42 steps to serfdom: What Price Security?

In their newly published short book What Price Security?, legal academics Andrew Lynch and George Williams point out that federal parliament has passed 37 laws dealing with terrorism during the past five years, an average of one every seven weeks. Another five pieces of legislation have been introduced. It is not, they argue, that new laws were not warranted but that we have overreacted.

Robert Menzies said as prime minister when introducing national security legislation in 1939: "The greatest tragedy that could overcome a country would be for it to fight a successful war in defence of liberty and to lose its own liberty in the process." As the book points out, Menzies ignored his own warning when, after the war, he introduced legislation banning the Communist Party and associations with it, though he was stymied by the High Court and a referendum. The anti-terror laws, argue Lynch and Williams, strongly echo that legislation.

They detail how ASIO's power to detain people is more extensive than that given to similar organisations in Britain, Canada and the US. Only in Australia can non-suspects be held in secret by an intelligence agency. Organisations can be banned not only for planning a terrorist act but for advocating one and people can be jailed for associating with such a body, even though they may disagree with what it says. The authors point out that control orders and preventive detention are a significant departure from accepted legal principles, such as not detaining people without trial or restricting their liberty without a criminal conviction.

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