"The measures will also only affect very small numbers of people in most unusual circumstances of their own choosing."

Like catching a train?

Don't you see? Don't you see that this has all happened before?

It's that damn sketch! viz:

(narrator)

In the early years of the 21st Century, to combat the rising demand for accountability, the Prime Minister gave his Attorney General, leave to move without let or hindrance throughout the land, in a reign of fear, suspicion and terror that used a terrific draft bill.

This was the Australian Inquisition!

(splintering door)

NOBODY expects the Australian Inquisition!

Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...
fear and surprise....

Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry...
are such elements as fear, surprise...

and... and ruthless efficiency..

...I'll come in again.

Neil James' "Fundamental point" is not if or by whom we are under attack but whether we are prepared to be stampeded into giving up critical elements of our reasonably democratic society for very suspect improvements in our homeland security.
His"Most Australians support" is flat out wrong. Recent surveys show 67% of Australians feel the proposals are "over the top"
If history teaches us anything it must be that whatever interpretation can be placed on a power we bestow on our governments, they will eventually find expedient to apply-to all of us. Given the proposals,I am seriously not happy.

'Most Australians'were,until recently, a casual,laid back lot. Happy to earn a quid, have a holiday,not much interested in Foreign Affairs, until foreign bombers jumped out of nowhere and got some of us.
We cannot return to that fairly placid,relaxed way of life anymore, we would be asking for trouble if we did.Ask those who returned to Bali after the first bombing.
Yet if we say we welcome tougher terrorist laws, laws that hopefully will prevent those who hate us from trying to kill more of us, we are branded as "racist".
How else can you stop such killers? Tell 'em not to be so naughty? I do not care how harsh the laws, if they work even most of the time, they will be worth it.

I still haven't figured out exactly - or even approximately - what aspects of the new legislation will actually assist in the "fight against terror" (or whatever we are calling anti-terrorist measures this week). It is a bit like the workplace legislation - long on spin, short on fact, and totally bereft of a basis in logic.

Neil James doesn't help with this confusion either. He is deliberately misleading in places...

>>Jon Stanhope [is]... apparently unhappy with preventative detention or control orders in a minute number of cases of terrorism.<<

... when he knows full well that it is the broader thrust of the legislation that caused the minister to bring this into the public arena.

>>The fundamental point in the counter-terrorism measures versus civil liberties debate is the question whether Australia’s pluralist liberal-democratic society is under attack from Islamist terrorism or not? If the answer is yes, as most Australians appear to recognise..."

Whether or not "most Australians" appear to recognize this (which I believe is in itself open to question), the point is still fundamentally unproven. Yes, it is possible that there may be an increased likelihood of terrorist activity on Australian soil at some time in the future, but an attack on our pluralist liberal-democratic society? Surely, that's over-egging the pudding.

If the possibility of a couple of suicide bombers represents a threat to our democratic system, it is time we outsourced our civil defence to a more capable body. Like the Bandidos, or the Comancheros.

>>Some of the new measures are undoubtedly tough by normal peacetime standards - which no longer necessarily apply. But they are not unprecedented during time of conflict and in coping with associated acts of subversion, sabotage, sedition and treason.<<

We are not at war. We may have a potential problem with terrorism, which may at some time reach our shores. This is not a "time of conflict". As drafted, the new laws are unnecessary and oppressive.

Among the catalogue of social disasters which Multiculturalism has created, we can now add a significant reduction in the civil liberties of Australians.

To those who wanted Multiculturalism and now cry over your lost rights, all I can say is, you sowed the wind and now you have got the whirlwind. It is amusing that they are now the ones screaming about the loss of civil liberties when they themselves were the ones who created this avoidable problem.

We in Australia now have to face the fact that we have imported people into this country who want to kill us and kill our children. These immigrants and their progeny have such a hatred for our society and our culture that nothing less than the complete destruction of our way of life will placate them. ASIO claims that there are at least 20 separate terrorist groups forming cells within Australia and some 800 “Australians” now under surveillance.

Those that once loudly claimed that asylum shoppers could never be terrorists have been proven wrong. Some of the “British” terrorists who have been involved in the four plots to mass murder British people (two have been foiled by British police) were either “refugees” or the progeny of asylum shoppers. One wonders how many times the social regressive caste will be proven wrong before they ever admit that their Quixotic social theories are a catastrophe.

The Dutch people have loudly proclaimed that they are the most tolerant on Earth. But their tolerance has been mitigated somewhat by the realization that their own rednecks were right all along and that their naivety has created a cancer in their own society. One Dutch minister recently cancelled a meeting with Muslim leaders when they refused to shake hands with her because she was a woman. How any advanced society can import backward people with such medieval mindsets and then think it will not cause serious social problems is beyond me.