No deal

Hurrah, Mark! Well said.

I read somewhere (I think it was Paul Sheehan in the SMH) that since 1950, 350,000 Australians had died on the roads, while, also since 1950, the number of Australians killed in all wars and terrorist incidents (remember this includes Vietnam, Korea and Bali) is 1000, that's right, 1000.

So, if our government was serious about keeping Aussie's alive, forget terrorism, ban cars.

Safety is an illusion, always has been, always will be. Giving up liberty and freedom to increase an illusion of safety is just crazy. Of course, we should be sensible and minimise risk, but, for God's sake, our risk of being killed in a terrorist incident is probably less than being struck by lightening. And, I don't know about you, but I still go out in a storm.

Well put enaj:

As you point out the body count for Australians is very low and world wide not much greater. As I have suggested else where as wars go the other guys aren't doing that well if body count is the measure.

But if you include wholesale changes to our way of life they are doing splendidly. Add to that the erosion of our values of fairness, equity and justice and I reckon these terrorosts dude would be well pleased with their efforts to date.

Ramping up security, not unlike wars on crime and the like, are little more than pissing contests between the big boys - we are not faced with a threat of any magnitude yet we are tying ourselves into legislative knots responding to that which may never come and if it does will have little impact.

Even the most basic commercial risk analysis using the paramaters of likelihood and consequences makes all this brou ha ha about security a nonsense - Donald Hornes assertion that we are a lucky country run by second raters gets more true with every passing second.

If the the threat to our physical being is so low what about then the threat to our values; Well what values? We pose a greater threat to our selves than any external force does. We are in fact compromising our values as we foster and feed athis unwarranted sense of paranoia, suspicion and rascism.

Mark Christensen doesn’t think the PM’s belief that the most important civil liberty is to stay alive and be free from death “is right”. OK, that’s a difference of opinion. He goes on to say, in a round about way, that we Australians don’t spend much time pondering the meaning of life. OK again, and we are not unique in that. But what is really “not right” is his assumption that he knows “what it is that Australians truly value” and that these dinky-di values somehow mean that we shouldn’t want the Government to take all steps to protect us and our country from terrorism. Where he becomes really puerile is the point when he talks about banning boxing and driving at 50kph as though this were akin to protecting ourselves from terrorism.

People who take risks with their own lives – boxing, swimming where there are sharks, base-jumping and other extreme sports make a deliberate choice and know the risks. When we are young, we are invincible and many of us die young because life is fun and we scorn death. You can’t legislate for fools who make their own choices, and dare devils heatedly reject any official attempt to ban their pleasures. But should they and others be killed and maimed by lunatics when it can be prevented or at least minimised by tough laws which will infringe only on the murderous activities of the lunatics? There is no choice or Australian “values” in being blown to bits by a cowardly bastard with a bomb.

Enaj, you need a good smack. When people of my generation were being pressed-ganged into the Vietnam War, proponents of the war were using the “more-people-killed-on-the-roads-than-in-Vietnam nonsense too.

And, sneekeepeete, what are you up to that anti-terrorist legislation will erode your “values” of “fairness”, “equity” and “justice”

"...it can be prevented or at least minimised by tough laws which will infringe only on the murderous activities of the lunatics?"

This is the point. The laws may not only infringe on the murderous, etc. They may infringe upon innocent persons because of anothers paranoia...

Leigh, do you often go around smacking people?
And it wasn't just your poor beleaguered generation that were being press ganged into fighting in Vietnam, it was mine too. Sounds like we're the same age, so it may be a little presumptuous of you to claim the right to smack me.
But I no more remember the argument than understand its relevance. Are you arguing that we sent soldiers to Vietnam to protect us from being killed by Vietnamese terrorists? I seem to recall a Yellow peril argument, the domino effect and the Godless hordes of communists, and other such drivel, but what people being killed on the roads had to do with Vietnam I have no idea.
Had we been curtailing human rights and liberties out of fear of Vietnamese terrorism in Australia, well, maybe, but even then, history would have proved such efforts fatuous. We lost the Vietnam war, achieved nothing, withdrew our troops and.......nothing terrible happened. Nothing.
My point about the roads is simply that our fear of terrorism is largely irrational, just as our fear of Indochinese communism was back in the 60s and 70s. Remember that great moment in the film Gallipolli when the gung ho main character is traversing the desert to join up. He meets a swaggie in the middle of absolutely nowhere and tells him he is going to fight the Germans. Why, asks the swaggie, To stop them invading, answers the young man. The swaggie looks around at the empty landscape and says "What, out here?"
I'm not saying terrorism may never affect us, just that a detached view of the risk would be much healthier right now than the current Henny Penny attitude of many people. You remember Henny Penny? "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"