Does Australia need new laws against terrorism? In 1979 Mr Justice Windeyer of the NSW Supreme Court argued that all the forms of violent wrongdoing that are called terrorism are already punishable as crimes under Commonwealth or state law. The best safeguard against new terrors and apprehensions, he told the Hope Royal Commission on Australia’s Intelligence Agencies, lay in the rigorous enforcement of existing criminal law rather than in making new laws expressly about ‘terrorism’.

His words were heeded then, but they have since been increasingly ignored by Australian lawmakers. Indeed, Prime Minister John Howard’s uncritical acceptance of President George W. Bush’s ‘war against terror’ has led to the formulation of more and more draconian laws in Australia, as well as the fusion of police and military forces and functions that should remain separate. Ministers seek to justify these measures in what Jenny Hocking, in Terror Laws, describes as a debasement of language: a banal, simplistic, cartoon-like dichotomy of good and bad, of ‘evil’ versus ‘freedom-loving’ people. Specific instances of political violence are abstracted from their political and social context. ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, ‘rogue states’ and ‘axis of evil’, indeed the very notion of a ‘war on terror’ depend on a rejection of complexity and a denial of reason. They are dangerous forms of US, and now Australian, baby talk.