The stage management of Monday’s big security jamboree at Australian Federal Police HQ was worthy of an Academy Award.
Lots of bunting, people in ribboned uniforms, spooks, coppers and a cast of old political stagers – George Brandis, Kevin Andrews, Michael Keenan, Peter Dutton and the prime minister himself – all doing their best to keep their gravest expressions fixed in place.
Serious issues are at stake, yet the difficulty for the Abbott government is that not many citizens take it seriously. This is an outfit with a bad attack of the totters, and in these circumstances it’s not surprising that a call to arms falls flat.
In his 17 months as prime minister Tony Abbott has addressed the topic of national security and terror on over 320 occasions, in media releases, speeches, doorstops, interviews, and so on.
Abbott feels secure talking about security, but a seasoned theatre critic might think the whole death cult show is wearing a little thin – something like the 250,000th performance of The Mousetrap.
Monday’s effort was no exception. There were generalities, reheated proposals on citizenship and immigration, a plea that we temper our deep well of “generosity and decency”, that free speech and the presumption of innocence take a back seat and that ill-defined lines in the sand need to be redrawn.
Contradictions abound. He said that the generosity and decency of Australians should not be exploited by people who would do us harm – this from a prime minister who has spent a great slab of his political life selling a refugee policy that appealed to our least generous and tolerant instincts. Australian generosity has been well and truly diluted by now.
His unrefined ideas about immigration, citizenship and Muslim leaders doing more to pull their weight is a cheap appeal to the least worthy instinct – xenophobia.
Abbott gave Muslim leaders a kick in the shins while at the same time the government is trying to engage them in anti-jihadist strategies. A curious kick-smooch straddle.
Then there is the PM’s belief that rights of the individual and safety of the community are mutually exclusive and require a “trade-off”. In a fine moment of having two-bob each way, Abbott said:
We will never sacrifice our freedoms in order to defend them – but we will not let our enemies exploit our decency either.
Freedom ... decency. One or the other? He then proceeded to get stuck straight into freedom with proposals to, in effect, widen the boundaries of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to add “vilification and inciting hatred”. The same prime minister who not so long ago was trailing some sort of perverted free speech notion by seeking the wholesale shredding of s18C.
And more latitude for police strong-arm tactics, based on little more than hunches.
If there is a choice between latitude for suspects or more powers to police and security agencies – more often, we should choose to support our agencies.
Somehow or other this has to gel with “never sacrificing our freedoms in order to defend them”.
The tipping point has well and truly been exceeded. We’ve already tipped over into an over-abundance of laws, apparatchiks, and institutions seeking to thwart the possibility of terrorist assaults on home soil.
The security machine is already bloated, able to extract ever widening powers from frail governments.
The two reports produced this week – into the Martin Place siege and the review of Australia’s counter-terrorism machinery – said in different ways that lone terrorist attacks by people who don’t use telephones or the internet in planning their activities are very hard to detect and in all likelihood cannot always be prevented.
That is not really telling us something that we don’t already know. It’s not as though the plans for mass surveillance through data retention will make any difference to the ability to detect single-handed zealots.
Indeed, the two reports were the work of astute Sir Humphries, writing with one eye on their political masters. Hence, the finding in the Martin Place siege report that no one really stuffed-up:
the judgments made by government agencies were reasonable and that the information that should have been available to decision makers was available.
And littered through the counter-terrorism review were nice bottled statements of the bleeding obvious:
We need to acknowledge that we have entered a new long-term paradigm of heightened terrorism threat with a much more significant ‘home grown’ element.
What was missing were rigorous, independent investigations done outside the public service, with full powers to probe and test assertions. We’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report for that.
So despite all the interminable speechifying, the jingling of top brass, the flags, the sideshow line-up of dignitaries, we really are no safer now or tomorrow than we were before the commencement of yesterday’s parade. The question though, is whether Tony Abbott feels any safer.
