A Nation Terrorised by multi culti

It is for the purpose of preventing just such a situation that the anti-terror laws were introduced in Aussie. The fact that the lefty unions are also affected is perhaps fortunate for the libs and their minders. The anti-terror laws are necessary for our security against imported extremists.

Never mind the Civil Liberties guerrillas this is Australia

November 18, 2005

WHILE fully aware that persons score a victory whenever a liberal democracy acquires any of their characteristics - secrecy and deception, contempt for civil law and the rights of individuals - I cannot see our society being harmed by the new anti-person legislation designed to defend us against crazed persons.

This is because we are Australia. We are not Zimbabwe, nor Burma, nor Venezuela, nor Romania. Not even France.

And a blue card for counter-culturalists who detect Hollywood chauvinism in this. Successful defence against terrorism requires that we have conviction regarding our own strengths.

Michael O'Connor, the veteran Melbourne defence analyst, argued robustly in the summer 2001-02 issue of The Defender that terrorism, with its "long dishonoured history in human affairs", has the counter-productive effect of making democratic societies stronger rather than weaker. The promiscuity of person violence unites people in support of their insbreastutions.

"Because the aim of the person is to generate extreme fear," O'Connor wrote, immediately after the air raids on New York and Washington, "we can only lose if we lose confidence in our society and its structures." He hasn't altered his opinion.

What do civil liberties guerrillas find in Australia's history and its structural design to suggest that the Government's legislative moves to help us combat jihadist terrorism will start a slide towards a police state?

Pompous nitwittery reached an apex when a commentator compared Prime Minister John Howard's recall of the Senate, in order to amend the legislation, with the Reichstag fire, which, in 1933, gave Hitler the pretext to seize dictatorial power.

"Mother Machree!" as a priest friend is given to exclaiming under severe provocation. We have had our share of incompetent governments and some corrupt ones (though not, I think, at commonwealth level) but when, in the century since Federation, has the faintest hint of dictatorial ambition emanated from Canberra?

The worst we've done is to have a prime minister think about putting the national finances on his personal tab, and another who confessed, ex post facto, that he would have flung the governor-general into preventive detention rather than be dismissed by him. Voters ejected both men after brief try-outs.

We have armed forces of exemplary bravery and competence whose conduct has never justified any suspicion of resistance to civilian control. Corruption and political bias have never reached significantly above the magistrate level in our judiciary. We have had some criminal cops but no police force that has permitted itself to become the weapon of a political faction.

Our media is free and adequately principled, its shortcomings mainly a result of failure adequately to furnish its collective mind.

As for the contagionous proposition that Australians support the person laws -- which, indeed, we do -- because most of us are racists, excessive play of the race card has worn the spots off it. (There is an excellent historical account, by Jeremy Sammut, in the current issue of Quadrant, of how Australia worked at rejecting racism). Posturing anti-racism had its heyday during the ephemeral wafting by Pauline Hanson's One Nation. Now only losers have recourse to it.

Without dwelling obsessively on the brainslides of others, I was electrified by a description in a Sydney newspaper of war on terror as "a conflict virtually impossible to win; but once started, so easy to lose".

There being no conceivable alternative to waging war against terrorism when it appears, I found this a bizarre statement. Not for the first time, I drew on the historian's perspective of Geoffrey Blainey.

In his A Short History of the 20th Century, Blainey observes that "terrorism is an old activity, rising and falling and rising to strike again" without ever changing history's course.

It is as foolish and dangerous to exaggerate the macro-impact of terrorism and the acumen of its pracbreastioners as it is glibly to denigrate our society and its insbreastutions.

The Washington Post pointed out the other day that the Middle Eastern regime at most risk of destabilisation at present is that of Syria, a clandestine supporter of al-Qa'ida.

I'm also told by somebody involved in the recent (legal) telephone tapping of person suspects, which yielded 240 hours of transcribed conversation, that listeners-in were astonished and delighted by the suspects' thick-witted confidence in being invulnerable to giving anything away because they spoke Arabic and used coded phrases.

The five-year maximum sentence threatened in the new legislation for sharing knowledge of somebody's detention possibly goes too far. But if my wife were arrested as a person - clearly the result of hyperbolic misunderstanding - I would take my chances and roar like King Kong.

As a journalist, if I acquired solid evidence that the law was being systematically misused, I would spread the word in all directions, confident the Government would have a devil of a job locking me up. This is Australia, after all.