Indeed, I thought the days of healthy insurrection were long gone from the liberal party.....thank goodness there back...

...but why now in particular? Is this a reaction against the government's current stronghold over the Senate?

Good article Greg. As an outsider I have certainly been concerned by the apparent stifling of dissent within the government.

Case in point is the PM's continued assertions that he will stay as long as the party room wants him put in context with the apparent howling down of anybody who expresses disatisfaction with his leadership. Whilst it might help to keep Howard in power it is likely to leave the party in disarray for a long time when he eventually goes. I hope Qld politics are not a sign of things to come but some of the patterns are familiar.

Well said Greg! I have a deep growing concern over John Howard's squashing of any dissent or expression of views other than his own. It is quite frightening for instance that he has said no conscience votes over Petro Georgio's Bill. Silly me, I thought were were living in a democracy! Actually this silencing of those who speak up, is very sinister and the country should not be ignoring it.

Mmmmm, George Lucas just made a film about a political leader who gains control of the senate...

Of course Howard wants the public to see that there is no dissent, but your local member is supposed to REPRESENT you, not represent him.

This is a respone to an article by Alan Anderson submitted to the Sydney Herald (last paragraph removed for word limits):
Last Thursday 2 June the Herald published in Comment an article by Alan Anderson, who defined himself as a Melbourne Lawyer and a member of the Liberal Party. In it he attacked Petro Georgiou’s proposals to make mandatory detention more human. There was something about this article that made me very uneasy, and for a while I could not explain the chilling feeling it gave me.

It was only as I was reading about Hannah Arendt’s views on Totalitarianism that I realised that what Anderson was presenting was a particularly insidious form of evil, posing as a contribution to the debate on the refugee issue. One can not obviously do justice to Arendt’s views in a few sentences, but her central argument was that, rather than look at the structures of Dictatorship, whether in the Stalinist or Hitlerian form, there origins lay in the self-destructive implications of the belief that everything is possible, demanding unlimited power to achieve it; in the end, it is a process that ends in ultimate destruction.

Anderson claims that the detention policy has two characteristics ‘unique in the Western World’ – they are he says ‘harsh and they work’. He seems to take pleasure in the harshness, despite the increasing evidence of the cruelty and injustice that are the direct results of a Government abdicating responsibility for the day-to-day running of the centres. For a lawyer not to include ‘justice’ in a situation like this is a worry.
And again for a lawyer, what about the common law presumption of innocence. when Australia is a party to international agreements on the rights of refugees. If after ninety days one cannot prove that someone is NOT a refugee, does this lawyer belief that one should continue to lock people up indefinitely in conditions that are actually worse than prison.