After having read reports of Kevin Andrew’s press conference where he provides further reasons for revoking Mohamed Haneef’s visa (like this one) I’m satisfied that he had good grounds.
The minister only has to operate on the basis of the balance of probabilities. Evidence that might not be sufficient to obtain a criminal conviction can easily sustain a visa decision. Criminal law requires a higher standard of proof because the penalties are so onerous, but there is no alienable human right to a visa, as there is to freedom from imprisonment.
That doesn’t justify Andrew’s entire actions in this case. To revoke a visa in order to hold a man without trial for a period of perhaps two years while awaiting trial on a matter where he had been granted bail, is a denial of basic human rights. It also, as Julian Burnside stated on Radio National some mornings ago, constitues a breach of the rule of law.
No-one will be interested in this point because hardly anyone understood it, or made it. Instead the debate divided into those who say that Haneef is innocent, and those who say that he might be, but there are enough problems with his story to treat him with extreme caution.
While he was in custody, the pro-Haneef forces seemed to me to have the upper-hand. Since the collapse of his case, and Andrew’s proper exercise of his discretion to deport him, the balance has changed. Haneef has made a number of mistakes.
He did a paid interview with 60 Minutes. Not an error on its own, but tacky. Then when he got back to India he put it in the context of claiming to be “victimised”. The tenor of his responses was clearly political. Islam is a “religion of peace” so he couldn’t have been involved in anything. Yes, well… And I’m sure I heard him say his training was against violence (but can’t find the video clip anywhere).
The government is a little lucky that these comments by Alexander Downer have disappeared, “What do you expect them to do, fall on the ground and grovel? Eat dirt? I mean, get real.” But Kevin Rudd must be wishing he’d kept to his original plan and said nothing, rather than calling for a judicial inquiry.
It could be that this will be a turning point in Rudd’s opinion ratings. He needed to take some risks on this issue, and he has, but the wrong ones. If they’d made a stand on using the visa to lock Haneef up after he’d been granted bail, then they’d be clearly differentiated from the government, but broadly on the publicly acceptable right line. Instead, they’ve allowed themselves to get side-tracked onto an argument about whether Andrews had the right to revoke the visa, which appears to have now been settled against them.

It must be one of the screwiest ideas to come out of a nominally intelligent person in quite a while. Labor MP Evan Thornley suggests that parents ought to be able to vote on behalf of their children under 18 years of age.

“Just imagine the radical change that would occur if parents voted not just on their own behalf but on behalf of their children, what that would bring to democracy, for investing in human capital, for investing in the next generation, for thinking about the environment and the longer-term future of our country…”

So last federal election I would have had 5 votes. One for me, and one for each of the kids. Thornley sees this as an advance with society moving from a property franchise to “one vote one value” and now “one person, one vote”. I guess there’s some sort of progression going on – you can’t vote for your wife anymore, so voting for your kids could be a good proxy.
Whoops. Now there’s a problem. Do I get to vote for the kids on my own, or do I have to share this right with their mothers? And how do we negotiate the voting balance as I’m pretty sure they don’t vote the same way I do. And what say should the kids have in this? And what rights would step-parents and adoptive parents have if the natural parents are still alive?
Thornley thinks that this change would tip the balance of power in favour of the future and such issues as “global warming, education funding and job creation”. But would it? Or would we be all casting votes in favour of Charlie Wonker after consultation with our off-spring?
Multi-millionaire Thornley has three children – more than the average – so perhaps is naturally predisposed to the idea. However, in general, the wealthier you are, the fewer children you have. I suspect there is a similar relationship between fecundity and “social progressiveness”.

“It would be a big change – yet hard, I would have thought, for the self-proclaimed ‘family values’ crowd on the other side of politics to oppose.”

More than a hint here of political positioning. Perhaps he’s chasing the Catholic vote, without having realised that Catholics no longer come in large families? (Although, according to our research, they do tend to vote Labor more than the general population).
Thornley floated the idea at The Australian Republican Movement conference in Melbourne where it was apparently warmly received. I’d be interested to see some regression analysis of the relationship between voting patterns in the republican referendum and family size.
Of course, we probably needn’t consult our kids, in which case we’d be skewing the system in favour of fertility, which doesn’t seem inherently reasonable to me. Who’s got more stake in the future – the parent or the capitalist? You might as well bring back the property franchise. In which case I wouldn’t get to vote at all. But worth $100 M Evan would get to spend all day filling out ballots.

The decision of the Queensland Government to establish the Urban Land Development Authority is at the one time both an admission that state governments are substantially responsible for the current housing affordability crisis, and another erosion of basic civil rights. It is also a further assault on local government, which is already under siege facing forced amalgamations and confiscation of its water assets.
Most worryingly the authority will have the power to compulsorily acquire land which it can then on-sell to developers who will be able to make a profit from developing it.
It will also side-step council planning legislation to bring on developments faster. It is alleged that this will make the price of a new house up to $20,000 lower (although there are no guarantees, according to Deputy Premier Anna Bligh).
The government is right to be concerned about the impediments that planning legislation puts in the way of developments, but the cure for this is adjustments to the legislation, not a new authority with Stalinist powers of acquisition.
The plan raises the spectre of people in inner-city housing in suburbs like Woolloongabba and Bowen Hills (both areas targeted by the government) being turfed out of their homes so that they can be demolished to make way for high density, highly profitable, new private developments.
This isn’t the first time that the state government has tampered with the property rights of individuals. Farmers face arbitrary loss of property rights under the operation of the vegetation legislation. These are larger civil rights issues than the federal government’s terrorism laws. Now the same arbitrariness has come to town will we see this recognised?

Peter Beattie appears to be leading the Rudd Labor attack on the federal government over the Haneef case. He is a curiously flawed tool.
Rather than attacking the decision to revoke Haneef’s visa, he has been burrowing into the government over the conduct of the case by the Federal Police and the DPP. Now I’d agree there appear to be flaws in their handling of this matter, but it’s not so long ago that Beattie himself was struggling with the conduct of his police and DPP in the Mulrunji case.
He more than most current political leaders should be aware that no government is entitled to direct a police inquiry or tell the public prosecutor how to assemble their brief. Howard is undoubtedly embarrassed over the federal police’s handling of the matter, but he is constitutionally and practically unable to do anything.
Which doesn’t mean that he should leave the issue alone. Former premiers of Queensland have been embarrassed by their ignorance of the separation of powers. Maybe Howard or Ruddock could forward the case of civics education and ask the current Queensland premier for his version of the doctrine. It could be embarrassing both for him and for Kevin Rudd, who is presumably the intended beneficiary of the premier’s stirring.

I like to think that I believe in civil liberties, but I’ve been barely troubled by the long time that Mohammed Haneef has spent in jail for interrogation. It seems to me that terrorism is not like any other crime. Allowing a suspect to roam around while you work to find evidence on which to charge them might represent an unacceptable risk to national security; and you may also need them incommunicado as part of a wider operation. The requirement for police to make a fresh application before a magistrate every 48 hours, and their ability to interrogate for a maximum of 24 hours seem to me to provide appropriate checks and balances.
I’m also not inclined to sneer at the charge that he recklessly provided a sim card to a terrrorist organisation. We’ll see how serious the charge is when he appears in court, but for the moment I’ll give the prosecution the benefit of the doubt. An indication of the seriousness of the charge can be gauged from the fact that he was granted bail on surety of $10,000.
But what I’m not prepared to accept is the federal government’s revocation of his visa, for no better reason from what I can make out, than to circumvent the successful bail application and lock him away again. The federal government has his passport. He is not leaving the country, so he can’t avoid facing the charges. A magistrate, after hearing evidence from both sides, has decided that he is not so dangerous that he has to remain in prison. So where is the point in putting him in a federal jail? After the trial is over we will all be in the best position to judge whether his visa should be revoked, whether or not he is convicted.
The only viable explanation that I can see is political, and it is one that ought to backfire on the government. If it doesn’t it will be because the Labor Party has laid down and agreed with their actions. The only opposition at the moment appears to be coming from Democrats senator Andrew Bartlett, and the Greens Kerry Nettle.
My sense is that while beating up on refugees and foreigners was a politically smart thing for the government to do in 2001 or even 2004, the tide has changed. The issue certainly doesn’t come up in our research, and the popularity of articles on On Line Opinion in this area has been waning. The reason that the government is so far behind in the polls is that the buttons that it used to punch so effectively are no longer connected to the national nervous system.
The only thing that must give it some faint hope of an election win is that the Rudd ALP’s “mini me” strategy is so risk averse that it won’t try to differentiate itself by even a millimetre from the government on this issue.

The Flegg effect is far worse than recent Courier Mail reports led me to believe. Today’s release of Newspoll figures allows for a comprehensive analysis of just when Bruce Flegg started to affect federal voting intentions and just how far the rot has spread.
Flegg became Liberal Party leader in August 2006. In April-June 2006 the two-party preferred federal Coalition vote was 55% in Queensland. Then in Jul-Sep 2006 it dived to 51%. So, let’s say that the initial Flegg effect was 4% (although it would be nice to know what the figure was in July, as I might be unjustly giving Flegg the credit for an effect caused by his predecessor Bob Quinn). There was certainly no other negative movement like this in any of the other states. In fact the Liberal vote in South Australia went up at the same time.
The Flegg effect seems to have cut in again in Jan-Mar 2007 with a further dip of 4% in the Coalition’s two-party preferred vote. Except that this dip is mirrored in every other state except South Australia, where the decline was 11%. Obviously word about Bruce Flegg was permeating around the country and voters were starting to mark the Liberal Party down as a result.
But familiarity sometimes breeds comfortableness. Or what else can you make of the effect that the vote in Flegg’s home state of Queensland has stayed constant since then, but the Liberal vote has deteriorated even further in NSW?
Yeah, well, if you believe any of this you’re obviously running strategy for the Queensland Liberal Party. The washout of the polls is that between last election and this there has been a 12.2% swing against the Liberal Party in NSW, 9% in Victoria, 11.1% in Queensland, 9.6% in SA and only 5.4% in WA. All the east coast states are pretty consistent. If voters in Queensland mention Flegg it is likely to be because they’re looking for a rationalisation of their voting intention.
When we poll voters more of them mention water and climate change as reasons for how they will vote. This probably provides a better explanation, although rainfall doesn’t seem, on a cursory analysis, to exactly match voting trends either.

The whole reason for having the ABC, and supporting it through taxpayer funds, is that it will be more objective than the commercial broadcasters and cover subjects that they won’t. Tonight Mark Scott’s ABC failed that test.
I edit On Line Opinion, a journal which tries to be balanced. We publish many articles which I think are wrong. I have faith in my audience. I believe that they are just as well equipped to spot the mistakes as I am, and that out of the competition between views they can work out who is correct. And maybe the mistakes I “spot” aren’t actually mistakes at all. We cover subjects that even the ABC won’t, and I believe that viewed as a whole, we are objective.
The ABC’s treatment of The Great Global Warming Swindle fulfils one of the purposes for which the ABC was established, and breaches the other. This is material that the commercial broadcasters would be unlikely to carry, even though it was a commercial broadcaster in Britain that commissioned it. A mark to them. Their broadcast of it was not balanced. A more serious mark against them.
The issue of the balance was the framing. Tony Jones opened the broadcast by saying that the views expressed in the documentary were not those of the ABC: When was the last time the ABC felt so impelled? That wasn’t the only time that he gave the audience to understand that this documentary was rubbish. Well, if it was that bad, why screen it? My test is arguability. If a substantial proportion of the population might agree with an argument, then we are happy to publish an article from that position. You won’t find any flat earth articles on On Line Opinion, but you will find articles with support from much less than 50% or the population.
Some other observations.
Michael Duffy was right on the money when he pointed out that Jones had failed to put Nicholas Stern to the same test as he had Durkin.
David Karoly was supposed to be the key witness for the defence, but he not only proved that he was no more honest than Durkin, but he let the marsupial rat out of the bag.
First, his dishonesty. Bob Carter (“Professor” to Karoly, not plain “Doctor” (if you saw the broadcast you’ll know the snide by-play I’m referring to)) stated, correctly, that the earth has in fact cooled since 1998. Karoly retorted that this was not true, because “on average” it had not cooled. High school mathematics is only needed to analyse this one. Averages are a lagging indicator, not a leading one. Anyone with the mathematical knowledge of a professor of earth sciences who relies on an average to pick a peak is being deliberately misleading.
Second, he stated that CO2 levels had been at 2000 ppm 50 million years ago, and that was when most of the carbon we are burning was laid down. We are currently, and again quoting from the professor, at 385 ppm, and no-one is forecasting anything like 2000 ppm in the near future. If life was so abundant with a level of CO2 5 times what it is today, what is all the fuss about. There is certainly nothing like a “one-in-five” chance that we are heading for a car crash as Robin Williams (the Richard Wilkins of science reporting) claimed. Rather the reverse – higher temperatures, within reason, equal more life.
The ABC probably did us a favour by broadcasting the Great Global Warming Swindle, despite the disclaimers. They failed to significantly dent the science that it presented. And that failure counts for something.

John Howard is like Adolph Hitler – I wouldn’t have even run that line in the greenest of my school boy debating days. So why would Paul Keating?
Paul is either (a) barking mad or (b) up to something. I’ll go for the latter. Howard’s ratings start to improve, so Labor needs a diversion, and one that underlines the fact that Kevin Rudd isn’t Paul Keating. The government lacks discipline and falls for the line, while Kevin Rudd sales blithely by talking up the chances of getting the price of bananas down.
One of the keys to Keating defeating Hewson was the way that Hewson was positioned as the trouble-making minority – always in a fight. I remember Hewson deftly catching an egg that was thrown at him at an open-air rally in Brisbane’s King George Square – all the public remembers is the brawling.
Next time Keating steps up for a fight the government should just let his own weight work against him and step away.