Distant Voices Read Online Free

Thus, hundreds of trials take place in secret every year, some of them deeply sensitive to the state. Under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, broadcasters and journalists must surrender film and source material to the police; and an order against one media organisation automatically applies to the others.
    In 1991 Central Television and I encountered the full sanction of government secrecy and intervention in the courts in a libel action brought against my film
Cambodia: The Betrayal
. ‘Public Interest Immunity Certificates’ – gagging orders – were used successfully against us before they were exposed in the Matrix Churchill trial. I have described this in the chapter ‘Through the Looking Glass’. Britain has the most restrictive libel laws in the democratic world – a fact which Robert Maxwell exploited until the day he drowned.
    The Director of Public Prosecutions has used the Prevention of Terrorism Act to force Channel 4 and an independent programme maker to reveal the identity of an informant whose life could be at risk. The case concerned a documentary film,
The Committee
, which alleged widespread collusion between members of the British security services, Loyalist paramilitaries and senior members of NorthernIreland’s business community in a secret terrorist campaign dedicated to sectarian and political assassination. 18
    This, and similar cases, receive scant attention compared with the sex lives of establishment politicians, and the marriage difficulties of the royal family. There are the perennial calls for protection of privacy legislation, but this has little to do with protecting the rights of ordinary people, and everything to do with protecting the reputations of establishment figures. There is no real desire to intervene in ‘tabloid scandal-mongering’ – which is duly reported in depth by the ‘quality’ press. The scandal mongers, after all, are important people. They can witchhunt dissenters when required; and every five years most of them can be relied upon to help elect a Tory government. For this, the Queen is instructed to honour their editors: a fine irony. The lost issue is the need to protect the public from the state, not the press.
    I have devoted the final chapters to Australia, which in many ways offers a model for the future. In the 1960s Australians could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. Since then the redistribution of wealth has been spectacular as the world’s first Thatcherite Labor government has ‘reformed’ the fragile Australian economy and given it over to the world ‘free market’. Bob Hawke’s ‘big mates’ – the likes of Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Alan Bond – were able to borrow what they liked and pay minimal income tax. 19 In 1989 Bond’s borrowing accounted for 10 per cent of the Australian national debt. 20 Today, Bond’s empire has collapsed, Bond himself has been in and out of prison; unemployment is as high as 15 per cent and the rate of child poverty is the second highest in the developed world. 21 And Australia can now claim the most monopolised press in the Western world.
    Of twelve metropolitan dailies, Murdoch controls seven and the Canadian Conrad Black three. Of ten Sunday papers Murdoch has seven, Black two. In Adelaide Murdoch has a complete monopoly. He owns all the daily, Sunday and local papers, and all the printing presses and printing premises. In Brisbane he owns all but a few suburban papers. He controlsmore than 66 per cent of daily newspapers in the capital cities, where the great majority of the population lives. He owns almost 75 per cent of all Sunday papers. And Black controls most of the rest. 22
    Both are conservative ideologues. Another arch conservative, Kerry Packer, owns most of the magazines Australians read and the only truly national commercial TV network. None of this could have happened without