Isn't blowing people up already illegal?

The only emotion approaching terror I felt last week was when I saw the numbers in parliament for and against amending the Terrorism Suppression Act.

Our nervous legislators are lined up 109 to 12 in favour of pushing through a law change with potentially appalling consequences if the wrong kinds of people were to one day have the power to enforce it.

We live in meek times, and we have the parliament we deserve.

Aside from the Greens and the Maori Party - easily disparaged as liberal flakes by the cosy cousins of the centre left and right - only Rodney Hide stood up to state the obvious: "The very freedoms that we are trying to protect are being eroded." Maybe he's got the collected works of Antonio Gramsci by his bed these days (they're both interested in capitalism, after all), but at least his ideological aversion to big government is consistent.

The only ripple on the surface of the Labour- National consensus took the form of some watery warnings from the Opposition that the police were on notice over the recent "anti-terror" raids, and that the party did not take giving them more powers lightly. In other words, "Here, have this bloody big stick . . . but mind who you whack with it."

This grand coalition on national security is reminiscent of what has happened in the United States Congress. The Democrats, despite a mandate from voters at the last election to rope in the Bush war party and get out of Iraq, have talked tough but walked soft when it comes to blocking the funding required to keep the military machine working. Even so, there seems to be greater public awareness of and interest in that debate than New Zealanders have shown in the removal of some of their own fundamental civil liberties.

The details of the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill have been well aired: the entrenching of power in the prime minister, the invention of a new crime of committing a "terrorist act", the provision for hearings held in closed court using classified security information, and so on. But behind it all lies the great unexamined concept of "terror" itself.

Leaving the legal niceties aside for now, there is something semantically absurd about a single word underpinning the redrawing of boundaries in a free society. At its root, "terror" is just a noun meaning "extreme fear". George Bush didn't just declare war on a noun, as has often been jokingly claimed, but on an emotion, too. Even if you use "fear" as a verb, it only means to be afraid of something. But then, the War on Being Extremely Afraid of Something doesn't have quite the same ring.

Within our anti-terrorism laws the definitions are little better than facile tautologies: a terrorist act being something designed to cause terror, a terrorist entity being an entity we or our allies have designated a terrorist, around and around in circles. Beneath all the legislative verbiage lies a nebulous abstraction.

What we really mean by "terrorism", of course, is people blowing stuff up, usually for political ends. Personally, I'm all for stopping the blowing up of stuff, especially the blowing up of other people. But last time I looked, we already had a fine bunch of laws designed to achieve just that.

Why the need for a special category of offences and protections? Well, as we've heard so many times, September 11 changed everything. By successfully wounding America on its own soil, al Qaeda lent new and urgent meaning to what was becoming (despite the best efforts of past presidents and other scaremongers) a bit of a tired old noun. What really changed, however, was the domestic political climate that has allowed constitutional outrages to be perpetrated with little or no dissent.

The term "terrorist" itself is as old as the French Revolution and was for quite a while used to describe violent acts done by states to suppress their own populations. Like beauty, though, terror is in the eye of the beholder. While many governments routinely commit what should still be called terrorist acts upon defenceless civilians, the label's application is now so subjective and loaded with geopolitical bias as to be little more than a synonym for "the bad guys".

The other obvious problem is that you cannot prevent something merely by naming it. There are laws against murder, but it still happens. Creating a crime of "terrorism" cannot prevent some maniac walking into a crowded foyer wearing a Semtex singlet.

What can stop it is good police work, and therein lies the truth about the hysteria behind most recent anti-terror efforts. What has worked is conventional crime fighting. What hasn't is the quasi-fascist, imperial thuggery of Bush's war on terror and all its trickle-down lunacies. As was observed after September 11, what was needed was hard-headed police action (albeit in the military sense rather than the community constable sense), not shock and awe.

But overreaction is all the rage these days. The bill will pass, obviously. If and when some less benign administration inherits it in some even more fearful future, where merely protesting about it might brand you an enemy of the state . . . no, it could never happen here.

- © Fairfax NZ News