The continuing politics of evasion

The expansion of AUKUS, new police surveillance, no action on gambling reform and restrictions on migration all governments avoiding scrutiny, protecting vested interests and searching for scapegoats.

A US base by any other name

The arrival of up to 2,300 US naval personnel, civilian employees, contractors and their family members, should finally end the political charade that HMAS Stirling in Perth is only hosting a short-term submarine rotation. The US Navy has established “Naval Support Activity Stirling” to provide housing, healthcare, childcare and recreation for this personnel, which suggests that it’s not creating the infrastructure of a brief visit or short-term holiday; it’s more along the lines of a permanent community.

The region of Rockingham will need to soak up additional pressure on housing, schools, roads and public services, while the US will gain a strategically valuable submarine hub underwritten by Australian taxpayers – which, of course, we were never asked about. Yet the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles continue to hide behind duplicitous language: the submarines are only “rotational”, the base will remain “Australian” – whatever that means in this day and age – and every decision that’s being made here somehow keeps our national sovereignty intact.

The Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy suggested this arrangement would only last “five years”, but quickly retracted that, and said that it an “enduring element” of American military presence in Australia. So, what are we meant to believe? Perhaps we should speak to the people of Okinawa, where 80 years of US surveillance and military operations on the islands has resulted in many social and crime issues, toxic pollution, noise disruption, poor economic and business opportunities for local Okinawans, and completely taken over by American interests.

The central question isn’t whether Australia technically owns HMAS Stirling and whether it’s on Australian soil – Okinawa is Japanese territory but a de facto subordination to the US – but whether we could refuse to partake in any American operation during a regional war on our doorstep. And given the maniacal behaviour of the current US regime, it’s not a fanciful as it sounds.

This AUKUS deal – which we know very little about but will soon be seeing the physical evidence of it – is gradually linking up Australian territory, infrastructure and military planning to the strategies of the United States – which would also include Israel – and it’s taking place without any parliamentary debate, without a public mandate or honest account of the risks. It’s all just being rolled out, whether we like it or not, and this is the real danger.

First, they went for the gangsters and then everyone else

The Minns government in New South Wales insists that the surveillance powers that it wants to introduce is all about targeting organised crime. We’ve heard this story before: identify a nebulous and frightening enemy, promise exceptional powers to combat this enemy, and dismiss anyone who asks the awkward questions as being “soft on crime”.

Under these laws, police can obtain a Digital Evidence Access Order, compelling anyone to provide their PIN, password or biometric access to a lawfully seized device, bypassing the conventional warrant that’s currently required. And refusing to do this, could end up in jail time. If you decide to avoid this jail time by giving up your passwords, then once the device is unlocked, forensics such as those supplied by Israeli company Cellebrite can extract everything on this device: photographs, long-deleted material, location histories, contacts, metadata and any form of communications that has left a digital footprint over many years.

This NSW government has a habit of doing this. Alongside access to toll-camera images and adding NSW driver-licence photographs to a national face-matching data system, this represents a substantial development of state-led surveillance of its own citizens.

The question here is not about organised criminals use encrypted phones – clearly they do. The issue is whether suspicions about organised crime should create a gateway to state overreach in the digital domain, and whether there are enough legal protections in place once police discover how convenient these powers are, which they can then use against anyone.

History suggests that once these powers are in place, governments refuse to give them up, unless they’re found to be unconstitutional – as was the case with the Public Assembly Restriction Declaration to silence pro-Palestine action. Governments always make the claim that they’re building surveillance systems for the worst offenders in society, but then quietly use these systems to silence protesters, journalists and anyone else they don’t like. This is another example of that.

Labor’s betting on doing nothing

Gambling advertising legislation is providing another test of whether the Albanese government governs for the public interest or for the vested interests, and just like every other test, this one will be provided in the favour of the latter.

The current bill in Parliament will restrict inducements, promotional odds, stadium advertising and betting logos on uniforms, while allowing commercial television to broadcast up to three gambling advertisements an hour between 6am and 8.30pm, which will still end up being 45 advertisements during that time.

This is well short of the comprehensive recommendations proposed by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy which, incidentally, received unanimous parliamentary support. And now, instead of working towards these recommendations, the government is considering shelving the legislation completely rather than accepting reasonable amendments from the Greens, Coalition and crossbench.

The familiar excuses for the government’s recalcitrance will then be offered – sporting clubs, netball teams, and the commercial media depend on betting revenue, and if the revenue were to disappear, many jobs would be lost and industries would collapse. But this is exactly the problem. Bookmakers finance recreational and professional sport, advertising sustains the broadcasters, gambling taxes add substantial amounts to state budgets, and political access is opened up to the gambling lobby to preserve this entire nefarious arrangement.

It’s not a conspiracy: just follow the money. The evidence is there in plain sight. The government needs to decide whether gambling harm is a public-health crisis or just another revenue stream that will continue once all these issues are managed through political spin and making it look like something is being done, without doing anything about it. At the moment, Labor’s public position is that reform is absolutely essential, provided nobody too powerful is seriously affected.

Migration as the convenient scapegoat

The Immigration Minister Tony Burke’s postponed his migration speech last week, and this suggests there’s a lot of internal dissent within the government about this package. The proposed restrictions will affect temporary residents, working holidaymakers, family migration, the work rights of asylum seekers and access to appeals, which apparently are all measures designed to prove that Labor is “doing something” about housing and cost-of-living issues.

Of course, migration does affect demand for housing and services, but there are many other issues that do contribute, most notably poor and inconsistent planning and building regulations across all three levels of government: federal, state/territory, and local council. But doing something about this requires hard work and patience – better to blame the migrant, instead of doing the hard work that would provide more meaningful solutions in the medium-to-longer-term period.

Australia’s continuing housing crisis has been created over many decades of underinvestment in public housing, massive tax concessions for property investors, privatisation and neoliberalism, weak planning and governments relying on the market to supply homes that it has no real incentive to make affordable. Migrants didn’t create insecure work, suppress wages, privatise essential services or neglect transport and social infrastructure, it was the fault of successive governments.

Business groups, of course, will defend migration because it supplies labour, consumers and results in economic growth. Their self-interest needs to be scrutinised too: employers should not be permitted to use temporary workers as a low-paid, easily controlled option for training and paying local workers a fair wage.

But the biggest issue is that this is all coming from the rhetoric of One Nation – the party that holds only two seats in federal parliament, while the government holds 94 seats. The greater political danger is that Labor adopts Pauline Hanson’s simplistic banter while offering a more palatable version of what she’s proposing.

Once migration becomes the excuse for every economic failure, the onus on governments to produce meaningful solutions falls away. Burke’s eventual announcement will reveal whether Labor can define migration in the national interest, or if the tail is wagging the dog, and it’s now One Nation that’s developing immigration policy, even though its relevance within federal parliament is insignificant.

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