Page 331 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006
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consideration; they are not saying, “This is absolute.” The committee has taken this issue seriously and this is a serious report to the government. Finally, I would like to thank my committee colleagues, Mr Stefaniak and Dr Foskey, and also Hanna Jaireth, the inquiry secretary. It was not easy for the three of us to come together because we all have very different views on this issue. I think we have worked together fairly cooperatively. I commend the report to the Assembly and to the government.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (11.02): I wish to endorse the comments of my colleagues about the collegiate atmosphere of our committee meetings on the draft Terrorism (Extraordinary Temporary Powers) Bill 2005. I also want to commend the government on its process in relation to this legislation. It is good practice to present controversial legislation—or legislation which, whilst not controversial, may initiate great change—as an exposure draft and set up a public consultation process whereby both ordinary people and experts can report to committees, speak at hearings and provide submissions, with the ultimate aim of improving the legislation. I believe that, if the committee’s recommendations are followed, the ACT government will have as good a set of legislation as it can have in response to the agreement made at the COAG meeting last year. However, as everyone is also aware, I have said at the front of the report that I do not believe these terror laws are necessary. To go further into that, I think we need to look at the world view that lies behind these and other laws on terror that we have watched coming in and eroding our freedom, or the freedom of other people in the community, over the last few years.
As an international relations scholar I studied the ideologies which shape Australia’s foreign policy and the subsequent impacts on our domestic policy. The tendency of the realists and the neorealists—especially the United States approach to the world—is to see the world in blocs. That is a very convenient and easy way to deal with the issues. The Cold War was of course a pre-eminent example. I hope we will not forget that we spent decades worrying about the scourge of communism. It was in that name that we saw many repressive laws. I am too young to remember the 1950s but other people will remember that time and the McCarthy era in the United States. A recent film was shown which reminded us of what governments can do in the so-called protection of our freedoms.
The demolition of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union left a vacuum in the early 1990s into which the so-called realists and neorealists tried to step. However, that was a little more difficult in the Clinton era and in the era of the Labor Party with Gareth Evans’s reign as foreign minister in Australia, which stalled the reimposition of a bloc approach to international relations. But then, very conveniently, along came Samuel Huntington in the mid-1950s with his book, The Clash of Civilisations. Clearly, this book was read by the advisers to Mr Bush because so much of its language was incorporated into his speeches.
The Clash of Civilisations asserted that the next war—of course, we know that the next war is inevitable because that is the whole foundation of the realist IR theory—will be between cultures. Although the theories in this book have been heavily critiqued for their sweeping generalisations, its appeal to these leaders was immediate. But instead of trying to break down any tendencies towards the forming of cultural-religious blocs—and Islamism and fundamentalist Christianity are the major ones for our purposes—leaders like George Bush and John Howard saw political advantage in solidifying and creating
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