What values do we want to bequeath to our children?

There are many reasons behind Blak and Black’s decision to attempt to identify and expose Australian Federal Police (AFP) corruption where we can, the main reason however is the relative power even the most junior AFP Constable has over an ordinary citizen; power that seems to be magnified when the AFP operate extra-territorially, What happened to Captain Fred Martens, Mr Julian Moti QC, the Solomon’s triumvirate and the Sogavare Government itself stand as ample testimony to this fact.

When we consider the role of the AFP’s operations in Australia we are immediately drawn the inexplicable miscarriages of justice that are the Ms Jill Courtney and Dr Muhamed Haneef affairs, both of which have the AFP’s fingerprints all over them. Less well known, but equally significant is the treatment the AFP meted out to the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue at the behest of a corrupt ACT Treasury and a vengeful Australian Labor Party (ALP), which highlights the issue that underlines all of the aforementioned cases – the politicisation of the AFP under former Prime Minister Howard and former AFP Commissioner Keelty. In fairness to the AFP, the politicisation of the Australian Public Service (APS) is not unique to the AFP, but extends across the entire upper echelons of the APS. This is an issue which I have more fully explored in my article The Wisdom of Miles Jordana: Hidden in Plain Sight. The significance of the politicisation of the APS versus the politicisation of the AFP is like ‘chalk and cheese’ to the average person. Even in a politicised APS there remain in place some checks and balances, albeit in a watered-down form (unless you happen to be an Aborigine). For a politicised AFP on the other hand, there are no checks and balances and their potential to adversley affect the lives of the average Australian is usually far greater than that of the average public servant.

Even a cursory reading of the Queensland Court of Appeal (QCA) reasons for decision in the Martens case will show that no matter how hard the QCA tried to disguise the fact, Martens was the victim of an AFP fit-up. Recently I came into possession of some Interpol records which show quite clearly that one of the star witnesses in the Martens case had served jail time, a fact that does not appear to have been disclosed to Martens defence team at the time of his committal. There are several problems with this. Firstly, Martens spent nearly three years in jail for a conviction the QCA subsequently quashed. Secondly, as has recently happened in the Solomons the Australian Government has proven all too willing to invoke its right to immunity from prosecution when claims that certain named AFP officers bribed witnesses and otherwise caused a miscarriage of justice in Bartlett, Dausabea and Ne’e matters came to light. A similar clause to the one invoked by Australia in the Solomons can be found in the treaty under which the AFP were operating in PNG at the time they arrested Martens there on child sex tourism charges. Bribing a witness and withholding evidence are serious criminal matters, but in a politicised AFP the criminals are protected at the expense of the average citizen. Is this justice?

When we look at the role of thee AFP in domestic Australian miscarriages of justice, their record is as equally appalling. In a damning submission to the Clarke inquiry into the handling of the Haneef case, the head of the country’s main intelligence agency ASIO said it had told the government that there were no grounds to believe Dr Haneef was linked to, or even knew about, the botched June car bombings in the United Kingdom. The ASIO submission raises questions about the actions of the Australian Federal Police in the Haneef matter. These are the same questions that we, the Australian public, are still waiting to be answered in the Jill Courtney matter. To the writer’s mind, the thing that connects all of these matters, both internationally and domestically, is the situation the AFP found itself in under Howard and Keelty. Once the AFP became politicised its focus shifted from being a disinterested information gathering and impartial law enforcement agency to being bovver boys in blue, there to enforce the political whims of their political masters with no thought to justice or the ‘rule of law’. This shift in focus at the top moved through all commands of the AFP including ACT Policing, which in turn became the plaything of the Stanhope Government.

The AFP in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT)

The thing that concerns me most about the role of the AFP is the fact that on two separate occasions the officers in command of ACT Policing, both AFP Assistant Commissioners, were killed while they held this command. The first, Colin Winchester, was allegedly murdered by a mentally unstable former public servant, Mr David Eastman, over a fairly minor issue one month before he was about to give evidence in a drugs trial involving organised crime, with implications for both the New South Wale Police and the AFP. The second, Ms Audrey Fagan, allegedly committed suicide while on holiday with her family in Queensland, after having agreed to look into the alleged death threats which were made against me and a three year old relative. This issue, like the trial in which Winchester was about to give evidence immediately prior to his murder, had the potential to focus attention on illegal activities not only in the AFP, but in the whole Canberra establishment. Following the alleged suicide of Fagan, the AFP refused to deal with me on the issue of the alleged death threats, threats that were witnessed by third parties. It is worth noting that the death threats made against me and witnessed by Mr Hart were intimately connected with the assault on Australia’s most senior Aboriginal female bank executive at the Waldorf Café in Canberra by an identified ACT Department of Treasury employee.

In my last article Have the AFP been busted, yet again! I looked at the conviction of Mr David Eastman, charged with and convicted of the Murder of AFP Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester. There remain many unanswered questions in relation to this conviction, not the least of which is motive. Assault, which was Eastman’s most serious charge prior to his alleged involvement in the murder of Assistant Commissioner Winchester, is a crime of spontaneity far removed from premeditated murder. What is interesting on this point is that evidence has re-emerged which if accepted would tend to call into question the soundness of Eastman’s conviction on Winchester’s murder.

While we’re on the issue of AFP corruption in the ACT, it is also worth remembering that the AFP allowed themselves to be used a vehicle of revenge by ACT Treasury against the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue for having the temerity to ask whitefella public servants to hold themselves accountable to the same standards of the ‘rule of law’ as whitefellas hold blackfellas accountable to. I’m still waiting to see evidence of that level of accountability from whitefellas!

AFP criminality and the immunity provisions of the RAMSI Treaty

I know I have discussed repeatedly the role of the AFP in the Solomons and the opportunistic actions of the Howard regime in using the War of Terror, which the Western Alliance euphemistically calls the War on Terror, as an excuse to re-exert white dominance in the Pacific. In this process the former Attorney-General of the Solomons, Mr Julian Moti QC, became the Pacific’s last Blackbird, referring to the kidnapping of Pacific Islanders to further the interests of the European Invaders of Aboriginal Australia between the 1870s and 1901, a practice re-instituted by the AFP in 2007.

Moti was Blackbirded not to work in the sugarcane plantations of North Queensland, but because he along with former Solomons Prime Minister Sogavare stood in the way of Australian Prime Minster Howard’s ambition of turning the clock back half a century or more to the halcyon days of his youth when the whitefella seemingly reigned supreme and the blackfella was nothing more than a lesser species to be exploited at will to further the ends of a white dominated world. I must go and see if I can find a pair of Howard’s rose tinted glasses – the world must seem a strange and unusual place when viewed through a pair.

The AFP fit-up of the Solomons triumvirate Bartlett, Dausabea and Ne’e to pave the way for Sogavare’s demise as the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands and the elevation of an incumbent more amenable to Canberra’s whims is inseparable from what befell Moti. The actions of the AFP in the arrest and prosecution of the triumvirate and the subsequent invocation of the immunity provisions in the RAMSI Treaty by Australia when the AFP were busted demonstrates clearly the changing role of the AFP from impartial law enforcement agency to bovver boys in blue, there to serve as enforcers of the political whims of their political masters.

I headed this article, “What values do we want to bequeath to our children?” By this I mean, do we want to bequeath our children a free and democratic Australia where the law reigns supreme or do we want to bequeath them a type of oligarchy where those with money, influence or power can exempt themselves from the rules that govern the rest of us, while those of us who are without these things are subjected to the harshest possible outcomes that the ‘law’ allows for. What is concerning in the type of facile environment I just described is that those with the false celebrity of ‘sporting hero’, those with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), but who have a lucky day kicking or throwing a ball with no other redeeming features, can rise to positions of power or influence while lacking the moral fibre that would normally come with this type of elevation. These narcissists, supported by their snivelling sycophantic groupies, are the ones who have created the problems that Australia is now faced with. Australia, the lucky country, sitting on the shoulders of morally corrupt pygmies!