A climate of terror?
AAP/Lukas Coch
The Abbott government’s shift from Voltaire to Orwell
last week is an act of political desperation. Replacing divisive
changes to the Racial Discrimination Act (because they have no hope of
going anywhere) with an equally divisive ramping up of counter-terrorism
laws suggests the government is using up the last reserves of its
political capital.
The carbon tax repeal did nothing to lift polling for the government. The looming showdown in the Senate over the class war-inspired budget is going to get very ugly, as the government racks up breaking a runaway number of election promises and a record number of own goals.
So what governments on the left, right and centre in western
liberal-democracies often do when they are cornered is play the
counter-terrorism card. What defines the modern state is that it has a
monopoly over both the legitimate use of violence and intelligence in
the name of national security.
The Nixon tapes released this month in the US reveal that in 1970,
the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, urged president Nixon to keep
the Vietnam War going for a further two years for political reasons – to
maximise chances of re-election. Thousands of American lives were lost
during those two years.
When a sitting government is in political peril, it might be
encouraged to play the national security card to put itself on a ‘war
footing’ whether this war is with alleged jihadists who have taken up
arms against Australian allies, or a trade sanctions war with Russia, or
a war with an enemy who Brandis believes:
… germinates within our suburbs.With the exception of surveillance of phone numbers and IP address
records and restrictions on Australians travelling to places where there
is specifically Islamic conflict such as Syria, details of the proposed
overhaul of counter-terrorism arrangements have not been forthcoming.
What is evident is that just raising an alarm about national security
fears is likely to play to enough of the electorate to give the
government a lift.
The proof that this is being done for political reasons is in three
parts. First, when in opposition, the IP snooping laws alone were
vigorously pilloried by the same politicians who are introducing them now.
Second is the fact that amendments to laws governing Australia’s national security organisations were already introduced in July without any fanfare, so the ‘Team Australia’ press conference was calculated to isolate Muslim communities.
And third is the fact that Abbott has centralised government to the
prime minister’s office (in a form almost identical to Kevin Rudd). As Peter Hartcher
notes, this office leaked the misnamed ‘metadata’ policy to Sydney’s
Daily Telegraph newspaper before Cabinet had heard of it when it met
last week.
This last revelation is potentially explosive but, fortunately for
Abbott, and unfortunately for Australia’s political culture, the
mainstream media has bought into this latest episode in a very old
narrative about counter-terrorism.
There may be little doubt that at least some of the jihadist
activities that the government has recently pointed to are very real,
and that they may one day pose a threat that could reach Australian
soil. But consider that no terrorists fatalities have actually ever
occurred on Australian soil (with the ambiguous exception of the Sydney
Hilton bombing in 1978), and that the most celebrified of so-called
jihadists – David Hicks and ‘Jihad’ Jack Thomas – have been from
non-Islamic family backgrounds looking to be participants in a macarbre
kind of war-tourism rather than driven by extreme elements of an Islamic
counter-modernity.
Because of this, some have argued
– prior to the Abbott government coming to power – that Australia’s
counter-terrorism laws are an excessive over-reaction to 9/11.
Nevertheless, we are likely to hear more about counter-terrorism from the government, although commentators
have already cautioned against the perils of overplaying this card. It
could backfire with the electorate, just as ditching the race hate law
repeals have alienated more extreme members of the Liberal Party.
The role of the media in public perceptions of terrorism has
dramatically escalated since 9/11. In 2006, two Swiss economists, Bruno
Frey and Dominic Rohner conducted a brilliant study
into the media-terrorism relationship. In their research into the
reporting of terrorism in two international broadsheet newspapers, they
argue that mainstream media and terrorist groups help each other out.
The readership and profits of newspapers increase following terrorist
incidents while the terrorist groups get publicity, feeding further
acts of terror in an ever-expanding cycle of violence and spectacle. For
this reason, tabloid newspapers in particular are very keen to report
even the slightest hint of terrorism.
But we could also point here to Margaret Thatcher’s very wise policy
on terrorism – that if you really wish to protect citizens, you do so by
discouraging media coverage of it. “Media coverage is the oxygen of
terrorism”, observed Thatcher. If politicians act irresponsibly and feed
media with national security fears, they can actually incite race hate,
violence and extreme acts. Therefore, the only time a government would
play this card is when it is itself under threat.
We saw it play out last week like an object lesson in how to feed a
news cycle to the point where it can feed off itself. The paradigm case
for what unfolded last week can be seen in the work of Paul Lazarsfeld,
who wrote a foundational text in communications studies in 1941, which took up a case study of research on the generation of fear in the media at the time presented as a ‘fable’.
In it, Lazarsfeld describes the way public opinion evolves in a
dynamic interaction between political actors, journalists, ‘opinion
leaders’ and audiences, with his paradigm case study being – you guessed
it – the religious or racial profiling of ‘aliens’.
Reading the ‘fable’ in his essay, set in 1940s America before it
entered the war, you could be forgiven for thinking he was writing about
last week in Australia. The forerunner to the media current was the story reported across many news outlets from late July about arrest warrants for two ex-Sydney men, Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf, fighting in Syria.
The focus on these men stemmed from the earlier publication of images
of one of them holding up decapitated heads of fighters killed in the
Syrian conflict. Then the Daily Telegraph ran a story saying the men
pledged to bring the horror of jihadi violence back to Australian
shores.
In the online version of the Daily Telegraph, this story is the only
story since July to have remained in the top five most popular stories
for each day, reaching number one spot on August 6, the day after Abbott
and Brandis gave their press conference.
But on the day of the presser, the details of the electronic
monitoring of terrorism had already been leaked to the Daily Telegraph,
further legitimising the need for a political announcement about
national security. Abbott’s speech took its script from the paper rather
than the other way around.
Click to enlarge
Simon Benson’s article makes it clear:
The government will today unveil national securityThe statements themselves drew an angry reaction by Muslim-Australians. They were followed by the Weekend Australian finding an ‘expert’, who warned of a 100-year war with radical Islam.
legislative changes – first revealed by the Daily Telegraph – in
response to the recent phenomenon of Australian jihadists fighting
abroad. Mr Brandis has named the domestic threat to national security
the most serious “in decades”.
The result has been the creation of division in the Australian
community and a nasty shift in political culture set to rival the
depravity of the asylum seeker situation. Abbott’s presser even
foreshadowed that the revamp of counter-terrorism measures would emulate
the techniques used in Operation Sovereign Borders.
As with border control, the creation of ‘Team Australia’ is made
possible by defining some Australian citizens as aliens that are either
real or imagined threats to an idealised Australian way of life.
The outcome is that this particular form of ‘terrorism’ in our midst
is officially discovered as a ‘problem’ that is projected beyond the
current newscycle to be one we must face for 100 years. And The
Australian has followed this up today with ‘exclusive images’ of the
severed heads from July being held up by the son of one of the
jihadists, followed by comments from Abbott on the barbarism of this
image.
What is really sad about this latest turn in the news cycle is that
it taps into fears that are irrational in the sense they are founded on
judgements about risk that are way down the hierarchy of risks that
really face Australians, compared to the most obvious forms of risk:
health and global warming.
The great irony of last week’s events is that Abbott actually does
have a legitimate ‘moral panic’ card he can play to the electorate that
would do a much better job than terrorism in generating something for
the voters to really think about.
Suppose Abbott said that intelligence (from climate scientists)
suggests that Australia is in grave danger from climate change; that the
impacts will be catastrophic to our health and our communities; and
that the government intends to do something about it.
Abbott could even give it a military frame of reference and point out that defence experts overseas see it as the greatest looming threat to national security; that climate change has already been the catalyst for the Syrian conflict; and that it is a threat multiplier for so many new potential conflicts.
The speech would be very easy to write, and Abbott just has to wait for the next extreme weather event to deliver it.
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