While it's important that respected Liberals like Amanda Vanstone voice their opposition to the Liberal Party's penchant for undermining rights and disregarding the rule of law, it is a case of too little too late, writes Greg Barns.

Former Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone is aghast at those in the Liberal Party who want to allow for the stripping of citizenship by ministerial fiat alone.

Such a move, says Ms Vanstone, is antithetical to "commitment to individual rights, the belief that you and I can and should do things for ourselves, with the state only sticking its bigger and bigger beak into our lives when it is really needed."



Ms Vanstone is right. But the party that she served for many decades, and of which I was once a member, has become the political force in federal politics that stands unambiguously for enhancing the power of the executive over the individual, of removing the courts from their role as protectors against arbitrary uses of power by the executive, and of an enlarged security state.

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In fact, the federal Liberal Party has been lessening core democratic values like the rule of law and individual freedom since 1996 when Ms Vanstone and her colleagues were re-elected to the Treasury benches for the first time since 1983.

When I joined the Liberal Club at Monash University in 1981 and worked for various Liberal ministers and premiers through the 1990s, the Liberal Party housed a strong liberal wing that stood for individual freedoms, both social and economic.

John Howard, however, facing a possible election loss in 2001, presented legislation to the Parliament equally as odious as the stripping of citizenship without appeal rights.

This was the so-called Tampa legislation. It was designed to stop a ship carrying asylum seekers from coming to Australia. That legislation suspended the rule of law in that it allowed Australian military personnel to use whatever force was necessary to keep the ship out of Australian waters. There was immunity from legal action for those who used force.

Mr Howard then used the pretext of 9/11 to devise and have enacted a series of so-called anti-terror laws that allowed for evidence to be used against suspects that was not available to their lawyers; that let ASIO and police hold a person for a number of days without charge; and that allowed for orders to be placed on the movements of individuals without that person ever having to be charged, let alone found guilty of a terrorism offence.

The Liberal Party under Mr Howard also introduced legislation to restrict access for asylum seekers to the courts. It sought to kill off the growing global movement for marriage equality by passing a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

It ought to be noted that the ALP supported much of this illiberal legislation, but as a former senior federal ALP figure said to me a few years ago, the ALP likes a big state.

The Howard years saw the Liberal Party become a misnomer. The party that Robert Menzies, its founder, had said should walk down the middle of the road, was now a deeply conservative force that favoured the use of the considerable power of the state to curtail individual freedoms and rights when it appeared politically expedient to do so.

On its assumption to office again in 2013 the Howard formula has been extended to a dangerous extent. The Liberal Party under Prime Minister Tony Abbott appears to regard the courts and other independent statutory office holders like the Human Rights Commissioner as dilettantes.

Potential abuses of state power by the military, ASIO and in immigration detention centres are now off limits to the media and to whistleblowers. The so-called Operation Sovereign Borders makes it difficult to know if the Australian Navy is acting in accordance with international maritime law principles when it turns back boats of asylum seekers. ASIO agents can now have an operation badged a "special intelligence operation", which allows the commission of crimes (not murder, serious injury, sexual assaults or serious property damage) and civil wrongs.

If a whistleblower or victim of such an operation goes public then that individual and the journalist who reports their story can go to jail for five or 10 years. The new border force law makes it a criminal offence for doctors, social workers, teachers and other workers in detention centres to go public with their concerns.

Last year the Abbott Government passed laws that stripped asylum seekers of the right to have the Refugee Review Tribunal hear their claims. Instead, a paper review by bureaucrats will determine the lives of many desperate and vulnerable people.

There is a pattern here. For almost two decades the federal Liberal Party has been the party that stands for tipping the scales in favour of the state and against the rights of individuals. While it is important that senior and respected Liberals like Amanda Vanstone voice their opposition to the Liberal Party's penchant for undermining fundamental rights and disregarding the rule of law, it is a case of too little too late.

The federal Liberal Party has become a creature that feeds on the politics of fear. Today it is fear of terrorist activity, and before that of asylum seekers. The jettisoning of liberal principles, once important values when the party was led by people like Malcolm Fraser and John Hewson, happened long ago.

It will take a lot more than a column from senior and well-respected Liberals like Vanstone to undo the damage that has been done to the term "Liberal" in Australia.

Greg Barns was a senior adviser to the Howard government from 1996-1999. He was disendorsed before the 2002 Tasmanian state election for his position on asylum seeker policies. He joined the Australian Democrats and in 2013 advised Julian Assange and the Wikileaks Party. He wrote "Whats Wrong with the Liberal Party?" in 2003.