Editorial: Bills grope for liberty's boundaries

Opinion

It is the classic liberal dilemma; to what extent can liberty be limited in the defence of liberty. Or to put it more crudely, at what point is liberty undermined by the very measures taken in its defence. Anti-terrorism proposals have presented Australia and Britain with the dilemma in recent weeks, and their Parliaments have come to quite different conclusions.

The Australian federal Government sought powers to detain suspects without trial for up to 14 days. The British Government sought the same power for 90 days. The Australian Parliament gave Prime Minister John Howard the law he sought, but at Westminster the desired detention period was pared back to 28 days in a defeat for Prime Minister Tony Blair that could hasten his resignation.

Principles can be hard to resolve when politics poisons debate as it did in both countries. The Howard Government was accused of whipping up terrorist fears to distract attention from contentious labour legislation, and Mr Blair's proposals were a test of his party's tolerance for his plan to hand over power later rather than sooner.

Mr Howard had the Labour Opposition's support for his measures and faced antagonism instead from state politicians, at least initially, and civil libertarians. The latter must have felt a little foolish on Tuesday when armed police swooped on suspected terrorist cells in Sydney and Melbourne and hauled 16 men into custody. The raid might have been carried out under previous law, but it put paid to suggestions the Government was cynically causing the public to jump at shadows. Australia, like Britain an ally of the United States in the invasion of Iraq, is a named target of al Qaeda, and like them, it needs to remain vigilant.

Mr Blair, by contrast, never had his own party unequivocally behind his bill, much less the Conservatives and others. He seemed to believe he had a better chance of shaming the Conservatives into support for his greater police powers than he did of reconciling opponents in his own party. He miscalculated badly, though it is not clear that the Conservative position was based on principle or the desire to see Mr Blair defeated.

There is much more in both countries' measures than periods of detention without trial. The British bill contained a new offence, the "glorification" of terrorism, and gave police powers of arrest for all sorts of minor offences that have been classed "non-arrestable". And for all but the most minor offences an arresting officer will have the right to photograph and fingerprint suspects and take DNA samples from their mouths.

Australia's new law has attracted most concern for a shoot-to-kill provision when the military are brought into anti-terrorist operations. Troops, ships and aircraft will be able to respond rapidly to a moving threat. Suspected terrorists will be able to be detained, held under house arrest or fitted with electronic tracking devices. A poll for the Sydney Morning Herald last month found three-quarters of Australians supported those steps, though almost two-thirds rejected the shoot-to-kill provisions.

So far there is no suggestion in New Zealand that we will follow suit and perhaps no need to. Our police have wide powers of arrest and, as the Ahmed Zaoui case illustrated, could hold a suspect trying to enter the country for perhaps two years before the courts might consider it unreasonable. We have suffered no terrorism of the kind that London experienced on July 7 and no scares on the scale that led to the arrests in Australian cities this week. But those felt very close. The dilemma terrorism poses for liberal societies has to be resolved here too.