Spooky parallels

Like New Zealand, Australia has an oppressed indigenous people. And like New Zealand, the Australian security services have regarded any effort by those people to gain justice and equality as a "security threat". In Australia, though, people get to see what the spooks have collected on them. And in the case of Aboriginal rights activist Chicka Dixon, the results are simply embarassing:

Mr Dixon was instrumental in the decade-long campaign for the 1967 referendum to include indigenous people in the census, the erection in 1972 of the tent embassy in Canberra, and in setting up the first Aboriginal legal and medical service.

In pages and pages of typed agents' reports, however, the man they called "The Fox" is painted as a "popular, well-dressed and strongly anti-European" dissident.

"Dixon could be a communist or is certainly very close to becoming one," one item says, because of his union background.

"He is an Aborigine," it adds, almost as an afterthought.

[...]

"There are lots of errors," he said. "They said I'd contacted someone in Victoria to go to China with [an Aboriginal delegation] in 1972. I'd never heard of him and I hand-picked the delegation.

"All they had to do was ask me. But they're spooks, they can't do that. It made me laugh."

Several of Mr Dixon's peers, such as Charles Perkins, Faith Bandler and the Melbourne academic Gary Foley, also have ASIO files. Mr Foley says the files highlight the "sheer incompetence of these idiots in analysing anything outside of their own culture" - as came to light again this year in the debacle surrounding the Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef.

"It's not comical," Mr Foley said. "We were accused of a plot to blow up the 28-storey headquarters of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra. I knew nothing of this until I read it in my file a couple of years ago."

What's scary is that people with the same mindset are behind the recent "anti-terror" raids on Maori, greens, and peace activists over here. Unfortunately, we don't get to see the results of their institutionalised incompotence, except through the lens of the police. But I suspect that if we did, we'd place a hell of a lot less faith in their pronouncements.