Thursday, 21 November 2019

Australia now a surveillance state with journalists as POIs under ASIO Act, Michael West, 21 November, 2019.

Australia now a surveillance state with journalists as POIs under ASIO Act

by John Stapleton -- 21 November 2019 -- Comment Analysis, Featured

'Persons of Interest: ASIO files (courtesy https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/)

Will future historians see the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison era as the period of governance when totalitarian instincts were unleashed? The targeting of journalists is just the beginning of a much greater disaster, writes journalist and author, John Stapleton.

The #RighttoKnow movement barely touches on the intensity of media manipulation by the conservatives since they regained power in 2013; from blocking popular Facebook sites to harassing little-read authors like me.

Imagine you’re writing something critical of the government. You know there are cameras in your home, a keylogger on your computer – every keystroke is observed or recorded. And then you hear cries of derision from a neighbouring house.

I experienced this while completing the third and final book in a series on Australian life, Dark Dark Policing. The first two, Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost and Hideout in the Apocalypse, may not have set the bestseller lists alight, but that is not the point.

My lifetime in journalism never prepared me for so much abusive surveillance.

My epiphany came post-retirement. Returning from years in Asia, I was jarred by the dilapidated state of Australia in contrast to the dynamic societies I had been in. And so began my work on a book initially titled Workers’ Paradise Lost.

But it was impossible to ignore the biggest story of the day, terror, with the then Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, abandoning good government in favour of terrifying the population, pounding on about “the death cult” at every opportunity. This was despite repeated warnings from terror-messaging experts that his terminology was counterproductive, actually attracting recruits to Islamic State.

The element that caused most offence was a surface one. Every single terror operation conducted by the Abbott government was named with a pro-jihad tag, from the blatant to the obscure. How could this possibly be?

But there they were: politicians and leaders of national security agencies trumpeting operations named after something that Muslims, with their culture’s sense of historical grievance, could decipher.

Some were so obvious that it was difficult to understand why nobody raised the alarm. Here are a couple:

CounterTerrorism Operation Amberd: Launched in 2015. Amberd is in Armenia and 2015 was the centenary of the largest massacre of Christians in history, 1.5 million.

Operation Coulter: Ann Coulter is an American columnist best known for her comment:

“Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim.”

When quizzed, the Australian Federal Police had a bizarre explanation: the government, they claimed, had nothing to do with naming counterterror operations.

From that moment, I felt I was under intense surveillance.

Media dead silent as Wikileaks insider explodes the myths around Julian Assange

Among the most egregious laws passed by the Abbott and Turnbull governments were Journalist Information Warrants, issued entirely in secret. Journalists are not informed if a warrant is taken out against them and face jail if they publicise the fact.

The laws have become so strict that journalists cannot write about security operations, or even surveillance of their reporting, without the risk of prison.

I chose to use novelistic techniques. The protagonist in the first two books is Old Alex, a dishevelled retired reporter with a wild imagination.

And, as Alex speculates:

“Could someone who had just written a book called Terror in Australia possibly be the subject of a Journalist Information Warrant? Or was it illegal to even speculate?”

Australia is a surveillance state.

And journalists are now POIs, Persons of Interest under the ASIO Act.

Much of this legislation was introduced into Parliament under Tony Abbott and became law under Malcolm Turnbull.

You would be right to ask where the journalists were when this was going on.

The journalists union, the MEAA, under CEO Paul Murphy, has produced a string of stunningly good reports on these issues. Media organisations ignored them; the public had no idea of what was going on. Until the government began arresting journalists.

There are many ironies. The two greatest players in the #RighttoKnow movement, the ABC and News Limited, are highly compromised in their relations with government.

Traditionally, ASIO has vetted appointments to the ABC via security assessments, and there is no reason to assume the practice has ceased. News Limited’s editorial line is so utterly in bed with the right wing of the Liberal Party as to be preposterous.

The tranches of legislation passed by Abbott and Turnbull make it almost impossible to report on many significant issues.

Here’s a straightforward example.

Blair Cottrell of the United Patriots Front, despite being routinely demonised by the mainstream media, attracted tens of thousands of followers whenever he appeared on Facebook. Like it or not, his anti-multicultural rhetoric struck a chord with many Australians.

In a now-removed Facebook post, he wrote about how he would meet ASIO officers before a rally, ostensibly to minimise violence. And how he learnt that the AFP and ASIO had worked together with Facebook to have him banned. Feeling betrayed, he told everybody.

The tranches of anti-journalist legislation introduced jail terms of up to ten years for journalists who disclose what are known as SIOs, Secret Intelligence Operations. Who decides what an SIO is? ASIO does.

Did an SIO ban Blair Cottrell from Facebook for expressing views similar to those of the duly elected Senator Pauline Hanson?

The point is, the public narrative – thereby, the nation’s culture – is being controlled: from barely read authors like me, to the mainstream media, to Facebook warriors.

Suppress dissent and you foment revolution.

Thanks to the blizzard of poorly drafted legislation that the Liberals introduced to exploit the fear of terror, we now live in a country where, as the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security recently pointed out, you can be jailed for five years for breaching orders you didn’t know existed; where children as young as ten can be incarcerated without charge.

It doesn’t take the gift of prophecy to know that future historians will see the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison era as the worst period of governance in Australia’s history, when totalitarian instincts were unleashed. The targeting of journalists is just the beginning of a much greater disaster.

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https://www.michaelwest.com.au/toxic-safety-orders-the-latest-tool-to-shut-down-free-speech/

Tuesday, 5 November 2019

The Carlisle: Extract from Hideout in the Apocalypse, A Sense of Place Magazine, 6 November, 2019.

The Carlisle Hotel: Extract from Hideout in the Apocalypse

Illustrated by Dean Sewell

John Stapleton

Nov 6 · 7 min read

The Carlisle Hotel in the back streets of Newtown in Sydney’s inner-west is one of the few places left in Sydney where the wowsers have not won; an old-fashioned pub in an increasingly strictured, shuttered country.

Hotels and beer gardens across Australia are now largely empty, barren places, the victim of grotesque over-regulation and over-policing, and an increasingly devastated economy. People just don’t have the money anymore.

The only people who seem to think the Australian economy is doing well are conservative politicians, paid many times the average wage, all of them desperately peddling the myth that they are good economic managers.

No, they are not.

Most everybody else knows the truth: the economy is tanking.

I came to know the Carlisle when for a while I rented the attic room in the big white house opposite, known to many of the locals as Poofter Palace after the charming grandiosity of the then owner, former opera singer Peter Binning.

In a very different part of town, The Big White House was also the name for the old Home for Incurables, a place which as a working journalist I had written a number of stories about. That, too, seemed appropriate, but enough of all that.

In this troubled, confused period of life I had come to rest in this little neck of the woods, and was determined to make my own village, to start anew.

And I loved the Carlisle.

There no bartender quoted Responsible Service of Alcohol legislation at any customer who dared to have more than two schooners in an afternoon.

Nor did they refuse to serve shots of tequila, bourbon or whisky, as so many other bars now do, in an increasing infantilisation of the population.

And nor were people refused service if they looked slightly dishevelled or hung over in the mornings, as now happens in so many other hotels, the dwindling remnants of freer times.

On the blackboard at the Carlisle were chalked the words:

Fill with mingled cream and amber,
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain —
Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away;
What care I how time advances?
I am drinking ale today.

The lines were said to have been penned by master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe while drinking in a tavern in Lowell, Massachusetts and passed on to literary scholar Thomas Mabbott by a barman. While the authenticity of the quote was disputed, it really didn’t matter, it was that sort of hotel.

Poe, who struggled with alcohol all his life, died aged 40 after being found lying in the gutter outside a polling booth on election day in clothes not his own, delirious, unable to move and in great distress.

Theories on the mysterious death of the inventor of the mystery story suggesting he was bashed by “ruffians” or was the victim of a voting fraud scheme, where strangers were abducted and forced to vote multiple times. In those days each voter was given a shot of alcohol after voting as a reward, and Poe may well have been suffering from alcoholic poisoning.

That his words should grace the Carlisle more than 160 years after his death was more than apposite.

Workers gathered at the Carlisle from 4pm to take advantage of Happy Hour.

Once they might have cared to exchange their prejudices on all manner of things: the idiocy of politicians, the bastardry of their bosses, the latest piece of bureaucratic inanity or politically correct absurdity. Now they had learned to keep their views to themselves, and talked of little but football, while the rundown poseurs at the other end of the bar sat in self-affirming clutches and exchanged their spiteful, fruitless gossip.

Dogs sat on barstools. Crazies muttered.

The Carlisle was, at least for for me, the archetypal bar:

As J. R. Moehringer wrote in his splendid paen The Tender Bar:

We went there for everything we needed. We went there when thirsty, of course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to celebrate, and when sad, to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals, for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just before. We went there when we didn’t know what we needed, hoping someone might tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.

Everyone had their view; and for the many university students in that part of the inner-city, those views were acquired through the orthodox left propaganda of the national broadcaster. They could tell themselves they were progressives, their friends would nod in agreement and they slept peacefully at night. They were good people.

As for the tradies and other workers who also frequented the hotel, if their views were out of sync with the prevailing fashions, or with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, most had learnt it was easier to say nothing at all for fear of being labelled misogynist, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, ignorant and uncaring.

In an inflamed state of mind, it was easy to recall those Biblical words:

Jesus answered, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone Me?”

“We are not stoning You for any good work,” said the Jews, “but for blasphemy, because You, who are a man, declare Yourself to be God.”

Jesus replied, “Is it not written in your Law: ‘I have said you are gods’?”

These Gods sat on their bar stools along the length of the old fashioned bar, wreathed their prejudices ever closer to themselves and talked of little else but football. In truth, they were not welcoming. They did not heed Muhammad’s admonition: “Be kind to the traveller, courteous to the stranger.”

That evening Glen, who was not, as I was repeatedly warned, who he said he was, came to dinner, which with a retired opera singer in charge were always grand affairs.

“Do you believe in empaths?” Glen asked.

“Is it even possible?” his girlfriend asked.

“Sure,” I replied. “The full potential of the human brain is rarely explored. A military trained empath is in and out of your head in a second, an untrained one senses images, emotions, intent, loud thoughts, but that is all. They can cause a lot of problems. They leak all over the place. They are often troubled individuals. They have difficulty making sense of everything around them. They don’t understand their condition. They don’t understand why nobody else hears what they hear.”

As if by way of explanation. As if, in the accelerating crisis by which they were now gripped any of these gifts would be enough to save them.

There were always multiple betrayals. If you are vulnerable, people attack. Humans did not become the top predators on Earth by being nice.

Later in the garden Glen, aware of the abusive and intrusive surveillance he had endured ever since writing a book called Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost, began recounting various experiences; whispering campaigns, a throbbing echo just out of sight.

Came a spiel about targeted individuals, synchronicity, mimicking, gossiping, the treacherous undermining or destruction of the reputation or credibility of those who dared to go against the government line, the voices just out of reach, the many many things that didn’t make sense and made the targeted individual doubt their own sanity.

“That’s happened to me,” I said, recognising explicitly many of the techniques Glen was recounting.

“They’re called Psyops, or Psychological Operations,” he said. “There’s a whole theory behind it. Look it up. There’s plenty of material around. You become conditioned. They can trigger a fright-flight response just by a sound.

“And if the person has had any problems, say with a particular drug, they will find themselves suddenly being offered it wherever they go.”

I asked: “And so, the person is so disturbed, so disoriented, he thinks he’s going mad, and either retreats or commits suicide?”

“Precisely.”

“Why don’t they just kill the person in question?”

“Because that would look suspicious.”

This is an extract from the book Hideout in the Apocalypse. The sequel, Dark Dark Policing, will be published shortly.

All images are copyright to Dean Sewell. He can be contacted for assignment or reuse of images through the photographer collective Oculi or his Facebook page.

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Thursday, 21 November 2019