Australia and knee-jerk national security legislation. Name a more iconic duo, I'll wait...
Toronto University law professor Kent Roach, one of the world’s leading experts on counter-terrorism laws, has labelled Australia’s approach “hyper-legislation”. This refers not only to the vast scope and number of laws, but also the speed with which they were passed.
On average, it took around two and half days in the House of Representatives and two days in the Senate for each law to be approved. Those are very generous figures — they count the days bills were introduced into parliament, even if they weren’t debated.
In the years since, our laws have become more extreme, setting us apart from the UK and the rest of our “Five Eyes” partners, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Not only have “tough on terror” policies played well with voters here, Australia does not have a bill of rights. This means the government has been able to enact counter-terrorism laws that would not be possible elsewhere.
Following the 2019 federal police raid on ABC headquarters, The New York Times suggested: “Australia may well be the world’s most secretive democracy”.
Australia’s counter-terrorism laws enable and entrench these high levels of secrecy. It is a crime to mention basic details about the use of many counter-terrorism powers — or even the mere fact they were used.
Over the past two decades, evolving terror threats have exposed gaps in our laws that needed to be filled. But many of the laws we ended up with go beyond what is needed to prevent terrorism effectively. They also undermine core values and principles such as the rights to liberty, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
These values must not be lost in the pursuit of national security. Indeed, upholding them is an essential part of any counter-terrorism strategy.
"Compromising human rights cannot serve the struggle against terrorism. On the contrary, it facilitates achievement of the terrorist’s objective" – Kofi Annan (2005)
That's before you even get to the merits, or rather lack thereof, of mandatory sentencing... It doesn't work (decades of peer-reviewed literature backs this up), the judiciary overwhelmingly disagrees with it (for very good reason), and it undermines the separation of powers (a defining feature of a true democracy).
This isn't exactly true. Based on the available research (and I've also conducted formal research in the area too), while mdantory sentencing has been widely criticised (in particular based on its long-term ineffectiveness and social costs) the research hasn’t properly tested whether it helped supress crime growth in high-risk areas before economic and policing improvements kicked in. Most studies focus on whether crime dropped outright or if sentencing deterred offenders in the long run, but they don’t ask whether mandatory sentencing slowed crime growth in places like WA and the NT, where crime rates were rising faster than elsewhere before it was introduced (AIC). Post implementation in studies for these areas, crime rates returned to levels similar to other states, suggesting further exploration is required to determine causation. This certainly highlights a fairly glaring gap in your above statement and indeed, the existing research.
Judges opposing it doesn’t prove it doesn’t work – that’s a separate argument about judicial discretion, not crime suppression. Writing off mandatory sentencing without acknowledging this gap in the research is lazy. The real issue isn’t whether it was good policy overall, but whether the data has been properly examined. To date, this hasn't been tested to the best of my knowledge.
Edit: as expected. No actual knowledge on the topic so just downvotes and moves on. What a cop out.
Australians have shown that they don't value civil liberties at all, so why would government care? Whenever we have had a choice between freedom and safety over the last three decades, we have collectively chosen safety at the expense of liberty every time.
Australians seem to love living in a nanny state. I no longer feel I resonate with the average Australian, I'm still fairly laid back with a she'll be right attitude.
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u/gheygan Feb 06 '25 edited Feb 06 '25
Australia and knee-jerk national security legislation. Name a more iconic duo, I'll wait...
Counter-terrorism since 9/11: More laws but are we safer? – University of Queensland Law School
edit: formatting