Law & Crime

Eighteen months after publicly reporting her assault, former Liberal staffer Dhanya Mani explains why this week does not represent ‘progress’.

The suffering has been intense. No costumes, no theatre, no crowds, no greasepaint. Barristers have been beside themselves for months as Covid-19 cancelled performances in courtrooms throughout the land. To have one’s stage so cruelly confiscated is a bitter pill for legal thespians who spent the best years of their life perfecting special flourishes and routines.

There needs to be a moment of reckoning that the man behind the Christchurch massacre is an Australian. He was born here, and it was in this country that his hatred and racism developed at a young age. While New Zealand’s government has accepted responsibility for intelligence failings that allowed the shooter to slip past checks in the months leading up to the attack, Australia’s intelligence services missed him for many, many years. There has been no contrition.

The Brereton report’s revelations demand that Australia’s military leaders take responsibility for what has happened on their watch. Their structures need a radical overhaul. But accountability doesn’t end at Defence headquarters. Military chiefs followed orders as much as gave them. Ultimately, sending people to war is a political decision.

Community standards, particularly around gendered and sexual violence, have progressed to the point that, arguably, the older a law is, the less it is likely to represent the interests of the people it is supposed to protect. Yet this perspective runs counter to a profession built on hierarchical deference to precedent.

There are two striking aspects of Australia’s response to coronavirus: the first is that it’s being increasingly led as a police issue, and the second is that this is happening while the rest of the world works to reform and curtail police powers. As other democracies talk about abolition, we’re sending armed officers into housing blocks and calling it public health.

When I came out of prison, I noticed there was a concerted censoring of my voice every single time I wanted to speak out about my experiences within the criminal punishment system. This came at me in many ways – aggressively, subtly and, at times, very publicly. Most obviously, and I dare say predictably, the system didn’t like me publicly raising its violence and brutality. Like every abusive relationship, it thrives on silence.

When news broke this week that an independent inquiry at the High Court of Australia found former justice Dyson Heydon had sexually harassed six associates during his decade on the bench, my non-law friends and colleagues were incredulous. To them, the allegations of a judge repeatedly breaking the law read as hypocritical. Within legal circles though, friends and colleagues are exchanging theories about who will be exposed next. And we are all wondering whether anything will change this time.

As if Scott Morrison hasn’t got enough on his plate, now he has been dragged into the quagmire of Donald Trump’s increasingly ugly campaign to cling to office. The invitation to attend the September summit of G7 world leaders in the United States would normally be a feather in the cap for an Australian prime minister. Now it only complicates Australia’s interests at home and abroad.

Muslims living in Australia were haunted by Christchurch – and Quebec, and Utøya – long before these names became shorthand for the crimes committed there. Because running alongside the mass killings, quietly, there has been a slow-motion massacre of Muslims living in the West in the years since September 11, 2001, as one hate crime steadily piled upon another.