Freedom and the terrorist threat.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Rarely do I strongly disagree with the Editor, so when I read his contribution to the September issue I re-read it several times and then spent quite a lot of time thinking it through. Having gone to all the trouble, I decided that I should reply.

I will not comment of the Editor's performance appraisals of journalists and lawyers. They can look after themselves. I will concentrate on what I think is the underlying theme in the piece which suggests that governments need extraordinary powers to deal with the threat of terrorism facing the country and they cannot be expected to explain the reasons behind the execution of these powers or the evidence used to justify their actions.

Where one stands on this is, of course, not based on any objective set of facts. It seems to me that it depends on three basic value judgments on which each of us should make up our own minds.

First, how strongly do we feel about the freedoms and rights that are challenged? I doubt that many readers of Quadrant would answer, "Not much". Occasionally we hear people saying that they have nothing to fear from the government knowing everything about them and that good people do not attract the interest of the police. But I do not believe that this is the view of the Editor, though there are probably some in government who would nod sympathetically to these observations. We can probably agree in this journal that our freedoms are extremely valuable and should only be reduced in very serious cases and temporarily.

Second--and this is where it starts to get more difficult--is whether we believe that the country is faced with a serious and likely threat of terrorist action. Here I am a sceptic. There certainly are those who wish us harm and they might do terrible things but I think the risk here is fairly small. As Matthew Parris wrote in his column in the Times on September 8, there are hundreds of ways in an open society that huge damage can be caused. In fact, since the War on Terror began there have been few serious incidents in Western countries. Nothing has happened in the USA since 9/11--there was one serious explosion in Madrid and one serious plus two incompetent attempts in the UK. That is all. Parris has his reasons why this is so. My guess is that there are really relatively few terrorists willing and able to do serious stuff. Whatever the reason, so far the evidence suggests to me that the risk is not great. Governments will say that this is because of good intelligence and the anti-terrorism laws. The lack of wild elephants in Australia might be due to the fellow in the old joke clicking his fingers, too. A couple of months ago the head of the Australian Federal Police told us that the greatest future challenge facing police was organised crime's likely use of cloned part-human robots. His predecessor once said that it was international trade in stolen human organs. Scepticism is a good starting point in dealing with all attempts from policemen and governments to make us afraid.

Third, can we trust governments to get all this right? Can we trust them to use the extraordinary powers properly? I have two serious problems with becoming comfortable with this.

Governments--all governments--develop a bias towards authoritarianism. I believe that John Howard grew up with a good set of liberal values. I believe that Phillip Ruddock did once support the beliefs of Amnesty International (at least when it was a genuine nonpolitical organisation). Neither of them is a natural dictator, yet both after some years got into the habit of reaching for the coercion lever. Why this is so would be an interesting subject to study. My guess is that it happens when a politician realises how little power he or she really has: how difficult it ...