Australia's response to September 11 was like that of many other countries.
We passed extraordinary laws
that challenged long held assumptions about how the criminal law
should operate.
Those assumptions are still
being challenged today, and they cast very big questions
about Australia's anti-terror laws.
One remarkable feature of
our anti-terror laws is just how many were passed
by our Federal Parliament.
We didn't start with any laws
on the National Statute Book but quickly passed many laws
in the wake of September 11.
All up, we've passed sixty-one
new anti-terrorist statutes since September 11.
Thirteen of those were passed
during the life of the Rudd and Gillard governments,
but in fact, most of those, forty-eight in fact, were passed
during the life of the Howard government.
That meant from 2001-2007,
Australia enacted forty-eight anti-terrorist statutes
or an average of one new anti-terror law every 6.7 weeks.
It was a remarkable bout of law making
that exceeds anything like it in other countries.
In fact, one international scholar,
Kent Roach, has said that Australia suffered from hyper-legislation
where we passed laws that outstripped the ability of civil society
simply to keep up.
Australia's anti-terror laws
are remarkable not just in the number that were enacted
but also in their scope.
In fact when you look at
the detail of those laws, it's clear just how directly t
hey challenged long held assumptions.
Anti-terror law itself depends upon
the definition of what it means to commit an act of terrorism.
That's something that is defined
in Australia's Criminal Code and it says that if you undertake
a violent act of disrupt an electronic system for political,
ideological or religious reasons in an attempt to coerce or intimidate
a government or a section of the population,
then you are committing a terrorist act.
It obviously covers such things as
hijacking planes or bombing people, but it goes further than that
in also dealing with acts of liberation that even though
they involve violence and political motives,
are the sorts of things that we wouldn't necessarily
regard as terrorism.
There's no doubt under Australia's laws
that Nelson Mandela and his fight against apartheid
was an act of terrorism.
It's also clear that
the people that have fought against the Syrian government
are engaged in terrorism and that those that fought Indonesia
in East Timor were engaged in terrorism.
It shows how broad our definition is,
and even though it's well drafted compared to many others
around the world, it does encapsulate acts of violence
and acts of liberation that might be more commonly seen
as those of a freedom fighter rather than a terrorist.
In addition to defining terrorism,
Australian law also deals with a range of new offences.
You can for example be jailed
for financing terrorism or even for possessing a thing
in some way connected with terrorism.
The police also get new powers
of warrant-less searches where they can enter people's houses
without getting a warrant from a Judge or someone else.
We've got control orders
whereby people can be held potentially under house arrest
for up to a year or prevented from using the internet
or a range of other restrictions on their liberty.
We've got preventative detention orders
which mean that people can be detained without charge or trial
for up to fourteen days and even other provisions
which deal with things such as news censorship and also speech
in that it's possible to be jailed not simply for what you do,
but for what you may say.
The most extraordinary
anti-terror laws of all in Australia is those powers given to ASIO,
that's our Secret Intelligence Organisation.
ASIO can have any person, a citizen even not a suspect,
detained for potentially up to a week and forced to answer questions.
If someone is detained
and they refuse to answer those questions, they can be jailed
for up to five years and it's something that can apply
to family members and others who may not be involved
in terrorism directly, but might simply have information
about potential terrorist activity that ASIO can require them to reveal.