Relaxed Politics

For years I’ve tut-tutted and giggled along with my American friends as the Bush administration displayed breathtaking levels of cruelty and/or incompetence. It’s time to come clean. If there were Olympic events in ‘Making a Mountain out of a Grain of Sand’ and ‘Victimising the Innocent’ you might be surprised to find Australia giving you a run for your money for the Gold.

It all began on a Sunday late in June 2007.  You might remember it.  A doctor tried to drive a vehicle into Glasgow Airport and blow it up. He succeeded only in setting himself on fire, suffering burns from which he later died.  He will be known henceforth as HWDE (He who didn’t explode).  Fox, of course, knew the answer.  It was all the fault of nationalised medicine.  It was all rather unsettling and puzzling given that doctors are, you know, supposed to save lives and be smart enough to rig a bomb.

The next day were told that HWDE has a cousin, Dr Mohamed Haneef, who was working at a Queensland public hospital.  It seemed that Dr Haneef had left his apartment in something of a hurry and was found at the airport with a one-way ticket to his homeland, India.  He was taken into custody and, thanks to our draconian terror laws, languished for a week without charges being laid.  The Federal Police were granted two extra days to question him or, more accurately, to go on a fishing expedition to find something, anything, to implicate the softly-spoken medico with the puppy dog eyes.  The most significant piece of evidence against him was an old SIM card of Haneef’s which was allegedly found in HWDE’s vehicle.

Finally, Dr Haneef appeared in court, charged with recklessly supporting a terrorist organisation.  The supporting document so impressed the magistrate that she released him on a minimal bail, claiming that there was no direct evidence linking the good doctor and any terrorist group.

Stung by the criticism, and probably monumentally pissed off that their scary terrorist was fading before their eyes, the Government quickly stepped in to withdraw Dr Haneef’s visa on “character grounds” and put him back in detention.  Apparently being related to people who do bad things reflects poorly on one’s character.

And now the fun begins.  It emerged that the dossier of evidence provided to the magistrate contradicted the record of interview quite a bit.  Presumably, the Feds never contemplated that both documents would end up in the public sphere. They had refused to release the record of interview however, as required by law, Dr Haneef had been given with a copy, which his lawyers helpfully published on the Web.  When the two were compared it was found that:

• While the Feds claimed that Haneef had lived with HWDE, the interview says that they both lived at the same address, but at different times.
• The Feds said that Dr Haneef could not adequately explain why he had a one-way, and not a return, plane ticket.  The interview clearly states that his father-in-law had bought the ticket so Dr Haneef could visit his wife and newborn baby.  The week-old girl, born by caesarean section, was suffering from jaundice and Mrs Haneef wasn’t exactly up to running marathons either.  The doctor planned to sort out his return travel later. Apparently sick loved ones weren’t a good enough excuse for our Feds.
• Oh, and by the way, a minor matter really, the SIM card hadn’t actually been in HWDE’s vehicle.  Instead it was in a phone hundreds of miles away in Liverpool, with yet another cousin.  You see, prior to coming to Australia, Dr Haneef had trained in Britain and, on departing had passed the SIM card on because it still had credit on it.  I suspect that he might also have recklessly given away a bus pass with a few trips left and a half a pack of biscuits but those incriminating details escaped our Federal sleuths.

A week after these revelations, the charges against Dr Haneef were withdrawn, his passport returned and he flew home to India.  He’d had a heck of a month.  On the 1st July he was a hard-working medical registrar and on the 29th he was headed home with no job, no visa and the taint of having been publicly labelled as terrorist-friendly.

The doctor’s lawyers meanwhile went to the Federal Court and had his visa reinstated.  A Government appeal failed and Dr Haneef is now eligible to return to Australia and work.  The hospital where he worked is ready and willing to take him back.  His is curently employed in Dubai and is seeking compensation for his appalling treatment.

Last November, the Government responsible for this farcical witch hunt lost office, an event which still brings a big smile to my lips.  Now, the new Government has launched an investigation into the whole fiasco.

This painfully sorry saga has reduced the reputation of our Federal Police to that of Keystone Kops but with better equipment.  God knows how many potential workers have crossed Australia off their job-search list.  And that’s bad; we rely heavily on foreign doctors, especially in remote and rural areas where they can’t attract local graduates.

So, why am I sharing this embarrassing tale with you?  It’s not so that you can feel less alone in the ‘right-wing government with a disdain for brown people’ stakes, although if it comforts you, good.  Instead, it’s a fine example of how easy it is for ordinary people to be steamrolled when Governments use terrorism to create fear to further their own agendas.  How easy it is to interpret the most simple daily conversations and activities as suspicious, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Had it not been for a public and media jaded after  years of hearing that David Hicks was ‘the worst of the worst’, and a legal fraternity determined to ensure that Dr Haneef receive a fair hearing, they might just have succeeded.

posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 6:00 pm under Uncategorized.