The Federal Government will develop a new anti-extremism strategy, appoint a national terrorism coordinator and change Australia's system of terror threat alerts in response to a review of counter-terrorism measures.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott will announce the changes in a speech on national security today, based on the recommendations of a counter-terrorism review commissioned in August.

"Australia has entered a new, long-term era of heightened terrorism threat, with a much more significant home-grown element," Mr Abbott will say.

Mr Abbott will also quote an increase in the number of Australians returning from conflicts in Syria and Iraq to back up his argument that "the number of potential terrorists ... who may live in our midst is rising".

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-23/tony-abbott-to-announce-new-government-anti-extremism-strategy/6200042

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Hooplah... hooplalah... The speech to the masses has already been leaked, supplied and sanctioned by the office of the primal minster. We're in for more of the same with more of it. ASIO goofed, thus we, the public at large, is going to be punished... The police state is just around the corner... We're a bunch of bad behaving monkeys... 

On an emotional level, it was a speech that began by inspiring fear, moved on to anger and ended with resolve. It's an old formula.

"People are anxious about the national security threats we face," the Prime Minister noted. And he made sure of it.

"By any measure, the threat to Australia is worsening," Abbott said. "The signs are ominous. ASIO currently has over 400 high-priority counter-terrorism investigations. That's more than double the number a year ago." And so on. This may be factually correct, but is it a prime minister's job to engender fear among his people? Isn't that the terrorists' job?

As an authority on the subject has pointed out: "The indirect costs of terrorism are, overall, significantly greater than the direct physical ones," writes the former deputy chief of counter-terrorism for the CIA, Paul Pillar.

"They start with the fear instilled in individual citizens, and what it leads those citizens to do. The fear itself – the sheer mental discomfort – is a cost."

As the word suggests, indeed shouts, terrorism is the use of terror. Fear is used to weaken a nation's judgement and its unity.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/tony-abbotts-national-security-address-a-siren-call-to-the-nation-20150223-13mmqo.html

But as Tony Turdy tells us that Citizenship of Australia is a "privilege" to be cherished, he still holds on to his Pommy passport ILLEGALLY in the Aussie Parliament, unless he can prove to all of us, he resigned it when he entered parliament as the law demands. He still is an impostor until proven to the contrary.... Kick Abbott in the budgies. ASIO goofed a couple of times, but there is no need to yet increase "anti-terra" legislation that will make all of us feel like convicts once more....

There is no phrase so bankrupt as: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." We're human beings, and we all have things to hide. We all have revelations to fear. Our secrets don't have to be criminal or seditious. We needn't be active terror cell members. Our simple human frailties are enough to indict us when exposed to view, and that is the function of retaining and searching metadata. To expose. To indict. To suppress.

Speaking during his statement on national security, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said: "Access to metadata is the common element to most successful counter terrorism investigations. It's essential in fighting most major crimes, including the most abhorrent of all - crimes against children."

Some heinous crimes should be exposed, of course. Some terrible schemes need suppressing with the full force of law and state-sanctioned violence. But even if that is the underlying purpose of these proposed laws – and that is a dubious claim at best – only the most naive and trusting of citizens would cede to the state the Orwellian powers the Abbott government seeks to claim.

By conflating child abuse with threats to national security, Tony Abbott does more than collapse any distinction between purely personal outrages and high level strategic threats from both state and non-state actors. He makes, or tries to make, a political case for soft totalitarianism.

It should not matter that only the rarest of paragons can rest easy knowing they have nothing to hide. Even they should join the rest of us in our guilt and shame at resisting this intrusion. At its heart it inverts the principle that we are all innocent until proven guilty, erecting an architecture of state surveillance that presumes a neverending potential guilt for the most banal of transgressions.

Ever torrented Game of Thrones or Walking Dead? Listened to a pirated song or album? You are much more likely to find yourself the eventual target of metadata trawling than some beardy nutter with a home-made  Islamic State flag. Bankstown council has already successfully approached the federal government for access to metadata. The RSPCA has access. The Australian Racing Board would like it, perhaps because their sibling organisation in Queensland can get your metadata without even going to the bother of securing a warrant. Journalists receiving leaked information from government sources can expect to be targeted immediately after the passage of any metadata retention laws. 

As our lives are increasingly lived online, they are increasingly open to scrutiny by anyone with access to the digital trail we leave behind us with our phones, tablets and computers. Ironically, the most professional of the "bad guys" who so exercise the Prime Minister's anxiety have known this for years and have learned to exercise signals discipline to secure their communications from the sort of surveillance that is about to become routine for the rest of us.

John Birmingham is a Fairfax columnist.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/national-security-measures-or-a-government-of-stalkers-20150223-13m68r.html

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All one can hope now is that the Australian senate will stop this loony nonsense from the rat turd... But we cannot trust the "learnered" idiots on the other side either: they might want to appear on the side of strength in constipation, they might want to be part of the tightening of the buttock sphincter, they might want to give the rat turd who heads this deceitful government the responsibility of implementing a ruthless fascist scheme, so they can decry it, but use it themselves when the time comes as their "inheritance"...

The metadata is also an invention designed to lessen our democratic rights under the implementation of the TPP, which this rat-turd government is eager to implement — as if to wash its hands of its own existence. 

I could be wrong but I sense some misogyny galore against Triggs, from our turd-in-chief... 

Allegations that the Abbott government breached the criminal code by offering Gillian Triggs an incentive to resign as president of the Australian Human Rights Commission are likely to be referred to the Australian Federal Police.

The secretary of the Attorney-General's department, Chris Moraitis, on Tuesday confirmed that Professor Triggs was told a senior role would be available if she resigned after being told she no longer had the confidence of Attorney-General, George Brandis.

Mr Moraitis denied explicitly linking Professor Triggs' resignation to the job offer and said he did not take the offer as "an inducement" and did not use the word "resignation" during a meeting with Professor Triggs on February 3.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/defiant-gillian-tr...

Tony Abbott wants the corrosive leadership chatter eating away at his authority to go away.

But it is Abbott who is feeding the insurrection with aggressive ill-judged performances that reveal a leader incapable of change, and determined not to listen.

A glance at the backbench when the Prime Minister is at the dispatch box hints at a dissatisfaction which has only hardened since the spill motion a fortnight ago.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/an-aggressive-t...