must retain the user ID of users, email addresses of senders and recipients …  data necessary to trace and identify the source, destination, date, type, time and duration of communications — and even what communication equipment is being used by customers and the location of mobile transmissions.”
      Yes, both Stephen Smith and Robert McClelland have made the decision to sign and ratify the European Convention on Cybercrime, which permits the Government record and access (or spy) the details of ‘all’ transactions made by ‘all’ Australian internet users – all in the name of possible copyright infringement, computer fraud and child pornography.
      - What percentage of the Australian population has infringed copyright and sold said content for a profit?
      - What percentage of the Australian population has committed computer fraud?
      - What percentage of the Australian population is trading in child abuse material?
      The answer to all the above is ‘a very small percentage’.
      These are the three biggest reasons that the Government can muster in order to justify logging every transaction of every Australian on the internet – if they had used terrorism is would have at least have been under the guise of national security, but no its copyright infringement, fraud and child abuse material.
      The convention akin to visiting a public library to view any content available within, however on arrival you must provide ID and any book, or page of book that you view must to be logged with the Library and stored for future access by the Government – just to make sure that everything is on the up and up.
      “Fairfax newspapers asked for details of the plan, ninety percent of the document was blacked out.”
      For those that say ‘if you haven’t done anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide”, you should ask the Government the same question. If they have done nothing wrong why is 90% of the document censored from the Governments employers – Australian Citizens.
      Something is defiantly not on the up-and up.

      Reply

    • paulm says:

      02:58pm | 05/08/10

      Part of the reason its not generating an outcry is becuase it all happens invisibly behind the scenes.  Could you imagine the reaction if the Government told Australia Post to open every letter sent to your house, take a photocopy and keep it on file just in case you do something wrong even though there is no evidence you ever have or will do something wrong?  And lets not forget the internet censorship scheme, were the government gets to block any website it likes without any form of notification, appeal or the like in place.

      Reply

    • Bill Of Rights. Australia Saya YES says:

      03:59pm | 05/08/10

      The way Australia is going, you’d have more freedom if you caught a flight to goddamn Beijing!  Seriously, censor this, ban that.  It’s absolute BS to put it lightly.  I am a grown man, I can make my own decisions of what is right and wrong.  We need a bill of rights.  ASAP.  We need a political party who is going to look after Australians, REAL Australians, not the latte sipping, tea totalling yupees in the city and who is not out to push their own agenda.

      Reply

    • George says:

      04:27pm | 05/08/10

      I would also argue our freedoms are being eroded because the majority doesn’t care.  I think there’s an attitude of: “I’m financially secure, have a home, do all the normal things I would do and life is pretty good.  I’ve insulated myself as much as I can and if it doesn’t affect me directly I don’t care.”

      Reply

    • Peter says:

      04:56pm | 05/08/10

      100% correct….

    • Edward James says:

      07:29pm | 05/08/10

      One thing I have trouble with it the way politicians have moved from main street to shopping centers. an example would be Chris Hartcher who moved from Mann Street Gosford to Fountain Plazer Erina what changed was the activist ability to stand out side the electorate office on a public and protest. Futher more one polling booth was inside a shopping centre and when it suited security came and asked that some political material be removed from the private property.  Perhaps all political business should be done from a frontage in a public street! Certainly it is correct to point out we are being distanced from the time worn and tradicitional political process of heads on sticks protest. Consider the oldest parliament in Australia NSW Parliament. For security reasons we have lost the gate where smal numbers of protesters could doo stop their elected reps. Now the entry and exit are almost eighty metery apart. And the forcourt has become the domain of Media for TV.  While I tried to reach people with the internet I have been reduced to buying full page colour ads each fortnight in my local paper. But I understand better than most how too many eligible voters, simply could not care less!

      Reply

    • Soames says:

      09:02pm | 05/08/10

      Nice piece Mark, which harks back in one sense to a fellow called Louis Cheskin, responsible for the evolution of marketing to the masses, mirroring Sigmund Freud’s value of the concept, and taken up by Marlborough, (the Marlborough man),  margarine manufacturers in the 1930’s , and Henry Ford in the early 1900’s selling the model T, by such a simple but effective method, the first mass assembly line production, ensuring lower cost retail sales to the public, employee investment participation and buyer discount, and so kept his trained people.  It’s been largely a success since., but not on equal parameters by employers.  Governments also now have recognised the value of the human psychological need to better themselves, either from greed, vanity or necessity, and the powerful message that mass advertising has on the people of our community, particularly for those who need goods the most, but who cannot afford to pay cash for them. Hence we have advertising from retailers screaming at us from voices carefully chosen to deliver the spiel in the somewhat uncouth vernacular, understood with a sense that the voice is ‘one of us’, by the uneducated and great unwashed, who have the least to spend, but, importantly, who can be trapped into signing the rest of their miserable lives in a never ending circle of debt, in the credit trap to purchase the goods, sometimes but not necessarily,  of entertainment value. That is how Governments’ exploitation in the shallow political value of the advertising phenomenon,  is evident in terms of short term populist ideas of little value other than to appear as a sort of St Nicholas in terms of consumerism.  There is a price to pay however, and that’s a strict adherence to the law, legislated by successive governments, about the possession of one’s goods, and the stealing of those by another. Penalties for stealing on a grand scale are greater than penalties for physical violence to another human, including taking of a life,  inducing a sense that Australia’s constabulary and judiciary are still in a rum induced coma legally, since the First Fleet. Vox Pops, in the current climate is a difficult survey, for participant fears of being ‘different’.

      Reply
 
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