APEC : Disaster narrowly averted by quick-thinking Justices

The Order of Australia has been preserved and the importance of individual citizens taking personal responsibility for their potentially dangerous character has been reaffirmed today:

APEC blacklisters lose court challenge
Sydney Morning Herald
September 6, 2007

Four men blacklisted by NSW police from attending any APEC protest have lost their appeal against the ban in an exceptional late-night court sitting in Sydney. The challenge was launched by the men – Dan Jones, Paddy Gibson, Dan Robbins and Tim Davis-Frank – who claimed the ban is unconstitutional… In the end the [three] justices [of the NSW Supreme Court] held that the banning of a limited number of potentially dangerous people from a protest, in a limited area, for a limited amount of time, served the legitimate end of responsible government.

Further words of wisdom…

1) It is to be remembered that the erosion of civil liberties occurred very gradually in South Africa. In 1948, before the Nationalist government took power, there was little difference in the laws and the attitudes of the people to those which you would find in most western countries. Changes in attitudes were gradually effected by propaganda (involving largely appeals to patriotism) and changes in the law. The fundamental proposition was that any person who did not agree with the changes to the laws was not a true patriot and an enemy of the people. Gradually, it became difficult to speak out without being faced with government and community opprobrium…

2) Almost every major reform in modern history – including the much vaunted Christian opposition to slavery – was opposed by both the organised churches and a majority of individual Christians…

3) Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress… Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.