Two steps backwards when trying to lead the march
Louise Dodson's thoughtful opinion piece ( SMH) was right to draw the link between Orwell's nightmares in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and some of the laws recently passed by our parliament. For a prosperous democracy that supposedly values individual rights, and opposes repressive, terrorist ideologies, our legislature has shown a great deal of contempt for many of our hard-won freedoms and values.
We are locking up refugee children in detention centres as a matter of routine. We are subjecting those acquitted by our courts to (now legalised) police harassment. Our freedom of speech, whether on terrorists' views or euthanasia, is being strangled.
This is not the Australia I want to live in, and I am ashamed of the government's response to the post-2001 world. We had every opportunity to take the moral high-ground against "terrorism," by fighting bad arguments with good ones. Instead, we lock up those who don't agree with us, stigmatise ethnic minorities and give extremists yet more reasons to spite us.
These may be dangerous times, but we cannot simultaneously take two steps backwards, and be seen to be leading the march of democracy, diversity and personal freedom forwards.