Black law white mask

The hounding of Haneef is evidence of the Australian government's brazen attempt to spin doctor mass frenzy of fear and racism with an eye on polls

Emma Torzillo Sydney

Dr Mohamed Haneef was one of many Indian-trained doctors working in Australia. In fact, the whole public health care system, particularly in rural and regional areas, is heavily dependent on overseas-trained doctors to staff its universally-available service. Indians play a key function in filling these essential roles.

So why was Haneef treated the way he was by the Australian government? While his relations with two of the men arrested in connection with the failed Glasgow Airport bombing incident was inevitably going to lead to investigations, there are at least three factors that suggest why the case has become such a controversial one.

First, he was arrested and detained under a new legislation, the Terrorism Act, passed in 2005 by the Federal Liberal National government, a Rightwing coalition that has been in power since 1993. These new laws were passed only after a bitter public debate because they so drastically erode civil rights with wide-ranging powers, including that of detention for specific periods without charge. Haneef's case led the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to ask repeatedly for extensions of that period in which they could detain him without charge, causing rising public suspicion that the evidence was flimsy, as well as reigniting the entire debate about the Terrorism Act.

Leaks from the UK about the absence of or the distortion of evidence about just where Haneef's SIM card had been found only added to the suspicion and prompted calls to either charge him or let him go. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) charged Haneef with providing support to a terrorist organisation, a move that silenced debate over what the evidence might have been as it was now sub judice; but this further focussed attention on the case. It went to court and the case collapsed miserably, leading the DPP to a humiliating public withdrawal and exposing just how weak the evidence had been as well as the inept nature of the AFP investigation.

Secondly, there was a separate but concurrent process occurring in which federal minister for immigration Kevin Andrews was reviewing Haneef's visa on the basis of information provided to him by the AFP. This body of legislation has been the focus of sustained and widespread public attack throughout the whole period of this government's rule. The power to incarcerate in 'mandatory and indefinite detention' those people who arrive in Australia seeking asylum has been the most publicly condemned element of the structure. The government has been shamed into some modification, finally, two years ago, agreeing to release children and their mothers (but not their fathers) from detention; but there are many men and women labelled as 'illegal immigrants' who are languishing without access to any assistance until deported.

Just as the court decision to throw out the DPP's charges was being announced, Andrews declared that Haneef's visa was cancelled. Hence, as soon as he is released from the Brisbane jail, he had to be transferred to the Sydney Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, to be held as an illegal immigrant, until his deportation could be carried out.

This was widely interpreted, by the public and the media, as the government stepping in to override the court's decision that Haneef should go free, and many condemned this act and called for an apology. Andrews' weak defence that there was 'secret security evidence' and that his decision did not need to rest on the same burden of proof as a court, did little to deflect public anger or to stem a rapid shift in sympathy for Haneef.

To understand this government decision and the response to it, one needs to understand the third factor in this whole process: the federal election campaign. This is the fourth campaign the government has fought since its victory over Labour in 1996. Before each election, the government has used or fabricated a high-profile drama to pose as strong leaders and defenders of the country in a time of terrorism.

In 2002, a Norwegian boat carrying refugees rescued from a sinking ship was blockaded at gun point by Australian navy vessels at the behest of the federal government, which was attempting to stop the refugees legally applying for asylum. Although the Norwegian captain defied the Australian navy and got the refugees to safety, the Howard government successfully portrayed itself as blocking a “flood” of “queue jumpers”, even though most of the asylum-seekers were later proven by UNHCR to be genuine refugees!

The prime example of deliberate fabrication was the 'Children Overboard' scandal in October 2001, in which the minister for defence released photographs taken by Australian navy personnel of another boat load of asylum seekers as they held their young children up in the air, allegedly threatening to throw them overboard. It was later proved conclusively that these photographs were deliberately misleading, that the refugees had been swimming to the safety of Australian vessels, and that the highest levels of government were aware from the very beginning of this gross distortion. The prime minister managed to avoid blame by denying all knowledge, and the election was won.

This time the going has not been so good. The opposition is looking stronger and the government is not having so much luck in finding its headline-catching, tide-turning drama to show itself off in decisive national leadership. It has tried — very hard. First, in January, it 'took over' the management of the major river system in Australia, the Murray-Darling, from the states, a move that turned out to be little more than marginal tinkering at tax-payers' expense.

The government has done better, however — and as always — with racially-based dramatics. It has spent the last decade appealing to the Rightwing advocates of 'equality' by systematically cutting funding to aboriginal-controlled health services and housing companies on the grounds that such services should be 'mainstreamed', not ghettoised. At the same time, it has ignored, again and again, the pleas of aboriginal women and community advocates to address the serious problems of family abuse that poverty and alcohol generate in remote aboriginal communities. After the release of yet another inquiry into the terrible conditions and abuse faced by aboriginal communities, the federal government used this event to 'take-over' the communities in the northern territory, literally sending in the army and police, purportedly to “save the children”.

This was not what the aboriginal authors of the report had demanded, when they argued for collaboration in dealing with a long-term and difficult problem of poverty. Instead, the government racialised the argument, drawing on widespread Anglo community prejudices about 'primitive' and 'savage' aboriginal 'traditional customary law' and alleged 'cultural' abuse of children.

The army has gone in — to the distress of many aboriginal communities — but they have at least recognised that the compulsory medical examination of aboriginal children by military doctors to detect sexual abuse, which is what Minister of Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough and Prime Minister John Howard first proposed, is not only barbaric but completely pointless in diagnostic terms.

It is now becoming clear that the 'take-over' is going to cover up the dismantling of the 1976 land rights laws that for the first time recognised aboriginal traditional rights to land and compensation, a set of laws the federal government has long wished to revoke but which it has had no mandate to do. While the massive amount of money the government is now suddenly offering the northern territory health and housing services seems to have disorganised and muted the initial condemnation of the military intervention, the initiative has not had the impact on the polls it was hoped to have when the spin-doctors in the prime minister's office dreamed it up some months ago.

Into this flagging election campaign came the case of Haneef. It must have seemed perfect. It evoked the legitimate anxieties many in the population have about terrorism but it also involved someone from overseas and on a temporary visa — calling up all the prejudices and hysteria about temporary entry being the source of danger which is what the earlier frauds had worked on so effectively. More significantly, it involved someone with an affinity to Islam.

This played on all the deliberate spadework the federal government has done in demonising Muslims in the wake of 9/11 and in building support for its assistance to the Bush invasion of Iraq. To do so it has targetted Islamic Australians, some born overseas but many born in Australia. Their long-established presence and religion has been raised repeatedly in this government's scare campaigns and its assertions that Christian ideology is some sort of core 'Australian' value, which it claims it will now incorporate in a disturbing new 'test' before citizenship will be granted.

All of this is why Kevin Andrews' decision to withdraw Haneef's work visa was greeted with a high degree of scepticism by the Australian public. The public was prepared to accept Haneef's initial detention for a day or two as reasonable response to the Glasgow incident. However, questions began to surface soon about the way the government had moved in to manipulate and whip up hysteria about Haneef and then to act to override a court decision that he should be released when the criminal case had been dropped entirely.

The impact from this mess has fallen most heavily on Haneef himself, who has had to bear the distress of detention, the smearing of his character and the major interruption to his professional medical career. It will also rebound severely on all Australians who will now face even more serious losses of civil and human rights in the amendments to the Terrorism Act which the government has foreshadowed as a result of this affair: longer periods of legal detention without charge, harsher restrictions on freedom of speech and more power to the AFP and the government.

The course of the controversy has made it clear that fewer Australians are prepared to respond blindly to the racist dog-whistle politics that have been such a characteristic election strategy for Howard. Far more Australians are sick of the cynical spin-doctoring. While the outcome of the federal election is still far from certain, it is clear that the old dominance of racialised scare politics is not as secure as it once was. A number of demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne joined the chorus of voices from the media and Parliament to condemn the arrest, detention and visa confiscation of Haneef. The resolve of civil rights and anti-war activists to prevent another episode of racist scapegoating of the government was strengthened.

Also strengthened were the links between advocates for national and international human rights in a transnational setting in which the truly vulnerable people are powerless 'non-citizens' like refugees, displaced people and those stripped of their residency status, as was Haneef and as are others in even more fragile positions. This may offer little comfort to Haneef, but these broad advocacy networks have now had a chance to see how these new laws work in local and international contexts and so will be better equipped to challenge them in the near future.

The writer is a Sydney-based advocate working on refugee and anti-racism issues