Wednesday 27th of November 2024
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the next time around .....

the next time around .....

from Crikey …..

Mick Keelty: master of blame dodging

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

In 1970, when Andrew Peacock's then wife appeared in an advertisement for sheets, Peacock offered to resign. John Gorton, sensibly, told him to forget about it, despite crusty old timers claiming it was an outrage.

That was probably the height of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility in Australia. We've come a long way since then. The doctrine took a battering under Paul Keating, when not only was Graham Richardson restored to public office after the Marshall Islands affair, but Bob Collins declined to take the fall for the pay TV licence auction debacle, blaming his department.

John Howard promised to restore the idea that ministers were held to high standards of conduct, and watched with horror as he lost five frontbenchers in rapid succession. He more than made up for it afterward, with blatant misleading of Parliament, wilful ignorance, tolerance of corrupt conduct and blame-shifting to unaccountable ministerial staff becoming par for the course. To date, not a single person has been called to account for Australia's biggest corruption scandal, AWB.

This shift away from accountability has been paralleled in the language of management consultants in the last two decades. In seminars and three-day residential courses and executive love-ins across the public and private sectors, well-remunerated consultants have talked about how things go wrong not because people screw up but because of systemic faults, of cultures, of poor decision-making processes, of mistakes in resources management and allocation.

Kevin Rudd has yet to be put to the test Howard faced because he has maintained an iron discipline amongst his ministers. Only Joel Fitzgibbon has come close to touching the void and then because his own bureaucracy dumped him in it. If he'd been in the Fraser Government - unlikely, since he would have been about 14 - that would have been the end of him.

Rudd's ministerial guidelines make it clear - as Howard's did - that the issue of whether a minister stands aside or resigns because they have breached the guidelines is one for Rudd to decide. There are no clear-cut hanging offences in the guidelines. Even misleading of Parliament must merely be rectified as soon as practicable.

But the lack of accountability appears to have descended yet further, as if pulled by gravity. No-one in the Defence Department or in uniform resigned over the SAS pay debacle, despite an apparently blatant contravention of a Ministerial directive and the subsequent humiliation of the Minister.

And then there's AFP Police Commissioner Mick Keelty.

Keelty is remarkable in his capacity to blame others for the AFP's mistakes. After the Haneef affair, Keelty blamed everyone else - the media (whom he proposed to prevent reporting such cases), Haneef's lawyers, Haneef himself, Scotland Yard, the DPP - for the debacle when his own officers were the ones responsible for leaking material against Haneef, fabricating evidence and demanding he be charged without any basis. The AFP also later tried to avoid cooperating with the commission established to investigate what happened.

Not that Haneef was the only beneficiary of the AFP's particularly inept form of persecution. The false imprisonment and illegal interrogation of Izhar ul-Haque by ASIO agents - another breach of an individual’s most basic rights that has escaped appropriate redress - occurred with the concurrence and participation of the AFP.

Now there's the weekend's events at Sydney Airport.

Thankfully they were only bikies intent on attacking one of their own. Terrorists could have killed hundreds and been heading off in a Silver Service cab before Keelty's Keystone cops arrived, the only threat being those sinister chauffeurs who try to foist rental cars on you when you walk through Departures. The CCTV system wasn't even working properly.

It is probably also worth remembering that Qantas apparently doesn't mind you using your mobile phone while in flight if you're a large, muscular male with a group of mates. Must remember that next time I'm told to turn my iPod off for safety reasons.

Rather like the Chaser guys exposing APEC security as a sham, yet again we've seen that the national security state twaddle promoted by both the Howard and Rudd Governments is aimed at show and at inconveniencing ordinary people going about their business rather than offering any sort of genuine barrier to people determined to inflict harm.

But Keelty clearly refuses to accept the idea that he is responsible for significant problems in the AFP. "I don't want to get into the blame game," he said yesterday, conveniently. "It's about getting this better for next time round." Law enforcement as a journey of self-improvement. Try that line if you're ever charged by the AFP.

But Keelty may figure that if it's good enough for politicians to duck responsibility, then it’s good enough for chief executives. And he may be right in doing so. This is the consequence of the slow evaporation of responsibility in our political culture under both sides of politics. Keelty didn't install the CCTV cameras. He didn't prepare the security plan for Sydney Airport. Why should he resign, any more than Bob Debus or Robert McClelland should?

But if so, who is in charge? Who is responsible? The system? Management culture? Structural issues? We've ended up with a system where responsibility is so diffused that there's no accountability. And accountability isn't just about finding out who caused something to go wrong, it's about maintaining the pressure to prevent errors in the first place.

Only one death. But only luck prevented there being more - of bystanders, of kids, of an airport employee reluctantly figuring it was their job to intervene in the absence of police. And no-one responsible.

"It's about getting this better for next time round."

and talking about the next time around …..

The stealth with which the NSW Government has sought to give police the power to search people's homes secretly has angered lawyers and civil libertarians.

Lawyers and human rights defenders representing six groups have written to the Premier, Nathan Rees, demanding to know why they were not consulted on the plan to extend already "unnecessary" police powers.

The NSW Attorney-General introduced legislation to Parliament this month that would allow police to search the homes of people not suspected of any crime, but whose homes adjoined those of people who are. The laws build on state terrorism legislation in 2002.

"None of us, or our members, were aware that the NSW Government proposed such laws, that such laws were considered necessary or on what basis they were considered necessary," said an open letter signed by groups including the International Commission of Jurists, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, and the NSW Council for Civil Liberties.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/protest-at-secret-search-powers-20090322-95ms.html 

"Law is often the tyrant's will & always so when it violates the right of an individual."

Thomas Jefferson

a feral phoney .....

 

from Crikey ...

Pollies' praise for Mick Keelty chafes with his resume .....

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Kevin Rudd and Robert McClelland issued the predictable cut-and-paste farewell to Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty this morning -- ten lines long, four more than Morris Iemma got from Rudd, although Keelty's came with some paragraphs summarising his career. You're not left with the impression Labor is shattered by his departure.

More ironic was Phillip Ruddock's glowing praise of Keelty. That contrasted with Ruddock's assault on Keelty in 2004 when the latter made the bleeding obvious observation that the illegal, immoral attack on Iraq in which the Howard Government had participated increased the likelihood of terrorists targeting us. Ruddock, Keelty's boss, called the comments "fairly simplistic", "inappropriate" and unsupported by evidence.

But then, the reaction from Ruddock and John Howard was as much fury that a beloved pet had disgraced itself in public as dismay that the implications of their Iraq venture had been so bluntly stated by someone in authority -- particularly someone with Keelty's reputation after his excellent handling of the Bali bombings.

For Keelty was a signed-up participant in the Howard Government's national security hysteria, in which the most basic of rights were overridden in the name of wedge politics, Islamophobia and a power-grab by security and law enforcement agencies that has never been reversed.

As head of the Australian Federal Police, Keelty was one of the prime beneficiaries of this significant tilting of Australia's criminal justice system in favour of the State and against individuals. But there's no doubt that Keelty brought more than institutional support to the Howard Government's counter-terrorism framework. He believed in it wholeheartedly and, in fact, felt it hadn't gone far enough.

In September 2007, Keelty declared that "the courts ... are going to need to change the way they view evidence, witnesses and forensics" in order to convict more terrorists. And in January last year, Keelty said he wanted to be able to enforce a media blackout on terrorism cases, replaced with a selective briefing by the AFP of a trusted group of editors.

It was the media, of course, who were responsible for revealing what a complete debacle the prosecution - or, more correctly, the persecution - of Mohammed Haneef by the AFP was - a revelation that proceeded despite the AFP's own selective leaking of biased and misleading material about the prosecution.

If Keelty had had a skerrick of respect for his office or any sense of responsibility he would have quit over the Haneef business. It was an outrage, perpetrated by the AFP on his watch. His failure to step aside, however, was part and parcel of the abrogation of responsibility that marked the Howard years.

Instead, Keelty blamed everyone else. Not merely the media, but Scotland Yard, for not giving the AFP the right information about the SIM card at the centre of the prosecution; the DPP for proceeding with the prosecution, Haneef's lawyers for - shockingly - leaking material to the press, Kevin Andrews for locking Haneef up, even Haneef himself for not cooperating fully.

Well into 2008, Keelty persisted with the fiction that somehow Haneef might yet turn out to be a terrorist and that the AFP was continuing to investigate him. Eventually Keelty declared that he thought Haneef should never have been charged, but even when the AFP finally called a halt to its $8m persecution of the man, it insisted "that some long standing overseas inquiries are yet to be fully resolved."

The announcement was buried on a Friday evening when Fairfax journalists were on strike.

Keelty should have departed in 2007. But that failure wasn't merely a moral one; his continued presence has prevented the AFP from starting the process of rebuilding community trust in its competence and willingness to accept responsibility for how it uses the extraordinary powers handed to it, with little accountability, by the previous Government and maintained by the current Government.