Aus Customs

[Worrals in the wilds]

Absolutely. Under the Howard Government, the federal agencies all perceived CT as sexy and budget enhancing, and immediately leapt on board to grab as big a slice of the pie as possible. I’m only surprised Fisheries weren’t bunging out press releases about how they were combating terrorism. (The same thing seems to be happening with the current mob in relation to environmental stuff; I imagine even ASIS is writing up a Sustainability Report and monitoring their secret bunker’s carbon footprint).


I think this led to a horrendous pressure within the relevant departments to Achieve Results. IME political interference (and there has been heaps in the federal public service) is the quickest way to screw up an investigation. Apart from training to do the job properly, the most important thing for competency in any of these departments is that agency staff have the confidence that management will back them up in their decisions and maintain a consistent policy. Once this confidence has been eroded (and it has in every department I’m aware of, although I don’t know any current ASIO people) the entire system falls apart.


However, this IS a democracy. There are references throughout this thread about judicial reviews, the Admin Appeal Tribunal and the extensive media coverage that has surrounded the few gulagings we’ve had in Oz. When media outlets are silenced and names of arrested dissidents are not released I might feel that my rights are being eroded. Until then, however, I would say the systemic checks and balances are fully operational and possible abuses of power are independently investigated.


There will never be agreement between the public and the law enforcement community about the correct balance between powers of officers/agents and rights of suspects. People will always be concerned that their rights have been stomped on, and LEAs will always be concerned that they are hamstrung by restrictions and prevented from doing their jobs properly. You simply cannot enforce these sort of laws without search powers, and you can’t always explain to people (or to Today Tonight) why they were targeted.
Remember too, that there are bad people out there. Many Aussies believe that there is no such thing as an Australian terrorist or bomber, and this is simply naive. We are not all law abiding and community minded, and without organizations such as the AFP (however many flaws they may have), the minority would likely wreak havoc within a short period of time.

Naturally the media like to polarize the community by running emotive articles on the ‘He’s a terrorist / He’s a victim’ continuum, sometimes running one of each in the same edition of the same paper. Apart from selling heaps of papers, this doesn’t actually achieve anything useful. Remember too, that by and large the media is incapable of reporting anything accurately or completely. You all know the mangling aviation incidents get on page 1, and this also happens to high profile terrorism stuff. The inherent spookiness of such investigations and the Privacy Act only makes this worse.

The departments are all terrified of media criticism because their grubby little ministers lose face over it. Unfortunately this fear will sometimes override the right thing to do, be it going after a suspect or backing off. Successful senior public servants tend to value Self over both the agency and the correct course of action (that’s how they became successful) so they will also put pressure on the serfs to produce a particular outcome.

On the agency turf wars, one remembers an incident where a suspect was surveilled by about 14 different people from 5 different agencies, because none of them trusted the others to either do it properly or share the info. As he was the last pax to check in on the last flight of the evening, the only people in the whole terminal were him and the various surveillance spooks, all jostling in the background and giving each other dirty looks. While there’s been a lot of internal propaganda about sharing and All Being on the Same Team, the old prejudices won’t be going away any time soon. However, I understand this is a big problem with LEAs right across the Western world.