EDITORIAL 

Saturday, July 12, 1997

A win for the panther 

THE release of the US black activist Mr Lorenzo Kom'Boa Ervin to 
continue a speaking tour of Australia represents a defeat for the 
Prime Minister, for the Acting Immigration Minister, Senator 
Vanstone, and for Ms Pauline Hanson who accused him of being "a 
known terrorist and gunrunner". It is, however, a win for 
Australia's image as a tolerant country, although that victory 
came at the expense of Australia's reputation as a competent 
country. The treatment of Mr Ervin, including placing him in 
custody for alleged breaches of the visa regulations, elevated his 
case into a free speech controversy and the Australian Government 
has now been exposed as being in the wrong.

It is probably being overly generous to Mr Ervin to suggest that he 
is even a minor figure on the worldwide left-activist circuit. He 
is widely unknown in his own country, the United States. Before he 
arrived in Australia, Mr Ervin toured the United Kingdom for six 
weeks. His visit was ignored by the major media outlets. On Monday, 
before the controversy about his visit erupted, Mr Ervin made a 
speech to a small crowd in Brisbane. The crowds would have 
continued to be small on his four-week tour if the row about 
Mr Ervin's visa application had not occurred. 

Rather than this predictable anonymity, Mr Ervin suddenly has become 
an international celebrity. For a few moments, perhaps, his claims 
about Australia being a racist country and his call for a black 
boycott of the Sydney 2000 Olympics will be carried by media outlets 
throughout the world. This publicity, of course, may disappear as 
quickly as it has flared. But Mr Ervin's promoters in Australia, the
virtually unknown "Angry People", have been offered a credibility 
and a prominence unimaginable only a week ago.

The Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Gerard Brennan, told the 
Federal Government that Mr Ervin's case came down to two questions - 
was the Government's power to deport subject to the requirements 
of natural justice and, if so, was natural justice done? These are 
two questions that should have been confronted by the authorities 
when they were contemplating forcing Mr Ervin to leave Australia. 
It is obvious, anyway, that natural justice must be a requirement of
any visa decision. The notion that a ministerial edict cannot be 
reviewed by the High Court makes a mockery of the rule of law. An 
Australian Government cannot and should not, without very good 
cause, stop a person from coming here with a legal visa. 

It is equally obvious that Mr Ervin's conviction for hijacking a 
plane to Cuba in 1969 could not be held against him nearly 30 years 
after the event. He was jailed, paroled in 1983 and, his lawyer 
says, was given executive clemency under the Bush Administration. 
This history does not fit Ms Hanson's allegation that he is a 
"terrorist". Mr Howard's determination to "have something done" 
about "someone with that sort of background" was an unfortunate 
over-reaction. Mr Ervin is at worst a Grey Panther with a colourful 
Black Panther past. But that past is well distant from his present 
activities.

The Ervin case raises questions about Mr Howard's judgment when 
confronted with allegations from Ms Hanson. It is hard to avoid the 
belief that he panicked when Ms Hanson questioned Mr Ervin's right 
to be in Australia. The matter, though, needed to be dealt with 
quietly, if it needed to be dealt with at all. It would be a pity if
the Federal Government now puts this matter behind it without having 
a close reflection on how clumsily it was handled - at both the 
bureaucratic and political level.