The Australian Governments anti-terror legislation reflects a terrible lack of good policy thought and strategic understanding. The laws are built on a completely false policy premise that has been designed to maintain the goverment’s political line about it’s involvement in the Iraq war.
The terror policies are designed on the false premise that the terrorists are attacking us because they hate us. Over and over again this premise has been proved false in all the research. The line that these people are blowing us up simply because they hate us is spouted by the US Government, the British Government and the Australian Government to protect themselves from the disaster that is Iraq.
Terrorists, especially the phenomena of the ‘home-grown’ terrorist are blowing us up (or want to blow us up) because of their perception that the US, British and Australian governments shouldn’t be in Iraq and are committing atrocities against Muslim peoples. Now whether you agree with that perception or not (and WEE don’t hold that view), it is clear as the nose on your face that they are not blowing us up simply because they hate us, but because they have a gripe with the policies of our government. Until Bush, Howard and Blair can admit that, then this cycle of violence will continue.
And now we in Australia are all being punished for our leaders’ ineptitude through these anti-terrorism laws. WEE are afraid these laws are built on the need for a fair bit of trust in your government. If there is one thing that not many people have for governments these days it’s trust.
We’ve been bombarded with examples of how government’s can’t be trusted — weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib, Children Overboard, IR Laws, asylum seekers, wrongly deported citizens — the list goes on. Now they want us to believe they should be trusted with the significant situation of denying Australian citizens their liberty.
Frankly, it’s not good enough for them to say that they will only be used against ‘real’ terror suspects (whatever that means). And who decides who the ‘real’ terror suspects are? You guessed it, the same people who have lied, obfuscated, blocked enquiries, and institutionalised abuses of human rights. The same people who got intelligence wrong on Iraq, who lied about their knowledge of the ‘rendition’ of Habib.
Sure, I’m feeling safer. It really is quite astounding that we could even be contemplating this. And the reason we are even contemplating this is the total incompetence of the coalition governments’ response to September 11. They have created this situation with their completely inadequate response to the challenges presented by that terrorist attack.
It strikes WEE that the incompetence of the last few years will only be surpassed by the incompetence of the implementation of these laws.
The only difference is that the government can suppress their incompetence in the future. Who knows what horrible mistakes will be made. But there is one thing for which we can be certain… there will be horrible mistakes made.
