The Irony Party of Australia
Encephalatronicalogical Pamphlet
September 6th 2007
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The Lucky Country
It's fortunate for Australians that they can rely on the authorities to toe the line, to hold to the mark, to go so far and no further. How fortunate! Because if not for this fact - that Australia is a serene, mature and stable democracy - some of the security measures taken in order to assure the safety of world leaders such as the United States' president George W. Bush might appear mildly draconian, and a challenge to the sense of well-being of the ordinary man in the street.
As usual in the event of a visit from the ultra-sensitive US delegates it appears Australian sovereignty has been suspended in order to allow a highly lethal entourage into the country for the protection of unpopular President George W. Bush. A helicopter follows the President's thirty-car motorcade, blocking mobile phone signals. For further security a five kilometre wall has been constructed, cordonning off the inner-city area in which APEC delegates are staying. Special police powers have been introduced, as has legislation authorising the domestic use of the Australian military, traditionally prohibited. Meanwhile, court injunctions have been issued against protestors planning peaceful demonstrations well away from the exclusion zones established by a prudent Australian Federal Police force. In Sydney the blueshirts are everywhere - now the wall has been constructed for the protection of APEC delegates it is incumbent on Australia's fine and authoritative policewomen and men to nip in the bud any threat to the wall itself. Tourists with cameras are being discouraged or turned away.
How few places in the world today could this be said: that democracy is safe, is assured, despite the breaching of Constitution and Convention, despite the presence of thousands of uniformed officers patrolling the streets, despite the prohibition on the passage of citizens through many of Sydney's streets, despite our acquiescence to the military of a foreign power, despite the imposition of electronic surveillance and the blocking of communications signals? Of all the countries on Earth, perhaps, only in Australia, is Democracy so deeply entrenched that these temporary suspensions, these short-lived curtailments of freedoms, are not taken as a warning by the people that something is terribly terribly wrong, that one system of Government, however shonky, is being replaced, step by step, with something more efficient and more terrible. Nowhere is there a country more fortunate in self-assurance, more comfortable in ceding liberties, more certain of their prompt return.
The Australian people are sanguine, today, in the face of what could be construed - in some other region - as the steady crumbling of a once somewhat permissive society. Because this is the lucky country - an old democracy, one of the most stable nations on the planet. Australians are, in any case, notoriously anti-authoritarian, and certainly wouldn't take any serious threat to our civil liberties lying down. In general, and as we confidently report to one another, or just leave unsaid: it can't happen here.
