Dale Mills
Victoria
The Terrorism (Community Protection) Act 2003 was passed in Victoria because the government and police said it was needed to combat terrorism. However, a year later, none of its provisions had been used. The law allows police greater powers to monitor telephones, place bugs, conduct secret surveillance, seize items, and use "sneak and peak" covert search warrants.
A police spokesperson was even unable to confirm whether or not any warrants had been applied for, according to the September 13 Melbourne Herald Sun.
South Australia
According to a September 13 ABC News online report, police in SA will get extra powers to search people and their property. The federal government said that the Police Powers Bill contains extra powers to help combat terrorism.
SA Labor Premier Mike Rann said that his government also wants extra laws to stop incitement to acts of terrorism because "that is as un-Australian as you can get".
Western Australia
On the same day, it was announced in WA that police will be given extra powers to stop and search people at random and enter people's houses without their knowledge, in order to combat terrorism (of course).
Labor Premier Geoff Gallop announced the new powers, which will allow the police commissioner, rather than a judge, to issue special warrants that will allow police officers to search people, cars and target locations for up to seven days.
Monash University library loans desk
The police and security services' focus on the Muslim community has, inevitably, led to growing fear and alienation among young Muslims.
According to research reported by ABC's Lateline on September 12, the Global Terrorism Research Unit at Monash University in Melbourne found that young Muslims are reluctant to report suspicious activity because of a fear of drawing attention to themselves.
Dr David Wright-Neville said that young Muslims fear that if they contact the Australian authorities, "they themselves might be punished for doing that, or that their community might be punished. And I think that that really looms as a major problem for us as a society."
Wright-Neville said that initiatives such as the "anti-terror hotline" (of fridge magnet fame) simply made matters worse. Although it received about 30,000 calls a year, the "vast majority of those calls have been about innocent people ... Trained intelligence officers with many, many years of experience in counter-terrorism find it virtually impossible to identify at first glance who is or who isn't a terrorist, so to expect Mrs Smith or Mrs Jones to identify a terrorist and then dob them in to the terrorist hotline I think is simply a ludicrous assumption."
A PhD student of Dr Wright-Neville, Abraham Rushdi, said he was visited by the Australian Federal Police "to ascertain if I was suspicious in carrying out any terrorist attacks or activities ... I explained I was doing an honours [thesis]... and those books were directly related to my studies." He says he was a victim of ethnic profiling "where the Australian Federal Police took my Islamic name and linked that with books I had been borrowing on terrorism ... and [the AFP] thought this might be suspicious activity."
From Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005.
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