Shouts from the desert

Senator Amanda Vanstone, Minister for Immigration, has been attacked by the opposition for suggesting that many of the additional security measures taken since 2001 offer no real increase in security and are just there to make people feel better. Of course the opposition called for her resignation.

Senator Vanstone is expected to admit later today that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning - presumably the opposition will call for her resignation over that too.

So, in combatting terrorism, how much use are measures such as denying passengers metal cutlery? None at all.

The Minister was apparently referring to anti-terrorism measures in general, although she gave specific examples of ways in which a terrorist, now unable to walk on a flight with a Stanley knife or to spread butter on their toast (or stale bread roll) with a metal butter knife, might be able to do as much damage with a broken wine glass held to the neck or a pencil driven through the eye into the brain. She is absolutely right - the human body is an incredibly fragile thing, and there is no measure that we can put in place to prevent a hijacker having some means of causing damage comparable to that which could be caused by the box cutters used in the World Trade Center attacks.

The measures in the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005 are no exception - their predominant purpose is to make people feel better. Their effect on the actual risk of death from terrorist attack is likely to be too small to measure, if not zero. A stupid terrorist without an understanding of principles of operational secrecy will get caught anyway - that much is guaranteed. But a smart terrorist operation leader will factor in any new laws and make adjustments to their compartmentalisation and secrecy strategies to ensure that they never come on the radar of police and security agencies.

The problem for Senator Vanstone is that she has strayed from the Prime Minister's script. That's fine for a backbencher like Senator Joyce, but Senator Vanstone is a Cabinet Minister - on accepting an appointment as a Minister of State, she agreed to maintain Cabinet solidarity. This is, quite literally, a Faustian bargain - in order to obtain a position of power, the Minister agrees that the public interest comes second to the interest of the Cabinet in maintaining a united front. If they find themselves placed in a position where they cannot do that, they are required to resign so that somebody who is less constrained by a sense of duty to the public can be appointed in their place.

Since the duty of solidarity is owed to the Cabinet, such a resignation is owed only to the Cabinet, and it is not for the opposition to call for the resignation in such circumstances - nor is it for a Government back-bencher to call for the resignation. Given that De-Anne Kelly has not been asked to resign over recent comments that seemed supportive of Senator Joyce's opposition to elements of Government policy, it seems unlikely that Senator Vanstone will be asked to resign for her comments this week.

That she is unlikely to be asked to resign is a good thing. Cabinet solidarity has the potential to be a cancer on democracy. Requiring people who hopefully have entered politics in order to serve the public, to then turn around and put the interests of their colleagues ahead of the interests of the public, is an abominable limitation that in my view seriously disrupts the ability of the Government to achieve objectively correct outcomes.