House of Border Guards

Happy birthday!

It’s 800 years since the Magna Carta was born. A few grumbling barons pulled the equally grumbling king to a grassy patch of Runnymede, which is the closest a town name has ever come to being a drinking song. The Magna Carta (Great Charter, or literally Big Paper) declared that everyone in society was a servant of the law. Even the king. It was 1215 and the world was a little colder.

To understand King John’s mood, imagine this conversation.
“Sign here. Great. Here’s your phone. You’re now an Apple user.”
“What have I done?”

It’s 2015 now. It’s becoming fast apparent that Australia’s ruling party paid people smugglers to send away at least one boatload of asylum seekers. This crime carries up to 20 years in prison, since people smuggling is the oil that keeps slavery running.

Here’s my prediction:

More evidence will appear. There will be no arrests.

Why no arrests? Because to arrest a Member of Parliament, the Attorney General must approve. That man is George Brandis, whose most famous fights in office have involved stopping asylum seekers from entering UN Refugee Charter Nation Australia, plus loosening Racial Discrimination laws. His reasoning? Not that people need protection from State censorship, or the ability to debate and strengthen ideas (the reasons why freedom of speech exists), but that we “have a right to be bigots.”

The Attorney General’s office is designed to take a lawyer and pull them out of their political career for a while, so they can take care of the High Court and defend the government if need be. They’re meant to be impartial and keep the court independent, aloof, unbiased.

When the office came to Australia a century ago, much like the convicts and settlers, it changed. Now the Attorney General is a senior member of Cabinet, who slugs it out in the political arena and is expected to keep the court biased. All for the Party. If someone wants to give the government legal trouble, they come through Big Bad Brandis first.

Oh – since 1903, the Attorney General has been allowed to intervene in court cases. If you put a human trafficker in a court, then lower Brandis down from the ceiling, he will legally be a deus ex machina. He becomes judge and god.

On the third day of legal proceedings, Attorney General Brandis abrogated the litigation. Records show he then removed all brown looking people from the courtroom and he saw that it was good.

So why will there be more evidence?

Because the leaks come in organised bursts, each one just in time for a fresh news day. There is motive. The Prime Minister is one of the most unpopular ever, several people around him want his seat. People who worked for the refugee camps are lining up to report every kind of abuse which humans can use to attack each other. There’s a focus on child victims.

So if someone is betraying Tony Abbott, who is it?

The most likely candidate to succeed the PM would be Malcolm Turnbull, who likes to dig in his barbs when things look especially bad for PM Abbott. Around the same time, he does a capital job of selling himself to the public. To get around the many far right elements of his party who disagree with his liberalism, Turnbull has to be shrewd. Still, his leadership is a matter of time. In 2009, when Abbott was far more popular, he took the leadership from Turnbull by one vote.

Then there’s Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop. She’s been loyal, totally loyal, but only pragmatically. In the February leadership spill, she backed down only when it became apparent that the PM had a good chance of leaving at least one greasy paw on his chair. She gambled and thrived.

Fun fact: Before politics, Julie Bishop was a WA solicitor for asbestos user CSR. She drew out the court case so that the victims would die and the companies would owe their grieving families less money. Lawyer Peter Gordon reported that she asked why victims “should be legally entitled to jump court queues just because they were dying.”

It could be someone lower in the Party who wants more power in the reshuffle that follows. Perhaps it’s a well connected someone or ones from a rival party. It’s possible that Tony Abbott is an idiot savant who was made for pandering to people’s ignorance, but is clumsy with hiding evidence. Perhaps he’s not psychopathic enough to make sure the traffickers and refugees who witnessed the payment were silenced, or he’s sociopathic enough not to think of it.

Pictured: Not Tony Abbott.

There’s a phenomenon called the Cobra Effect. In the British Raj, there was a plague of cobras. The British gave a cash reward to anyone who killed the snakes. They weren’t used to the clever Asian traders. People hacked the system and began to breed cobras and make a snake-killing. When the British discovered this, they scrapped the reward. Those snake peddlers had no use for their stock anymore. They released the cobras into the wild and the population increased.

Paying people smugglers to skip the dangerous action of offloading their human cargo is a Cobra Effect.

Meanwhile, watch this story. There’s more to come.