Politics

More arguments against the Dutton plan

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Dutton Law, the latest brainfart from a goverment bereft of common sense, would see the likes of Simon Crean, Mark Latham and Bob Brown lose citizenship for protesting against the Iraq War, not to mention David Hicks who is still in the government's sights, writes Bob Ellis.

IT HAS BEEN pointed out that any Vietnam card-burner would lose his citizenship if the Dutton Law came in, even now.

Any anti-Vietnam demonstrator, in fact – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – who showed that he or she was on the side of the Viet Cong “terrorists” and against “Australian values” when those values included birthday-balloted conscripts coming home suffused with Agent Orange and having mutant children contentedly in the suburbs, like patriots.

And those who protested against the Iraq War – Simon Crean for instance, Mark Latham, Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Natasha Stott-Despoja – could lose their citizenship even now for having favoured the “fugitive terrorists” Uday, Qusay, Saddam, and Chemical Ali against “the Winston Churchill of our time, George W Bush” (in Gerard Henderson’s lush affirming phrase). If Dutton thought they were dodgy fellows whose published words encouraged “Australia’s enemies” in time of war, they'd be goners.

And David Hicks is obviously still in the gun. He pleaded guilty to “assisting terrorists”, didn’t he? And Mohammed Haneef, who gave them his sim-card, didn’t he? Terrorist sympathisers all; millions of them; millions.

It is unlikely Abbott will survive this foolishness. The leaker, Pyne, has been a Turnbull man for a long, long time and has long resented the hundred thousand dollar degrees he has been stuck with. Pyne who got his own degree for nothing, and resented even more the lost submarines and the lost ABC studios in Adelaide which may cost him his seat.

He is smart enough to know that Abbott is a “loaded dog” you can’t take anywhere, whose friendship with Pell, the paedophile protector and with Nestor, the paedophile, and with the youth-abusers of St Stephen’s who remained his friends (cf page 68 of the Duffy book) is politically lethal. It cannot but engulf him in the next few months.

Pyne is the leak, and Abbott knows it. His “come to Jesus moment”, was aimed at his fellow fundamentalist radical Catholic Pyne, who will have got that message, loud and clear.

And we will see what we shall see.

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