> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://redflag.org.au/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # FROM THE ARCHIVE—War abroad and repression at home (November 2005) - URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-war-abroad-and-repression-at-home-november-2005/ - Published: 2026-09-10T05:32:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-10T05:32:27.000Z - Author: Tom Bramble - Tags: History, Imperialism *This is an edited version of an article written in response to the 2005 Anti-Terrorism Bill, which was rammed through parliament by Prime Minister John Howard’s Coalition government with the support of the Labor Party the following month (December 2005).* *The legislation gave security agencies the power to detain and question suspects for up to fourteen days without charge; and it made it a crime for people who had been detained to tell anyone about it. It also gave police the power to impose control orders on suspects for up to a year.* *Further, it reintroduced the crimes of “sedition” and “seditious intention”. The latter includes the crimes of intending “to bring the sovereign \[the federal government\] into hatred or contempt” or to “urge disaffection” against the constitution, the government or the parliament.* *Bramble noted that “the Australian government has passed 26 laws that restrict civil rights in the name of ‘combating terrorism’”. By 2021, the* Australian Financial Review *could report that “more than 130 pieces of national security legislation” had been enacted since 9/11.* --- Howard’s latest “anti-terrorism” laws, due to take effect by the end of this year, are a drastic attack on the civil rights of all ordinary Australians and Muslims in particular. These laws are the direct product of September 11, but not in the way that our government would have us believe. Wars do not involve just military forces but ideological warfare as well. The enemy has to be demonised—to be rendered sub-human in order to justify its slaughter. In addition, an “enemy within” has to be created to cement “national unity” at home. Thousands of Muslim residents of the USA, UK and Australia have been subject to police harassment, detention without trial, secret hearings, censorship and torture. Their homes have been raided, their communications intercepted, and infiltrators and provocateurs planted in their communities. At the same time, the climate of anti-Muslim racism stoked by the “war on terror” has resulted in an increase in harassment on the streets, with Muslims being abused and assaulted. Since 9/11, the Australian government has passed 26 laws that restrict civil rights in the name of “combating terrorism”. Howard’s new laws represent the further acceleration of state repression. Their purpose is not to keep us safe on public transport but to foster a climate of fear, suspicion and racism, the better to keep us divided. Such an environment helps Howard push through his unpopular agenda at home of union-busting, locking up refugees, privatisation of Telstra and the destruction of Medicare. Under these new laws, Muslims in particular will be subject to control orders which allow people deemed in secret court hearings to be “terrorist risks” to be electronically tagged. Those subject to control orders will be subject for 12 months to travel bans, restrictions on whom they can meet, and bans on communicating with associates by telephone, internet or email. The government has already announced that it has its eye on 800 Muslim suspects The legal tradition of *habeas corpus*, whereby people cannot be held unless charged with an offence, will be trashed. Preventative detention allows the police and ASIO to secretly lock up people for up to 48 hours and, with the assistance of state police, up to 14 days. Preventative detention applies not to people who have allegedly committed an offence or even alleged to have any information in relation to an offence, but merely on suspicion of what they may do in future. It will be a crime for an organisation to “advocate” terrorism, which includes “directly or indirectly counselling or urging” a terrorist act, or “directly praising” terrorism. The range of groups that can be banned as terrorist will be dramatically widened and any of their members, supporters or financial donors can be imprisoned for years. In order to push all of this through, the AFP and ASIO are undergoing a massive expansion, with ASIO growing from 584 officers in 2001 to 1860 by 2010\. With this expansion in numbers goes ever-increasing powers: use of CCTV surveillance, the power to secretly enter and search premises, intercept communication and seize material. The AFP will have new powers to stop, question and search people on the street, seize documents and obtain airline passenger information. ### **The Vietnam Syndrome** The “war on terror” has a second major purpose: to overcome once and for all the Vietnam Syndrome—the belief that domestic populations would not tolerate a war of aggression against a distant enemy. Overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome is also about destroying the gains won by the Left during the Vietnam War—the right to organise street marches, to challenge government policy in a vociferous manner, and to challenge the idea that Uncle Sam was always right. Our governments want to go back to the days when open dissent was a dangerous exercise, when people were too scared to raise their voice in protest, and when government censors regularly prevented “seditious” literature, such as the *Communist Manifesto*, from arriving in Australia. Bush and Co. hoped that quick victories over Afghanistan and Iraq would create a jingoist fervour that would pave the way for further aggression in the future and allow the rolling back of civil rights at home. However, the occupation of Iraq has not gone according to plan. What was supposed to be a crowning triumph for the Bush administration has turned into a disaster. Thus, measures are needed to undermine opposition to the war. Wars are always associated with suppression of civil liberties at home—during World War II we saw the introduction of no-strike legislation, suppression of the press and of rights of association. Things have not gone this far with the “war on terror”, mainly because it is not a total war mobilising the entire resources of the country, but the civil rights of ordinary Australians, Muslim and otherwise, still have to be attacked. ASIO has made 44,000 “threat assessments” in the past year and we can be sure that several thousand of these related to protest actions organised by the Left and the unions. Harassment of the Left led to the deportation of US peace activist Scott Parkin in September on ASIO’s advice that he represented a “threat to national security”. And so as well as all the “counter-terrorism” legislation primarily aimed at the Muslim community, Howard is also sneaking through legislation to revamp the crime of “sedition”. Sedition will include “urging disaffection” against the constitution, “promoting feelings of ill-will or hostility between different groups”, or urging conduct that is intended to assist “an organisation or country engaged in armed hostilities” against the Australian military. During the Vietnam War, socialists in the West raised the slogan “Victory to the National Liberation Front” (the Vietnamese guerrilla army fighting US occupation of their country). Under Howard’s legislation, those promoting this slogan could be jailed for seven years. Today, the equivalent would be calls of support for the Iraqi resistance in its fight against US occupation. Likewise, the extended definition of what constitutes “terrorism” could see people locked up for participating in peaceful demonstrations which turn violent after being attacked by cops. ### **Our opposition** The sheer range and depth of the attacks on our civil rights has aroused widespread opposition, from talk-back radio to demonstrations. On 22 October, 500 rallied outside State Parliament in Victoria, while 700 attended a public meeting called by civil rights groups in Sydney. In opinion polls, 30 percent express opposition to the new legislation. Given the overwhelming support for this legislation within the political establishment, Labor as well as Coalition, this is a major achievement. However, if we are to combat this legislation and render it inoperable, we cannot capitulate to the arguments that are put up for its defence. Too often the argument from lawyers, Muslim leaders, Greens and Democrats is that “the Howard government is going the wrong way about tackling terrorism”, that “the legislation will only drive more Muslims into the arms of the terrorists”, or that it represents “a victory for the terrorists in destroying our civil liberties”. These arguments will cripple opposition to the legislation because they accept its basic premise—that all Australians face a threat from terrorism and that we have to find a way of combating it. The opposition to this legislation is also hamstrung by the failure of the mainstream critics to situate their criticisms in the context of the entire agenda of US imperialism and specifically the war in Iraq. We have to be clear: our opposition to this legislation is not because we have better solutions to combating terrorism, but because its passage only harms our ability to tackle the real terrorists—our own ruling classes—by dividing our ranks and hindering our rights to organise. We are not opposed only to the “extreme fringes” of it; we don’t want it to be tinkered with, but defeated in its entirety. And we have to always make the connections to the broader imperialist agenda—our civil rights will always be in peril so long as our government is fighting aggressive wars. ### **The capitalist state** The new legislation is just the latest manifestation of a more general process—the expansion of the repressive powers of the state. As capitalism ages, competition between rival capitalist blocs intensifies. The state increasingly intervenes to protect the interests of “its” native capitalist class. Hence the repeated drive to war over the past century. As capitalism ages, however, its ability to ensure an obedient working class by satisfying its material needs also deteriorates. Belief among the mass of the population in the merits of the capitalist order begins to decline as a result. Participation in the structures of institutional politics (e.g. membership of political parties) declines. And, at least among a minority of the working class who sink out of the paid workforce, sometimes for many years, the discipline instilled in it by regular work and its integration into capitalist society also declines. Thus the phenomenon of riots, not just in the Aboriginal population but also in the white, as in Macquarie Fields in Sydney. Depending on the circumstances, capitalism can come increasingly to rely on state force as opposed to social consensus to hold its grip on the population. Thus governments in Britain, the US and Australia, the world’s leading pioneers of neoliberalism, have rapidly expanded the number of police, jails and prisoners in the past two decades. Likewise, the civil liberties that were won progressively by struggle and reform are gradually wound back. The bourgeoisie increasingly retreats from the ideas of civil rights, the separation of executive, legislature and judiciary and the free movement of people, while the welfare functions of the state increasingly give way to the repressive. This process proceeds until and unless there is determined mass resistance to it. Thus, it is no accident that the anti-terrorism legislation is being promoted at the same time as anti-union legislation. Both indicate a turn to greater state coercion in managing the domestic population. Just as the right to remain silent has been stripped away from terrorism suspects, so that same right has been removed from union delegates in the building industry. Just as the AFP is authorised to conduct dawn raids on Muslim families, so Howard’s union-busting goons have the power to do the same to union offices and union delegates. ### **We can fight back** The Howard government is using its parliamentary majority to push through a swag of repressive laws. The anti-terrorism legislation is supported by the state and federal ALP. Howard has been given a major boost in this respect. Nonetheless, the fate of the existing sedition legislation demonstrates the limits of these kinds of laws. Governments, police and spy agencies can only use these powers if we let them. We assume today a range of rights such as marching on the streets, distributing leaflets, organising socialist bookstalls and meetings on university campuses. And yet none of these were considered “rights” until the wave of anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s fought for and won these rights. The organisers of virtually every left-wing demonstration in the past century could have been prosecuted for sedition under the old laws but organised regardless. Strictly speaking, there was no right to strike in Australia until 1993, but hundreds or thousands of strikes occurred every year. And, more broadly, no state is able to withstand a revolution if the people are determined to bring it down. Consider the Shah of Iran, who was thrown out of power in 1979\. The Shah had at his disposal thousands of trained torturers, and tens of thousands of informers, all operating without any legal checks. And yet these all came to nothing when the oil workers stopped work, the students demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands, and he was forced to flee the country. A similar fate befell the leaders of the old East German state ten years later. The old Communist government was protected by the monstrous secret police, the Stasi. Nearly 200,000 East Germans were in the pay of the Stasi, equivalent to one in 40 adults. And yet, when the masses tore down the Berlin Wall, the Stasi leaders and staff were forced to scuttle away as the enraged population stormed their offices and ransacked them. The government wins without a shot being fired if we let them intimidate us into silence by these laws. We need to continue our efforts to stop the bloody occupation of Iraq and to defend our civil rights at home.