The Canberra Times has a rousing piece on a speech given by the ACT’s Chief Justice Higgins to the Isaacs Law Society. The subject being the new terror laws Mr. Stanhope signed us up to after the secret police scared the brown stuff out of him at the Premier’s summit.
“Curiously, the law allows ASIO to conduct such interrogations in secret; detained persons who explain their week-long disappearance without prior permission from ASIO can be found guilty of a criminal offence and jailed for up to five years.
The terrifying thing is that these new laws are probably not going to be resolved this side of a massive campaign of civil disobedience, in which large numbers of conscientious citizens will need to go to jail (and also risk giving succour to, and becoming fellow travellers with, the real bad guys out there).
The alternative is the Orwellian vision of perpetual threat justifying perpetual “vigilance”, with the political class (loosely divided into “Labor” and “Liberal”) lording it over us with ever increasing interventions in our lives requiring ever greater “donations” to curry favour with their organisations.
The long nightmare is here. It’s not islamic extremists we need to fear though.
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