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In Fear of Security

Launching his new book, Anthony Burke argues that the cry of "security" is the last refuge of the political scoundrel

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I keep thinking about the very witty TV ads put out by the Australian Democrats during the election campaign, which superimposed the sound of two dogs barking over shots of the debate between Kim Beazley and John Howard. And what were they barking at us for five long, terrible weeks? Security. Security at home and abroad. Security in times of international turmoil; security against terrorism; and most incredibly, the security of our borders against asylum seekers, against the alarming threat posed to our "national life" by those who wish no more than we do: to work and live with some sense of safety; to support and educate their children; to worship their gods; to give and receive love.

More than once during the past few weeks it has occurred to me that the cry of "security" is the last refuge of the political scoundrel. One of the lessons of this book, when it comes to these dogs barking security, is that we are always going to be on the wrong side of the fence from them. They promise to keep us safe, but they're only tearing us to bits.

I know there are a lot of us who feel a deep sense of shame about where this nation has sunk to. I felt shame when our leaders could only trade insults as 350 people drowned off Indonesia, and as I listened to John Howard speak on 2GB radio with the most alarming imagery he could plausibly use: "I don't want to use the word invaded", he said, but the "shores of this nation [are] thick with asylum seeker boats, thick with asylum seeker boats".

The question is, what do we do with that shame? Do we turn it inwards and let it corrode our hope and idealism? Do we succumb to resentment? Or do we strike out in a new direction, based on a deeper understanding of how this occurred and how we can promote a new reality? This book tells us a lot about why this election occurred and why Howard's strategy worked - he was drawing on an anxiety that has run through Australian culture for two hundred years. This book also tries to imagine a new kind of identity and sovereignty fit for the moral, political and economic complexities of a globalised world; one in which our space of community and sympathy is always enlarging, rather than turning in on itself like a dying plant.

This book takes a very critical look at the idea and practice of security in this country and elsewhere, and it does end up being very sceptical about the concept of security. But I do believe that there are security issues that are important: I accept the kinds of domestic security issues Kim Beazley was talking about the during the election campaign, about jobs, health, education and opportunity - we can argue about Labor's ability to deliver on them, but these are real needs and at least someone tried to remind us of them. There is the basic defence of Australia against serious military threats; there is the need to be vigilant (but not overanxious) about terrorism; to control the flow of hard drugs into our society; and the times when our strategic concerns merge with the human security of our neighbours, as occurred in East Timor in 1999. There is plenty of room for debate in these areas, but they are rarely the stuff of scandal.

This book is about the way in which security in this country has become a scandal, and unfortunately we are not talking about a few policy aberrations. It goes to the heart of who we are: to our basic images of national identity, of political rights and participation, to our relationship with the traditional owners of this country, and to our relations with the outside world. It is about the relationship between inside and outside in what passes for our national consciousness. It is about whether or not this is truly a liberal society or some kind of 18th century sham, weighed down by its fear of the Other and its obsession with exclusion and control. It is about whether or not justice, in its most profound historical sense, has a meaningful place in our world. It is about whether we are free, or slaves to someone else's claustrophobic idea of freedom.

So this is a book about Australia's security obsession, but even more importantly it is a book about security as a form of politics and power, about security as something that does things to us and to others, that controls and cramps our lives rather than something that enables and enriches them. It is about a security that always seems to be on the wrong side of justice, whether it be justice for indigenous people, for the people of East Timor and Afghanistan, for the developing world, and more.

Australia's treatment of asylum seekers is only the most recent example of the pattern that has run through Australian history, from the very first decisions made by the British Government of William Pitt to colonise this continent. In that pattern, we have always purchased our security at the expense of another, at the expense of the suffering and insecurity of another.

In 1786 the British chose to colonise Australia to secure their ruling classes from the threat of what they saw a growing wave of crime in England; once that colony was established, the first serious threat to its security came from the traditional owners of this country. In the 1880 and 90s it was the fear of Asian immigration, of Japan, and of striking workers. Speaking of this time, Manning Clark coined a phrase that became a kind of Leitmotif for this book: he wrote that the Australian Constitution was designed as "a fortress against both the enemy without and the enemy within".

How often have we seen that since - during the Great War and after, as Billy Hughes split the Labour movement overt the issue of conscription, accusing his opponents of being an unpatriotic rabble of Bolsheviks and Sinn Feiners. Again during the Cold war, when Menzies sought to use the defence powers of the Constitution to outlaw the Communist Party and its "fellow travellers", at the same time as he sent troops to Southeast Asia to fight communism. It is worth recalling Sir Garfield Barwick's argument in 1962 that "Vietnam is our present frontier" and that of Defence Minister Paltridge who believed that "the security of Australia would be at stake if Vietnam fell".

The enormous suffering of the Vietnamese, and the trauma of our veterans, was to be the price of our security, just as was the suffering of the 1.5 million murdered and imprisoned by the Soeharto regime between 1965 and 1970 - a regime Gough Whitlam welcomed as an agent of "democracy, justice and freedom". Through the 1970s, 80s and much of the 1990s our security was purchased at the expense of the suffering of the Timorese and other opponents of Soeharto, according to an assumption that the his regime was, in Paul Keating's words, "the most beneficial strategic development to affect Australia and its region in thirty years".

This is why, in my own efforts to try and understand our obsession with security, I turned to the comment by East Timor's Bishop Belo, from his biography. After the murder of a youth by Indonesian security forces on the eve of the 1991 Dili Massacre he exclaimed to a friend: "The news put out by TVRI was false! False! The truth turned upside down. We live in a country where bad is good, light is dark, and there is no justice!"

This is how I feel about security - it's the truth turned upside down, a world where bad is good, light is dark, and where we seem to accept these appalling paradoxes at face value. I was reminded of the Party's slogans in Orwell's novel 1984, "Freedom is Slavery", "War is Peace", "Ignorance is Strength". We may not be living the nightmare of that world but we have entered into its logic, and to those slogans we have added our own: "Security is Fear".

This explains the presence of theory and philosophy in this book, interwoven with the narrative. Not because some of these ideas are fashionable, but because it seemed the only way to cut through the structure of commonsense that men like John Howard and Philip Ruddock have used to such destructive effect. Our problem is twofold: not only are we faced with the very long presence in Australian culture of a fear and exclusion of Others, but by the presence of that fear in the basic concepts of security, identity and sovereignty that we inherit from western political thought. By turning away the Tampa and detaining asylum seekers, John Howard is faithfully implementing the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Gorg Hegel and Jeremy Bentham. In the face of this, we have a lot of unlearning to do.

The suffering of Shayan Badraie in Villawood, the deaths of those who drowned off Indonesia last month, or Shahraz Kiane, the Pakistani man who died after setting fire to himself in protest outside Parliament house, in despair at DIMA's wicked and dishonest treatment of his family. Three cases among many which prove that, as a nation, we are bent on securing ourselves at the expense of others. We should also remember that the Howard Government has been doing this for a lot longer, whether it be in relation to the traditional owners at Jabiluka, their Wik legislation, the refusal to acknowledge and compensate the suffering of the stolen generations, and their support for mandatory sentencing. We are still governed by the spectre of the enemy without and the enemy within.

In the increasingly borderless world of globalisation our dominant images of sovereignty and security are failing us. Our security can no longer be thought in isolation from the security of others; our sovereignty can no longer be thought as a wall protecting us from the world, from our global responsibility for that world. This is particularly so in the case of asylum seekers, where there is an urgent need both to reform the repressive laws which govern their treatment within Australia, and to achieve regional and global solutions to what is one of the most pressing human security problems the world faces.

The treatment of asylum seekers cannot be left to the cynical whims of nation-states who champion the dissolution of borders for capital and trade, but then want to close them to people. We need a 'Kyoto Protocol' for asylum seekers, based firmly on the 1951 Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human rights, an agreement in which there is a global assumption of responsibility and the common dream of a world that is truly changed.

In Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety (Pluto Press Australia, 2001) retails for $39.95

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»	Union Journo on Death List
»	First 'Lab Rats' in Bank Hold-Up
»	Monk's Mad Power Grab from States
»	Big Print Merger Threatens Jobs
»	Anger as Labor Staffers Shun Unions
»	Unions Are Well Advanced In Change Unions Tell ALP
»	Unions Step Up Organising Drive
»	Education, Call Centre Unions Sweep Awards
»	Bank AGMs Focus of Worker Anger
»	Gender Balance in Transport Concessions
»	Concern As Sydney Collapses
»	Bakers Seek More Bread
»	CFMEU Forces Re-Think On Asbestos
»	Call Goes Out for Union Summer
»	Twelve Weeks Parental Leave For Kiwis
»	Organiser of the Year Nominations Open
»	Activists Notebook

»	The Soapbox
»	Sport
»	Labour Review
»	Tool Shed

»	What's Wrong With Labor
»	Why I'm Quitting the ALP
»	Compo Flak
»	Union Democracy
»	Multi-Skilling Corrigan Style

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