“Worst of the worst?” was the title of a Four Corners investigation into Mamdouh Habib on 20th July, 2004.
Anyone wanting to weigh into the debate about his detention and then lack of trial ought to read the transcript. In showing that he wasn’t the worst of the worst the programme still demonstrated he was working hard to recruit jihadists, if without success.
I’ve always thought that David Hicks has been hardly done by and I will be following his trial closely. Seems to me like he was an adventurer who ended up in the wrong war in the wrong country at the wrong time – Beau Brummel in a parallel universe. It’s not a crime to accidentally find yourself fighting against your own country.
As for Habib, if I were the Australian government I’d have him under close surveillance too. I certainly wouldn’t stand with Bob Brown who said:

He says Mr Habib is now a free man and should not be under watch.
“Mr Ruddock’s talk about constant surveillance is to try to continue the presumption of guilt rather than innocence under the law,” Senator Brown said.
“It’s this reversal of law and Australian standards by Mr Ruddock and Mr Howard that we need to keep under surveillance.”

The absurdity of this statement is highlighted by the AVO slapped on Jamie Fawcett and Ben McDonald by Nicole Kidman on the basis that they “might” be charged with “menacing driving” (whatever the hell that is). Allegedly threaten our Nic and anything’s OK, but involve yourself in terrorism, and the enforcement agencies are not even entitled to be vigilant. Imagine how much more crime would be committed if the police were only permitted to survey suspects after they had been convicted! We’re not talking Queensland Special Branch here, keeping files on ALP and Civil Liberties activists (not to mention some parliamentary members of the Liberal Party). That was absurd, but this is commonsense.
Of course, if Habib’s allegations of being tortured can be proven, that is another thing. Undoubtedly the evidence will be hard, if not impossible, to gather, so they probably can’t be proven, but who will believe the Yanks innocent? In Australia these days, balance of the doubt only appears to cut one way – in some quarters there is no doubt who the worst of the worst really is.
[BTW, I notice Trevor Cook at From the sidelines has an entirely different take, but Michelle Grattan and I appear to be on much the same wavelength.]

As I predicted soon after last election – Howard government control of the Senate is likely to lead to more intra-Liberal Party activism than in previous parliaments (certainly any in the ’90s). One sign of that is the newly formed Backbench Tax/Welfare reform group co-chaired by Victorians Sophie Panopoulos and Mitch Fifield. But what does the group stand for?
In an article first published in The Australian and republished here in On Line Opinion Sophie Panopolous argues that we need to index taxation and increase the tax-free threshold. This would solve bracket creep, which she sees as a real problem, and ease the financial incentives against the welfare-to-work transition.
Yesterday, in The Australian another co-chair, Mitch Fifield argues that indexation is a waste of time and we should be reducing the top rates of tax while leaving the tax free threshold alone. Both Mitch and Sophie appear to agree that, whatever else, the government ought to be using some of its surplus to hand money back to taxpayers rather than spending it on programmes targetted at specific groups.
In the meantime, Treasurer Peter Costello, presumably not being keen to hand back any money directly to taxpayers, and having been in the business longer than the other two, is advancing his own taxation scheme – to simplify the provisions of the Tax Act and base them on principles rather than black letter law.
I’m not sure that I like the Treasurer’s approach. I suspect that all that will happen is that the complexities of the tax act will migrate from the act itself into myriads of court appeals and tax office rulings which will be even less accessible and more voluminous.
I can sympathise with Fifield (although he seems overly obsessed with people earning more than $80,000 per annum), but I’m right on board with Sophie. The “Uptown Girl” as she has been dubbed by Crikey! is looking after the down-trodden, and not only is that good social policy, it’s good economics. Turning welfare recipients into earners saves costs and increases income. I wouldn’t be surprised if the net result was that a few years after implementing Sophie’s policies there were enough additional tax revenue to cut top marginal rates as well.

The last fortnight’s shennanigans show just why Mark Latham won the Labor leadership in the first place, and why federal Labor is likely to continue to lose elections.
Mark Latham was a supporter of On Line Opinion from an early stage, and one of the few Members of Parliament with any intellectual depth. He seemed to like ideas, and the bigger the better. For most politicians this is a flaw, and so it proved for Mark. Ideas weren’t enough to rescue the ALP from the bind in which it finds itself.
For Latham to have been able to win the last election he needed to do two things – one was to get his party to co-operate with him, and the other to get John Howard to do the same. In the end neither happened.
The problem for Labor is that it needs to reinvent itself, but there is nothing that it can reinvent itself to be which would be electorally more popular than it already is. Latham’s insight that Labor had to target aspirational voters was right, but to target this group he had to do two things. The first was to force the ALP to move convincingly to the right of the spectrum, just as Tony Blair did with UK Labour. The second was to prise aspirational voters free from John Howard.
In the end Latham appeared to lack conviction in his own platform and ideas, so surrendered to vested interests in his own party, like the anti-logging , the anti-private school and pro-free and universal health lobbies. Labor didn’t move to the right, he moved to the left. This abandonment of his positions reinforced electoral perceptions that Labor stood for nothing more than creeping into government, making his second task of regaining voters impossible.
And even if he had moved Labor to the right, he would still have needed Howard to abandon the centre to him for the gambit to work. Instead, Howard stayed there, and threw money at anyone whose vote he needed to win. Governments really do lose elections, and Howard knows that, so anyone leading Labor was going to have a hard time.
That doesn’t excuse Labor from trying to win elections, so this isn’t an excuse for staying as they are.
The reason that Latham couldn’t change his party is the reason that his party is in trouble. It doesn’t really want to change, and even if it did, it can’t agree on what it might change to, nor does it have a sufficiently competent and persuasive potential leader to guide it through. At the same time it knows that it can’t stay where it is. So the original election of Latham to leader by one vote was a fitting expression of this dilemma. While Beazley as the past was untenable, Latham, as the future, was only marginally better.
Without Latham there appears to be no future, not if Gillard and Rudd are the only two candidates. The last week and a half of shennanigans show that neither have the intellectual or political depth to do anything but perpetuate what is already there, and if its perpetuation you want, then Buddha Beazley is as close to Nirvana as you are likely to get.
That neither Gillard or Rudd are politically astute is demonstrated by the ham-fisted way that they have handled the nomination process. They should both have known from the outset that they didn’t have enough support, so running should not have been an option for either of them. Good politicians instinctively know when they are in with a show, and you shouldn’t need to count if you have less than a quarter of caucus votes in your pile.
If Rudd is a little innumerate and slow, then he could have used his visit to Indonesia as a cover while other people did a quick count, but there is no excuse for coming back to Australia and then doing the counting yourself. His remark “I’ve got a field marshal’s baton in the backpack,” Mr Rudd said. “It’s just that the season is not right to take it out,” will haunt him. It undermines his statement of support for Beazley because it says “I am only with you as long as I don’t have the numbers.” It undermines his own position because it says “All I am interested in is being Prime Minister”. Rudd, a pracitising Anglican, should know that “he would be first shall be last”. It’s certainly the way electors tend to judge politicians.
Gillard is in even a worse position. Not only can’t she count, but she doesn’t even have a significant track record. Much of the commentary about her candidacy has centred on whether a childless unmarried woman from the left is electable as Prime Minister. This has been criticised as being a bigotted and parochial criticism. Instead it is just nonsense. For the right unmarried childless left-wing woman, these would not be issues. There would be other things to write about, such as her past achievements – her successful advocacies and manouevrings. That Gillard is not the right woman is demonstrated by the fact that apart from the personal, the only policy position she has held that the media think worth commenting on is Medicare Gold!
As Kevin Rudd told The Age:

“We need to patch this up straight away in order to lift ourselves out of the muck and become a viable alternative government for this country,” he said, echoing a familiar chorus since Labor lost the October 2004 election. “This country deserves better than we are currently delivering.”

Unfortunately, at this rate they are going to have to bring in contract cleaners from outside because all of the kids are making a mess of the inside.