Michael Head, Calling Out the Troops: The Australian Military and Civil Unrest: The Legal and Constitutional Issues.

Cahill, Rowan

Michael Head, Calling Out the Troops: The Australian Military and Civil Unrest: The Legal and Constitutional Issues, The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2009. pp. vii + 247. $49.95 paper.

Early one morning in February 1978 a bomb exploded in a garbage bin outside the Hilton Hotel, Sydney, venue for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM). Two garbage collectors and a police officer were killed, and a number of people injured. While individuals were subsequently framed by police and intelligence agencies for connections with the explosion, the cases against them later fell apart. To this day the real culprits and the reason for the placement of the bomb are unknown, except, of course, to the culprits. Informed speculation persists that the blasts were the result of a bungled operation mounted for domestic political purposes by elements within the Australian security/intelligence community.

The 1978 Hilton explosion resulted in '[the] only major mobilisation of troops in an urban setting in Australia's history' when CHOGRM relocated south of Sydney to the comparative isolation of the rural town of Bowral. The town and surrounds were placed under a form of martial law by some 2,000 heavily armed troops. As the media and politicians of the time parroted, 'the age of terrorism' had arrived in Australia.

Significantly, the Sydney explosion heralded the beginning of an ongoing process of empowerment of Australian law enforcement and security/intelligence agencies, and the military, escalating, with little critical public debate, during President Bush's 'War on Terror'. It is an escalation Michael Head views with alarm, as an historian, as a legal specialist, and as a socialist.

Michael Head is an Associate Professor in the School of Law at the University of Western Sydney. Calling Out the Troops is a blend of history, polemics, civil libertarian concern, and legal exegesis. It is a history of the deployment of troops domestically against perceived threats to social/economic/political stability in Australia; it is polemical in that it expresses Head's argument that martial power lies at the heart of the capitalist state/system and that, with the likelihood of tensions within capitalism domestically and globally continuing to create civil/social unrest, we can expect martial management solutions to feature within democracies like Australia.

As exegesis, Calling Out the Troops amounts to a legal position paper. Head examines Australian national security legislation introduced in 2000 and extended in 2006, giving Australian governments and defence leaders the power to call-out Australian troops to combat 'domestic violence' and to defend 'Commonwealth interests'.

The terms are in inverted commas here because, as Head demonstrates, these are slippery terms, not fixed and defined by law, but open to political and opportunist definition and manipulation. The military powers conferred are dramatic, including police powers and the use of lethal force; in Head's analysis they trample on civil liberties. The discussion is enhanced and informed by reference to 43 statutes from Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and reference to 44 legal cases from Australia and the United Kingdom.

Overall the impact of Head's discussion and analysis is dramatic, particularly as he grounds his legal analysis in a reading of Australian history which demonstrates the uncomfortable/unsettling proposition that Australian history, from early colonial times onwards, is one in which martial solutions to political, social, industrial problems are not strangers. Indeed, martial solutions are more common in Australian history than allowed for by many historians.

Unfortunately Head's book is a tad on the expensive side, and given its legal tome appearance, might not reach a wide audience. But it should. It is the sort of discussion missing in Australia since the Howard government, and now the Rudd government, variously rubber stamped and endorsed 'the War on Terror'. I suggest that the book should be studied by the trade union movement, particularly unions involved in strategic industries, like those in the maritime and mining industries; according to Head's analysis, they could well be on the future receiving end of 'slippery' definitions and political opportunism. And protest organisations should study it too, particularly since the Hawke Labor government deployed troops against protestors at the Nurrungar joint Australian-United States military satellite base in 1989; not necessarily an isolated event according to Head's informed futurology. As Head's legal analysis makes clear, it is now easier, and more possible than ever before, for politics in Australia to come from the barrel of a gun.

ROWAN CAHILL

University of Wollongong