Rigged Australian elections?

[Niemmy]

I found this on the net, And it struck a cord.Who knows it may even be true!

Dear Members,

There is little doubt that the Federal Election was rigged so that the very unpopular Mr Howard could win again.

The electoral offices are staffed by mainly ASIO people, and ASIO has close links with the American CIA.

Former members of the CIA have admitted rigging elections around the world for many decades.

Mr Latham was a new interesting leader, who won the TV debate, had a much more impressive campaign launch and also was infinitely more popular than Howard.

Bush the US president, wanted Howard to win, and the CIA / ASIO combination, made sure that Howard did win, as I predicted prior to the Election.

You will most likely find that Senator Kerry will get about sixty per cent of the votes in the US presidential Election, but many of these votes will be stolen on Election day, and it is likely that Bush will be declared the winner again, just like the unpopular Howard.

Internal polling in the liberal party only a few weeks ago, was suggesting that they would lose twenty or more seats ( this was confirmed by a senior Fairfax Journalist on the ABC insiders program several weeks ago) but instead of that - they improved their vote and quite inexplicably may end up controlling the Senate.

That would allow the half wit Howard, to introduce a lot of extremist legislation, selling off Telstra etc

And also closing down or stifling Senate committees, the greens etc. introducing extreme industrial relations legislation.

Virtually destroying Union activity .(Howard has always hated Unions)

The Election result is a perfect result for right wing extremists, like Howard, Downer Etc

The Election was rigged.

If you think it was not rigged, you must be a very naïve person.

Over some weeks in e-mails to most Mp's, I predicted that the Election would be rigged.

Just why Mr Latham and the greens don't call the police in- to scientifically examine a lot of the votes cast, is beyond me.

On many of these voting slips only the fingerprints, of ASIO people secretly working in the electoral offices, and the scrutineers would be found, not those of the general public. Also the number 1 done a thousand times, on voting slips, by the same hand, becomes as obvious as any forged writing.

Try to think rationally about this crime that we are all witnessing now.

Is Pauline Hanson or the greens picking up the last senate seat in Queensland ?
No it is likely to be a not very well known member of the co-alition.

This is fantastic, totally unbelievable !

How did the serial liar - Mr Howard, suddenly become hugely popular with the Voting public ?

He didn't, he actually lost his seat . Mr Latham won the Election and the greens won control of the Senate.

But that is an inconvenient outcome for the ultra conservatives in our midst.

They take the view that they can fool the public any time they want to, simply by substituting ballot boxes on polling day.

Consider the situation where Larry Anthony is making an amazing comeback in his seat as counting of postal votes continues.

He is getting sixty per cent of the postal votes. This is normal for co-alition candidates at Elections, not because they have special appeal to voters but because ASIO people in the Electoral offices tamper with the postal votes, to favour co-alition candidates.

A quick examination of these postal votes would prove them to be fraudulent.

This is in ' The crime of the Century ' category now.

Do Co-alition members really want to be in Government by fraud and false pretences ?

It seems to me, that they are just as guilty as the arch criminal Howard, if they go along with this fraud.

They are trashing our great democratic system of government at this time.
Holding the Australian voters in contempt !

Does anyone believe that Mr Turnbull won the seat of Wentworth, after all the dissension in the ranks of the local liberal party, split votes and loss of preferences. A blatant fraud !

Are there no Co-alition members with enough integrity to say : " I cannot be part of this appalling fraud being perpetrated against the Australian People "

Howard should be in Jail - not in the Prime Ministers residence.

There are a very large number of lawyers in the Parliament.

So many of these lawyers know about being accessories to criminal activity.

Are Coalition members not being accessories to the crime of the century now ?

My reply was eloquent

You are kidding, right?

and then, not being willing to let an opportunity like this go:

Hang on...let me get this right.

ASIO were in all the electoral booths. I didn't realise that the local residents working there were part of ASIO but I suppose that is my problem.

Then at the end of the day, before the scrutineers came in, the REAL boxes of votes were whisked out without anyone seeing (who wasn't part of the conspiracy) and then NEW boxes were brought in full of votes filled out by ASIO.

Is that the story? And the scrutineers didn't notice that?

I am not happy about the election result, but you are fucking idiots.

Him to me:

No, it was rigged alright.

The local people working in the booths are not aware of what happens.

It is the permanent people like returning officers, who are ASIO people.

During the afternoons when things are quiet, they just move the full boxes aside and replace them with boxes they have filled out themselves.

No scutineers arrive till much later.

Howard lost the TV debate, was basically unpopular, had no policies to speak of, and yet he had a landslide win, especially in the senate.

Getting full control of the senate gives him absolute power in this country now.

You think that was all accidental ?

me back at him:

You reckon this happened and not once was it discovered or if it was it has been covered up, right?

Do you seriously think that this sort of thing could happen and not one person would blow the whistle?

How widespread was it?

What evidence do you have to support that it happened at all? Have boxes of ballot papers been found?

No, I don't think it was "accidental", I think Australians are a bunch of fools who have been manipulated by the politics of fear.

the rant begins...or does it continue?

Defamation laws are pretty severe in this country.
even I am taking risks, speculating on elections being rigged, but I don't care.

I am fairly well known in politics. ALL federal MPs got e-mails like you did, and not one
responded . It is Dynamite .
The ALP people mostly agree that it was rigged, but they can't prove it, and to make unsubstantiated statements in parliament, (even under priviledge) might achieve little except perhaps incite riots.
And the Liberals are maintaining a guilty silence.

Internal polling by the liberals some weeks before the election, had them losing twenty or more seats. this was confirmed by a senior fairfax journalist on the ABC insiders program.
So how did they go from losing twenty seats, to winning in a virtual landslide ?

The senate is almost impossible to get a majority in- these days, but that is what the ballot riggers are giving them.

This has been going on for sixty years or more.
Mr Chifly almost certainly won the 1949 election that he "lost "

Mr Menzies was in power all through the cold war years.

Only thirty per cent of the population have any commitment to the Co-alition.
It has always been like that.

In Tasmania, the ALP has been in power almost always.
The reason for that is that ASIO people, apart from taking an interest in Tasmanian senators, (Brian Harradine never won a seat in the federal parliament ever ! but because he was a strong right winger and virtually an ASIO man himself- they always rigged the votes to keep him in the senate ) never bothered about Tasmanian politics because
it was inconsequential to them. So the natural party of the bulk of the population ( the ALP) has always been in power.
It would have been the same story on the mainland too, if they had not always been rigging ballots.

Mr Menzies probably never won an election, and Mr Howard has certainly never won an election. Mr Latham won this recent election, and Kim Beazley won the two elections before that .

Howard is a boring unprincipled serial liar. Most people think that is true. How could he win a landslide Victory against a fairly impressive new opposition leader who looked like he might add a bit of excitement to Australian politics ?


Howard actually lost his seat

What the fuck? Let's see if we can get to the point

Thanks for that, but all you are doing is speculating based on the election outcome.

What PROOF do you have? Where did the idea even come from?

this guy can type:

Steve,
You do take some convincing, but that might be a good thing.

I first started to question secret ballot elections, when I stood for preselections in the liberal party for safe seats ( Mr howard does not care about non safe seats, he just wants his friends to survive any election result and that is why safe seats are bitterly fought over in the liberal party) between 1986 and 2002.

Now, you have to remember that friends of Mr Howard tend to be boring like he is, and they are his preferred candidates at preselection time in the liberal party. After losing three preselections which I was privately told I was likely to win, in exasperation at the last preselection, I told the preselection panel, that I was potentially the biggest vote winner that Australia had ever seen ! that was difficult for me to say, because I am renowned for my self effacing modesty etc
ha ha.

But after the Panel stopped laughing, they started to agree with me.

But ultimately it made no difference - I was the first candidate eliminated in the ballot, (Which was to find replacement for former senator Herron in Queensland) as had happened in the previous three preselections I enter erred.

Think about that, on four occasions over 17 years, potentially the biggest vote winner the liberals ever had, was thrown out on the first ballot each time at preselections

It does not make sense.

But consider a couple of people who won those preselections. In 1994 I stood for preselection in the safe seat of warringah in Sydney ( I moved around a bit over the years) and the " winner " was the foolish Mr Abbott. He was standing for preselection for the first time and NO-ONE gave him any hope of winning. Ah but you see he was on Mr Howard's staff at the time and Mr Howard likes his staff members to get into parliament.

So like every other preselection for safe seats in the liberal party, it was rigged so that Mr Abbott could win. The People who collect the votes at these secret ballots, substitute votes which are earlier marked by people in Liberal HQ, who are mostly ASIO people, and the substituted votes are then presented to the scrutineers for appraisal. A bit late then of course.
You might think that is unlikely, but Mr Abbott is now about $2 MILLION dollars better off if you include superannuation etc, and i

[Niemmy]

Howard's roads to absolute power

By Margo Kingston
June 30, 2003

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Imagine you are John Howard sitting at your political chess board. Your dominance is almost complete. Your backbenchers don't speak out on anything any more - your popularity and political control is such that dissenters feel they have no choice but to fall in behind you and enjoy the spoils. Your opposition is punch drunk. It is divided over what to do, where to go and how to play to match you. The media is largely compliant - being so popular, and now in your third term, no-one is game to take you on or push you to answer questions, so you get away with dissembling, even lies. Your handpicked elite has now fully replaced that of the other lot, and the losers are dispirited and exhausted from constantly fighting to save some of what they gained before you came to office. Most Australians seem to trust that whatever you do it'll be OK and they don't need to know much about why. What next?

I got an inkling of what might be next in Canberra last week. Wave after wave of new policy spat forth - intervention in the Solomons, selling Telstra, getting ASIO through, pushing for cross media abolition, passing another detention law through the lower house which would keep some people in detention forever. Labor people tended to get drunk early and party, frenetically, all night. I even saw tears in the eyes of one of them. They have no time to get their balance or to regroup or to plan strategy. John Howard is rolling all over them. And the Senate? I'll get to that beleaguered, frightened institution soon.

When Howard decided to stay on on June 3, many people thought he'd missed his "Menzies moment", that magic phenomenon of leaving while you're on top and handing your organisation to the next generation in good shape and untouched by leadership blood. Peter Costello certainly thought so, and told Howard to his face when Howard deigned to kill his hopes the day before the announcement. It can't get better for you than this, Costello told him. You've won the war without a casualty, you're loved by the people, your luck will run out, people will tire of you. Now is the time to hand me the prize.

But Howard is no Hawke, the old bloke addicted to the glamour but with nothing much more to contribute. Hawke got to the top the easy way. Howard did it very hard, and got very bruised and battered along the way. In a position as good as his, he wants more. Howard has a big agenda. A very big one.

Howard wants to go out on a high alright, but he wants the high to be higher than the one he's already on. He wants to transform Australia so completely that the old Australia can never be revived. His vision is so radical that only a man in complete charge of the political agenda could even dream of it. And the cross media legislation - the one I've been writing about in such despair for a week now - is central to his plans.

Just days after he announced he'd stay leader for as long as the party wanted him Howard dropped a bombshell. He wanted a referendum to strip the Senate of its power to reject legislation, because it "has become a house of obstruction". It had to be a joke, surely. Labor, the party of reform, had always wanted just such a thing, by tradition. It was conservatives, protectors of the status quo, which honoured the Senate. Now, the roles are reversed. Howard is the radical. Labor are the conservatives.

It is conventional wisdom that such a referendum would never succeed. You only have to look at the nightmare legislation Howard has tried to get through this term - including defining political protests as "terrorist acts" and imposing a virtual police state with his original ASIO laws - to know that the Senate has acted as a bulwark of our human and civil rights. It is a place for genuine debate on the merits and real community input because the government does not have the numbers to force everything through.

Howard, leading a party traditionally suspicious of big brother government, has become the champion of it. It is now Labor, not the Liberals, who champion privacy laws. It is now Labor which defends civil rights, since Howard and his followers successfully swept small 'l' liberalism from the federal party over the last two decades. It's worth noting that the big media has, almost without exception, embraced Howard's idea, arguing that in a fast moving world of global economics, a government must move swiftly. In other words, democracy must be subservient to economic growth, and unchecked government power is good for us.

Howard will decide later whether to put the proposal to a referendum at the next election. It's a card in his hand, one of many he's playing to put almost intolerable pressure on vulnerable Senators.

The next card is the escalating threat of a double dissolution. In a dd, the Democrats would be all but wiped out. As it is, Andrew Murray, Natasha, Lynette Allison and Andrew Bartlett are in for another five years, while only John Cherry and Aden Ridgeway would be up for reelection, along with ex Democrat Meg Lees. So you can see why the Party is in crisis, apparently threatening to split and cross the floor last week over cross media.

The Democrats are in no-man's land. At a time when values are imperative, they drift between the Greens on the left and the centrist Labor party with no articulated difference from either except that they're prepared to do deals, sometimes, and except that it's their ex-leader Meg who's doing all the dealings and getting all the publicity.

As I wrote last year during the Democrats leadership debacle, the missing market segment is now a small l liberal type party, espousing small business economic values and progressive social values ( The Democrats: Split on survival). A decent breakaway from the Liberal Party would have helped, but the liberal moderate Greg Barnes moved across just before the party disintegrated and it came to nought.

How can the Democrats hang on? I think Howard means to split them off as soon as possible, setting up a group of three - Lees, Murray and Ridgeway - which will amenable to deals on his legislative agenda. With them on board, he'd need only one of Shayne Murphy, Brian Harradine and Len Harris to win through, and that sounds pretty easy to me.

What could he offer the three ex-Dems? Lees seems to be already on board, and she's got a party up and running called the Australian Progressive Alliance and managed by ex-Democrats. Howard would offer Liberal preferences, and more.

But would he really go to a double dissolution if the Senate stood firm? It doesn't make sense to, on the numbers. Political analyst Malcolm Mackerras wrote in a recent AFR piece republished below that the Coalition, with a Senate vote of about 42 percent, would get 33 of the 76 seats. But it could conceivably win half the seats up for grabs at a normal half senate election, which would give the liberals half of the 76 Senate seats. He'd then need only one Senator to get his agenda through. Murray is the obvious candidate.

And what is his agenda? In my view he wants to smash the "social contract" in Australia to smithereens. He wants to establish Australia as a US style democracy where people fend for themselves and save for their needs, including health and education. He also wants the US model of a corporatist state run by government in partnership with big business, where politicians and businesspeople swap roles routinely and big business finances the conservative party. And he wants Australia to divorce itself from the multilateral system of international relations AND become part of the American world.

But Australia would be a different place from America. We do not have a bill of rights, which in the United States keeps the Government and its powers in check. Howard would be much freer than the American president to trample our human and civil rights. He's already walked away from our multilateral human rights obligations, and stacked the High Court with judges antagonistic to incorporating our international human rights commitments into our constitution.

What he also has that President Bush doesn't is a concentrated media, the most concentrated in the Western world. If he gets his cross media bill through in three months, as planned, Australia's media will be under the effective control of Rupert Murdoch, who will own most of our newspapers, a TV network, our pay TV network, and, in cities where he cannot own both a newspaper and a TV station due to his already great share of the advertising market, the key news talk station. Kerry Packer could take Fairfax and keep the Nine Network if he wished, as well as keep his stake in Foxtel and his large stable of magazines. By coincidence (?) both men already effectively control three of our major sports - AFL, Rugby League and Cricket, and would now control the reporting of those sports, ensuring news coverage only in their commercial interest.

Thus two immensely wealthy, powerful businessmen, would set the news agenda in this country, and control much of Australia's forms of MASS entertainment. Unlike the United States president, who faces a vast and diverse independent media, Howard could, in large measure, rule effectively free from media scrutiny or dissenting analysis on crucial issues. The big two and Howard want Australia run by big business to compete in a globalised world - with favoured treatment for them, of course. Murdoch, reaching a position of immense media power even in the US, wants a free trade agreement with the United States to enmesh the two countries militarily and economically. Faierfax, the only remaining skeptical commercial media voice, one without commercial conflicts of interest, would be gone. The ABC, bruised and battered by concerted government attack enthusiastically backed by the Murdoch press, would be cowed into acquiescence. It is no accident, in my view, that The Australian recently called for the abolition of Radio National, the only mainstream avenue for big ideas and intelligent dissent in Australia.

These ambitions would be very controversial - perhaps too controversial - if we had a free independent media, and if voices of dissent could be heard. In Howard's ideal world, they would be heard hardly at all. It would be government by big business for big business, with a powerful state apparatus to watch the public and crush radical dissent.

I wouldn't put it past Howard to achieve these goals. When Labor reigned supreme after many years of power, with its elites firmly in place, it ran out of puff. Why? Because it disconnected from the needs and aspirations of the Australian people, and became arrogant and complacent. Howard will not make the same mistake.

As he screws the batters economically he caters to their nationalistic desires for an Australia safe from boat people and other undesirable immigrants. He gets them on strident nationalism in this way, while making us a client state to the United States in other, much more important, ways. He runs a strong anti-drugs line and socially conservative social policy to ease their fears of a society too complex to comprehend. His proposal on joint custody appeals to many conservative voters, and is a core platform of One Nation. He is keeping the battlers happy with social policy, while hurting them economically.

Howard's new media elite is also different from Keating's. For all its faults, the Keating media elite remained critical of Labor, its double standards, and its various betrays of principle. It kept Labor accountable. In contrast, some of Howard's most powerful media elite act as unabashed propagandists.

So Howard has all the cards. The Democrats are fighting for their survival and Labor is a headless chook. He can now sit back and decide, when the time is right, which of his many possible roads to Australia's transformation and his absolute power in partnership with big business is most likely to succeed.

There are risks in all this, which I'll write about tomorrow.

***

Howard flies constitutional kite

by Malcolm Mackerras, June 10, 2003, AFR

Over the past 30 years John Howard has always been the Liberal Party's candidate for Bennelong at federal general elections. So what? Not much, except this. Over that same period of 30 years there have been 15 proposed constitutional reforms unsuccessfully placed before the Australian people.

For 15 questions, in which the people voted yes zero times and no 15 times, how did Howard vote? Answer: yes twice and no 13 times.

So Howard's record is a smidgin more reformist than that of the Australian people but markedly more conservative than his fellow politicians. Suddenly this conservative politician takes the road to Damascus (sorry, a flight to Adelaide) and we witness a Alpine conversion with Howard proposing radical constitutional reform.

The proposal he outlined is a real stinker, so much so that I refuse to believe in his conversion. This proposal will get nowhere. It is a political stunt.

In his Adelaide speech Howard referred to the fact this very reform was recommended by an all-party committee of federal parliament in a 1959 report. True. However, he should have also pointed out that the report of that committee was republished by Robert Menzies and Garfield Barwick, speaking for the government of the day.

Why would the attitude of Menzies differ so markedly from that of Howard? I suggest a simple answer. The Menzies coalition Senate vote was 50.4 per cent in 1949, 49.7 per cent in 1951, 44.4 per cent in 1953 and 48.7 per cent in 1955. The Howard coalition Senate vote was 44 per cent in 1996, 37.7 per cent in 1998 and 41.8 per cent in 2001. I predict the vote will be 42 per cent in 2004. Consequently Menzies, with his high percentages, knew he could win a Senate majority at a double dissolution election. Indeed he did, in 1951. By contrast, Howard, with his much lower percentages, knows he can never win a Senate majority. Never believe his line that he cannot get such a win because the Hawke government rigged the system. That is rubbish. Howard cannot get a majority because his Senate vote is so low.

However, the coalition can win half the Senate places at a half-Senate election. Indeed the coalition did win half the Senate places both in 1996 and in 2001. The government's weak situation at present is the consequence of its abysmal vote in 1998 when Alpine Hanson and its own GST promise were the cause of the decline. I confidently predict there will be a House of Representatives plus half-Senate election in November 2004 as a consequence of which 38 of the 76 senators will be coalition from July 2005. In other words, the coalition will have 50 per cent of the Senate seats for a 42 per cent vote twice occurring. Thereafter all it will need is to do a bit of bargaining and exercise patience and its economic reforms will all become reality.

In a double dissolution election a 42 per cent vote would give the coalition only 33 senators - five fewer. What, then, is the point of the double-dissolution talk and this constitutional reform stunt? Simple really. The purpose is to talk up the government's Senate vote at the next half-Senate election.

Clearly there will never be a referendum on this outlandish proposal. The proposal would makes joint sittings such a regular feature that a bicameral parliament would become, in effect, a unicameral parliament. The government's House of Representatives majority would always overwhelm the Senate.

Most constitutional reformers these days think there should be more limits on government power. This proposal moves the system is the opposite direction.

Meanwhile, while I am not as strongly opposed to Labor's fixed-term proposal as I am to the Howard plan for Senate reform, I think Labor's reform moves the system too much the other way. The present arrangements, in my opinion, strike exactly the right balance between the executive and the legislature, between the two houses of federal parliament and between the politicians and the people. It is extraordinary that our present arrangements, drawn up more than a century ago, can be quite so contemporary in the way they actually work.

Malcolm Mackerras teaches in the school of politics at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra.

[Niemmy]

THE HILTON OPERATION
by JOHN JIGGENS
members.tripod.com/~Hilton_Bombing/index.html

(John Jiggens, the author of THE INCREDIBLE EXPLODING MAN - Evan Pederick and the trial of Tim Anderson, tells how Australia's political police killed three people and got away with it for 14 years. Not to be reprinted without first seeking permission)

For Constable Terry Griffiths, the worst thing about the Hilton bombing was that the blast did not render him unconscious. His intelligence recorded it all: the bright orange flash; the sound of glass shattering all down George Street; the flying shrapnel; the cries of the maimed; the grimaces on their faces; the pieces of flesh. Two garbage workers at the back of the council truck were blown apart. One of them, William Favell, was hurled fifty metres through the air. Half a dozen other people were seriously wounded. One, a policeman named Paul Birmistruw, would die ten days later. Terry Griffiths himself was so horribly injured, he can remember being convinced he was going to die. After an operation that barely saved his life, he woke up to find his large bowel hanging out of his body. He stayed that way for two months. Shrapnel had torn a hole in his foot, ripped open his leg, and punctured his body.

Griffiths wasn't even supposed to have worked that night but the NSW Police Department had cancelled all police leave for the CHOGRM conference. Griffiths arrived at the Hilton Hotel sometime after 11PM on 12 February 1978. The shift seemed routine. A few VIP limousines pulled in, dignitaries got out, then disappeared up the escalators into the Hilton Hotel. The only unusual thing was the overflowing rubbish bin outside the hotel. The police joked about how odd it looked to have all this rubbish lying around on the ground outside a luxury Hotel which was hosting such an important gathering of Commonwealth leaders. It was only when he began his own investigation into the Hilton bombing that Terry Griffiths came to realise that the overflowing rubbish bin was no joke.

Two earlier shifts of garbage workers had been prevented from emptying that bin, that was why it was so full. That garbage bin was the only one in Sydney not emptied that weekend. Someone connected with the security operation for the Hilton knew there was a bomb in that bin. For fourteen dogged years, Terry Griffiths has campaigned for a royal commission into the Hilton bombing. In that time he has witnessed an endless procession of cover-up and frame-up by the police. But now Terry Griffiths is closer than he has ever been to his goal. On December 9, NSW parliament unanimously called for a royal commission into the Hilton. The resolution was moved by the shadow Attorney-General, Paul Whelan, and supported by the Attorney-General, Peter Collins, and the Independent, Mr. John Hatton. Emphasising the need for a royal commission, the three men held a joint news conference, at which John Hatton said it was reasonable to suspect that ASIO had planted the bomb. Now only the Federal Attorney-General, Michael Duffy, stands in the way of a royal commission. (2) The morning after the bombing, Superintendent Douglas, the NSW policeman in charge of the operation, was asked why the bin was not searched. He replied "I did not think it was necessary".

He said that NSW police had been sent overseas to train in anti-terrorist tactics, but had not been considered necessary to search the bins. As an ex-NSW police officer, Terry Griffiths finds these comments incredible. The bin with the bomb in it was in one of the most sensitive security areas; it stood only a few metres away from the spot where Malcolm Fraser officially welcomed every head of state. On the 18 November 1972 NSW police permanent circular number 135 was released. The subject: Instruction for the Guidance of Police Dealing with Bomb Threats and the Discovery of Explosives or Suspected Explosive Devices. This outlined official NSW police procedure for dealing with bombs. Not only does this give prominence to searching rubbish bins, but on page 3 figure two, centre left, there is a conspicuous drawing of a rubbish bin. If NSW police received overseas training in anti-terrorist tactics, it certainly wasn't from the New York Police Department. A journalist called Graham Beaton interviewed Inspector Howe of New York's bomb squad on the 14 February 1979 in the Daily Mirror. The inspector said: "Bins would be at the top of our search list. And we would send in the dogs. If they didn't have dogs in Sydney, I feel rather sorry for them. If we had twelve dignitaries staying in one Hotel in New York, we would organise a sweep. First the sniffer dogs, Alsatians trained to detect the slightest trace of dynamite, gunpowder, etc. would go through the area. Then they would go through it again. Rubbish bins would be top of our list. In would go our lookout squads. They would be posted around the building so no one without a special pass could get in. They would be posted round the hotel Q in the lift well, on top of the building, and at every door. We would also have a lookout outside perhaps looking from across the road. Then we would send in the dogs again. They're wonderful in this kind of work. We wouldn't be without them."

Inspector Howe's comments about the importance of sniffer dog teams underlines another concern about the security operation outside the Hilton Hotel. Terry Griffiths has a letter from the ex-corporal in charge of the Dog wing, Keith Burley. In that letter Keith Burley states:

"Approximately two weeks prior to the Hilton, the operational squad (that is the sniffer dog team) was placed on standby for the CHOGRM conference. We were told specifically to train the dogs on such things as letter bombs and parcel bombs. . . . We trained specifically for this task for two weeks. On the Thursday before the Hilton Bombing we received information at the kennels saying we were no longer required. This we thought was unusual to say the least. We attempted to find out why, but were unable to determine where the cancellation came from.

"Those dogs were so finely trained," says Terry Griffiths, "they could have found a 303 shell a foot under the ground. From the point of view of a victim, the fact that they were taken away is an absolute scandal. Because those dogs were the only ones in Australia we had that could have detected explosive material, and they were withdrawn.

"I say, as a victim, that those dogs being withdrawn was the reason people were killed and injured. Had those dogs been allowed to carry out the work they had been trained for, the bomb would have been found."

The bin that exploded not searched. It was the only bin in Sydney that was not emptied that weekend. The sniffer dog teams were called off. The most charitable thing that could be said about the security operation outside the Hilton for the CHOGRM conference, was that it was unbelievably incompetent. A more likely explanation is that whoever was in charge of security for the Hilton knew all about the bomb because they ordered it placed there.

The Hilton Operation Begins

There has always been a strong suspicion that ASIO were involved in the Hilton Bombing. To understand the reasons for this suspicion it is necessary to understand the crucial significance of the Hilton Bombing in the development of Australia's political police Q ASIO, the State Special Branches and the military intelligence groups.

Throughout the Cold War, the political police in Australia had seen their role as being concerned with the surveillance of subversives. As opposition to the Vietnam War grew, the political police were used extensively against the growing anti-Vietnam movement. In turn, this mass movement saw the political police as a major threat to Australian democracy. The Campaign against Political Police was born out of the Vietnam Moratorium movement.

This campaign reached its climax in February 1978 when a series of extraordinary political upheavals confronted Australia's political police with the gravest crisis in their history. At this time, the Hilton Bombing provided the means whereby the Australian political police redefined their role from being anti-subversive to being anti-terrorist.

In November 1977, Don Dunstan, the Premier of South Australia, asked Justice White to investigate the nature and extent of security records kept by that state's Special Branch. The release of this report would have catastrophic repercussions for security police throughout Australia. The report demonstrated the extent of political police surveillance of "subversives". More importantly, it showed that this concept of "subversive" was extraordinarily broad. Files were maintained on all ALP candidates and elected members; on all members and activities of the ACTU; on demonstrators and participants in peace movements (even prayer meetings for peace were watched and recorded); and on all members of the South Australian Council for Civil Liberties. Long before the Council was formed, the public utterances of prominent citizens who advocated any form of civil rights and liberties were recorded and indexed. In all, files had been established and built up on a staggering 40,000 people.

According to Justice White, the concept of "subversive" covered everyone with opinions to the left of an arbitrary centre point chosen by someone in Special Branch. Justice White continued: "I have no doubt that the arbitrary centre point was established by Special Branch with the assistance of ASIO."

Another aspect that disturbed Justice White was Special Branch's complete lack of skill in intelligence gathering. They collected gossip and rumours, and after a while this gossip became accepted as fact. Justice White referred to the files as "a mass of records . . . relating to matters, organisations, and persons having no connection with genuine security risks . . . material which I know to be inaccurate, and sometimes scandalously inaccurate, appears in some dossiers."

The South Australian Commissioner of Police, Harold Salisbury, strongly urged that the Government not publish Justice White's report as the effects of publication would be "volcanic", with ramifications that would extend to all state Special Branches, ASIO, and foreign intelligence sources. However, on 17 January 1978, Don Dunstan sacked Police Commissioner, Salisbury for misleading him on the extent of Special Branch files, and published the report.

This event, one month before the Hilton bombing, sent the intelligence community into convulsions. On the same day, Dunstan wrote to Prime Minister Fraser to tell him that South Australian police would no longer act as intermediaries for ASIO. All but two of South Australia's Special Branch were transferred to other units, and those two were retained to help with the destruction of all records that were not to do with genuine security risks. The ramifications of these events were exactly as the sacked Police Commissioner Harold Salisbury had predicted: they shook the secret police in Australia as no other events had. On 20 January , the West Australian opposition called for an Inquiry into its Special Branch, and the next day, the Melbourne Age echoed this concern editorially. In an editorial on 19 January 1978, the Australian commented on the South Australian affair: "It is the size of the surveillance that is disturbing . . . Clearly the latitude given to Special Branch has been immense. It is worthy of a banana republic. It is not worthy of an Australian state."

The issue had assumed such importance that in the week following Salisbury's sacking, The National Times devoted a special issue to the South Australian controversy and the role of the Special Branches in Australian politics. It was called The Political Police - The Extraordinary and Disturbing Behaviour of our Special Branch Police. Federally, ASIO was now embroiled within the burgeoning crisis; there were calls for it to destroy all files no longer relevant to security; and federal cabinet decided to appoint a committee to investigate the relationship between ASIO and the state Special Branches. Strong laws were proposed to curb ASIO's excesses.

The Special Branch controversy widened to include New South Wales, when Don Dunstan detailed an episode that revealed that ASIO files had been given to the Leader of the Opposition in New South Wales, Peter Coleman. A Sydney journalist claimed that ASIO files on five prominent left-wingers had been made available to him by Coleman in 1971. These files were to be used in a magazine called ' The Analysis ' which was to prepare articles on the basis of information supplied by ASIO to discredit radical individuals, in particular members of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. One of the files had been prepared by South Australian Special Branch for purely political purposes.

This seemed to be a damming example of the political misuse of intelligence information: Secret Police files were to be used as a party political weapon. It confirmed deeply held left-wing and ALP fears that the secret police were a secret arm of the conservative parties. The Privacy Committee of the NSW parliament began examining the files of NSW's Special Branch on Jan 23. On February 9 (four days before the Hilton Bombing) Premier Neville Wran announced that a judicial inquiry would be held into the links between NSW Special Branch and ASIO, and also into the connection between them and the leader of the Opposition in New South Wales, Peter Coleman. The inquiry was to investigate the allegations that Coleman was involved with a scheme to use ASIO documents to discredit people. It threatened to become a major political scandal. The establishment of this Inquiry was due to be announced on February 14, the day after the Hilton Bombing. It was on this day that the sniffer dog squad was called off.

It seems it was at this stage that the Hilton Operation began. Someone very high up in the security forces decided that the political police could rescue their position with a publicity stunt. A bomb was going to be found in a rubbish bin outside the CHOGRM conference at the Hilton Hotel. It was to be planted Saturday morning before the heads of state arrived. It would be discovered after a warning phone call on Monday morning. The press were to be alerted too. A blaze of pro-political police publicity would follow. All that had to be done was to keep people away from the garbage bin.

The Warning Phone Call

The Hilton Operation ran strictly according to plan up until 12.30AM on the Monday morning. Two garbage pick-ups were prevented by the NSW police. Whoever planted the bomb was well aware of the garbage collection times. Another garbage collection was due at 1AM Monday morning. At 12.30AM the warning phone call was made. (Terry Griffiths says another police officer told him the warning phone call was made by a Sergeant in Special Branch who had been observing the scene outside the Hilton in a red torana, a police observation car. The warning phone caller rang the police switchboard and asked to speak to Special Branch. It was 12.30AM Monday morning. Normally, Special Branch would not be there at that hour, though the phone caller seemed to believe they would be. (Indeed, the same person called back an hour later at 1.30Am and again asked to speak to Special Branch.) After the phone rang a few times, the police telephonist transferred the call to the sergeant in charge of the CIB, Cec Streetfield. The Hilton Operation had begun to unravel.

What Streetfield did on being informed of the bomb, is one of the mysteries of the Hilton. What he did not do is notorious: he did not warn the police outside the Hilton over the police radio. Streetfield testified before the Hilton Inquest in 1982. According to Terry Griffiths, he told a pack of lies. According to Streetfield, the phone caller said: "Dere is a bomb in der bin outside der Hilton Hotel." The phone caller then rang the Sydney Morning Herald and told them they might be interested in what was about to happen outside the Hilton Hotel. The Hilton Operation continued to fall apart. The garbage collection truck was running twenty minutes early that night. They arrived outside the Hilton at 12.40AM before the bomb was found.

The Hilton Fallout

The blast transformed the Australian political climate in favour of Prime Minister Fraser's beliefs in strong security measures, against the softer "civil liberties" line adopted by Wran and Don Dunstan. The public debate over security matters would be now totally overshadowed by the psychology of terror and terrorist danger. The newspaper headlines, which for the past month had been taken up with the Special Branch issue, were now dominated by the Terrorist Threat. Images of sinister, hooded men in balaclavas - the "terrorists" - stared from newspaper pages. Against a background of bullet holes, they clutched their machine guns tightly. The Hilton Hotel bombing was "a political baptism", the papers declared. Terrorism (the "Cowardly killer that knows no innocents") had "come to Sydney". The Sydney Morning Herald said, "Australia this week had a new and shocking experience. It was our first full taste of Twentieth Century terrorism."

The Herald declared the Hilton Hotel Bombing an "ugly new dimension" in "reckless political violence". The day after the Bombing, the leader of the Country Party in New South Wales, Mr. Punch, called for a widening of the powers of Special Branch. "Terrorism in Australia is now a fact of life" conceded Neville Wran.

For the political police, the newspaper beat-up of the Terrorist Threat was an amazing transformation in their political fortunes. In the aftermath of the bombing both Wran and Dunstan backed away from their decisions to investigate the links between ASIO and Special Branch and retreated from their threats to abolish Special Branch. In both cases, the Bombing was a major factor. Wran announced he would not proceed with the inquiry to investigate the links between ASIO and the leader of the Opposition, Peter Coleman. The Canberra Times reported Malcolm Fraser had pressured Wran to abandon the inquiry "in the light of the bombing". Dunstan decided to maintain his state's Special Branch, claiming that tragedies like the Sydney bombing established the need for a genuine security branch. A damaging chain reaction had been aborted. The attacks on Special Branches were stopped. ASIO stocks, which were at an all time low, before the bombing, rose dramatically.

Three weeks after the bombing, a new bill was tabled that gave ASIO vastly increased powers. ASIO's new powers included the interception of mail, telegrams and telexes; the use of bugging devices; legal break-ins and searches. Disclosure of ASIO agents identities was to become a criminal offence. ASIO's illegal violation of rights were to become legal violations of rights.

In this regard, the Hilton Operation was an unqualified success. But something had gone incredibly wrong. The bomb had exploded when it had been picked up by a garbage truck. Three people had been killed. Public pressure on the police to solve the crime was enormous. The newspapers demanded that the culprits be found. Many were suggesting that the security forces themselves had organised the bombing. Someone needed to be made the patsy. Within a year of the bombing, there were two bombing conspiracy cases in NSW which were widely regarded as frame-ups: the Ananda Marga trio and the Croatian Six. (6)

"There are many questions that have been asked for thirteen and a half years," says Terry Griffiths, "and they have been officially avoided. We would like to find out who was the person who told police to wave the garbage men on. As a policeman and a victim I would like to know why permanent circular 135 of 1972 was not adhered to. Why wasn't the rubbish bin searched? Why wasn't that area Q which was top security Q constantly combed by the security forces? Why were the military Q in particular the Dog Squad Q not where they should have been? Why were they withdrawn?" "It seems that the normal routine anti-terrorist procedures were not followed."

Was the Hilton Bombing the result of a remarkable series of bungles and coincidences? Terry Griffiths believes not. He believes there is a simple explanation for why the Dog Squad were called off; why the bin was not searched; why the garbage trucks were waved away. Security forces involved with the operation knew there was a bomb in the bin. It was going to be discovered just before the garbage collection arrived. That was the purpose of the warning call. ) Terry Griffiths is particularly critical of the 1982 Hilton Inquest and the numerous attempts by the police to accuse members of Ananda Marga for the bombing.

"Det Sgt. Jackson, one of the police involved at that 1982 Hilton Inquest, stated at the recent Anderson trial that the police knew that some of Seary's evidence was false."

Special Branch agent Richard Seary claimed at the Inquest that Ananda Marga members Ross Dunn and Paul Alister had confessed to him they were the Hilton bombers. Sgt. Jackson said it was well-known by the police at the time that Alister was in Adelaide at the time of the bombing and could not have been responsible for putting the bomb in the bin. Yet no one told the coroner who concluded there was a prima facie case against Paul Alister for being the Hilton Bomber. Terry Griffiths believes the conduct of the 1982 Hilton Inquest should also be investigated at a Royal Commission. "I believe there was evidence that that Inquiry was a huge cover-up and the police were part and parcel of that cover-up."

Griffiths is also very critical of claims made this year that another Ananda Marga member was responsible for the Hilton Bombing. The Sixty Minutes programme alarmed him because it appeared to me to be an unofficial ASIO public relations exercise. Years after the Hilton Inquest; after the trial of Tim Anderson and his acquittal; notorious Special Branch informer, Richard Seary and an unnamed ASIO agent called "Ron" alleged a new unnamed Ananda Marga member was the mastermind of the Hilton Bombing. Griffiths points out it has taken these men fourteen years to come forward. "We go from 1979 to 1991 with all those avenues to have those matters aired and for the evidence to be investigated by the court and not one mention of this suspect."

On the use of Seary as a reliable witness, Griffiths was scathing. "I don't think it was correct to put Seary up as a credible witness when it is a matter of public record that he has no credit with the courts in this state. Justice Wood said his evidence was not credible. When a judge says he is not a credible witness, I think it is remiss for anyone to put him forward as a credible witness and I don't think that should be done. The way that programme was put together it seemed like it was a staged reply to the questions that Ted Mack was asking in the Federal Parliament."

"Who are the people who cancelled the dog squad? Why haven't we been able to subpoena key personal like Superintendent Douglas to give evidence at any previous court case. They are the people we should start questioning first. These things have never been brought into evidence. We have had all this stupidity about Ananda Marga, and yet we don't even know what type of explosives were used in the bombing. "

"We have always had somebody who is charged, convicted and then freed - made the patsy for it. Now we have a new patsy for the Hilton Bombing. It doesn't gel with me. In my opinion it was a media event that went wrong, and in my opinion there is more than enough evidence to suggest that members of our own security force were responsible for the bombing."