A Summary Of Schapelle's Plight - So Far
Here are the essential details of this young Queensland woman's arrest and prosecution; within a system of 'justice' that is internationally recognised as corrupt and erratic.

• Schapelle worked triple shifts at her brother's shop on the Queensland Gold Coast, in order to save the money for a trip to attend her sister's birthday in Bali.

• According to a close friend of the Corby family, Jodie Power, she had never known Schapelle to use marijuana in 13 years of close acquaintance. "She doesn't like the stuff" she said.

• On Friday October 8, 2004, Schapelle and her younger brother and two girlfriends flew to Bali. From Brisbane the flight went via Sydney and then to Nagurah Rai airport in Bali. Schapelle did not see her bag once she put it on the check-in scale, until it came off the flight in Bali. It is said, I don't know how reliably, that there would have been no further weighing of the bag past Brisbane, and no individual screening of the luggage for drugs.

• On clearing Indonesian immigration and collecting their luggage Schapelle's group went through a customs check. There, a transparent plastic bag about the size of a pillowcase was found inside Schapelle's boogie board cover, just sitting on top of her flippers with 4.2kg of marijuana inside. In plain view, just unzip the cover and there it was. The estimated street value of the drug was AU$80,000, making it the biggest haul of marijuana ever found at Bali airport. If it was of Australian origin the cost of procuring the drug would have been AU$30,000; a sum of money that was typically beyond Schapelle's means or those of her family.

• According to one of Schapelle's legal team, Vasu Rosiah: "Somebody would be really mad, out of their mind to bring 4.2kg of marijuana in a transparent plastic bag. It's bizarre."

  Another of her lawyers, Lily Sri Rahayu Lubis, told reporters: "Do you think somebody can be that stupid, can be crazy? I don't know what to say but for me it is unbelievable".

  In Indonesia the penalty for importation and possession of marijuana is up to 20 years imprisonment and a one billion ruphia fine. The penalty for the more serious offence of trafficking or dealing in the drug is death by firing squad. Since a quantity of 4.2kg of marijuana is far too much for personal use such an amount strongly suggests that whoever placed the package in the boogie bag intended to traffic it in Bali.

• Upon the arrest of his daughter Schapelle Corby's father, who is reported to be presently battling cancer, told the media that he believed the marijuana was planted in her bag without her knowledge. He said:

  "She's been set up. Somewhere between Brisbane, Sydney and Bali she's been set up. She's completely innocent. ... She's a very pretty, lovely girl who has nothing to do with dope. I watched her pack her bag. I watched her the other day, sitting right in front of me. She was fixing her board. There was a strip missing and she was shellacking her board".

• The Sydney Morning Herald of February 3, 2005, reported:

  "The Australian Federal Police (AFP) have told Bali police that Corby has no criminal record. Queensland narcotics investigators have no intelligence linking Corby or any of her family to narcotics".

  "It is a known criminal activity to send narcotics internationally through the baggage of innocent travellers, using luggage handlers to insert and collect the drugs. ... I want to stress that it is not common. But it happens. We have arrested baggage handlers at Sydney international airport for intercepting narcotics". ("..an AFP officer told the Herald yesterday".)

• An Australian Sixty Minutes program contained the following interchange between the reporter, Liz Hayes, and Schapelle's sister, Mercedes.

  "LIZ HAYES: If Schapelle didn't put the drugs in the bag, then who did? It's a question the family is still grappling with. Her older sister Mercedes, who once lived in Bali, is convinced there's a sinister explanation.

  MERCEDES CORBY: Everybody is just saying, "Ooh, Mafia, sabotage".

  LIZ HAYES: That's what they are saying to you?

  MERCEDES CORBY: Everybody. Even if I'm in a taxi. 'Why are you going to Pokla?' 'Oh, to see somebody there.' 'Oh, that Australian girl? Oh, Mafia business.' Everyone."

• Speaking to Schapelle Corby, Sixty Minutes noted the seriousness of her predicament.

  "SCHAPELLE CORBY: And then they did a little test and it came up purple. And then they gave it to me and said it's marijuana. And I'm like, 'Well yeah, I can smell it's marijuana, but it's not mine. But they were getting my brother to touch it and do all the things. I'm like ... it didn't hit me. What's happening?

  LIZ HAYES: Did you know this was trouble?

  SCHAPELLE CORBY: Yeah, I didn't know exactly how much trouble.

  LIZ HAYES: Under Bali drug laws, possession is everything. That bag was Schapelle's, the drugs were Schapelle's unless she can prove that somebody else put them there. So now it is up to her legal team to try and establish her innocence because, as far as the Bali authorities are concerned, the case is closed. She's guilty."

The Australian government was aware of how difficult it would be for Schapelle Corby to escape a guilty verdict, and very possibly a firing squad, but they did little more than advise her to get a lawyer and send along a couple of consular officials to observe her trial. The AFP have offered to test the marijuana to see if it is of Australian origin (such help was refused by the Bali authorities as 'unnecessary'), but the ministerial and consular Feds have done nothing to help Schapelle Corby. It seems that as far as they are concerned her Australian passport is just a means of counting her in and out of the country. When she gets into serious, life-threatening, trouble they aren't prepared to intervene to ensure that she is treated fairly.

To the Australian public it might appear that the presence of consular observers at her trial and the fact that she has a local legal team will give Schapelle support in her efforts to avoid harsh justice in Bali. But the Indonesian system is entirely different to Australian or American law, and such people as defence lawyers and consular observers are little more than bystanders. The Australian Feds know this very well, but the Australian public is not aware of the true situation. If they understood the remoteness of Schapelle's chances of being acquitted of possession and trafficking of marijuana in Indonesia, the Australian people would be raising their voices in concern and anger at the inaction of the Australian Feds. They would also be seriously considering never going to that country, whilst it continues to operate a one-sided court system and apply the death penalty.

Many Australians would also begin to wonder why they should remain citizens of a federation that is so lacking in support for its citizens in trouble overseas, yet fawns over the children of murderous Indonesian generals who come to Australia to be educated, and often to be trained in modern warfare and military technologies that might one day be deployed against the ordinary people of Indonesia.

The Indonesian Trial Process
The following account of the differences between the Indonesian legal system and that of Australia are reproduced from a WWW page by Associate Professor Tim Lindsey of the Asian Law Centre at the University of Melbourne.

• "The Indonesian legal system is a Civil Law system rather than a Common Law system (the Common Law System is found chiefly in Australia, England, America and other former British colonies). As the Indonesian legal system is derived from French and German models, its procedures are entirely different to those in Australia.

  For example, Civil Law systems do not use juries. Instead, decisions as to guilt or innocence are made by a panel of three judges. One of these judges is the Chair(ketua) and is usually more senior than the other two judges. Typically, the judges produce a single, joint judgement (Putusan). It is virtually unknown for a judge (hakim) to dissent from the decision of the other two members of the panel and dissenting judgements are rarely produced and never released (except, recently, in the Commercial Court. (Pengadilan Niaga)).

  Typically, Civil Law judgements are shorter than Common Law judgements. In Indonesia, for example, the judgement may be only a few pages. In major cases, judgements tend to be long, of a length expected in a Common Law Appeal Court, but this is usually because the Courts often summarise all the evidence in the judgement (This is not usual in Common Law judgements). Legal reasoning to distinguish previous cases and so forth is relatively rare, because Civil Law systems do not have a system of precedent.

  Precedent, in Common Law systems, is the principle that previous cases with similar facts on an identical point of law will bind courts of equal or lower status. In Civil Law systems, courts are not bound by decisions of courts at the same level or higher. This means that there is little need for law reporting in Indonesia and certainly not for published authoritative sets of judgements. Some, limited collections of judgements are published (for example, Yurisprudensi) but they are ad hoc in nature. In fact, statements as to preferred interpretation or policy issued by the Supreme Court in the form of surat edaran (circular letters), rather like practice notes in the Common Law System, tend to be more influential than previous decisions, even of the Supreme Court.

  Another key distinction between Common Law and Civil Law systems is that Civil law systems are 'inquisitorial' in nature while Common law systems are 'adversarial'. This means that in Common Law systems the judge acts as an impartial referee while the parties present their witnesses in an attempt to convince a jury or, in most cases the judge. The judge generally does not ask questions of witnesses and is usually active only in enforcing the rules of evidence and procedure. In an inquisitorial system, however, the judges conduct an enquiry into the truth of what occurred, that is, the facts behind the legal issues in dispute. for this reason, judges control the proceedings and may directly question witnesses. In some Civil Law systems the judges may even dominate the hearing to such an extent that lawyers are left with few questions to ask at all.

  The layout of an Indonesian court reflects the inquisitorial nature of Civil Law proceedings. The judges face the witness who sits alone in a chair in the centre of the court. Lawyers are placed off to the sides, reflecting their relatively reduced significance in proceedings. judges may sometimes even call witnesses that the parties have not called, demand that additional witnesses attend or even refuse to hear from witnesses called by the parties. There is also less emphasis on the rules of evidence in inquisitorial systems as judges tend to allow most material in and then decide on its merits at a later point.

  In Indonesia, prosecution is always conducted by state officials known as jaksa or prosecutors. These are always government employees and private lawyers are never hired to represent the prosecution. Normally, police conduct initial investigations and then hand a brief to the prosecution, Issues such as arrest and detention can only be decided on the application of an accused person at a pre-trial hearing (praperadilan) and can never be raised at the main trial."

Schapelle Corby doesn't have any hope of arguing her innocence to the senior judge (the others judges are going to go along with whatever he decides) unless she can get evidence such as whether her fingerprints are really on the inner plastic bag containing the marijuana (which could only have been touched by whoever packed the drugs) and whether the marijuana even came from Australia.

As she said in the Australian Sixty Minutes interview:

• "Well, the thing is I am innocent. I didn't do it. It's my bag, yeah. And that's why my lawyers are working so hard to try to determine where, where and when and who. Maybe not who, maybe that will never be found. Where and when. So it would be really, really helpful if some authorities could help me out to try and get that information."

Schapelle's lawyers aren't going to be able to help her much during the trial because the judges will call and interrogate the witnesses. They have the daunting task of trying to prove their client is not a drug trafficker, even though she was found in possession of such a large quantity of marijuana. The star prosecutor in the case, Ida Bagus Nyoman Wiswantanu, does not have to prove that Schapelle is guilty; that is already the assumption; because the marijuana was found in her bag. Schapelle's legal team and family have to come up with evidence to show that somebody else put the drugs in the boogie board cover; preferably they have to find out who.

Only that sort of evidence can save Schapelle Corby. From the antics of the Bali authorities and lack of interest on the part of the Australian Feds, it is pretty clear that no such evidence is going to be found.

Two Winners And Yet Another Loser
The Indonesian authorities, and the regime of the Generals, will presumably be big winners from the trial and execution of a foreigner; already described in the local media as the Queen of Marijuana. It will be good for the careers of the government employees involved in her arrest and prosecution, and it will show that the regime is 'tough' on those who traffick in drugs (except the military, who do so with impunity).

The Australian Feds will lose a young citizen but, hey, there are plenty more left. They will continue to curry favour with the Indonesian military, and pursue strategies of globalised economic exploitation of the resources of that nation. This is why the Balibo Five were sacrificed in 1975; for the geopolitical ideologies of western powers, particularly those of the United States.

Schapelle Corby is set to become yet another loser in the sorry history of Australian-Indonesian relations. Like the Balibo Five, Schapelle carried an Australian passport to Bali. She probably thought, as most Australians do, that the government of Australia would come to her aid if she was in danger from dark forces in Indonesia - 'They don't do that to Aussies do they?'

Well, yes, Schapelle, I'm sorry to say they do. An Australian passport in not worth spit in Indonesia, because the Australian Feds won't lift a finger to help Australians in danger there. What happened to the Balibo Five, and what's happening to Schapelle, should be a clear warning to the rest of us - DON'T GO THERE !

If you carry an Australian passport don't go to Bali or anywhere else in Indonesia. Don't go for a holiday, don't go on business, don't go for any other reason; not even to help rebuild places ravaged by the recent tsunami. You shouldn't go there because being an Australian in Indonesia is like walking around with a target on your back and the instruction:

If you want to, send money for tsunami victims but don't go to Indonesia; don't let your children go there either. It is not safe there, because the Australian Feds will always put their relationship with the murderous military of Indonesia ahead of the safety of any ordinary Australian citizens that the Indonesians might decide to harm..

To Be Shot To Death
What's it like to be executed by a firing squad, as Schapelle Corby is likely to be, or gunned down by Indonesian red beret Kopassandha (secret warfare) troops, as the Balibo Five were? Here's an account from a page on the WWW about 'Shooting and The Firing Squad' by Richard Clark:

• "... The traditional firing squad is made up of three to six shooters per prisoner who stand or kneel opposite the condemned who is usually tied to a stake. Normally the shooters aim at the chest, since this is easier to hit than the head. A firing squad aiming at the head produces the same type of wounds as those produced by a single bullet, but bullets fired at the chest rupture the heart, large blood vessels and lungs so that the condemned person dies of haemorrhage and shock. It is not unusual for the officer in charge of the firing squad to have to give the prisoner a 'coup de grace' - a pistol shot to the head to finish them off after the initial volley has failed to kill them.

  A bullet produces a cavity which has a volume many times that of the bullet. Cavitation is probably due to the heat dissipated when the impact of the bullet boils the water and volatile fats in the tissue which it strikes. According to Dr Le Garde, in his book 'Gunshot Injuries', it is proved both in theory and experimentation, that cavitation is caused by the transfer of momentum from the fast moving bullet to the tissue which is mostly comprised of incompressible liquid.

  Persons hit by bullets feel as if they have been punched - pain comes later if the victim survives long enough to feel it. ...

  Shooting is always a gruesome and bloody death."

A Production Line Of Executions
Like many Asian countries, Indonesia has the death penalty in a big way. In 2004 three separate executions by firing squad were carried out and eight more convicted persons who had their appeals rejected are at imminent risk of death by firing squad in 2005. Those to die last year were:

• A male Indian national, Ayodhya Prasad Chaubey was executed in August, for drug trafficking.

• A male Thai national, Saelow Prasert was executed in October, for drug trafficking.

• A female Thai national, Namsong Sirilak was also executed in October, for drug trafficking.

Of the eight death sentences passed by Indonesian courts in 2004, seven were for drug trafficking by foreign nationals. In June and July of that year, then President Megawati Sukarnoputri rejected appeals for clemency from eleven people convicted of drug-related crimes and sentenced to face firing squads.

We Need Passports With Teeth
The omens for Schapelle Corby are not good. But all the Australian consular officials in Bali would do for her was to advise her to get a lawyer, knowing full well that lawyers play little part in determining the outcome of trials held under Indonesian Civil Law. It's time for ordinary Australians to consider what value they get from being citizens of a federal system of government that was set up in very different times from those we live in today, and which is increasingly failing us at home and abroad.

National passports are little more than a means of checking us in and out of Australia and various places we visit. When it comes to human rights or the rights of Australian citizens, like Schapelle Corby, to be afforded a presumption of innocence and a fair trial, the Feds don't deliver any value whatsoever. Australian passports are not backed up by any resolve on the part of the issuing authorities to defend the rights of the holder. We would be far better off without the Feds and their toothless passports, and a lot wealthier as well.

Australians no longer need a federal government. As James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, writing in their 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, put it:

• "The idea that humans must naturally place themselves in an 'invented' community called a nation will come to be seen by the cosmopolitan elite as eccentric and unreasonable in the next century."

What will we do for passports if we secede and form free cities and regions in various parts of Australia? Will each free community have to produce its own passports and get them accepted? Of course not, such communities might wish to produce a form of identification for their members but global travel would be better handled by a non-government organisation with a genuine interest in protecting human rights. Amnesty International is one obvious candidate for this role.

Why Not Carry An Amnesty Identity Card?
Although the present membership of Amnesty International is too small for effective representation of travellers via its own identification cards or biometric network on the Internet (or its successor technology, the Lightnet), such potential is certainly there.

As more and more nation states descend into totalitarianism, and attempt to maintain old forms of control in the face of magic, new - and inherently liberating - technologies, opportunity will knock on Amnesty International's door.

It will become practical to boost the membership of Amnesty International from the present level of under 2 million to a new level of well over 200 million. The coming 'market' for freedom, and the backlash against the bogus 'War on Terror', will be more than strong enough to ensure such growth.

There is absolutely no reason why any nation state, or any free city or region, should not accept travellers identification provided by an independent, non-government, organisation such as Amnesty International. New digital technology and biometrics will be sufficiently reliable to make it practical for an independent organisation to guarantee our identities and record where we come from on this planet. Our place of residence need not necessarily be a nation state or sub-set areas of government control. It is entirely practical to describe all of terra firma using a system of grid boxes that have nothing whatever to do with governments; either federal or state. See sub-heading [142] of the 2nd Renaissance freesite for further details of a 2nd Renaissance residency system.

Natural Human Communities Are Tribal, and Inherently Leavers
One hundred and fifteen years ago a group of politicians gathered in Melbourne, in the British colony of Victoria, to draft the founding documents for an Australian Federation. It was an experiment that had been introduced in many other countries, and was to be repeated in still others. Eighteenth and nineteenth century societies went from being monarchies to being federations of democratic states. Federation was politically fashionable, it also came to fit the centralised organisation model of Industrial Age production, in the 20th century.

All wide-ranging kingdoms, empires and federations are grounded in what Daniel Quinn describes as a Taker ethos. Conversely, societies that pre-dated the cultivation and storage of grain crops and the separation of human religion from a oneness with the natural order of things, were inherently Leavers.

In economic terms, the dominant idea in the Taker world is scarcity. Scarce resources, scarce territory, scarce water, scarce food, just about everything is competed for and taken. This 'taking' may be done militarily or via back door tactics and instruments, such as Free Trade Agreements (FTAs).

In the Leaver world the dominant economic idea is abundance. A spiritual connection with nature is integrated with the notion of bountiful returns from the earth, the sky, and the waters. Leaver people believe that if they look after and live in harmony with nature, it will automatically provide for them.

Takers see nature as something to be fought and conquered. Leavers know nature as a friend, and the source of their capacity to live and grow in harmony with a grand design.

The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Bill of 1900 placed the people of those days in a collectivist model of society and furthered the pursuit of Taker philosophies and thinking, through to the present day. However, today's Australians should not feel in any way bound by the decisions of people who are long dead, and who made their choice in entirely different circumstances to those that exist today. Then, there was no 2nd Renaissance; today there is. That changes everything. It becomes practical for Leaver-oriented groups to secede from the collectivist mess that is Australian federalism and strike out in new economic and social directions.

War Or Peace?
Daniel Quinn does not claim that all the tribes that lived before the Taker ethos developed around grain stores were peaceable and not inclined to warfare. Recorded history suggests that there were wars between hunter-gatherer tribes. He simply claims, with considerable justification, that the tribe is the longest-lived and most natural form of human organisation. It's hard to disagree with that.

Whereas tribal cultures respect the rights of individuals within a group context, modern democracies are non-tribal and collectivist. Collectivism emphasises group rights over those of individuals and, in its most totalitarian forms, it actively suppresses individual rights and freedoms in favour of the collective good - otherwise known as 'the national interest', or 'the public interest'.

An analysis of recorded history will quickly show that the combination of collectivism with a Taker ethos and mindsets inevitably results in persistent warfare and tyranny on a large scale. The whole history of the 'modern' and 'civilised' 20th century was one of warfare, genocide and barbarism. Conversely, where tribalism and a Leaver ethos have been combined, as they were in Australia prior to European conquest, peace and coexistence have prevailed for extraordinarily long periods of time.

To me at least, it seems that living in a spiritual oneness with nature, as indigenous Australians did, and at the same time enjoying the nurturing and inclusive tribal culture, predisposed those people to peace and coexistence. I suspect that if it had been measured the mean consciousness of such a culture would have been considerably higher than the mean consciousness level of federated Australia, and of federated America, for that matter.

These ideas are depicted in the following diagram which shows how a certain combination of attitudes and values can predispose a culture to be warlike and destructive, while another combination can set it on a course of peace, coexistence, and harmony with nature.

In his book, Beyond Civilization, the prize-winning author Daniel Quinn draws on Richard Dawkins' concept of memes. A few excerpts will explain what they are and why they are relevant to the diagram above.

• "The best [way] would be for you to read Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, but in case this isn't convenient for you right this second. I'll summarise. Briefly, memes are to cultures what genes are to bodies.

  Your body is a collection of cells. Every cell in your body contains a complete set of all your genes, which Dawkins likens to a set of building plans for the human body - your body in particular. ... A culture is also a collection of cells, which are individual humans. You (and each of your parents and all your siblings and friends) contain a complete set of memes, which are the conceptual building plans of our culture. Dawkins coined the word meme (rhymes with theme) to apply to what he perceived to be the cultural equivalent of the gene."

• "Every culture is a collection of individuals, and each individual has in his or her head a complete set of values, concepts, rules, and preferences that, taken together, constitute the building plans for that particular culture. Whether you call them memes of marglefarbs is irrelevant. There can be no question whatever that they exist."

• "Which memes do we need to change? This question is a lot easier to answer than might be expected. The memes we need to change are the lethal ones.

  Richard Dawkins puts it with irreducible simplicity: "A lethal gene is one that kills its possessor." It might well strike you as unfair and somehow unreasonable for such things as lethal genes to even exist. You may wonder how lethal genes manage to remain in the gene pool at all. If they kill their possessors why aren't they eliminated? ... Lethal genes that come into play in early adolescence are of course quickly eliminated from the gene pool because their possessors are unable to pass them on by reproduction. Lethal genes that come into play early in adolescence also tend to be eliminated, but those that come into play in middle or old age remain in the gene pool, because their possessors are almost always able to pass them on through reproduction before succumbing to their lethal effect.

  ... A lethal meme is one that kills its possessor. For example, the Heaven's Gate cultists possessed a lethal meme that made suicide irresistibly attractive to them - but I'm not much interested in memes that are lethal to individuals. I'm interested in memes that are lethal to cultures (and to our culture in particular).

  ... The memes that made us the rulers of the world are lethal, but they didn't have a lethal effect ten thousand years ago - or five thousand or two thousand. They were at work, turning us into the rulers of the world, but their deadliness didn't become evident until this century, when they began turning us into the devastators of the world.

While much of my writing might seem to attack politicians and career bureaucrats who run the Commonwealth of Australia, it is actually their wrong-headed thinking - or lethal memes - that I am aiming at. I fully accept that it is not for me to judge or punish individuals or groups who act criminally or negligently in the name of the Australian nation. I believe that there is a divine audit trail and balance sheet that will take complete care of such matters. No, my arguments are focused on thinking. The good thing about thinking and ideas is that once you decide to change them you can do so almost instantly.

It is our simple choice whether we want to continue as citizens of a Taker/Collectivist federation, or whether we simply want to secede from it and move to a better form of existence. We will eventually have to go there anyway, the old order will not survive the 2nd Renaissance. What we need to decide is how quickly we jump off the Australian Federal Express. Do we do it at the next slow bend, or do we wait for the inevitable train wreck and then attempt to crawl out from under the mess? Think about it. And think about how many people will be better off the sooner we and they jump. War or peace? It's our choice.

'Democracy' Is Collectivism's Brand
Nobody should be fooled by the line that Australia is a democracy and that is the best form of government. The latter is simply untrue, democracy is one of the worst possible forms of government. There is no logic in continuing to put up with the failures of federalism simply because the system is 'democratic'. Centralists have dressed democracy up as something it is not. They have made it the 'brand' of their particular ideology. The following excerpts from the writing of the American author and commentator, G. Edward Griffin, make it clear what democracy really is.

With admirable clarity of thought, Griffin cuts through the plethora of labels that are used to describe politics and reduces the difference in approaches to citizen's rights to a single question. Where do the rights originate? Individualists believe that such rights are intrinsic, they come with birth. Collectivists believe that the group is more important than its members, and that rights derive from human institutions, from governments and government law making processes. Here are some of the points that Griffin makes about the difference between individualists and collectivists beliefs about rights.

• "The collectivists believes the group is the most important element of society; that all solutions to problems are better solved at the group level than at the individual level; and that the larger the problem is, the larger the group should be to solve the problem. And so they believe in collective action....The collectivist sees government as the solution, because government is the ultimate group, and so the collectivist mind can be easily recognised. It always has an affinity to government as the solver of problems. The individualist, by the way, is more sceptical. He tends to look at government as the creator of problems."

• "Collectivist solutions gravitate from local governments to state government, to national government, and finally to world government. If there is a really big problem, such as the environmental issue involving the whole planet, the collectivist is convinced that it cannot be solved except through the action of world government."

• "The collectivist believes that the group is more important than the individual and, if necessary, the individual must be sacrificed for the group. Sometimes that is expressed in terms of 'the greater good for the greater number.' It's a very appealing argument."

• "The individualist on the other hand says. 'Wait a minute. Group?' 'What is group?' That's just a word. You cannot touch a group. You cannot see a group. All you can touch and see are individuals. They make up the group....So the individualist sees that, if you sacrifice the individual for the group, you have made a huge mistake. The individual is the essence of the group. He is the core of the group. The group has no claim to sacrifice its own essence."

• "The view of individualism was expressed clearly in the United States Declaration of Independence, which said: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men.' Nothing could be more clear than that. 'Unalienable Rights' means they are the natural possession of each of us upon birth, not granted by the state. The purpose of government is, not to grant rights, but to secure them and protect them."

• "By contrast, all collectivist political systems embrace the view that rights are granted by the state. That includes the Nazis, Fascists, and Communists. It is also a tenet of the United Nations. Article Four of the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights says: 'The States Parties to the present Covenant recognise that, in the enjoyment of those rights provided by the State....the State may subject such rights only to such limitations as are determined by law.'

  The reason this is important is that, if we agree that the state has the power to grant rights, then we must also agree that it has the power to take them away. You cannot have one without the other. Notice the wording of the UN Covenant. After proclaiming that rights are provided by the state, it then says that those rights may be subject to limitations 'as are determined by law.' In other words, the collectivists at the UN presume to grant us our rights and, when they are ready to take them away, all they have to do is pass a law authorising it.

  Compare that with the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution. It says Congress shall pass no law restricting the rights of freedom of speech, or religion, peaceful assembly, the right to bear arms, and so forth - not except as determined by law, but no law. What a difference there is between individualism and collectivism."

• "The collectivist says you have to force people. That's why he has an affinity to government. Government is the embodiment of legalised force. You can always spot a collectivist because, when he confronts a problem, his first reaction is to say, 'There ought to be a law.' His attitude is that we must force people to do what we think they should do."

• "By contrast, individualists say. 'We also think we are right and others are wrong, but we don't believe in forcing anyone to comply with our will because, if we grant that principle, then others, representing larger groups than our own, can compel us to act as they decree, and we will have lost our freedom."

• "As an individualist, I am not opposed to collective action. Just because I believe in freedom of choice does not mean I have to move my piano alone. It just means that I renounce the right to compel someone to help me. Individualists seek cooperation based on voluntary action, not compulsion.

  And so here we have a second distinction between the collectivist and the individualist. The collectivist believes in coercion. The individualist believes in freedom.

When the Coalition forces invaded Iraq, the senior US Military Commander in the field announced that the aim was to bring the Iraqi people democracy and the rule of law. That was undoubtedly the plan. The US did not, and still does not, wish to see an Islamic Republic replace the regime of Sadam Hussein. It wants a collectivist government that can remove rights by majority vote and enforce its injustice through the rule of law. Here are some of the key distinctions that G. Edward Griffin makes between a democracy and a republic. He says.

• "We have been taught to believe that a Democracy is the ideal form of government. Supposedly, that is what was created by the American Constitution. However, if you read the documents of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution, you find that they spoke very poorly of Democracy. They said in plain English that a Democracy was one of the worst possible forms of government. And so they created what they called a Republic. The bottom line is that the difference between a Democracy and a Republic is the difference between collectivism and individualism."

• "In a pure Democracy, the concept is that the majority shall rule. That's the end of the discussion.....A Republic is simply a limited Democracy, a Democracy with limits on what the group can do, with limits on what the majority can do. Republics are characterised by written constitutions that say the government - even though it represents the majority - shall not do this; the government shall not do that; and it shall be prevented from doing that also. We have individual liberties and rights that stand higher and are more important than the group."

Griffin also crystallises the concept of the political spectrum, which purportedly has 'left' and 'right' orientations, but in reality is only a measure of how much government there is. He says.

• "We often hear about right-wingers versus left-wingers, but what do these terms actually mean? For example we are told that Communists and Socialists are at the extreme Left, and Nazis and Fascists are on the extreme Right. Here we have two powerful ideological forces pitted against each other, and the impression is that somehow, they are opposites. But, what is the difference? They are not opposites at all. They are the same....Communists believe in international Socialism, whereas Nazis advocate national Socialism. Communists promote class hatred and class conflict to motivate the loyalty and blind obedience of their followers, whereas the Nazis use race conflict and race hatred to accomplish the same objective. Other than that, there is absolutely no difference between Communism and Nazism. They are both the epitome of collectivism, and yet we are told they are, supposedly, at opposite ends of the spectrum."

• "There's only one thing that makes sense in constructing a political spectrum and that is to put zero government at one end and 100% at the other.

  Now we have something we can comprehend. Those who believe in zero government are the anarchists, and those who believe in total government are the totalitarians. With that definition we find that Communism and Nazism are together at the same end. They are both totalitarian concepts. Why? Because they are both based on the model of collectivism. Communism, Nazism, Fascism and Socialism all gravitate toward bigger and bigger government, because that is the logical extension of their common ideology. They cannot help becoming what they are. More government is needed to solve bigger problems, and bigger problems require more government. Once you get on the slippery slope of collectivism, once you accept that ideology, there is no place to stop until you reach all the way to the end of the scale, which is 100% government. Regardless of what name you give it, regardless of how you re-label it to make it seem new or different, collectivism is totalitarianism."

More detail of Griffins ideas and of the contrasts between Natural (Tribal) and Collectivist social orders can be found on the 2nd Renaissance Freesite. See sub-headings [183] and [184] in particular. The download link for the 2R CD Collection is given at the foot of this edition. The text-only version of 2nd Renaissance is on the Freenet network, but it lacks the diagrams that are included in the 2R CD version.

Resistance Is Futile But Abandonment Isn't
Increasingly totalitarian states, such as the Australian Federation and the various State governments, have all manner of powers and defences against any attempts to undermine or overthrow their absolute control. However, their power and control is illusory. It is effective against civil disorder and revolution but it is helpless against abandonment.

Daniel Quinn, has thought and written on this subject. In his book, Beyond Civilization, Quinn contends that while governments can imagine a revolution they can't imagine abandonment. As he puts it:

• "..even if it could imagine abandonment , it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support."

When the thinking of a whole population changes so does the society. The East German state collapsed in November, 1989, and the Berlin Wall was torn down by former citizens of the old Communist regime. The guards at the wall did not fire on the people, because they knew that the society was moving to a freer existence. There was no hope of averting that abandonment of the rule of the old regime. It was past; over, gone.

Governments can only use force to maintain the status quo while their position of authority and control is widely accepted. Once a populace no longer accepts the status quo they will abandon it, and there will be little that the old order can do to prevent that shift in the society. The Constitution, the English-based Rule of Law, and the dark 'democracy' of post-911 Australia, won't count for anything once millions of Aussies decide that they've had enough of the failed experiment of the nation state.

Don't Talk To 'Them', Talk To Each Other
If you want to see something done to help Schapelle Corby; if you want to choose Peace and Abundance over War and Scarcity, talk with your fellow Australians. Dialogue the issues and solutions; Us-2-Us. Don't waste your time petitioning the Feds, they despise ordinary citizens and are quite happy for their counterparts in the Indonesian totalitarian state to shoot one of our young women in the interests of political advantage and a 'tough on drugs' image. Talk to your family, talk to your friends, talk to your workmates, talk to your congregation, and get all the Aussie ants on the same wavelength. Remain non-violent, and focus on the many actions that you can take rather than breaking laws put in place to control us.

The value of talking Us-2-Us is that it provides an alternative to the slanted information and interpretations that are printed and broadcast by the mainstream media. There is a lot going on besides the appalling plight of Schapelle Corby in Bali. Pick up each new error, each new atrocity of the Federal and State collectivists, and tell the news like it really is. Present the news to each other without the 'spin' and misinformation that the parrot people of the media always introduce to the stories.

Here are a couple of items to start with.

This is a very simple issue, it is about the right, or otherwise, of a person born in Australia to live here. It is the classic intrinsic and inalienable right to belong to where you are born versus the notion of collectivisim and 'the greater good', that extrinsically grants and removes rights such as whether a person can have a residency birthright or not.

Here are a selection of reports and ministerial comments on the Pixie Skase matter now being taken to the federal administrative appeals tribunal.

• "Pixie Skase wants to return to Australia because she is lonely in her luxurious Spanish hideaway."

  ... Townsville Bulletin 29 January, 2005 [Actually she's been living in England.]

• "The wife of dead fugitive businessman Christopher Skase will take her fight to regain Australian citizenship to a federal tribunal within weeks.

  Pixie Skase was refused citizenship and was forced to leave the country after her tourist visa expired. ...

  The Skase's renounced their citizenship in 1998 while they were living in Spain and vowed never to return to Australia.

  The federal government knocked back Mrs Skase's application to regain her citizenship partly because of anti-Australian comments she made that year, Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper reported. ...

  While not talking specifically about Mrs Skase's case, Treasurer Peter Costello said Australians who threw away their citizenship would find it hard to have their status renewed.

  He said the minister had to carefully assess any application by former Australians who had deliberately relinquished their citizenship. ...

  ... AAP, 28 January, 2005."

• "TREASURER:

  It is different to a situation where somebody who accidentally relinquishes it, maybe they failed to renew their passport, where somebody actually says, 'I don't want to be, I don't want that citizenship. I don't want it,' well they get rid of it. And you can imagine when you turn around and say, 'well I have changed my mind,' it is a bit harder to get it back.

  MITCHELL:

  But we are a pretty generous country though aren't we?

  TREASURER:

  I think we are, but you have got to remember this, there are millions of people all around the world who would like Australian citizenship and if there is someone who does have it and throws it away and says, 'I don't like your country, I don't want it anymore,' you might look quite differently when they change their mind."

  ... Interview with Neil Mitchell of Radio 3AW, 28 January, 2005.

• "If you go around and bag Australia, you give up your citizenship, you tear up your citizenship and then you say well you know it's a terrible country and you're going to take some citizenship somewhere else, well good riddance to be perfectly frank."

  ... Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, quoted in the Townsville Bulletin, 29 January, 2005.

There are a number of inaccuracies in the above reports and statements, but even if there weren't the assumptions made, and the memes driving them, are all due to collectivist notions of the absolute power of the Feds to grant and remove the rights of citizens. This thinking completely overrides the notion of an intrinsic birthright - that a person such as Pixie Skase, once born in Australia, always remains an Australian.

For the record here are the inaccuracies:

• The Skases were forced to take up citizenship of the Dominican Republic after the Australian Feds cancelled their passports - because Christopher Skase wouldn't return to Australia to face the creditors of his failed Quintex group.

• There are no recorded comments by the Skases that denigrate the people of Australia. When Christopher Skase said that losing his citizenship was similar to throwing away a pair of smelly socks he was referring to the Australian government. There are many Australians who might take a similar view of the odour of the Feds.

  The hapless Balibo Five who were sacrificed on the altar of Australian/Indonesian relations and oil interests in the region might well have done so; but they are all dead. However, their loved ones, such as Greg Shackleton's wife Shirley, would be justified in regarding the Australian consular officials and various other Canberra apparatchiks as decidedly 'smelly'. So might Schapelle Corby and her family who are being left to battle the Indonesian justice machine alone.

  You see, an Australian passport might not be worth much more than a smelly pair of socks if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the Feds decide to exercise their perceived right to grant and remove the privileges of citizenship, and decide not to support you in any way.

One might also wonder how the Federal Treasurer and the Queensland Premier might reconcile their views on Pixie Skase's right to 'belong' in Australia with the 1960s referendum outcome in which the majority of the Australian people voted citizenship rights to indigenous Australians on the grounds that since they were born in the country they had a natural right to legal citizenship.

Finally, and although this edition is not the place to go into the matter in any depth, there is the relativity of Christopher Skase's crime, for which some people still seem determined to punish Pixie. Briefly, Skase is said to have had personal debts of around AU$172 million when he fled to Majorca. There were also wider debts associated with the failure of his Quintex group. These latter debts are said to have caused the subsequent failure of the Tricontinental merchant bank and with it its parent the State Bank of Victoria; the state from whence the present Federal Treasurer hails.

It's not a good record for Christopher Skase but it is relatively paltry compared to the thefts carried out by all State governments in respect of the 'Stolen Wages' of Aboriginal Australians. The following excerpts are from the WWW pages of the Queensland Greens:

• "Records show that as much a AU$500 million in wages and savings was kept back from Aboriginal workers employed by the Queensland Government from the late 1890s to the 1970s under compulsory labour contracts.

  While the Beattie Government offered just AU$55.6 million in a 'take it or leave it' deal in May 2002, less than AU$6 million has actually been paid back.

  One in three claims is rejected by the Government and there is a cap of AU$4,000 on the amount Aboriginal workers can receive. ...

  This is an outrage that would not be tolerated in the white community. If it were any other employer, Queensland unions would have acted long ago. I urge them to show more solidarity with Aboriginal workers and lobby the ALP Government to do more."

It will never happen, but if there was ever a serious attempt to sue government officials and graziers and their heirs in relation to the 'Stolen Wages' of Aboriginal people across Australia, there would be 'standing room only' in Majorca !

If we need anything to talk to each other about, and to convince ourselves that the Australian Feds are intent on pursuing a cavalier approach to human rights in this country, it is to be found in the case of Cornelia Rau.

Here are a few excerpts from various media reports on her sad predicament.

• "Cornelia Rau, 39 who had lived in Sydney since she came from Germany as a baby had been kept in detention for 10 months before her family discovered she was locked up by the Government as a suspected illegal immigrant.

  Suffering from schizophrenia for five years, she had walked out of Manly Hospital on March 17 last year. She was a permanent resident of Australia but had a German passport.

  Her distressed family told NSW police and her name and photo were put on the missing persons list. Two weeks later, a group of concerned Aborigines brought her to Queensland police, who passed her on to immigration authorities when they could not identify her as she spoke German.

  Her mental condition deteriorated; she often refused to talk, gave false names and changed her story. Her mental health was assessed, but she did not meet the criteria for mental illness.

  But no connection was made to the NSW missing persons list, and after six months in detention [in a women's prison] in Queensland she was sent to the tough, isolated Baxter detention centre in South Australia on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.

  Her condition worsened in Baxter. She screamed, ripped her clothes, smeared faeces on walls and refused to co-operate with guards so she was locked up in the centre's most severe punishment cells - the Red One block.

  "For more than 18 hours a day she was kept in solitary confinement in Red One because she was screaming and uncontrollable" said refugee advocate Bernadette Wauchope.

  "We visited the centre often and detainees told us they were worried about a woman they called Anna, who was screaming all day and night in her cell. They said she wouldn't talk to anyone, muttered in German and was clearly mentally unstable and needed help."

  "She was locked up in an isolation cell for more than 18 hours a day. When she was allowed out of her room for a few hours' exercise it would take up to six riot officers [in full riot gear] to force her back into her room fighting and screaming. One man who had been in Red One said he could hear her screaming in her cell for hours."

  "A guard said she was just putting it on as she just wants to get out."

  An immigration spokesman confirmed Ms Rau had been locked in Red One, where detainees are kept in isolation in a bare cell under 24-hour camera surveillance.

  Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists chairwoman Louise Newman said she and others tried to see the woman at Baxter in December but were denied permission."

  ... Article by Frank Walker in the Sun-Herald, February 6, 2005.

• "In the whole continent there could be no place less conducive to the wellbeing of a seriously mentally ill person than Baxter. Unlike the major cities, it has no secure hospital facility where psychotic conditions can be adequately treated. Furthermore, it is brutally austere, geographically remote, subject to climatic extremes and full of highly distressed people facing deportation.

  If the poor woman recovers sufficiently to take charge of her life, I hope she has the good sense to return to Germany where there is no chance that she will suffer a repetition of her terrible ordeal if found disorientated and speaking English."

  ... James Dagnall, in a letter to The Australian newspaper, February, 2005.

• "There was a time when, if you were found wandering in the remote bush, babbling and obviously distressed, you were given appropriate medical treatment and mental assessment. Now they hand you over to contractors running refugee camps who keep you isolated for months.

  You start out treating refugees with contempt for their human dignity and after a while you treat your own citizens the same way."

  ... Blair Hunt, in a letter to The Australian newspaper, February, 2005.

• "Wake up Australians from your dream that the Immigration Department treat asylum-seekers and refugees as they say they do.

  The dark ages treatment of Cornelia Rau is exactly the same as that inflicted on all mentally ill people in Baxter.

  A high proportion of those who have fled torture in Iran and other places are driven mad by their incarceration at Baxter then further abused by punishment in the isolation cells. Open your eyes and join the calls to close Baxter and abolish indefinite detention."

  ... Allan Neild, in a letter to The Australian newspaper, February, 2005.

• "Inquiry? Pig's arse. What we need are the heads of the Colonel Klink who runs Baxter and Amanda (Schultz) Vanstone."

  ... Warwick Davenport, in a letter to The Australian newspaper, February, 2005.

Baxter Basics - What's Being Done To Innocent People In Our Name
The Baxter facility, where Cornelia Rau was so badly mistreated, is relatively new but it is already infamous for human rights abuses, including the serial-abuse of children, mothers, and mentally ill people who had suffered torture in the countries they fled from. These people paid serious money, often their life savings, to voyage in leaky boats across a shark-infested ocean to Australia. They thought they would be safe here but they were mistaken. Awaiting them in this democratic nation were US designed and managed concentration camps that have been specifically configured to crush the spirits of these unfortunate 'queue-jumpers'.

It is almost as if the US Military had studied the horrors of Dachau, Belsen, and other Nazi concentration camps and then worked out how to 'improve' on them, so that no one could ever remain sane there. It would seem that this 'know-how' was then taken up by former FBI, CIA, and US Military bigwigs who formed for-profit corporations and set out to dominate the private prisons industry on a global basis.

Baxter is their handiwork, and the Australian Feds have already paid these cruel and unprincipled American 'contractors' AU$500 million of taxpayers money to incarcerate and torment innocent people. It has been done in our name, it has been done with our money, and we are fully implicated in the crimes against humanity that have occurred, and which continue to occur, at Baxter and other detention centres.

Here are a few more observations about the Baxter Detention Centre and the way it's run.

• "While the government claims that Baxter has a higher degree of 'amenity', an article in the May 22 New Zealand Herald gives a much truer picture of the grim reality of Australia's maximum security refugee prison.

  "By any grim measure", the NZ Herald reported, "Baxter Detention Centre is a chilling sight, surrounded by barbed wire and towering electric fences humming with 9000 volts.

  No life can be seen from the outside: all buildings face inwards, and there is only the long, lonely road that winds out from Port Augusta at the remote apex of South Australia's Spencer Gulf, past mangrove swamps and into the vast plain that vanishes into the distant Flinders Range.

  If it is sobering from the outside, it is so much more when the gates slide shut behind the asylum-seekers sent there under Australia's policy of mandatory detention."

  "It is like a prison here", one inmate said. "There is a fear in us when we see the cameras everywhere and the doors are all electronically opened. They only gave us a room with a toilet inside, like an ensuite ... It is only a land with grass and all around us there are rooms that other people live in. We can see only the sky and the grass".

  The 24 hour camera surveillance, the restrictive small compounds and the electrified fences at Baxter all contribute to a deliberately oppressive environment. Baxter is a custom-built facility designed to break detainees psychologically, to the point where they will give up all hope and accept repatriation to dangerous and often life threatening situations."

  ... Excerpt from an article by Julie Sprigg, in the Green Left Weekly, May 26, 2004.

• "The next thing that came to mind was when you actually get on a river boat and cross that ocean and the river boat disintegrates, crikeys, what they must have been feeling must be pretty bad. I would not have the courage and determination to do that. You know. to cross the ocean in a river boat, I think, takes enormous courage and determination. And those are a couple of qualities that Australians really admire. And so I thought to myself, Anybody who's gone through that and survived and gets to Australia, there's a fair chance they're going to be a worthwhile citizen."

  "Well, I'm on the road today. We're coming to Baxter Detention Centre to have a bit of a look. I mean the main reason for me having a look at Baxter is basically for my education, to try and find out a bit more about how refugees have to live, what they've got to put up with. Driving up into Baxter and looking around, the first thing I thought to myself, This looks awfully like a jail to me. So I'm going to be interested to see what its like on the inside."

  "Well, having been inside, I guess the two words that sort of come to me are depressing and frustrating. You'd like to be able to do more about it and you sort of feel like you're handcuffed. You're born here and pretty proud of a lot of things that Australia does, but to hear them talk about, you know, some of the things that Australia has done to them was embarrassing. You wanted to say to them, "Look, not all Australians feel that way." And, you know, it's pretty bad. I feel horrible about having to apologise for my own country. That's a horrible position. I don't like being put in that position."

  ... Ian Chappell, former Test Captain and Australian Cricketing Great, recorded in an Australian Story documentary, shown of national TV, July, 2003.

• "Australia is clearly in breach of the United Nations convention on the Right of The Child, a morally untenable position which should disqualify any Minister in the Howard Government from commenting on human rights abuses in any other country - a concept which appears to have escaped Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. We should face the fact that as a nation, we are serial human-rights abusers. The detention of children alone renders irrelevant and hypocritical the criticisms by Australian politicians of the regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or the beheading of Nicholas Berg in Iraq." ...

  [ Condoleezza Rice appears to have similarly missed the hypocrisy of her criticism of Robert Mugabe's regime, while the largest and most inhumane women's prison on the planet is being operated in the U.S.A., at Chowchilla - and is largely filled with African American women. See the 'Medieval Justice' freesite for details, (click on the link in the sidebar).]

  ... "Anyone who has had anything to do with child protection knows that there are holes in the umbrella and the wires are bent and sticking through the canopy. But the intention was good. How has it worked? the theory was that if detention-centre staff believed a child was at risk they were obliged to fill out a mandatory notification report, which was to be passed on to the Family and Youth Services branch of the Department of Human Services, now under the administration of a portfolio known as Families and Communities.

  There is a 13-year-old boy in Baxter near Port Augusta, who has been the subject, at the time of writing, of 20 such mandatory notifications, yet he remains in detention. He has tried to hang himself and has harmed himself on several occasions by cutting or burning his flesh. It is understood he is considered by staff to be at continuing risk of suicide or self-harm. If the FAYS branch cannot have this boy removed from detention, the MoU is farcical. How do South Australians feel about a 13-year-old boy in that condition being incarcerated on SA soil? Are we powerless or ambivalent?"

  ... Excerpt from The Adelaide Review, June, 2004 Edition.

• "When Group 4 Falck first tendered for the contract, a spokesman said:

  "As a private provider of public services, Group 4 Falck Global Solutions is committed to providing services which uphold human rights values and in treating detainees with dignity and respect. Immigration detention per se is not prohibited under international human rights law provided that it is both lawful and not arbitrary. The Australian government has a duty to ensure that it complies with international human rights legislation."

  Last Saturday, a detainee who was subjected to the GSL behaviour modification program, which detainees call the GITMO system, had to be airlifted to the Royal Adelaide Hospital where he is still in intensive care receiving treatment for a drug overdose.

  The behaviour modification program used by GSL involves prolonged periods of solitary confinement over eight weeks. However, this process begins after detainees have been incarcerated in GSL's management unit (MU) for anything up to five days.

  While in the MU, detainees spend 23 .5 hours a day in a brightly lit cell, wearing only a short gown, with no mattress, no bedding or towels. Security cameras are trained on the room, shower and toilet area 24 hours a day."

  ... Excerpt from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre website, June 29, 2004.

• "In hearing a case concerning an Iranian man held in a GSL management unit, Judge Bradley Selway began giving his comments by saying:

  "What is surprising is that there are virtually no provisions either in the act or in the migration regulations which purport to regulate the manner and conditions of that detention. It is usual when powers of detention are conferred for the parliament to make provision for the manner of the exercise of those powers. ... It would not appear that any such regulations have been made."

  Judge Paul Finn added to this by saying:

  "I wish to make only two additional comments. The first is to associate myself with the observations of Selway J concerning the absence of a statutory regime regulating the manner and conditions of immigration detention. The present legislative vacuum is, in my view, potentially unfair both to those involved in the conduct of detention centres and to the detainees."

  ...Excerpt from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre website, June 29, 2004.

• "A food sample from South australia's Baxter detention centre will be presented to health authorities for inspection after detainees complained they had been served a meal crawling with maggots. The Immigration Department last week said one maggot had been found in food and an investigation was under way. South Australian Greens MP Kris Hanna said he would today present a sample of meat and rice to the State Environmental Health Department for examination. Mr Hanna said the food sample was smuggled out of Baxter following frustration among detainees about the situation. "According to reports in the centre, the food was crawling with live maggots," Mr Hanna said. Detainees at the Baxter centre last week upturned rubbish bins in protest after complaining about maggots in their food."

  ... The Age newspaper, August 20, 2004.

Detention Centres Contract A Game Of Musical Chairs
Despite having been sacked for unspecified, and one might say deliberately concealed, breaches of its contract to manage Baxter and other immigration detention centres, the U.S.A. parent organisation (once called Wackenhut Corrections Corporation but now renamed Geo Group) looks likely to regain control of their management.

Speaking just after the announcement of the deal, Federal Opposition immigration spokesman, Stephen Smith said:

• "This is but another illustration as to why the management of detention centres needs to be returned to Commonwealth officers on Commonwealth territory. You can take over a company but you can't take over the Commonwealth."

The rather complex changes that have almost led to the resumption of management control of Australian immigration centres by the American corporation earlier sacked from that contract is diagramed below. The black structure is taken from a U.K. inquiry into the effects of the combining of the US owned Wackenhut empire with the Danish security firm Group 4 Falck. Red additions show the various shifts in ownership and control.

As it eventuated, Wackenhut/GEO Group's bid was not successful in 2004 and the GSL (Australasia) contract now comes under the control of the European venture capitalists, Englefield Capital and the Electra Group. However, since the likely intention of venture capitalists will be to build up the value of their acquisition and then sell it, in four or five years time, there is still the distinct possibility of the control of the contract for Australian immigration detention centres reverting to interests connected with the former Wackenhut corporation.

In an economic regime governed by a new Free Trade Agreement (FTA) the Commonwealth and the States of Australia might well find themselves legally obliged to allow the re-entry of the GEO Group (the renamed Wackenhut) into the detention centres and private prisons market in Australia. US corporations have already successfully sued countries and states for imputed loss of profits suffered due to their being disallowed entry to energy and water contracts, and there is no reason to think that they won't do the same in respect of prisons and detention centres.

The Wackenhut Worry
It might seem that the leopard could change its spots, and that the previous issues with the contract for the management of detention centres will be rectified; given the benefit of hindsight, and so on. But, human rights activists in many countries are very concerned about the history of failures and abuses under Wackenhut's management of prisons and detention centres, and they have good reason to be wary of the same people (under a different corporate identity) reappearing and growing fat in the lucrative corrections market.

So why won't the leopard change its spots? Here are some excerpts that address this question:

• "... the Wackenhut Corporation, has for many years worked closely with the [US] federal government, performing various sensitive task such as guarding nuclear-weapons facilities and overseas embassies. Indeed, the company has long been accused of operating as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency - an accusation that its founder, George Wackenhut, has vehemently denied. In the early 1950s Wackenhut quit the FBI, at the age of thirty-four, and formed a private-security company with three other former FBI agents. He went on to assemble the nation's largest private collection of files on alleged 'subversives', with dossiers on at least three million Americans.

  During the 1970s the Wackenhut Corporation diversified into strike-breaking and anti-terrorism. The company, headquartered in Florida, has branch offices in forty-two states and in more than fifty foreign countries. Its annual revenues exceeded $1 billion. George Wackenhut remains the Chairman of the company, but the day-to day operations are handled by his son, Richard.

  Over the years Wackenhut's board of directors has read like a Who's Who of national security, including a former head of the FBI, a former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency, a former head of the Secret Service, a former head of the Marine Corps, and a former Attorney General. After the company decided to enter the private-prison industry, it hired Norman Carlson, who had headed the Federal Bureau of Prisons."

  ... From an article by Eric Schlosser in the Atlantic Monthly, December, 1998.

• "[In] Coke County Justice Centre (Bronte, Texas):
  Several girls were sexually, physically, and mentally abused by Wackenhut employees, including a man with [a] prior conviction for sexual abuse of a child; a lawsuit settled for $1.5 million (1999).

  TYC confirmed allegations that some staff members manipulated a 'demotion/graduation' system to coerce girls into giving them sexual favours or dancing naked in front of them; some girls were raped or fondled, while others were made to disrobe and shower in the presence of male employees (1995).

  [A] 15-year old female victim of sexual assault by a Wackenhut employee committed suicide in the wake of a lawsuit settlement that allowed the company to avoid accepting responsibility (1999)."

  ... An article , 'Highlights of Private Prison Scandals In Texas' prepared by Michele Deitch, Attorney and Consultant, February, 2003.

• "One of the hottest stock market plays of the 1990s was the investment in hotels without doorknobs: privately operated prisons. And the hottest of the lot was a Florida-based outfit Wackenhut Corporation, which promised states it would warehouse our human refuse at bargain prices. In 1999, I thought it worth a closer look. That year, New Mexico rancher Ralph Garcia, his business ruined by drought, sought to make ends meet by signing on as a guard at Wackenhut's prison at Santa Rosa, New Mexico, run under contract to the state. For $7.95 per hour, Garcia watched over medium-security inmates. Among the 'medium security' prisoners were multiple murderers, members of a homicidal neo-Nazi cult and the Mexican Mafia gang. Although he had yet to complete his short training course, Garcia was left alone in a cell block with sixty unlocked prisoners.

  On August 31, 1999, they took the opportunity to run amok, stabbing an inmate then Garcia, several times. Why was Garcia left alone among the convicts? Let's begin with Wackenhut's Jails 'R' Us method of keeping costs down. They routinely packed two prisoners into each cell. They posted just one guard to cover an entire 'pod', or block of cells. This reverses the ratio in government prisons - two guards per block, one prisoner per cell. Of course, the state's own prisons are not as 'efficient' (read 'cheap') as the private firm's. But then, the state hadn't lost a guard in seventeen years - where Wackenhut hadn't yet operated seventeen months.

  Sources told me that just two weeks prior to Garcia's stabbing, a senior employee warned corporate honchos that the one-guard system was a death-sentence lottery. The executive's response to the complaint? "We'd rather lose one officer than two". How does Wackenhut get away with it? It can't hurt that it put Manny Aragon, the state legislature's Democratic leader, on its payroll as a lobbyist and used an Aragon company to supply concrete for the prison's construction."

  ... Excerpt from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a book by investigative reporter Greg Palast, as quoted on the Guerrilla News Network's web site, June, 2003.

• "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation's trouble with allegations of understaffed facilities, sexual assaults against inmates, and internal violence by guards and among inmates has not been confined to the Travis County state jail. allegations similar to those at the TCCJC have arisen in several other states. Among Wackenhut's more notable difficulties:
  • Louisiana: In April 2000, allegations of guards abusing juvenile offenders prompted the state to take control of the Jena Juvenile Justice Centre run by Wackenhut, the Baton Rouge Advocate reported. The facility, opened in December 1998, was plagued by problems, including riots during the first month the facility was open, allegations of 'abusive and untrained' guards, and lack of 'meaningful' rehabilitation programs, medical care, and educational opportunities. The paper reported that inmates also complained of shortages of food, and clothing. According to the Advocate, juvenile inmates said they would purposely mutilate or attempt to kill themselves, hoping to get away from their 'tormentors'.

  • Florida: At the Broward County work release facility in Ft Lauderdale, allegations of sex between guards and inmates, and a successful escape, caused the sheriff to ask for tighter oversight of the Wackenhut facility. According to The Palm Beach post, five guards were either reprimanded or fired as a result of the allegations. In June of 2000, the Florida state ACLU [Union] filed a public records suit against the Palm Beach Gardens-based Wackenhut for 'stonewalling' access to records. The ACLU said they believed the documentation it sought would confirm ongoing allegations of sexual harassment, abuse, and 'excessive profit' taken by the company.

  • Elsewhere in Texas, a former inmate of the Wackenhut-run minimum-security lockup in Lockhart claimed she was raped repeatedly over a four-month period. In July 1998, as reported in the American-Statesman, the former inmate filed a federal suit alleging that, although a prison internal affairs investigation found that the sex was not consensual, Wackenhut officials failed to fire or reprimand the accused guard. The guard later quit after a second sexual assault allegation came to light.

  Asked about the many allegations against the company, a Wackenhut spokesman told the St Petersburg Times that the cases aren't that unusual, given the company's size. "The lawsuits were filed against us on allegations by inmates who are convicted felons", the spokesman told the Florida daily. "So they have a record of dishonesty and misleading people"."

  ... Excerpts from an article by Jordan Smith in the Austin Chronicle, July 5, 2002.

• "A lock out of prison guards at the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre private prison in Brisbane could result in prisoners being confined to cells; significant court delays and a cessation of prison visits.

  The union representing the guards is angry about plans put forward by their employer, Australasian Correctional Management, to use prison labour to increase their profits.

  This follows a strategy first established by ACM's parent company in America, Wackenhut, where prisoners are supplied to private enterprise to make cheap manufactured products.

  Guards commenced industrial action today (Jan 8) in the form of a 'work to rule' once the mandated enterprise bargaining 'peace obligation' period came to an end.

  "Australasian Correctional Management have threatened to stand down our people, without pay, and institute a lock-out even though union members are acting within their legal rights", Ron Monaghan, the Queensland LHMU Secretary, said today.

  The 300 prison guards have announced a 24 hour stoppage from next Monday.

  Correctional officers and security guards have been attempting to negotiate a new agreement to replace the 3 year agreement which expired on December 31st, 2002.

  Prison officers are pursuing a list of claims, which includes amongst other things a 19 month duration new agreement, a 7.5% or $52.00 per week pay increase, common classification structure and improved job security.

  ACM have offered 2% or (CPI -1%) whichever is greater per year.

  ACM have recently contracted a 10 year preferred tendering agreement with the Queensland Government to run the prison.

  The LHMU believes that ACM is taking a tough line against its workers so they can recoup some of the profit they have lost in tough negotiations with the State Government who have screwed down on the tender price.

  "We do not see why our members should pay for tough talks between this private company and the State Government". Ron Monaghan, the Queensland LHMU Secretary, said.

  ACM have also proposed to the union to cut staff and employ inmates in unpaid work in kitchens and other areas where prison officers would normally do the work.

  ""Again it is a basic principle of the union movement that prisoners should not be used to undermine the working conditions and wages of ordinary citizens". [Mr Monaghan said.]

  ACM is a subsidiary of the controversial US-based Wackenhut Corporation which regularly uses prison labour in American prisons as part of its strategy to make a profit for its shareholders.

  In Texas, Wackenhut prisons allow factories inside their facilities to employ prisoners in eyeglass, circuit board and valve manufacturing.

  Local critics claim Wackenhut is using these prisoners as 'indentured slaves' working under conditions that the US Government criticises in countries like China."

  ... Excerpts from the LaborNET website, January 8, 2003.

• "With a minimum of publicity or questioning about the tendering process, the Liberal Kennett government has implemented its plans for the widespread privatisation of the Victorian prison system. As a result, private prisons will soon hold around 80% of female prisoners and 45% of all prisoners in Victoria.

  This has been allowed to take place in an information vacuum due to the government-initiated 'commercial confidentiality' clause which makes it virtually impossible for concerned people to obtain information about the privatisation proposals or the tendering process. ...

  ... It has also been interesting to note the frequency with which the corporations concerned have turned to the pro-big business judicial system to have writs issued against activists who have spoken out against them. This, coupled with the same corporations' habit of sending threatening letters to these activists, could lead one to believe that the corporations have reason to fear public knowledge of their background and history as well as the details of their current tenders.

  These companies include: Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), Corrections Corporation of Australia (CCA) and Group 4 Remand Services.

  ACM, which has the tender for the 600-bed men's prison at West Sale, is owned by the US Wackenhut Corporation and is currently running the Junee Correctional Centre in NSW and the Arthur Gorrie Remand and Reception Centre in Queensland. Since their opening, both those prisons have been plagued by problems.

  There have been numerous disturbances at Junee, which critics say is mainly staffed by people with no experience as prison officers and minimal training, and who are employed at a lower rate of pay and in worse working conditions than their state counterparts. ...

  ... These circumstances have badly affected inmates at Junee, where there is a higher than average rate of internal violence and drug use. There have also been complaints about a lack of educational and vocational programs.

  The biggest concern, however, is the number of deaths in this supposedly medium security prison. Since April 1993, there have been four deaths in custody at Junee [the year of the article is 1996]: one was a murder, two were suicides; the fourth is still under investigation.

  The Arthur Gorrie Remand and Reception Centre has experienced many complaints of overcrowding and a lack of services. Between November 1992 and September 1995, there were eight deaths in custody - the worst death rate in any comparably sized prison in this decade.

  Opponents of private prisons also cite problems at Wackenhut's prisons in the United States. In Texas, company officials are alleged to have misappropriated more than US$700,000 allocated by that state for drug rehabilitation programs. The funds were allegedly used on mobile phones and trips to Britain. ...

  ... Wackenhut attracted considerable notoriety in 1994 when a US Congressional committee found that it had run covert operations on behalf of private companies against individuals who are whistle blowers, environmentalists, anti-nuclear activists of union organisers. It is also the largest provider of security services to the US government."

  ...Excerpts from an article by Ben Alterman in a 1996 edition of the Green Left Weekly.

• "Wackenhut, the parent company of Australasian Correctional Management or ACM, the detention company who lost last year its second bid to run Australian detention centres, has recently re-launched itself under another name on the New York Stock Exchange as a new company, with a new CEO and a new Executive team - and it now attempts a buy-out.

  Global Expertise in Outsourcing, or GEO Group Inc is the new name for Wackenhut Corporation, and its Australian company, formerly calling itself ACM, is now called GEO Australia Pty Ltd. ...

  ... With a Mission Statement which strongly alludes to making a break with its often controversial past - even to the point that no references to its past flood its perception and new image, GEO states:

  "Every day is a commencement. The end of one thing and, at the same time, the start of something new. It is a gift in which to exercise our talents in concert with our fellow employees on behalf of our newly-named company. The GEO Group. GEO aspires to be a world leader in government outsourced services that are diversified in their scope and uniquely professional in their quality. This vision can only be accomplished and sustained by an organisation that has the necessary depth of talent which is united in its purpose. Working together, we will shape our remarkable new future one day at a time."

  GEO also prides itself about running

  "Religious/Faith-based Programs" because "When and offender changes his values system, he changes his behaviour. Religious programming is an important element in offender rehabilitation."

  and

  "to include a voluntary, faith-based, residential Bible college where offenders can earn a Bible degree through correspondence courses. We also work closely with the Kairos Ministry and other religious groups to provide expanded faith-based programs. ..."

  Project SafeCom's coordinator, Jack H Smit, commented that this attempt, first Wackenhut's new disguise under its new name, new CEO, and new 'quasi-religious" cover of cooperations, is in itself nothing else than a set of strategic con-man methods. "Nothing that Wackenhut and ACM does under another name or in another time, can undo its criminal past."

  "The Australian government ought to be well warned about making any future deals with this company - and on this occasion, the ALP's push to return detention contracts back into the hands of the Australian public service ought to be promoted fiercely within government ranks". ..."

  ... Excerpts from a Media Release by the Western Australia based Project SafeCom Inc, March 16, 2004.

Be Alarmed ! Be Concerned ! Fear For Your Children's Future !
Even if the record of Wackenhut, which seems from available materials to be very unsuited to the management of Australian prisons and detention centres, is not as bad as it seems to be, the other global players in the private prisons industry are also highly suspect. (One has to wonder how they ever passed the screening processes for government tenders in Australia.)

For example, here is an excerpt about another US provider of contract correctional facilities management services to the Victorian government.

• "This [Corrections Corporation of Australia, (CCA)] company is owned by Corrections Corporation of America which has been operating prisons in the states of Texas, Tennessee, Florida and New Mexico since 1983.

  CCA's Australian director is Don Hutto, the former director of corrections in West Virginia and Arkansas in the US. While working in those systems, he was found by the US Supreme Court to have violated the eighth and fourteenth amendments of the US constitution regarding cruel and unusual punishment. This is the person that Jeff Kennett wants to put in charge of the women currently suffering at the hands of the state-run prison service. ..."

• "... One of the most disquieting aspects of this privatisation scheme, which involves the commodification of prisoners, has been the attitude of the government. There are now more than 450 extra beds in the Victorian prison system as a time when government statistics reveal a 4% drop in the overall crime rate. This indicates a trend similar to the US system, where private prison contractors first build more prisons and then lobby the appropriate authorities to increase the incarceration rate."

  ... From a 1996 article in the Green Left Weekly by Ben Alterman.

It would seem not to matter whether Wackenhut regains the contract to manage the Australian Immigration Detention Centres, because the company that does it now (quite badly from the reports of human-rights activists), is held by venture capitalists who will on-sell it within the burgeoning global industry of private prisons and prison manufacturing centres - the returns on investment there are higher than most other, more legitimate, forms of enterprise. The dominant players in this new globalised market are members of what I call the American Military Industrial Complex (AMIC), and one or other of them will surely get hold of the Australian detention centres contract, in due course.

Besides the private prisons, Federal and State governments in Australia have contracted services to AMIC companies in many other areas. One such is IT support and maintenance, where the same outfit that has an exclusive contract with the Pentagon for such services, also services the majority of Australian Federal Government departments. There is no way that local Australian providers of IT services will ever be able to wrest such contracts away from the AMIC, because everything that happens in government is now an open book to the AMIC and they can head off any moves to depose them from their now privileged position. They can also monitor what's going on with contracts in the private prisons sector and use their knowledge to help AMIC firms to enter and dominate that lucrative 'market'.

A major tactic of the AMIC has been to use Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) to put favourable legal conditions in place. This has just been completed, to the first stage, in Australia. No one can argue with the 'level playing field' notion that underpins the 'Free Trade' concept. However actual FTA agreements are anything but free or level. They are thinly disguised mechanisms of unrestricted access and exploitation of the national markets of formerly economically independent countries around the world - in other words vehicles of globalisation.

The principal beneficiaries of early 21st century FTAs are always AMIC agencies and corporations. But the mainstream media very seldom say so. Thus most Australians think that the 'opening up' of the US market to Australian manufactured goods and agricultural produce (20th century trade items) is a good move. They are unaware of the disadvantage that Australian enterprises in services and knowledge-based commerce (21st century trade items) have been placed under by the recent FTA with the United States.

At least one Australian political cartoonist, John Ditchburn, has grasped the true nature of the Australian/US FTA, as the above image shows. I've added a little to John's original by identifying the AMIC with the Orwellian pigs.

It is not political terrorists such as al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah that Australians should fear, but economic terrorists - in the form of AMIC agencies and corporations. Whether they realise it or not, the Australian Feds have now lost both their control and relevance. Other players now aspire to shape the Australian economy and the Australian society to their own ends and purpose.

Australians now have very good grounds for divorcing the Feds and establishing free cities and regions that are outside the ambit and rule of Takers from America. As I wrote in Edition One of this freesite:

"When your spouse lies to you and repeatedly acts to deceive you, then you can separate from them and gain a divorce. You are quite entitled to take such action because the marriage 'contract' has been broken. Without openness and honesty there can not be a viable marriage."

"When your spouse hops into bed with a gent wearing a star-spangled shirt and red and white striped trousers, that's infidelity and - again - you are quite entitled to a divorce. The open-ended FTA that the Auzzie Feds have agreed with the US Feds is not about free trade, it's about globalisation. Globalisation of our minerals, our water, our forests, our radio spectrum, our brands, our hospitals, our ports, our tollways, everything we have. That star-spangled guy wants it all, in the name of free trade, and so he can continue to live in the style he's become accustomed to."

"When the kids you lovingly raised to be wonderful young men and women are drawn into an endless War on Terror, by that same guy in the striped pants and your sleep-around spouse in Canberra, you need to get a divorce. Otherwise your kids will end up scrounging for vehicle armour in some god-forsaken rubbish tip on the edge of the next city or town to be 'liberated'. In the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa, in South America - anywhere and everywhere."

The Australian Feds have already shown, clearly and unequivocally, that they will act in the interests of big and powerful corporations, and the US Feds, rather than the interests of ordinary Australians.

Again, political cartoonist, John Ditchburn, has captured the essence of this betrayal.

But there's a puzzle to be solved. It's about the reasons for building such impregnable barriers to the entry of asylum seekers and refugees into such a large and empty land as Australia.

Why Such Strong Immigration Defences?
This is a question that we need to address. We need to work out, between ourselves, what are the real reasons for the quite recent changes in the policies of the Australian Feds regarding the entry of people displaced or threatened in their own countries. The official reasons, even the anti-terrorist arguments, simply don't stack up.

Here are some excerpts from an article in the May 28, 2004, edition of Executive Intelligence Review.

• "The detention centre policy was begun in 1992 under the ALP government of Prime Minister Paul Keating. Keating and his ALP predecessor PM Bob Hawke discarded the national banking, pro-sovereignty traditions held by the ALP since it was founded in the 1890s, and ushered in the globalisation, privatisation, and deregulation nightmare which the Howard government has only deepened since it came to power in 1996.

  At their height in late 2001, the IDCs and the 'offshore centres' at Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and Nauru in the Pacific, held some 2,800 immigrants in extremely harsh, overcrowded conditions. The centres - widely referred to in Australia as 'concentration camps' - were run for years by the private firm, Australasian Corrections Management (ACM) a subsidiary of the notorious U.S, Wackenhut firm. ... Detainees, visitors, and human rights advocates have consistently described the camps as "worse than prisons", with no medical care, widespread abuse by prison guards, middle-of-the night "counts", and "isolation cells" like something out of Edgar Allan Poe's 'Pit and the Pendulum' story. The camps are ringed by barbed wire, some are in the middle of the desert, or in other far-flung locations; the government tightly controls access so that no news from the inside leaks out."

• "Many of the detainees are held for years, with no knowledge of when, if ever, they will be released. The Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) which oversees their cases is composed of political appointees with no background, legal training, or experience in such matters, and it invariably rules against the immigrants. In September 2001, Howard rammed through a series of "Border Protection" laws, which removed any right of appeal of the RRT to the Federal court, so that the kangaroo court RRT has the ultimate say over the refugees' fates.

  Under these conditions, numerous detainees have committed suicide or attempted it. Incidents of "self-harm" are constant, with inmates throwing themselves on razor wire, slashing themselves, drinking detergent, or sewing their lips together in protest at the inhuman conditions in which they are held.

  Numerous children have emulated their parents in these practices.

  Psychologists and psychiatrists have testified repeatedly to the devastating degree of mental problems experienced by all the detainees, as many as 75% of whom were already victims of torture and trauma in the countries from which they fled, mainly Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Many of them are members of persecuted minorities who faced death or further imprisonment, had they stayed.

  While the camps on the mainland are horrible enough, the Australian government in 2001 initiated its 'Pacific solution', by dumping hundreds of refugees on Manus island or Nauru, where they live in utter squalor, with only brackish water to drink. On the few occasions when they were allowed outside the camps they were sometimes beaten by poverty-stricken natives, who are enraged at anything having to do with the Australian government."

• "While the government has attempted to imply that its inhuman immigration policy is to "stop terrorists", the policy of large-scale internment began before 9/11 - and in spite of the fact that, of the 17,000 immigrants who arrived before 2001, only seven [7] were found to have been criminals, and not genuine refugees. As many have pointed out, a terrorist is hardly likely to choose an unseaworthy, overcrowded boat as his passage to Australia. Additionally, under international law, all of these so-called "illegal immigrants" have the right to seek asylum wherever they can find it; in any case, the numbers involved are tiny, Australia ranking only 41st in the world as a refugee destination."

So, thinking people can immediately see the flaws in the official truth. The harsh treatment of the 'boat people' is not explainable in terms of anti-criminal or anti-terrorist exclusion measures.

• Why then are these people being so badly treated?

• Why have the AMIC moved in to design and manage detention centres in remote Australian deserts?

• Why are people who have committed no crime being incarcerated indefinitely in these hell holes and further subjected to inhumane 'behaviour modification' processes that involve being locked up in isolation?

• Why do detainees spend 23 .5 hours a day in a brightly lit cell, wearing only a short gown, with no mattress, no bedding or towels, while security cameras are trained on the room, shower and toilet area 24 hours a day?

• Why are we, the taxpayers of Australia, continuing to pay for such atrocities to be perpetrated in our name?

• Why have we already paid American contractors AU$500 million to incarcerate and torment innocent people

• Why are we still paying the salaries of people such as Vanstone, Ruddock and Howard?

• Most importantly, what is the real aim behind all the 'fortress Australia' policies. If they aren't to keep out criminals and terrorists what are they really for?

These are far more important questions than anything in the mainstream media; than musings about when the Sydney property market might top out, or the prospect of an official rise in interest rates. Why aren't they being asked?

The Unprecedented Australian Maritime Information Zone
In December, 2004, Australia announced the establishment of a 1,000-nautical mile (1,850km) security zone around the entire country. From March, 2005, all shipping traversing the new zone will be required to provide full details of their cargo, crew, location, speed and destination port. A new joint command that integrates elements of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), particularly the Navy, coast watch, and customs will enforce the AMIZ. It will be headed by a Rear Admiral and will have powers to intercept and board any craft suspected of carrying illicit materials or terrorists.

This new policy by the Australian Feds is unprecedented. It is, literally, the first time any nation has presumed to both ignore the principle of freedom of navigation on the high seas and also infringe the territorial waters of neighbouring sovereign states. Only very serious threats to Australia's security could ever justify such a policy in times of peace. But no such threats are apparent.

The following map gives shows the indicative extent of the new AMIZ.

The unilaterally imposed Australian Maritime Information Zone infringes the sovereignty of no less than six nations. It is very serious stuff indeed, although the Australian Defence Minister claims, glibly, that there is no law against seeking information from vessels on the high seas, the zone extends into the territorial waters of neighbouring countries. As you can see, in some cases the AMIZ completely blankets a country, covering all its territorial waters.

The AMIZ is a major attack on freedom; it attacks freedom of navigation on the high seas and the freedom of neighbouring nations to control their own territorial waters. In an interview with the Australian ABC channel on December 15, 2004, Don Rothwell, a professor of international law at Sydney University said:

• "... with the exception of pirate ships and ships that are not carrying flags ('stateless' ships not registered with a country), and one or two minor exceptions, there is no real basis upon which any country can just stop any ship at all on the high seas because it does infringe this fundamental freedom of high seas navigational freedom ... If [Australia is] proposing to enforce this zone [AMIZ] within the maritime zones of our adjacent neighbouring states, that would really be seen as quite a hostile act."

Despite the attempts of the Australian Fed's media manipulators to heighten the spectre of a terrorist attack by Islamic fundamentalists on targets in Australian ports, most reputable analysts consider the risk posed by shipping to be minimal to non-existent.

During the 2004 New Years Eve celebrations in Sydney the Feds and the NSW authorities held a Panamanian registered tanker, the Pedoulas, outside Sydney Heads and prevented it entering the harbour until the following day, by which time the crowds had dispersed. It was slavishly reported by the mainstream media that Australian intelligence and police officers had observed 'Islamic fundamentalists' - including a 'known terrorist', Saleh Jamal, acting suspiciously in a pleasure craft near the Pier One Wharf (a centre of celebrations) and the Shell oil terminal in Gore Cove. Nothing actually happened that night and nobody, not even the 'known terrorist' Saleh Jamal, seems to have been interviewed/interrogated or charged with any offence in regard to that evening. Participating in New Years Eve Celebrations on the harbour is not yet an illegal act.

Put bluntly, this trumped-up story of a planned attack on New Years Eve revellers by a shadowy group of Muslims is as lacking in credibility as the official findings on the Bali bombing. The Australian media should never have printed such stories. Neither holds any water. See Edition 1 of this freesite for an analysis of the unanswered questions about the nature of the Bali bomb and who was really responsible for the attack.

Nothing Is What It Seems To Be - Question Everything !
Just as scientists are now coming to realise that the physical reality that we experience is not at all solid, but simply a manifestation of energy, so are more of us coming to understand that contemporary geopolitics is also illusory.

Einstein contended that: "... what we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter". Various thinkers are perceiving a 2nd Renaissance, and they are recognising the parallels between what is happening in the War on Terror and what happened in the persecution of heretics and witches; in Europe, 500 years ago. Nothing is what it seems to be. The officially stated motives for cracking down on 'terrorists' and 'fundamentalists' are not the real motives. Those real reasons remain unstated and unreported.

If you find it hard to draw any parallels between the current War on Terror and the earlier War on Witches, click on the link to the 2nd Renaissance freesite (the text-only version - Part 1 will do) and start reading at Sub-Heading [150]. The Papal Bull (an apt term) of 1484 relating to the reasons for persecuting witches is a complete load of rubbish, yet it readily equates (some might say resonates) with the drivel issued by the leaders of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) nations following 911 and prior to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. History really does repeat itself. Not only has a 2nd Renaissance begun but also a 2nd Inquisition.

Question The Ring Of Protection Around Australia - What Is It Really For?
We will not discover the truth about the isolation of Australia from 'outsiders' by watching TV or reading newspapers. Only the official truth is in those 'news' coverages. To identify the real motives behind what is happening and why Australia is being so thoroughly 'sealed off', we must develop our own theory; asking questions and identifying possible answers until we have a model that can logically explain every event and every policy.

This is the 'scientific method' and it's not as hard as it sounds. However, I'm not going to attempt to work it all out, here in this second edition of Divorcing The Feds. But let's pose a few initial questions.

• Who is the 'barrier' intended to keep out of Australia?
  • So far, it seems to have been refugees and asylum-seekers, who have been predominantly Muslims. The justifications have been that they were 'queue-jumpers' and that Australia couldn't afford to absorb them - the old "Where's the money coming from?" argument.

  • The AMIZ is said to be aimed at keeping terrorists and their weapons out of Australia, but stopping and boarding shipping is highly unlikely to offer any protection against true terrorists. Such people are essentially guerillas, and they blend into the population. They won't come in a fleet of invasion barges.

• Who might the 'barrier' be intending to keep in Australia?
  • At first, most Australians won't think that the idea of sealing off Australia could be to keep in anybody who is already here, and prevent them from leaving. But this initial view is predicated on the notion that those of us who are already here will be allowed to roam free as we always have. That isn't what happened in Nazi Germany, it's not what happened in Communist Russia, it's not what's happening in China, or North Korea.

• What's so important about Australia anyway? Why might foreigners occupy it?
  • The attraction can't be economic. Australia is not a major economic power and the AMIC would know well enough, from its secret science projects and military weapons development, that energy is actually abundant, and thus Australia's energy resources are not going to be required in the 21st century.

  • It's not the weather or the beaches, good though they are, that would attract the AMIC to Australia.

  • Nor is it the empty land. There is still plenty of space in the US and even in the UK.

  • It's not about the Aussie women either, although they proved to be desirable to the US servicemen who were stationed here during World War II.

  • So, if the attraction has nothing to do with economics (food, shelter, wealth, etc), and it has nothing to do with the acquisition of more territory, nor with sex and reproduction, the only basic need left would seem to be SURVIVAL.

  • This poses a further question.

• Why might Australia be a uniquely survivable location?

I'm not going to try to explain why Australia might be attractive for reasons of survival. Not here in this edition of this freesite. What I'm going to do is reiterate that it's time to stop accepting what the Australian Feds and the US Feds are saying about the War on Terror and why it's necessary to seal off Australia. It's time to start asking our own questions, and they need to be the right ones. We need to understand the steps being taken, right now, to increase the CONTROL of the government over the population already living in Australia. Not the 'queue-jumpers', the boat-people, the asylum-seekers, but we who are already here.

We need to understand how organisations like Wackenhut can 'help' the federalist drive for total control of the Australian population. Such Jails 'R' Us outfits are the specialists who are capable of taking innocent Australians like Cornelia Rau, and locking them away in facilities designed and equipped to break human spirits and drive people mad. Don't say it can't happen, it just did.

Until next time then.

And in the meanwhile, give some further thought to the line from Gravity's Rainbow that says:

Lothar, February 2005.