Detention comes in various forms, and all have a basic premise: the removal of liberty of the subject, the presence of permanent control and surveillance, the utter reduction of rights to life to obligations to the state.
The suggestion of internment of terror suspects by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson hints at a historical awareness of one thing: that rounding up citizens and keeping them under lock and key, assisted by firearms, is one way of dealing with a threat. That such an idea is dangerously flawed is not something that enters the One Nation party room.
On the Sunrise program, Hanson insisted that Yacqub Khayre’s attack in Brighton had been motivated by religion. Then came her suggestion. “It is an ideology and with these people, you know what? Intern them. I don’t want to see one more Australian killed or one more person in fear of their life or their kids lives.”
In the United States, this form of internment was practised on a massive scale during the Second World War. Citizens were held up; rights were trammeled and even muted. In Korematsu v United States, such internment was subjected to Supreme Court scrutiny. Given the times, the verdict was not favourable for US citizens of Japanese ethnicity and ancestry.
While it is commonly mistaken to be a case decided solely on whether internment was legal (it had, in fact, to do with a bureaucratic matter of excluding persons from various zones on West Coast of the US), the result was…