Mike Rann, Safety v Civil Liberties, and a knock on the door from Constable Plod a cure for everything

(Above: Mr. Pooter discovering the red paint on the bath was not a success, unlike Mr. Rann, who relentlessly boasts of relentless success).

You know as soon as you read a sentence starting "I would never presume to pre-empt" that you are in fact in the presence of a humbugging, pettifogging dingbatting politician worthy of inclusion in George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody. Who will of course proceed to presume to pre-empt anything and everything in a preening, grandstanding way.

Never read the book? It's fun, and while it's set in Victorian times,  you can surely find Mike Rann, premier of South Australia, predicted within it, with unerring Nostradamus-like capacity for comedy, in its story of the aspirational Mr Pooter and his sense of self-importance.

The owl loving Rann - perhaps he thought his pet owl reflected his own capacity for wisdom - is at it again in his Pooter-ish way, under a header which says it all: Bugging the firebugs: when safety trumps civil liberties.

Er actually no, safety doesn't have to trump civil liberties, and safety and civil liberties are not mutually exclusive in a civilized society, unless you want me to break Godwin's Law and start listing societies that did believe safety (or whatever other catchphrase politicians could devise at the time) would always come out ahead of the civil liberties of the citizenry.

Rann goes way back to the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfire in South Australia as the inspiration for his own vision of a society stripped of its civil liberties in pursuit of safety. Now it so happens I was up close, and amongst the flames in that fire, having made the mistake of taking to the Adelaide hills at the wrong time and managing to get myself in the wrong place.

So Rann doesn't need rhetoric to remind me of that dodgy time, nor of the impact of other bushfires I've seen up close.  But Rann piles it on because that's how you embark on the fearmongering. By first of all planting the fear - a nuclear bomb striking the land, the button pressed by arsonist terrorists - so that Rann can go on to explain how he's devised an excellent plan to quash the fear, by deal with potential arsonists the way you would an errant cockroach.

The knock on the door at the dead of night from cops who know you're guilty, guilty as hell.

Everyone knows that catching and convicting bushfire arsonists is extremely difficult unless they are caught red-handed.

Our focus, through a program called Operation NOMAD, is on preventing them from plying their deadly deeds in the first place.

So, on days of high fire risk, police officers “visit” potential offenders who have been identified as suspects through the intelligence process.

We let them know we’re on to them.

Which come to think of it is a handy way to deal with any likely miscreants you might find contemplating any kind of deviant behavior. Like a knock on the door of potential burglars to let them know the cops are on to them. And even a whack across the chops with a telephone book - always the best way not to leave unseemly marks - just to let them know we're really on to them (though what will happen if we get rid of telephone books in this digital age? Will a dictionary do the job?)

In fact, you could start knocking on almost anyone's door at any time to remind them that the cops are on to them - for almost anything that happens to threaten the security and safety of the citizenry. Or indeed corporations. Which means you might have a hard time explaining exactly where that mp3 came from (not to mention those ripped discs).

Excellent, I'm beginning to get the hang of this. Guilty until you can produce some evidence you're innocent, until of course we know we're on to you for another crime. Let's face it we know you're guilty, it's just a matter of establishing your crime. Perhaps even a thought crime against fearless leader Rann.

Now I don't have a problem with pro-active policing or patrolling bushfire areas on high risk days - and catching firebugs in the act - but I do have a problem with Rann's righteous rhetoric about having people on a list, and judging them guilty on suspicion. But then if you grew up in New South Wales, where fitting up people was one of the chief skills of an extremely corrupt police force, you wouldn't be quite so sanguine about the outcomes as proposed by Rann.

Rann is in effect boasting about how Victorians copped a wave of bushfires, and this time South Australia got off lightly, as if it's all to do with him and his government. Well I don't want to go old testament prophet on him, but we'll see how well South Australia goes in future years, if they're mug enough to imagine that the tap on the shoulder by the cops will keep the citizenry safe from fires in a state which has big fires as regular as clockwork.

Funnily enough, the incident Rann celebrates at the end of his column actually involves conventional policing, but maybe Rann doesn't care to think about the implications of conventional policing, and the financing thereof, as opposed to the joys of harassing his citizenry:

Highlighting the effectiveness of this collaboration, there was a recent incident where Molotov cocktails were found by firefighters at a fire scene.

They preserved the area and alerted the police, who identified fingerprints that were then linked to those found on other Molotov cocktails located nearby.

As a result, two alleged offenders were arrested and were charged with deliberately lighting two bushfires.

They now face life imprisonment.

What? No knock on the door? Just firefighters and cops and fingerprints? How disappointing. 

Meantime heaven help you if you get tagged in the South Australian system as a firebug. What recourse do you have? What right to correct the record if it should turn out that you aren't one?

That's a never no mind to the pious, gloating humbug of Rann:

I’m sure the Royal Commission will come up with many positive ideas on how we, as a nation, can be better prepared to deal with the menace of bushfires.

But across the border in South Australia, we have a program that works, has strong public support, and is at least reducing the incidence of bushfires that are deliberately lit.

One commenter on the column - a Mark Newton - puts it neatly:

It isn’t just the headline of this article that makes that association (civil liberties v. safety), it’s his whole approach to the “proscribed organizations” legislation too, which rests on the assumption that we must kill freedom of association in order to make society safe.

That’s an extremely lazy way of governing, and betrays a total lack of useful ideas about how to deal with the assaults against safety he perceives. If we are to believe Mr. Rann, we’ll be unsafe if we are free, and destroying civil liberties are the only way to produce safety.

I can think of lots of ways of dealing with bikies and firebugs which don’t impinge on the civil liberties of law-abiding Australians—aggressively enforcing existing laws would be a start, as would adequately funding police (in the case of bikies) and mental health facilities (in the case of firebugs), but apparently these measures aren’t worth trying for Mr. Rann.

And now for a lighter moment, which reminds me ineffably of Adelaide, and is taken from Diary of a Nobody, as narrated by Mr. Pooter:

I shall never forget the effect the words, "happy medium," had upon him (Mr. Huttle). He was brilliant and most daring in his interpretation of the words. He positively alarmed me. He said something like the following: "Happy medium, indeed. Do you know 'happy medium' are two words which mean 'miserable mediocrity'? I say, go first class or third; marry a duchess or her kitchenmaid. The happy medium means respectability, and respectability means insipidness. Does it not, Mr. Pooter?"

I was so taken aback by being personally appealed to, that I could only bow apologetically, and say I feared I was not competent to offer an opinion ... 

... He continued, with an amazing eloquence that made his unwelcome opinions positively convincing: "The happy medium is nothing more or less than a vulgar half-measure. A man who loves champagne and, finding a pint too little, fears to face a whole bottle and has recourse to an imperial pint, will never build a Brooklyn Bridge or an Eiffel Tower. No, he is half-hearted, he is a half-measure - respectable - in fact, a happy medium, and will spend the rest of his days in a suburban villa with a stucco-column portico, resembling a four-post bedstead."

"That sort of thing," continued Mr. Huttle, "belongs to a soft man, with a soft beard with a soft head, with a made tie that hooks on."

You have to have lived in Adelaide to understand the intimate conjunction between a premier who cheerfully believes in fear mongering and a knock on the door from the cops, and the conflating of safety and civil liberties. 

Gee, it feels only yesterday that Don Dunstan was sacking state police commissioner Harold Salisbury after discovering that the police special branch had kept thousands of secret files on public figures. 

Rann fancies himself as a current day Dunstan, but he doesn't have a clue what a breath of fresh air Dunstan was to a closed society ... and what a breath of closed, stale air Rann himself is ...