Taking a leaf out of the extremist handbook

Blair Cottrell.

COMMENT

This week the question has been firmly put. Should there be more Nazis on television or less, or for the grammar pedants out there, fuhrer?

All right. That’s a really bad joke. The point is that so many people including journalists have got this horribly wrong.

Blair Cottrell should appear on television. But not in a glad-handing, matesy, incurious interview on Sky News, a terrible panel show on the ABC or by means of deliberate misrepresentation on Channel 7.

Cotterill needs to be confronted, subjected to scrutiny and forensically cross-examined,

What to call him then? The media has cobbled together several terms, all of them fairly unhelpful, including activist, patriot and ultra-right wing extremist. On Channel 7 he was described as one member of a group who were planning to put “a neighbourhood watch group together”.

Let’s start with what he is. Mr Cottrell is a violent criminal, having been convicted of arson, stalking, aggravated burglary, trafficking in steroids and breaching interventions orders. He added racial vilification to his rap sheet earlier this year.

What to ask Cottrell? Giles could have started by asking if Cotterill remained patently anti-Semitic. Giles could have gone armed with predictably vile Facebook posts Cotterill had made between 2013 and 2015. Cottrell has deleted these posts, but they continue to exist as screenshots on the web.

Here’s one example: “Zionists … I’m sick of hearing that coward word. Get some guts people and just say Jews, they are all Jews or Jewish servants. For thousands of years these Jews have been expelled and chased out of European Nations for the same s..t. Napoleon and Hitler were the last to stand against them (please don’t reply to this comment with ‘muh holocaust’ bullshit, cause that is a load of crap too).”

Giles might have asked why Cottrell was photographed celebrating Hitler’s birthday with his Nazi mates in 2017 and then a week later, snapped again outside Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance attending the Anzac Day dawn service.

In short, Giles could have done some homework. At very least, he should have decided not to kick off his interview with the appellation, ‘Mate’.

Nazis don’t get about in public in jack boots, brown shirts and swastikas much these days. We are not dealing with some of the world’s smartest people but over time they have realised the need to avoid the obvious symbols and signs of Nazism. The uniforms stay in the cupboard, the intrinsic anti-Semitism rarely mentioned.

The meek treatment of Cottrell and his violent agenda was a shambles but his ban from Sky News should be lifted. What is the point of it? He can turn up anywhere else and has.

Victoria's Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan, right, appearing on Sky News.

The dismal farrago switched to high farce yesterday when the Victoria’s Transport Minister, Jacinta Allan banned Sky News bulletins from being broadcast at Melbourne railway stations.

Andrew Bolt described it as political censorship. He may well be right. One could argue Allan exercised the state government’s commercial rights, but there’s no doubt she was in the punishment business, acting on miserable ideological grounds.

Train wreck doesn’t even come close to describing the awfulness of Allan’s interview with Sky News’ Laura Jayes and David Speers. This was supernovas colliding in deep space with an almighty thud with Allan at the wheel. She was not just poorly informed, but it appeared as if she had not taken the bold decision to own a television, let alone look at one.

The entire brouhaha has driven a lot of babble about free speech. Cottrell thinks his is at risk because Facebook routinely takes his various pages down. In the US, Info-Wars nutter, Alex Jones, has been reduced to going back to his roots and shouting at people through a megaphone, when You Tube, Spotify, Apple and Facebook ejected him eerily at the same time for having breached their respective terms of service.

Interestingly, Twitter decided to keep Jones tweeting with company boss, Jack Dorsey, claiming Jones had not breached Twitter’s rules of engagement.

There is a mistaken belief that being punted from various web platforms is an attempt at silencing the outspoken, but the decisions are made strictly on commercial lines. One who plays around on social media does so under the rules of the platform. The rules are applied roughly to those with few followers like Cottrell while generally speaking, people like Jones are cut breaks because they have more followers and thus more potential to earn advertising revenue for said platforms.

No one should be afraid of free speech, but we need to understand how it is defined, how it operates in Australia and see for ourselves just how flimsy the edifice is.

The only right to free speech we have in this country is an implied constitutional right that we can be critical of the state and its various apparatuses without fear the wallopers will pop around and put everyone in the back of a divvy van. That is what our constitutional forefathers intended, or they would have opted for something akin to US First Amendment rights and/or a bill of rights within the constitutional architecture.

But even as it stands that narrow right comes with all sorts of caveats and legal impediments including our appalling defamation laws which essentially protect ne’er-do-wells from scrutiny.

What it does mean is you can clamber up on a soap box in a public place pretty much anywhere in the country and say what you think. Again, caveats apply. If your rant is of the fruity type, the wallopers may wander up and determine you have committed that most vaguely defined of criminal charges, offensive behaviour.

Similarly, the plod may apply to move along laws. These laws have their genesis in New South Wales and were said to be tailor-made crowd control devices specifically created for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The Carr Government swore hand on heart the laws would be revoked after the Olympic caravan was hitched up (ditto for laws that allowed people going peacefully about their business to be sniffed down by police trained dogs) but that proved to be a lie.

And just like that, we coughed up hard-earned albeit implicit rights of free movement, association and speech over a sporting carnival. Those rights are gone, and they are not coming back.

The Sky News ban reached even further depths of cant and nonsense when the Prime Minister was asked for his two bob’s worth yesterday. Malcolm Turnbull characteristically vacillated, equivocated, erm-ed and err-ed before announcing, “the Liberal Party is the party of free speech”.

Tell that to Witness K, Malcolm.

Witness K was an ASIS operative who became aware the Australian government had bugged Timor-Leste government buildings during negotiations in 2004 between the newly formed nation and Australia over mineral resources, especially LNG in the Timor Sea.

He reported his concerns to his senior officers and to the intelligence oversight body, the inspector-general. He found himself out of a job not long afterwards.

Witness K and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, face prosecution for breaches of Section 39 of The Intelligence Service ACT (2001). If convicted they face up to two years in prison. The case has been delayed but will return to the courts next month.

It is the Commonwealth DPP who has launched the prosecution, but the Attorney-General’s office had to consent to proceed with the charges.

Witness K’s only crime, as I understand it, is to draw attention to a very sordid business. The impasse between the two countries over the issue has now been resolved and new rights drawn up. Why would a government want to pursue Witness K other than to make an example of him, so others might be deterred from speaking out?

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: AAP

There has been a stream of legislation go onto the books during the Turnbull’s term in office that adds more ghastly penalties for those who blow the whistle on dodgy government conduct. Suffice to say there could not be a Watergate in Australia now because Deep Throat, Bernstein and Woodward would all be banged up in the slammer.

Our right to free speech may be skinnier than most people realise but our right to be properly informed on the darker machinations of government has become almost non-existent.

This is the way totalitarian governments behave and it seems the Turnbull government is not averse to taking a leaf out of the extremist handbook.