How many tranches are we up to now?

You might recall, Attorney-General George Brandis used to enumerate the Abbott government’s various “tranches” of counter-terror laws as they ticked by, including the imposition of mass surveillance on Australians and a law to jail journalists who reported on intelligence operations. Brandis appears to have given it up after the “sixth tranche”, which was in 2016.

The “tranche” framing has been replaced with one of ongoing reform, a permanent legal revolution, already reduced to cliche by Malcolm Turnbull, the man who gave us mass surveillance as communications minister, with his endless invocation that national security “is no place for set and forget”. Counter-terrorism laws must be constantly updated. Anyone who disagrees is necessarily on the side of terrorists, or at least of the wilfully negligent — those who would commit the crime of Setting and Forgetting.

When John Howard and Philip Ruddock first began the process of dramatically strengthening the powers of security agencies at the expense of individual rights in the years after 9/11 — as the War on Terror rolled across the Middle East in a great wave of death that only served to create new generations of disaffected and angry people ready to embrace extremism — the draconian changes they proposed were the subject of considerable debate. Occasionally, even the timid Labor Party expressed objections to some aspects; a lunatic change by Ruddock to re-introduce the crime of “sedition” ended up being overturned.

[Something is badly wrong with the way we protect ourselves from terrorism]

And in the early stages of the “tranches”, the Abbott government, to its considerable credit, went further. It picked up a precedent established by Labor’s Nicola Roxon of tasking Parliament’s Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security with considering counter-terrorism changes. Under the leadership of Liberal Dan Tehan and Labor’s Anthony Byrne, the committee played a constructive role in assessing legislation.

More recently, now-Prime Minister Turnbull appointed Tehan to the ministry and turned the committee into a right-wing joke: Andrew Nikolic, Michael Sukkar and Andrew Hastie were, in succession, appointed to chair the committee, rendering it virtually useless as a mechanism for genuine scrutiny of bills.

And with Turnbull’s “permanent reform” mantra, there can be no genuine debate about even major changes to national security laws. Indeed, that’s the point; it becomes more difficult for what pass as civil society bodies in Australia to keep up with constant changes, and to offer informed, thoughtful analysis of them. It’s legal whack-a-mole for bodies with limited resources as each new reform emerges. Meanwhile, the media, and voters, struggle to maintain their interest — ironic, since part of the “permanent reform” justification is the political imperative to be endlessly seen to be Doing Something about terrorism. Not, as in the case of both Abbott and Turnbull, that it helped politically.

So the latest iteration of the permanent reform are to make the mere possession of terrorist instructional material a crime, to extend detention periods and to make terror hoaxes a serious crime. None of the proposals are unproblematic. While those without a particular attachment to basic freedoms might accept the right of governments to dictate the mere possession of information (not images, as with child abuse) to be something that can constitute a crime, what precautions will there be to ensure that people with legitimate reason to possess such material — such as academics trying to study the process of radicalisation, which remains poorly understood — aren’t jailed. Any extension of arbitrary detention periods, no matter what lurid scenarios are invoked, should be regarded sceptically. And ask UK man Paul Chambers about laws about terrorist hoaxes and see what sort of answer you get.

Meanwhile, one of the most common characteristics of terrorists and mass murderers continues to be on display. We know from the examples of the Nice truck driver, the Westminster attacker, the Florida nightclub gunman, one of the Boston Marathon bombers and our own Man Haron Monis that domestic violence and other forms of violence against women recur repeatedly in the backgrounds of terrorists. Now there are reports Stephen Paddock was abusive and controlling toward his partner. 

Focusing on domestic violence and violence toward women cannot be dismissed, as many cultural warriors on both the left and the right want to do, as an indulgence of middle-class feminists and some sort of thought crime against working-class men. It’s a well-demonstrated pointer to radicalisation and propensity to other forms of more catastrophic violence.

[The Rosie Batty effect: a recent timeline of Australia’s response to domestic violence]

Contrary to the claims of many of his critics, Tony Abbott significantly lifted funding for the National Plan To Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children and left a further substantial increase on top of that ready to go when he was removed as Prime Minister — it became Malcolm Turnbull’s first major announcement.

Politicians on all sides are now putting more resources into addressing both the causes and consequences of domestic violence. But, as a society, we still normalise and filter out the steady drip-drip-drip of murdered women: three women alone were murdered by former partners in New South Wales in the last week. The deaths elicit no prime ministerial press conferences or meetings of the national security committee of cabinet, no promises of further rounds of ever-more draconian laws. And certainly no tranches.

It’s a funny outcome at a time when anything even tangentially connected to terrorism is the object of obsessive attention by politicians keen to be seen as pro-active.