Australia - Bikie laws on highway to hell

OFF THE WIRE
  GREG BARNS
FOR the past few months, Tasmania Police has been giving the impression it is running a campaign against bikie gangs.
There have been regular stories appearing about bikie gangs allegedly buying properties and bringing weapons and drugs into Tasmania.
The campaign, if one can call it that, is designed, it seems, to do two things. Firstly, to ensure that the Tasmanian Parliament introduces so-called "unexplained wealth" laws and secondly to copy the existing laws in some other states that outlaw bikie gangs and criminalise membership and association by individuals with members.
That Tasmania does not have such laws is a good thing because they trample on human rights and sweep up innocent people and their families in their wake.
Unexplained wealth legislation was first introduced in Western Australia in 2000 with the Northern Territory following soon after that. The Commonwealth is now looking to introduce similar laws and Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales have or will soon have laws.
The essence of these laws is that they place the onus of proof on the individual whose wealth is in dispute. "In other words, in jurisdictions with unexplained wealth laws, it is not necessary to demonstrate on the balance of probabilities that the wealth has been obtained by criminal activity, but instead, the state places the onus on an individual to prove that their wealth was acquired by legal means," according to the Australian Institute of Criminology's Lorana Bartels in a paper on the subject published in 2011.
Reversing the onus of proof is a clear breach of one of the most fundamental of the rights we all have as citizens in a democracy that is underpinned by the Anglo system of law.
It is the state that has to prove its case, and the more important or grave the allegation, the more important it is that the burden does not shift.
The other difficulty with these laws is that families suffer demonstrably from their enforcement. Assets of convicted individuals can be seized by the state under these laws and those assets include the family home, even if it was not in any way associated with the crime committed.
There are literally thousands of innocent husbands, wives, partners and children who have become homeless because of unexplained wealth laws.
The other part of the Tasmania Police legislative wishlist is likely to be so-called anti-bikie laws. Former South Australian Labor Premier Mike Rann, who despised lawyers and their insistence on fairness, was obsessed with bikies.
He created laws that have been copied in other states like Queensland and New South Wales. Parts of these laws have been found to be unconstitutional by the High Court of Australia but they remain on the statute books.
Essentially this type of law allows for police and courts to ban groups or organisations, make it a criminal offence for people to associate together and make it a criminal offence for a person who is a member of a banned group to be seen with any members of that group.
While trying to eliminate bikie gangs was the genesis of these laws, they can be used by government and their law enforcement arm to make criminals of any group they like.
Environmental groups, unions and clubs are all fair game under these laws. Appeal rights against bans are limited and police can act on secret intelligence to undermine rights without having to disclose any of this to the person or group affected.
Tasmanians who care about democracy and human rights, and who are rightly suspicious of the powers of the state, should be alarmed at the campaign.
In June last year, senior Tasmania Police officer Scott Tilyard said that while existing legislation was "generally adequate", the "implementation of unexplained wealth legislation, similar to that in other jurisdictions" would assist police dealing with bikie gangs.
This is simply code for "we would like the Parliament to give us exorbitant amounts of power to do what we need to do".
One hopes that Mr Tilyard's naked grab for power on behalf of Tasmania Police is not heeded by our politicians, particularly given the gross injustices that unexplained wealth laws and anti-association laws are creating in other parts of Australia. And even more relevantly, in the absence of proper human rights protections in Tasmania because the Giddings government has shamefully dropped the idea of a Human Rights Act to protect citizens from the abuse of power by the state.
We need also to remember that not everybody in a bikie gang is a serious or even minor criminal.
Bikie gang members have been down at the bushfire sites helping the clean-up. People join bikie gangs because they enjoy the camaraderie and riding on the open road. Let's not be seduced by the police media campaign but see it for what it is -- lobbying for draconian powers.