A tussle between idealism and pragmatism

You get to bounce back pretty quickly from being placed on a control order or detained for a week or so in a five star Australian jail (even if such orders turn out be unjustified) but victims of bomb blasts almost never recover. Thankfully, we have a federal government that’s switched on enough to accept this obvious balancing exercise.

Not so misguided civil liberations, who six months after the Federal Government mercifully rammed through the counter-terrorism laws through parliament are still whingeing that the laws threaten our way of life.

The only people whose way of life is being threatened are potential terrorists. Notably, more than 20 people have been arrested on terrorist related offences and not one of the counter-terrorism powers has been abused by government officials since the law were passed.

Now that the dust has settled it is important to reflect on the political and social dialogue that occurred in the months leading up to the passing of the laws. This will ensure we are better placed in the future to deal more expeditiously and less divisively with future government interventions that place the common good above individual freedoms.

Rights worshipping civil libertarians failed to recognise that the supposed draconian measures introduced by the laws were not oppressive. Rather they are, on balance, measured responses to a new type of risk. Terrorism differs from your garden variety crime in three ways.

First, in the case of terrorism the victims are selected at random, meaning that everyone is potentially at risk.

Second, people who are willing to blow themselves up are almost impossible to stop during the course of an offence. The only defence is to catch them in the planning phase.

Finally, the potential devastation from a terrorist attack massively exceeds the fall out from traditional criminal behaviour.

Control orders, detention without trial and sedition provisions were the government’s response to this new risk.

Despite the claims that these measures “spell the end of our hard won civil liberties” and “corrupt democracy”, opinion polls consistently showed that the community supports the changes.

Fortunately, we saw that it is not easy to con the normal punter with the use of grandiose high sounding phrases. The community knows that emotive phrases are often mere puff and that when individual rights clash, we must choose the path of harm minimisation thereby promoting the common good.

Further, there was nothing new about the counter-terrorism provisions. Rather they merely extend existing measures to meet the bigger risk. Claims to the contrary were widely exaggerated.

We’ve had control orders for years. If you hassle an ex-partner or neighbour they can swan down to the local court and control your movements by getting an intervention or restraining order which limits where you can go and who you can communicate with. Detention without trial is a stock-in-trade risk management practice - that’s why a “no vacancy” sign is often erected at Remand Centres across the country.

The government did, however, get it wrong in relation to the sedition provisions. There is a big difference between saying something and doing it. Also, the best way to nullify loopy views is to dowse them with copious doses of reality. Making extreme views illegal only drives them underground where they are not subject to counter analysis, thereby increasing the risk that they will in fact be adopted by others.

The government knew that the sedition offence was a mistake. Its justification for the offence was weak and at the last minute it watered down the offence by providing a defence to the media. Despite this, it was never going to fully back down on this front. It already buckled on the proposed shoot to kill provisions and it didn’t want a pattern of yielding to outside pressure to emerge. Pride, even when it is patently misplaced, still goes a long way in the political arena.

Fortunately there is no real risk that the sedition offence (which is currently under review) will be abused. This law is merely a modern version of an offence that has been in existence but not been used for decades.

Thus, the counter-terrorism laws are no different in nature to existing investigative measures. The difference is only one of degree - as is the size of the threat.

The notion of accountability further explains the discord between the government and the community on the one hand and the libertarians of the other regarding the merits of the laws. Accountability spurns responsibility which induces pragmatism. If a bomb explodes in Australia, the community will look to the government for explanations.

In a tussle between idealism and pragmatism, the latter always wins the day. That’s why even pacifist parents have been known to smack their children to prevent them from again racing across the road.

This explains why governments in the United States and United Kingdom have introduced similar counter-terrorism measures. It is not that all these governments are compromised of unintelligent, authoritarian individuals. Rather, it is simply that they don’t have the luxury of expounding the sort of teenage idealism that comes with having no accountability for errors of judgment.

Thus, the government was always going to introduce measures of the type that are in contained in the counter-terrorism package. Moreover, future governments will react in exactly the same manner.

Idealists don’t get to govern democratic countries. We are aware that their high sounding principles are a threat to our common good. At best we let them have active observer status, where they can sound off in Parliament but lack the power to do anything. That’s why the Greens and Democrats have exhausted their support bases.

Will the counter-terrorism measures work? They will help so long as they are used sharply to focus on genuine terrorist suspects as opposed to being employed as crude measures to target significant portions of the Muslim community. Still there is no guarantee that we won’t be subjected to a terrorist attack.

In any event, the government by passing the new laws has acquired an insurance policy if an attack does occur. It can say that it did all it reasonably could to avert such an event.

And certainly civil libertarians couldn’t argue against this. Then again, when you have no accountability you get to say what you want. One thing you won’t see is a “we were wrong” statement from them when with the passing of time we find that the skies haven’t fallen in as a result of the counter-terrorism measures.

Not that they need to. That’s one of the splendours of living in a robust democracy - a democracy that has served us well with the passage of the laws.

Next time, it will serve us even better if the libertarians spare us the trouble of putting us to the task of sorting out the facts from the hyperbole and if they learn that in the end the common good will (and should) prevail over shallow notions of individual rights.