Newman like Putin: Qld lawyer A barrister has likened Queensland's premier (pic) to Russia's Vladimir Putin over anti-bikie laws. QUEENSLAND'S premier has been likened to authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea over the state's anti-bikie laws. Barrister Peter Callaghan SC also says the laws speak in the language of 1950s US communist-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy. Mr Callaghan has written an opinion piece in Fairfax Media which says giving a parliamentary committee one day to scrutinise an 180-page bill is tokenism and disrespectful to proper process. "You can almost hear muttering to the effect that Putin does not have to worry about the scrutiny of parliamentary committees," he wrote on Thursday. He said the laws would threaten a citizen's liberty if a person was, or at any time has been, a member of a relevant organisation. "It is sickening to think that the language of Joseph McCarthy is now part of the law of Queensland," Mr Callaghan said. It is just wrong to change someone's status in the eyes of the law because of something they did long ago, back when that something was perfectly legal. He said retrospective laws were condemned by "every civilised nation in the world" as they were against values expressed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. "However, there is a short list of places in the world such as North Korea where the beliefs that underpin that covenant are clearly not valued," Mr Callaghan wrote. It cannot be good for Queensland's 'brand name' to be associated with the countries on that list.