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!"

Mark, enaj and sneekeepete

Well, I have to disagree guys.

Yes, there are any number of more likely causes of death than terrorism, such as cancer, heart attacks and road deaths.

However terrorist killing (inherently) causes terror. It puts people in fear of their lives (rightly or wrongly) and everyone wants to know about it, especially the media. This is because people are not objective estimators of threats. You’ll notice that rare diseases always get a disproportionately long airing on “A Current Affair” and “Today Tonight”.

Many problems are domestically self inflicted (for example smoking and lung cancer) but terrorism is often an attack from foreign terrorists on your own country. This makes a great deal of difference to the public and politicians.

For these reasons people usually expect the government to do something, or be scene to be doing something about terrorism. “Why didn’t the government foresee this” is always raised after a bomb goes off.

Hence after the London bombings and prior to the Melbourne Commonwealth Games the government would be seen as deficient if it didn’t bring up (or re-invent) new counter terrorism measures.

Whether it comes up with something workable and not counterproductive (for example, alienating Melbourne’s Muslim community) is another question.

But my point is terrorism is an important issue in the public’s (and media’s) eyes regardless of the number of lives lost (to date).

Leigh what I mean is it is neither fair, equitable or just to incarcerate people for days, question them without absolute recourse to counsel and forbid them to discuss the experience or offer any explanation as to why this is happening to them or to their family - because we think they might know a guy who knows a guy who does things - thats where we are now even before any other legislation is shoved down our throats - like an unwelcome brussel sprout.

Look to the latest; an American teacher and activist was deported becuase he was seen by ASIO as a security risk; they will not tell you why - they will not tell his legal representative either - They have however briefed Kim Beazley who is satisfied; but he will not tell us with what. So there you have it. ASIO is happy, Big Kim is satisfied and we havent a bloody clue what is going on!

We can expect more of the same; but it will be Australian citizens next time. Incarcerated questioned, obstructed and observed all becuase the dominant view wrongly assumes we are some how at risk.

You really want to trust your security to these types - those who were sure Sadaam was bristling with WMDs? Them that believed he could sling an airborne WMD over to London in a matter of minutes? The same ytype of guys complicit in turning intelligence streams off to our soldiers in the fields of Timor for reasons yet to be determined - even in capable hands the new security measures are stupid and open to abuse.

We can expect more of the same; but it will be Australian citizens next time. Incarcerated questioned, obstructed and observed all becuase the dominant view wrongly assumes we are some how at risk.

And Plantagenet that is why we write these things - it is becuase member of the public, dim witted politicians and the media distort the facts relating to terror - there needs to be an opposing voice to these extremes:

sneekeepete

I agree with what you say in your last para. As a little advertisement, please see what I said in the comments (in "How do you know if you are winning a war?" on the OLO site today) regarding Bush's need for a popular public diversion and the war in Iraq.

I think the public being misled about the reasons for the (oil) war in Iraq and WMDs cannot be easily blamed on intelligence agencies. I imagine that when intelligence agencies are ordered by politicians (and their unelected political advisers) to serve up exactly what politicians want to read and make public – results like the the “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) deceit are produced.

I think this ABC interview http://abc.net.au/am/content/s804540.htm
of a former Office of National Assessments intelligence analyst, Andrew Wilkie, immediately before the invasion of Iraq shows that, at least some of these intelligence types had the guts to resign when they could see that intelligence was becoming distorted be political considerations.

Firstly, can we stop comparing deaths by terrorism with deaths by car accidents? We can choose to drive a car but we cannot control the intentions or actions of the terrorist. There is no such thing as safe terrorism as there is with driving.

Secondly, the best thing John Howard can do towards the anti terrorism compaign right now is to stop the media from hyping it up.

it is democracy is it not - a 2UE poll suggests that some 80% of Australians want to end 'non-christians' immigration. On the whole of society im sure that would get down to no less than 51%, we have a majority!! yay!! when will a politician have the 'balls' to listen to the makority - is it a democracy or a minority run despotism??

anOTHer profound and mind numbing comment of great depth from Kenny :)

Aussie values ? "don't really think about God much or the meaning of life" ? (paraphrased)... well... who is to blame for that ? was it 'always' like that ?
Not really. Our heritage without question is "Christian" even if it is in the most nominal form. When 150,000 people gathered to hear Billy Graham at the Crusade in 1956 at the MCG... (the largest crowd EVER at MCG) and that without population much smaller than today, it becomes abundantly clear that there was a time when the underlying assumption of European life in Australia included God as our reference point.

I look back on the 60s, through which I lived as a teenager, and I saw it blow by blow, as the values which underpinned our life were eroded.

I watched as Mr Ross, became "Julian" from the mouth of a 5 yr old.
Where students became increasingly emboldened and feel no fear of intimidating a teacher.

While we lost a lot of things we didn't really need to keep, such as certain racial attitudes, we lost so much more that we should have held dear.

Kant, Hegel, Marx, life and death.

Kant showed the folly of Empiricism, Hegel and Marx gave us "the inevitability of history and the dialectic"
But only Christ gives us LIFE, and is the conquerer of death.

"I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father, but by me" John 14.6

I think this article makes an important point: there are some things more important than life itself, there are some things that are worth dying for. By placing being alive at the apex of concerns John Howard plays a dangerous card that he can use to justify all manner of things. The poverty of modernity is just that we do not know the things we would die for and we are liable to this kind of blackmail.

Thanks, Sneek. We’ll never agree on this. I love Brussels sprouts. You are concerned about people (as yet we don’t know who they will be) being incarcerated for days without the ‘normal’ legalities. But we are not talking about normal offences or normal people. We are talking about people, alien or homegrown, suspected of being a threat to the safety and security of Australia and its people. I know it’s a cliché, but I remind you of “no guilt, no worries”. I’m not sneering at your concern. I just think there are people much more worthy of it. Frankly, if a person is treated in the way you object to, there must be a reason, and I’m all for it.

As for Scott Parkin, I would have thought that you would have objected to a foreigner, and a Yank at that, preaching here (even if you agree with him). At the very least, it was an extremely ignorant thing of him to do. We might not know what he did, but we know his leanings and his record, and he was certainly running meetings. In matters of security and foreign policy, we cannot be told the ins and outs of cases for the very reason of security.

As you say, an Australian citizen could be caught up (in all but deportation). Again, this doesn’t concern me one iota. You don’t agree because you say the dominant view of threat to Australia is “wrong”. I don’t know how you come to that conclusion. I thought the stats and polls were different, but even if you are right, we, as you point out, don’t know what ASIO and other intelligence services do know about possible threats. We could very well crap ourselves if we did.

When it’s all boiled down, we have to put trust in “these types”. All we get is one vote every now and then in an imperfect system which is still better than anything else available. At least we can still air our opinions without fear.

Regards

Mark

Thanks for your timely article.

I like your notion of being " ... detached but not disinterested". Quite thought provoking for me.

Cheers
Kay

Hey sneekepeete,

>>Look to the latest; an American teacher and activist was deported becuase he was seen by ASIO as a security risk.... We can expect more of the same; but it will be Australian citizens next time<<

Remember this? From the Sydney Morning Herald 21/1/04

"Ian 'Molly' Meldrum refused to eat his first meal while locked up in Los Angeles international airport yesterday, a high-ranking US customs official said today.... The veteran Australian celebrity interviewer was deported from the US last night and landed back in Melbourne this morning."

The battle has already been lost, unfortunately. Once these acts are seen as standard operating procedure, there's no turning back. Politicians just love doing stuff that curtails our freedom in the name of "looking after us". And in return for being so caring of us, they can use our money to protect themselves with bodyguards, police escorts and so on. Love it.

John Howard and his Liberal team have done more to stir up irrational fear and disrupt our lives than the terrorists.

The fear mongerers tell us about the Muslim terrorists and their atrocities, but the ones who have developed and control a nuclear arsenal that would wipe out all life on earth and have invaded and terrorised a soveriegn nation (because they were were suspected of trying to make a nuclear weapon)are the ones capitalising on all this fear to introduce all sorts of repressive laws and ID cards.

Remember the right-wing statistics on this - they say that more people have been murdered by their own governments than other nation's armies.

Remember also Thatcher's complaint that too many citizens look to governments to help them. Okay Australian Government why don't you just trust us, empower us instead of trying to cripple us.

God Bless Jimmy Dowling -- as for Liberal Member for Pine Rivers, Peter Dutton, you and your henchmen mates have lost all credibilty when it comes to talking of democracy and concern for societies members. No excuse for physically abusing a harmless little fellow like Jim.

Blowing up buses,trains or buildings only cause minor disruptions.If they can get their hands on processed uranium or nerve gas or biological weapons,they can paralyse an entire city and thus destroy whole economies.The threat is real because we know the intent is there.

These nutters have been doing this for decades.Just because a bomb has not gone off for while doesn't mean it will never happen.They could well be planning something really big.Their long term aim is to expand the Muslim philosophy and laws.When you know you've got Allah on your side,reason and common sense means nothing.

When the planes hit the Twin Towers,there were reports of many dancing in the streets here in jubilation.While most don't feel this way,a sizable proportion do.

I wholeheartedly agree with Sells. As a community we should all go on a retreat for a few days of contemplation, reflection, and honest discussion about what we really do value. I'm sure that, were they to give some real attention to the question, most people would rank a number of things higher than "staying alive". By our weakness or apathy we are letting Howard, Beazley and their cohorts lead us towards an Orwellian nightmare.

I regard every day as a bonus. What's wrong with that?

Cheers
Kay

I agree with Sells – the way we live is more important that just living.

Like David_BOAZ, I find the comment by Kenny obtuse (maybe Kenny’s logon is inspired by South Park)

Crabby, whilst you agree with Sells – I note you suggest

“By our weakness or apathy we are letting Howard, Beazley and their cohorts lead us towards an Orwellian nightmare.”

Check history - Animal Farm observed a powerful and officious bureaucratic state (run by and for the principle benefit of the pigs).
Similarly, Orwell wrote “1984” in 1948 – the significance of the “date name” was as an anagram, inspired by the growing influence of Stalin and the communist system at that time in post WWII history.

Fortunately the state which Stalin created was demolished with the collapse of USSR.

Suggesting Beazley will take us toward the Orwellian nightmare is rubbish. Suggesting Howard, a Liberal, whose political career has been devoted to opposing “the Orwellian nightmare” is pure hyperbole, verging on hysterical rubbish.

Surrendering to a terrorist threat will take us to the "nightmare". Resisting all and every terrorist threat is what we can do and what we should do. The words of Dear Margaret Thatcher ring true “All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. It must be business as usual.”

To those of us fortunate enough to have lived through the cold war and seen the collapse of state organised terrorism, we have the memories of the a lot of East Germans and other victims of communism oppression dying in attempts to get over the Iron Curtain / Berlin Wall.
Democracy works best – it is imperfect but ultimately, dying for a democratic state is better than living under a despotic one.