The amount of taxpayer money soaked up by the post 9/11 pretence at airport security must run into the hundreds of millions. How many shoe searches? How many sheep yard herds of frustrated travellers shuffling toward hypersensitive metal detectors? How many confiscated nail files? All for our own good of course.
All just slivers of comfort and convenience willingly sacrificed in the noble cause of fighting terror and making the skies safe for the innocent traveller. What piffle.
If one thing is proven beyond doubt by the bikie brawl at Sydney airport it is that the gestures of the past decade toward airport security are nothing more than a highly expensive, inconvenient public relations posture. Never mind the strictest security strictures imaginable, all you had to do to kill on the check-in concourse, was reef a lump of metal out of the ground and swing it with a will.
Proof that in this instance governments have acted not because through acting they could make us safer, but because they needed to be seen simply to act.
It was the boss what made us done it. Remember Dubya, the old boss?
Thankyou for this intelligent comment which we won’t find elsewhere. I am enraged by the political fear mongering to which we have been subjected by our politicians with no evidence to support it.
Who was the idiot who thought that we needed a re-run of of the anti-terror ads all thorough the weekend of the bushfires when Victorians had real fears to attend to?
Those of us in inner city Melbourne managed without fear mongering while 30 criminals shot each other in our cafes, sporting grounds and pubs, over a number of years.
The last straw has been the nonsense at Australian airports as we are subjected to a succession of terror detection gadgets. The armed “air marshalls” disappeared without a trace of embarrassment. The latest gadget is the gunpowder and bomb-making detection device used on boring 60 year old women. It is not as if there was evidence that 60 year old women had a penchant for carrying bomb making equipment.
Clearly a little more training in actually intervening in violence might be more useful to airport security than all these airy fairy scary techniques in how to confiscate nail files.
Airport security, like shopping centre security, event security or government building security has always been window dressing. With due respect to the staff involved, if anyone expects the average underpaid and probably undertrained private security guard to insert themselves into an incident such as this at the risk of their own safety is kidding themselves. Either do it properly with properly trained police or don’t do it at all.