by Brian Toohey
Chapter 42: Seventy-five new laws against murder
1 Saul Eslake, ‘The quest for “security”: Is it rational, has it made us safer, and at what cost?’, address to the Royal Society of Tasmania, 14 November 2017.
2 George Williams, email to the author, 11 February 2019.
3 George Williams, email to the author, 13 December 2018.
4 ‘Politically motivated violence in Australia: 1966–2009’, in Appendix 1 of Clive Small and Tom Gilling, Blood Money, Allen & Unwin, 2011.
5 A well-regarded journalist, Hamish Macdonald, concludes in his self-published book, Reasonable Doubt: Spies, Police and the Croatian Six, 2019, that a group of Croatians was wrongly convicted in the 1980s of trying to set off bombs against Yugoslav targets in Sydney and that the key Crown witness allegedly worked for UDB (Yugoslav intelligence).
6 Evan Pederick, an Australian member of the Indian movement called Ananda Marga, was convicted and spent eight years in jail. The case remains contentious.
7 Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence in Australia, 2018, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2018, p. 72.
8 Mark Thompson, The Cost of Defence: ASPI Defence Budget Brief 2017–18, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, May 2017.
9 Man Haron Monis, a notorious attention seeker and self-proclaimed terrorist, killed a hostage during the December 2014 stand-off at the Lindt Cafe in Sydney. In October 2015, a fifteen-year-old terrorist shot dead a civilian employee of the NSW Police. In 2017, an alleged terrorist, Yacqub Khayre, killed a man in Melbourne before police shot him. In November 2018, a Melbourne man was killed in a knife attack; it’s unclear if the attacker was primarily a terrorist or mentally ill.
10 Eliza Manningham-Buller, ‘Securing Freedom’, Lecture One, Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4, 6 September 2011.
11 Lisa Burton, Nicola McGarrity and George Williams, ‘The extraordinary questioning and detention powers of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’, Melbourne University Law Review, 36(2), 2012, p. 417.
12 Michael Bradley, ‘Anti-terror laws: Control order plan takes us closer to a police state’, The Drum, ABC News, 15 October 2015.
13 Council of Australian Governments Review of Counter-terrorism Legislation, Australian Government, 2013, p. 68.
14 Cameron Stewart, ‘We need new laws for a more dangerous world’, The Australian, 19 July 2014.
15 Chris Berg, ‘Security bill widens government surveillance powers’, SMH, 3 August 2014.
16 Ibid.
17 Chris Berg, ‘Be sceptical of vague new “national security” powers’, The Drum, ABC News, 17 July 2012.
18 Michael Safti, ‘University of NSW student wrongly accused of terrorism offences plans to sue police and media’, The Guardian, 23 November 2018.
19 Alfred McCoy, ‘The outcast of Camp Echo’, The Monthly, June 2006.
20 Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis, Counter-Terrorism and the Post-Democratic State, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007, p. 58.
21 ‘Hicks just not handling it well: Ruddock’, SMH, 31 January 2007.
22 Eslake, op. cit.
Chapter 43: Australia’s own national security state
1 Email to the author from Paul Murphy, CEO of the MEAA, 10 July 2018.
2 Joint Media Organisations Submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security on National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Bill 2017, 22 January 2018, pp. 1, 2.
3 Ibid., p. 2.
4 Ibid., pp. 2, 3.
5 Ibid., p. 4.
6 Ibid., pp. 7, 8.
7 Law Council of Australia Submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security on National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Bill 2017, 22 January 2018, p. 61.
8 Chris Merritt, ‘Defamation payout to hit Nine’, Weekend Australian, 23–24 February 2019.
9 Colin Hawes, ‘Why defamation lawsuits are crucial for protecting the rule of law: a comment on the Chau Chak Wing case’, Pearls and Irritations, 19 March 2019.
10 Chapter 1 in this book explains why the information the Canberra spies sent to Moscow in 1945 was trivial.
11 Jann S. Dunlap, ‘1961: The CIA readies a Cuban invasion, and the Times blinks’, NYT, 26 December 2014.
12 Keiran Hardy and George Williams, Free Speech and Counterterrorism in Australia, forth-coming book.
13 Brian Toohey, ‘The ABCs gutless kowtow over lost Cabinet papers’, AFR, 7 February 2018.
14 ‘Espionage report a step in the right direction’, Law Council of Australia press release, 8 June 2018.
15 Email to the author from Paul Murphy, op. cit.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
Chapter 44: Fighting a phantom called foreign influence and the encryption demons
1 Scott Ludlam, ‘National security is a government strength—so Labor will let them be reckless with it’, The Guardian, 6 December 2018.
2 Counterintelligence Glossary: Terms & Definitions of Interest for CI Professionals, Homeland Security Digital Library, Washington, DC, 1 July 2014, p. 9.
3 Bret Walker, ‘What problem, exactly, would a foreign agency law fix?’, The Interpreter, Lowy Institute, 29 November 2017.
4 James Laurenceson, ‘China zealotry comes at a cost, if it stops shared university research’, AFR, 26 February 2018.
5 Ibid.
6 Church Committee: Book I—Foreign and Military Intelligence, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, US Senate, 1976, p. 158.
7 Scott Shane, ‘Russia isn’t the only one meddling in elections: We do it too’, NYT, 17 February 2018.
8 Examples are given in Chapter 28 in this book.
9 See ‘Transcript of joint press conference, Parliament House, Canberra, 5 December 2017: Foreign interference; foreign donations; same-sex marriage; citizenship’, parlinfo.aph.gov.au.
10 Brian Toohey, ‘How JIO tore into Fraser’, NT, 27 May 1983.
11 David Wroe and Mark Kenny, ‘Foreign interference laws: Paul Keating may have to declare as foreign agent’, SMH, 6 December 2017.
12 Philip Dorling, ‘Arbib revealed as secret US source’, The Age, 9 December 2010.
13 Exposure Draft: Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018, House of Representatives, Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 14 August 2018.
14 ‘Rushed encryption laws create risk of unintended consequences and overreach’, Law Council of Australia media release, 7 December 2018.
15 Ibid.
16 David Swan and Primrose Riordan, ‘Encryption bill “a gut punch” to the tech sector’, SMH, 15 December 2018.
17 Christopher Knaus, ‘Google and Facebook join rights groups to fight Australia’s encryption bill’, The Guardian, 3 October 2018.
18 Paul Karp, ‘Australia’s war on encryption: The sweeping new powers rushed into law’, The Guardian, 8 December 2018.
19 Andy Patrizio, ‘Microsoft to NSA: WannaCry is your fault’, Network World, 17 May 2017.
20 Ludlam, op. cit.
21 Ibid.
Chapter 45: The national security supremo
1 Michael Pezzullo, ‘Secretary’s remarks to the Trans-Tasman Business Circle’, Department of Home Affairs, Australian Government, 13 October 2017.
2 Official Secrets: Legislation and Policy, NAA Series A47 94/C 645.
3 Karen Middleton, ‘George Brandis’ secret ASIO speech’, Saturday Paper, 24 February 2018.
4 Dana Priest and William Arkin, ‘A hidden world, growing beyond control’, Washington Post, 19 July 2010.
5 Pezzullo, op. cit.
6 Paddy Gourley, ‘Mike Pezzullo’s Department of Home Affairs belongs in a dark galaxy far, far away (from reality)’, Canberra Times, 7 November 2017.
7 Pezzullo, op. cit.
8 Michael Pezzullo, ‘Seven Gathering Storms—National Security in the 2020s’, Australian Strategic Policy Ins
titute, Canberra, 13 March 2019.
9 Nigel Gladstone, ‘State intensifies citizen tracking’, Sun Herald, 4 November 2018.
10 Cynthia Wong, ‘We underestimate the threat of facial recognition technology at our peril’, The Guardian, 17 August 2018.
11 ‘Identity matching bill must clearly define the line between appropriate and illegitimate use’, Law Council of Australia media release, 3 May 2018.
12 See previous chapter.
13 Karen Middleton, ‘Metadata requests top 350,000’, Saturday Paper, 24 November 2018.
14 Ibid.
15 Andrew Fowler, Shooting the Messenger, Routledge, 2018, p. 230.
Chapter 46: The foundation myth of our four colonial wars
1 Julia Gillard, speech at the opening of the Chinese-Australian War Memorial, Sunnybank, Queensland, 6 April 2011.
2 Judith Brett, ‘Alfred Deakin and the roots of Australian foreign policy’, Pearls and Irritations, 15 September 2017.
3 ‘Sudan (New South Wales Contingent) March–June 1885’, Australian War Memorial, n.d.
4 Ibid.
5 ‘China (Boxer Rebellion), 1900–01’, Australian War Memorial, n.d.
6 Amitav Ghosh, the novelist who wrote the Ibis trilogy about the Opium Wars, told an interviewer that during his research he discovered a diary in which a pious British opium trader wrote, ‘Please forgive me, God. I was too busy selling opium today, I forgot to pray.’ Michael LaPointe, ‘The Opium Wars, revisited’, The Tyee, 12 November 2008.
7 Craig Wilcox, ‘The Boer War: Australians and the war in South Africa, 1899–1902’, National Archives of Australia Research Guide, 2001.
8 ‘Australia and the Boer War, 1899–1902’, Australian War Memorial, n.d.
9 Jason Ditz, ‘The Philippines: Remembering a forgotten occupation’, Huffpost, 18 June 2013.
10 Fransjohan Pretorius, ‘The Boer Wars’, BBC History, March 2011.
11 ‘Scorched earth and guerrilla warfare’, in Voluntary Guides Backgrounder 004: Boer War, Section 9, December 2010; ‘Australia and the Boer War, 1899–1902’, Australian War Memorial, n.d.
12 Andre Wessels, The Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902, Sun Press, 2011, p. 78. Thanks to AWM historian Thomas Rogers for pointing to this source.
13 Phone conversation with AWM’s media manager, 4 March 2019.
14 For a summary of this discussion see Paul Daley, ‘Why the number of Indigenous deaths in the frontier wars matters’, The Guardian, 15 July 2014.
15 ‘Deaths as a result of service with Australian units’, Australian War Memorial, 2018.
Chapter 47: World War I: Labor’s secret plans for an expeditionary force
1 Quoted in Greg Lockhart, ‘Race fear, dangerous denial’, Griffith Review 32, May 2011.
2 The Defence Act was changed in 1943 to allow conscripts to serve in the south-west Pacific, and in 1964 to allow them to serve in Vietnam and elsewhere.
3 Lockhart, op. cit.
4 John Mordike, An Army for a Nation: A History of Australian Military Developments, 1880–1914, Allen & Unwin, 1992; John Mordike, We Should Do This Thing Quietly: Japan and the Great Deception in Australian Defence Policy 1911–1914, RAAF Aerospace Centre, 2002.
5 B. Beddie, ‘Pearce, Sir George Foster (1870–1952)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, ANU, 2017.
6 Lockhart, op. cit.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Paul Daley, ‘Australia spares no expense as the Anzac legend nears its century’, The Guardian, 15 October 2013.
10 Tony Stephens, ‘Anzac 100: The legend has outgrown the men who fought’, SMH, 22 April 2015.
11 Tony Stephens, ‘Last Anzac is dead’, SMH, 17 May 2002.
12 Tony Stephens, ‘Alec Campbell, the adventurous one 1899–2002’, SMH, 18 May 2002.
13 Stephens, ‘Anzac 100’, op. cit.
14 Ibid.
15 For one assessment see Douglas Newton, ‘Armistice Day: Narrow nationalist naiveties and voodoo vindications of war’, Pearls and Irritations, 13 November 2017. See also Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History, UNSW Press, 2010.
16 Paul Daley, ‘The moment that forever changed my perspective on Anzac mythology’, The Guardian, 9 December 2018.
17 See for example Anne Glenday, ‘Digging up the truth about Fromelles, not the bodies, is what counts’, SMH, 14 July 2008.
18 Josephine Cafagna, ‘Closure for the relatives of the Fromelles dead’, 7.30 Report, ABC-TV, 20 March 2010.
19 AAP, ‘Did Gallipoli make the Australian nation?’, SBS News, 25 March 2014.
20 Malcolm Fraser with Cain Roberts, Dangerous Allies, MUP, 2014, p. 38.
21 David Noonan, ‘Why the numbers of our WWI dead are wrong’, SMH, 30 April 2014.
Chapter 48: World War II: No sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia
1 John Edwards, John Curtin’s War, Vol. 2, Viking, 2018, p. 75.
2 Richard Evans, ‘Why Hitler’s grand plan during the Second World War collapsed’, The Guardian, 8 September 2009.
3 Sergey Yarov, Leningrad 1941–42: Morality in a City Under Siege, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017, p. vi. This quote is from the preface by Peter Barber, a historian at King’s College, Cambridge.
4 Ibid., p. x.
5 Max Suich, ‘Diplomacy that led to human catastrophe’, The Australian, 23 June 2012. Suich expanded his argument in ‘The1930s couldn’t happen again—could they?’, The Australian, 30 June 2012.
6 Suich, ‘Diplomacy that led to human catastrophe’, ibid.
7 Edwards, pp. 5–76.
8 Clem Lloyd, ‘Curtin and the invasion threat’, NT, 27 April 1983.
9 Edwards, p. 75.
10 ‘Second World War, 1939–45’, Australian War Memorial, n.d.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Gavin Long, The Final Campaigns, AWM, 1963, p. 18.
14 A.T. Ross, Armed and Ready, Turton & Armstrong, 1995, p. 427.
15 Ibid.
16 Some complex high-tech weapons and electronic systems may have to be imported, but local industry could make many weapons platforms and systems.
17 David Fettling, Encounters with Asian Decolonisation, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017, pp. 189–90.
18 Desmond Ball, ‘The moles at the very heart of government’, Weekend Australian, 16 April 2011.
19 Pam Burton, ‘John Burton: Undermined by dishonest history’, Honest History lecture, Manning Clark House, Canberra, 18 August 2014.
20 Ernst Willheim, ‘Sex, spies and lies? The spurious case against ex-department head John Burton’, Canberra Times, 6 November 2014.
21 William Pritchett, ‘The US and us’, Pacific Security Research Institute, 1992, p. 26.
Chapter 49: Korea: Barbarism unleashed
1 Michael Pembroke, Korea, Hardie Grant, 2018, p. xvi.
2 Ibid., p. 72.
3 Tim Colebatch, ‘Menzies and the making of postwar Australia’, Inside Story, 17 September 2016.
4 ‘Robert Menzies in office: The Menzies era 1949–66’, Australia’s Prime Minister
s, NAA, n.d.
5 Pembroke, p. 79.
6 Ibid., p. 107.
7 Ibid., p. 83.
8 ‘Flying Mustangs over Korea was a hazardous occupation’, The Anzac Portal, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australian Government, n.d.
9 Darien Cavanaugh, ‘Why the Korean War was one of the deadliest wars in modern history’, Public Interest, 2 May 2017.
10 David Morgan, ‘Report: Korean War-era massacre was policy’, AP, 14 April 2007.
11 Bruce Cummings, North Korea: Another Country, New Press, New York, 2003, p. 16.
12 See Pembroke, ch.12, ‘Secrets and lies’, pp. 170–83 and Chapters 7 and 8 in this book.
13 Pembroke, p. 221.
14 Ibid., p. 225.
15 Min Jin Lee’s 2017 saga Pachinko (HarperCollins) gives a compelling portrayal of life for those with little power in Japanese-occupied Korea and afterwards.
16 Transcript of doorstop interview, Kapyong, 24 April 2011, PM Transcripts, Australian Government.
Chapter 50: Off to war again: Malaya and Indonesia
1 ‘Indonesian Confrontation, 1963–1966’, Australian War Memorial, n.d.
2 ‘Communist gangs kill three British planters, two Chinese in Malaya outrages’, SMH, 16 June 1948.
3 Malcolm Fraser with Cain Roberts, Dangerous Allies, MUP, 2014, p. 108.
4 ‘Indonesian Confrontation, 1963–1966’, op. cit.
Chapter 51: Vietnam: Stopping an election, then losing an unnecessary war
1 Quoted in Frank Walker, The Tiger Man of Vietnam, Hachette Australia, 2016, p. 283.