Abbott’s ‘Team Australia’ Would Be Hilarious If It Weren’t So Terrifyingly Real

There’s two sides to this whole Team Australia debacle that’s been unfolding over the past 24 hours or so.

The first side is the straight-up mocking that, come on now, was bound to happen when the Prime Minister of this country starts bandying terms like “Team Australia” around in 2014.
Urologists nationwide noted a bladder in the proposal completely bereft of liquid as dutifully, and mercilessly, the piss was well and truly taken out of it.
From the “Had to be Done” files…

…to sporting comparisons…

…to a satirical response from Abbott’s Minister for Women hat.

And then there’s the other side of the coin that’s preventing the whole ordeal from descending into pure farce – that being the fact that there are laws about to be pushed through that are, at the very least, very concerning.
This whole thing began with the bewildering step back on the behalf of the Government to simply drop long-proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act, which would have seen the all-important Section 18C repealed. Prime Minister Abbott stated, “I want the communities of the country to be our friend not our critic. I want to work with the communities of our country as Team Australia.
Leadership is about preserving national unity on the essentials and that is why I have taken this position.
But far from being a throwaway line, we’re apparently going to be hearing it said a lot more in the coming future. Along with that really bizarre legislative about-face came two additional areas of policy: Tightening Counter-Terrorism laws, and the collection of Metadata from all Australians.
Team Australia, as it stands, is now a real Government and Defence Force initiative that has its own (albeit preliminary) website on Defence.gov.au – complete with dubious, rushed-looking logo that kind of resembles a flattened nose.
The counter-terrorism measures – which, by the way, were punctuated by this pearler of a quote from the PM: “I stress that the terrorist threat here in this country has not changed. Nevertheless, it is as high it has ever been.” – will involve facial and fingerprint scanners at exit and entry at all Australian international airports. It will involve airlines being obliged to provide your information to anti-terrorism authorities before you get to the airport. And it will involve a team of 80 National Security officers, deployed to every airport in the nation, to deal with “potential threats.”
The laws are primarily aimed at halting what the Government calls “Home Grown Terrorism” – young men and women leaving the country to engage in battle in Syria and Iraq. So sayeth the PM, “When it comes to counter-terrorism, everyone needs to be part of Team Australia,” hoping to squeeze some of the ridiculousness of the term out straight away through incessant catch phrase repetition.
Meanwhile, everything you look at on the Internet is going to be retained by the Government for up to two years. Every website you visit. Everything you download. Everything. It’s all part of the Government’s “in principle” agreement to draft metadata retention laws into Parliament by year’s end; requiring telecommunications companies to retain records of every Australian citizen’s browsing history for up to two years. But don’t worry, it could also be used to help fight “general” crime too, so… There’s that.
And this also extends to your phone records as well, just quietly. But Tony Abbott insists that what’s being kept is really nothing more than what’s on “the front of an envelope.” If that envelope had location tracking and knew exactly who you were calling, when you were calling them and where you were calling them from – y’know, like some sort of highly sophisticated SmartEnvelope except instead of a fucking paper pocket it’s a Government more or less invading your privacy under the guise of “national security.”
But still, y’know. It’s important we all get on board with “Team Australia.” After all, what’s a little invasion of your personal freedoms in exchange for… For uh… The uh…
Hm.
Actually if someone could figure out how the ordinary Australian is going to benefit from all this for me, that’d be great.
Photo: Mark Nolan via Getty Images.

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV