Miranda doesn't say who she thinks the law should be a servant of, but I suspect that is the crux of the matter. She obviously thinks the law should bow to the arbitrary will those who have power, while of course those who believe in the rule of law believe it should be impartial.
Mind you, Miranda is a comparatively sober voice on the right. Sure, there's a little bit of froth at the corners of her mouth as she tilts against the "rights of the public" to be "protected". (No doubt a few Control Orders would be a useful means of getting the trains to run on time, if only it was possible to make them universal.) But there's much worse than her. Some of them - well if they were dogs, you'd have to shoot them.
The odd thing is that Miranda is claiming that on one side of the argument (mine) are "the inner-urban "elites", the academic/legal/media classes", While her side represents "...the rest of Australia - suburbanites, the working classes, and country people." This is weird, given that, for instance, I not only live in the country, but am working class by any definition and served a bare minimum sentence of just 11 years in the education system. While of course Miranda is not any of those things. In fact she is one of her despised "media classes".
Very odd indeed. It isn't as though I'm exactly exceptional either. Talking to my mate the other day who is usually a bit of a reactionary (Still maintains the Greenhouse Effect, or the "Ozone layer" as he calls it, is just a myth) and he is just as sceptical about the great terror scare. All a circus dreamed up by the politicians and media to distract us according to him. He even predicted that most of those arrested would eventually have to be set free. ('Course he hasn't been following the law changes, which defines terrorism offenses so broadly that its not all that hard to get a conviction anymore. In fact I think he's guilty of a few things I won't mention that might make him eligible for a 20 year sentence personally.)
This is a bloke who hasn't read a newspaper for years, doesn't have the internet (or even a home phone). Seems to have a better grasp of what's going on than Miranda though. He would agree with her about the academic/legal/media classes having their heads in the clouds though. And with media commentators like Miranda its hard to argue.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
Raw truths about the great divide
Miranda Devine
Sydney Morning Herald August 31, 2006
JON STANHOPE, sharpen your pencil. We have another candidate for Australian of the Year, and maybe for Father of the Year, as the family of Jihad Jack Thomas, 33, energetically uses the media to express outrage at his treatment by Australian authorities daring to curtail his civil liberties.
Just like fellow Muslim convert and jihadist David Hicks, Thomas has become the pin-up boy for human rights lawyers, left-wingers, Noam Chomsky and anyone else who believes John Howard and George Bush are a bigger threat to world security than Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakar Bashir (Jihad Jack's mates).
Thomas is the fifth-generation Australian taxi driver who, like Hicks, trained in al-Qaeda terrorist camps in Afghanistan. He was on his way back to Australia with a falsified passport on an al-Qaeda-funded airline ticket when he was arrested in Pakistan in 2003. He was convicted in the Victorian Supreme Court in February under anti-terrorism laws for receiving funds from al-Qaeda and holding a false passport and sentenced to five years' jail.
That jury conviction was overturned on appeal two weeks ago because the court believed the confession he made to the federal police had been given under duress. (The court is still considering a retrial on the basis of a Four Corners interview Thomas gave in February, in which he made much the same admissions).
Believing Thomas to be a threat to national security, the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, this week signed a control order under anti-terrorism legislation, which prevents the father of three from leaving his house between midnight and 5am, restricts his phone and internet use, requires him to report to police three days a week, and not contact Osama bin Laden.
These restrictions "attack our way of life", squealed civil libertarians who are upset that Thomas was "at the beach with his family" when the control order was signed.
But people can simultaneously be family men who go to the beach and all sorts of other things, and the simple pleasures of going to the beach with your family was something his terrorist friends turned into a nightmare for 88 Australians and their families in Bali in 2002.
"Control orders are about protecting the Australian community," said Ruddock. "You wouldn't need control orders if you could rely on the criminal justice system to provide that ongoing protection." Which, of course, you can't.
As Peter Faris, QC, former head of the National Crime Authority, pointed out refreshingly on ABC's Lateline on Tuesday night: "This is a case about trying to protect the Australian public. And all we have is this Š this galaxy of civil liberties lawyers who don't care a fig about the safety of the Australian public, but only care about the rights of Jack Thomas. What about the rights of the Australian public? Don't they have a right to be protected?
"We are at war. And this is a very important function for the Government to protect its citizens."
Faris says apprehended violence orders are issued by courts every day, along with intervention orders, injunctions, money-laundering restraining orders, preventive detention orders, supervision orders. "The left is not marching in the streets about these."
As Justice Philip Cummins said in his sentencing in the Victorian Supreme Court, Thomas "voluntarily undertook paramilitary training at the al-Farooq training camp, a terrorist training camp of al-Qaeda. Included in that training was the learning and use of topography and the manufacture of explosives."
Like Hicks, he met bin Laden.
In an interview with News Limited journalists this week, Thomas claimed his travels were just an adventure.
"It's an Australian thing to do, go on an adventure. They talk about the Anzac spirit and the free-roving spirit Š I reject killing innocent people, of any type. I reject killing flies; it's what I've been taught by Mum and Dad, and it's what Islam teaches us."
So why go to Afghanistan to learn how to fire a Kalashnikov?
Thomas and his boosters should be thankful he has been treated so well. For one thing, his enormous legal bills are being paid by taxpayers, who will presumably also fund the costly exercise of going to the High Court to challenge the control order.
He has made a big deal of having a "post-traumatic stress disorder" so chances are there will an attempt at compensation.
Really, the debate over Thomas, like the Hicks debate, is a proxy for the biggest point of difference between Australians - between the inner-urban "elites", the academic/legal/media classes, and the rest of Australia - suburbanites, the working classes, and country people. It is a divide that the demographer Bernard Salt says will only grow. It is between those who believe the rule of law trumps all, and those who believe the law is servant, not master.
It is the same debate about discipline in schools, about lax parenting, about tougher penalties for criminals, about immigration detention, about whether or not there is a war on terrorism, about whether events of September 11, 2001, were "understandable", as some believe.
On one side are those who believe the terrorist attacks of September 11 should have been dealt with as if they were a policing matter; in other words, leniently, with hardly anyone arrested, let alone convicted or given a penalty that was anything more than a joke. On the other side are those who understood that Islamic terrorism was an immediate threat requiring firm retaliation and pre-emptive action.
This is not just a left-right dichotomy. At a recent conference of a conservative think tank, a number of attendees did not consider we were fighting a war, but simply facing a series of unfortunate incidents perpetrated by misguided young men, who happen to be of the Muslim faith.
That would be a comforting position to take, and yet the evidence against it mounts daily.