Shouts from the desert

It may seem odd that I have not commented on this before. After all, the Prime Minister's statement last week that there was a specific terrorist threat gave rise to a lot of comments in the media, some suggesting that the PM was making the whole thing up to take attention from the industrial relations legislation or to create a perceived need for the rest of his anti-terrorism laws. Such comments failed to recognise an important element - a lie of that kind would become apparent very quickly, and it is improbable that the PM (or anybody else with the slightest touch with reality) would lie in circumstances where he did not believe he would get away with it. Then the Attorney-General stated that the changes in the law might not result in any specific arrests, giving rise to more claims that the PM was using the claim for political purposes. The Attorney-General's statement was, however, consistent with operational requirements in a case like this - you must, as far as possible, leave some ambiguity. Of course that brings us to the other attack on the Prime Minister's claim - that by making it he compromised a long-running investigation. That criticism, too, lacks sufficient foundation. The PM's actions were within the possible range of reasonable responses depending on the information he had before him.

In the circumstances, my view was and remains that the PM did nothing wrong or even inappropriate in making the claim he did. Further, any attempt to make some comment raised an odds-on probability that events would soon prove any (and likely all) conjectures made wrong. In such a situation it would be silly to enter the fray prematurely.

Then we have the arrests this week. It is a dramatic turn of events because it is the first time ever that an alleged terrorist operation on Australian soil has been prevented by arrests.

This is not, as some claim, the first time terrorism has played out on Australian soil. For people in Sydney who are old enough to remember, the Hilton Hotel bombing in the 13^th of February 1978, which killed two garbage collectors, stands out as an obvious example. That attack resulted in two arrests and convictions (one subsequently quashed) over a decade later.

There is no categorical list of terrorist incidents on Australian soil, but such incident include: the assassination of the Turkish Consul-General in Sydney in December 1980; the bombing of the Israeli Consulate-General and the Hakoah Club in Sydney in December 1982; and the bombing of the Turkish Consulate-General in Melbourne in November 1986.

The arrests this week have caused some to claim that they demonstrate an attack on Australian soil is a real possibility, and so justify the new laws, and others to claim that they demonstrate that police have all the powers they need because they demonstrate that they were able to stop a terrorist attack. The arrests do not provide any basis for drawing either of these conclusions.

The claim by the Prime Minister has been that the new laws are needed because a terrorist attack in Australia is a real possibility. However terrorist attacks in Australia have always been a real possibility. The fact that an alleged terrorist plot has been uncovered now does not suddenly make it a possibility - as a single incident it does not even provide a basis for reassessing the probability of further attacks. Given the size of modern populations and the chances of seriously aggrieved groups forming within them, it is not surprising that an alleged terrorist cell has been discovered - what is surprising is that we do not have a regular stream of terrorist incidents taking place.

The claim that the arrests demonstrate no new laws are needed rests on an assumption that the alleged terrorist operation in this case is typical of all terrorist organisations and so future operations will be just as easily foiled. There is nothing to justify such an assumption. By all reports, it seems this operation was conducted by a group of people of underwhelming intellectual capacity, who had no understanding of basic requirements of operational secrecy - the alleged leader of the group even drew attention to himself by making public statements supporting Osama bin Laden. Make no mistake - a terrorist operation run by an intelligent and competent commander could easily bypass any security measures we currently have in place, and even any security measures that are currently planned.

Given that assessment of the threat you might be thinking I support the proposed anti-terrorism laws - but you would be wrong.

Until recently, our laws were considered adequate to deal with the threat. If it is thought necessary to change the laws, then it is not enough to say that terrorist attacks are a real possibility - it is necessary to provide probabilities. We need to be told what the change in objective probabilities of a terrorist attack has been over time. We also need to be told how the new laws are expected to alter those probabilities - how they will change the probability of an attack. Without this information, we simply do not have any basis for concluding that the new laws are necessary. Without the information we need to evaluate the necessity of the new laws, we must, as a matter of course, oppose them because they constrain civil liberties.