Bakchos has inadvertently stoked the thoughts in my own head of late with several of his posts. Last week’s discussion of the Jinn combined with this week’s reading about Heraclitus to reinforce my opinion that the treatment of Ms. Masters and Lucinda McMillan at the hands of the Australian Federal Police are both not only undemocratic, but downright racist and sexist. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher is credited with the concept that a man cannot step into the same stream twice. He believed that the sun was made anew each day and that the universe was in constant flux; as such, nothing is permanent, change is the universal law, revolving in a constant duality reminiscent of yin and yang. Mortal laws must support the divine law. The maxim pointing to mortal practicality, “The people must fight on behalf of the law as they would for the city wall” is balanced against divine proposition that “All the laws of humans are nourished by a single law, the divine law.”
The battle that is being fought via Blak and Black is as for the city walls, with Bakchos calling on the leaders of Australia and its law enforcement agencies to act within the bounds of the rule of law, which in its purest unadulterated form, should reflect divine law. Unfortunately, the rule of law has been subverted for what a small but influential group see as personally important. In failing to maintain the precepts that underpin the rule of law by adhering to the processes that allow victims to be heard, they have in essence torn down the city walls.
Sir Albert Kenny in his tome Ancient Philosophy, draws from the play A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt, in which Thomas More argues with his nephew, Roper as to why he will not arrest a spy.
ROPER: Arrest him.
ALICE: Yes!
MORE: For what?
ALICE: He’s dangerous!
ROPER: For libel; he’s a spy.
ALICE: He is! Arrest him!
MARGARET: Father, that man’s bad.
MORE: There is no law against that.
ROPER: There is! God’s law!
MORE: Then God can arrest him.
ROPER: Sophistication upon sophistication!
MORE: No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what’s legal not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.
ROPER: Then you set man’s law above God’s!
MORE: No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact-I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can’t navigate. I’m no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I’m a forester. I doubt if there’s a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .
(He says this last to himself)
ALICE: (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he’s gone!
MORE: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
ROPER: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man’s laws, not God’s-and if you cut them down-and you’re just the man to do it-d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Thomas More, in this tale, has behaved as he should, within the bounds of the law. He upholds the law in the full knowledge that to do so is to protect not only the Devil, but also himself. He claims not be God, he even accepts that man’s laws are deficient, but he argues to act deliberately against them, even for the sake of catching the Devil, would be to subvert his own safety. Thomas More shows himself to be an honourable man, respectful of both the rule of law and aware of its intent, however inept, to make practical the laws of the divine. He is a man aware of the great gulf between the laws of man and that of the universal divine.Not so those law enforcers in our modern age who have stood and continue to stand in the way of justice, who have failed to protect Ms. Masters and Lucinda. In a land ‘planted thick with laws’ honourable actions, evidence of divine law, have been replaced with an expediency and efficiency Roper himself could only have hoped. This legal subversion, driven by an agenda that favours political aspirants and power mongers, is fed by men intent upon maintaining a dominance over not only Indigenous Australia, but women.
Some would argue that the Australian Federal Police has been compromised in chasing Australia’s perceived devils outside of the rule of law; but their compromise gave way to absolute corruption when they failed to treat all devils the same, selling their souls to the Inquisitor and the ACT Department of Treasury to pursue a racially based attack upon the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue. It is one thing to chase the Devil; it is another entirely to deliberately deny another victim justice because the laws you subverted in the first instance have left others exposed and unsupported; hence those laws must be cut down as well. In denying Ms. Masters and Lucinda their rights, the Australian Federal Police has behaved like the unscrupulous corporate logging companies that indiscriminately cut down the trees, leaving a barren landscape with nowhere to hide. The deer in the headlights is not the Devil himself, but those who have paid him with their souls. Am I saying that the Australian Federal Police have behaved dishonourably? Absolutely.
… The indigenous peoples of West Papua face systemic discrimination and exclusion from political and economic power; they continue to be over-represented among the poorest, the illiterate, the destitute; they are displaced by military intervention and environmental disasters; the weapon of rape and sexual humiliation is also turned against indigenous women for the ethnic cleansing and demoralization of indigenous communities; indigenous peoples are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and deprived of their resources for survival, both physical and cultural; they are even robbed of their very right to life …
Women and children are the soft targets in many battles and in the machinations of the Inquisitor’s world in which he presumes to know the truth only known to the divine, Ms. Masters and Lucinda are the prime examples of one man’s power over so many others who seek a truer god than him.The Indigenous people of Australia remain, 224 years after British settlement, the single most underprivileged group within our nation, with the lowest life expectancies and highest incarceration rates. Whilst Ms. Masters has risen to become Australia’s most senior Indigenous female banking executive, ‘the weapon of rape and sexual humiliation’ has been most effectively used against her. It has proved the ineffectiveness of application to study and persistence in the belief in the rule of law for Indigenous Australians, because even with her qualifications in Arts and Law from the University of Sydney and corporate background the AFP has refused her their protection. Lucinda’s encounter with her assailant was driven by a single purpose, the ‘demoralization of indigenous communities’. Both ladies who have attempted to adjust to the Western concept of the rule of law, having been historically ‘dispossessed of their ancestral lands’, have now been ‘deprived of their resources for survival, both physical and cultural’, not only in their customary law, but in the failure of the rule of law in which they were led to believe. As such they have been ‘robbed of their very right to life’.
Our suffragist forebears battled for voting rights for not only women, but Indigenous Australians. As a central tenet in the Western rule of law, the extension of the one-man one-vote to all Australians regardless of race, colour, gender or ethnicity made each person’s opinion and their personal rights, ostensibly at least, valid and equal. One hundred and ten years since women were granted the vote by the Commonwealth and forty-five years since Aborigines were extended the same courtesy, I believe our forbears would view the plight of Ms. Masters and Lucinda with dismay. Equality still seems as remote as it was at the time of Australia’s Federation.
The double standards put in place by the Australian Federal Police have proved an agenda based not only upon a racist attitude to those of non-European heritage, but to women. For all the rhetoric about the role of women within their ranks and their supposed role in upholding the rule of law, they have deliberately ignored or targeted these two Indigenous women. We need fear the devils unlawfully pursued by the AFP at any cost no less than their own corruption, for it is their own double standards, the racism and sexism that has become their undoing as the protectors of the people. There can be only one way forward: a Royal Commission into the racist, sexist, Australian Federal Police. Perhaps then, Lucinda and Ms. Masters will receive the justice they deserve.
| Will you sign the petition calling for a Royal Commission into the Australian Federal Police? |
