In George Orwell’s most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the white face of the Ministry of Truth – the Government’s propaganda arm – bears the slogans: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Orwell – whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair – was a complex man and, in an irony worthy of the novel itself, seems to have ended his days as an informer on his fellow writers, compiling lists of left-wing writers and their ideological reliability which he sent to British intelligence.
Nevertheless, his insights into the nature of totalitarianism and how it gets going have a certain resonance today. Australia is not approaching dictatorship, but a quick look at Orwell’s slogans in the light of the past week’s news makes disturbing reading.
WAR IS PEACE. Mr Abbott informed the nation that 'Daesh [Islamic State] is coming, if it can, for every person and every government with a simple message: 'submit or die'.
'You can't negotiate with an entity like this. You can only fight it.' Troops are accordingly off to Iraq – despite our unenviable history there – even as anti-terror legislation is passed at home with nary a whimper from the Opposition. The threat levels are rising all the time and only more commitment to the war will suffice – even if we don’t know what victory might look like.
At the same time, whether or not the Government celebrated International Refugee Week by boarding a boat in international waters and paying the people smugglers who piloted it to return their load of asylum seekers to Indonesia is described as a matter of 'national security'.
This is of a piece with the militarisation of asylum seeker policy more generally. There is no limit to the force which immigration contractors will soon be able to use with impunity on those unlucky enough to have dared to ask Australia to honour its international protection obligations.
There are wars on every front and only the Government can keep you safe – just trust it. In Orwell’s work, this had become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Oceania is alternately at war with one or other of the remaining powers in order to keep its people obedient and rallied round the flag.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, Mr Abbott announced that terrorists 'hate our freedom'. Presumably on the 'small target' theory that has served both political parties so well, the Government and Opposition seem to have agreed that Australia will pre-emptively remove many of these itself. Certainly both major parties have fallen over themselves to allow interception of electronic data, give ASIO unprecedented peacetime powers and allow for increased powers to detain people without warrant or court supervision.
It seems the citizenship of dual nationals – and possibly even Australians with no other citizenship – is to be made revocable henceforth with the wave of a Ministerial pen. This is not Orwell yet, with even the Solicitor General apparently thinking that the High Court would strike down such legislation as unconstitutional. Nevertheless, we are told that it will not even go back to Cabinet for approval before being introduced to Parliament. This is, remember, the 800th anniversary of the first signing of Magna Carta, with its embryonic notion of government subject to law.
In Orwell’s case, 'freedom is slavery' was a critique of Communist systems where the will of the collective trumped individual will to the extent that only absolute subjection of individuals would do in order to preserve society. It is a terrible irony, revealed by the Snowden files, inter alia, that the 'winners' of the Cold War are operating a surveillance system which would have seen the STASI’s jaws drop in awe.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Here is the core of the problem which aggravates the other issues. Orwell’s dystopic vision was of a totalitarian state where information was so tightly rationed that people could be forced into doublethink – believing propaganda which was at odds even with itself. While channels of information are still more open here than in 1984, this week provided disturbing signs that we have set out on that path.
The destruction of the 'business model' of 'people smugglers' has been said to be the reason that Australia detains asylum seekers in conditions condemned by everyone from the Immigration Department’s own internal review to the UN Rapporteur for Torture. This week, however, we are told that the Government does 'whatever it takes', 'by hook or by crook' to 'stop the boats.' Never mind that, if it is indeed true that Australia stopped a boat in international waters and paid its crew to return the asylum seekers on board to potential persecution, Australia would have breached international and domestic law and destroyed its own rationale for its relentless cruelty to refugees.
The reason this argument can run for as long as it has, of course, is that information is practically unavailable. Even the Parliament, a body notionally sovereign according to Australian jurisprudence, is unable to prise information relating to 'Operation Sovereign Borders' from the Executive which is supposed to be answerable to it.
Big Brother may not be in power yet, but the safeguards which would have prevented his rise: an informed population in a vibrant democracy, are showing serious cracks.
Justin Glyn SJ is a student for the priesthood with a PhD in administrative and international law, who previously practised law in South Africa and New Zealand.