Your Rights as an Australian Citizen

Being an Australian Citizen affords an individual a small number of unique rights. The first right is the right to live in Australia, the second is the right to vote in elections and the third is the right to a Passport / travel document. Over the last year Australian laws have changed and now we find that all of the above is a privilege that can be revoked at the whim of the Government at anytime. In certain occasions a person may have their passport cancelled if the authorities feel that person is about to commit an offense under beefed up Terrorism laws. The law is intended to prevent would be Jihadists from traveling to places like Syria to engage in radical Islamic terrorism, blowing people up, chopping off heads, that sort of thing. In that intent, the law is justified. So what happens if a person intends to travel to a country for a holiday or to visit friends or even to work abroad? Well if the authorities “feel” that that person may at some stage decide to engage in hostile activities in a foreign country, then they may cancel the person’s passport to prevent a home-grown Terrorist from traveling. That all sounds fair enough BUT what if the person is NOT a Terrorist and is NOT seeking to engage in hostile activities against a sovereign state? Should the authorities have the right to make an arbitrary decision and prevent them a fundamental right of being an Australian Citizen? Particularly when that decision is influenced by the repressive policies of another country (Turkey)? The issue here of course is the continued harassment of Ashley Dyball by the Australian Government and the Australian Federal Police. Detained at Brisbane airport with a one way ticket to Sweden, the authorities have obviously decided that Ashley was intending to return to Rojava and pick up where he left off “illegally” clearing IEDs left by ISIL and otherwise doing humanitarian work for the YPG ie. a standing army of a democratically appointed governing entity friendly to the west and at the vanguard of the war against ISIL. As a result, the Australian authorities have cancelled Ashley's passport and by doing so have signaled to the world that they view Ashley as a criminal who needs to be contained and our allies, the Kurdish led Syrian Democratic Force, as little more than terrorists....ponder that. A fairly strange way to treat an Australian citizen and our military Allies isn’t it?