Terrorism and government: Between history and criminology
| Published date | 01 August 2013 |
| Author | Mark Finnane |
| Date | 01 August 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865813483296 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
46(2) 159–177
!The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865813483296
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Article
Terrorism and government:
Between history and
criminology
Sir John Barry Memorial Lecture,
University of Melbourne, 2012
Mark Finnane
Griffith University, Australia
Abstract
Incontestably the decade since 9/11 has been the age of terrorism. Or has it? In this lecture
we consider terrorism as an object of government and of academic research. In arguing that
law and criminology have been the pre-eminent disciplines attending to governmental
responses to terrorism we note that their interventions have been significant in both their
critical stance and in their impact in shaping discourse about the tactics and limits of counter-
terrorism, particularly legislation and its uses. But what understanding of the broader role of
government in responding to terrorism emerges from such a literature? And what histories
are available to inform such an understanding? Existing historical accounts of Australian
security and intelligence as a response to political violence and terrorism are for the most
part dominated by Cold War politics and ideology, especially through their preoccupation
with the politics of intelligence organisations. Increasing availability of security archives,
together with a more international view of the context of Australian counter-terrorism
histories, provide a sounder base for assessing the emergence of terrorism as an object of
government attention since the 1970s.
Keywords
Australia, counter-terrorism, government, history, security, terrorism
It is forty years since Geoffrey Sawer, co-author of JV Barry’s first book, presented the
first Sir John Barry Memorial Lecture. He was succeeded in the following year by the
judge’s close friend, Norval Morris, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and
the first academic appointment to the University of Melbourne’s Department of
Criminology. Many distinguished researchers, lawyers, judges and public servants
Corresponding author:
Mark Finnane, ARC Australian Professorial Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Mt Gravatt
Campus, Mt Gravatt, Qld 4122, Australia.
Email: m.finnane@griffith.edu.au
have followed them. It is therefore a great honour to have this opportunity to join
the list.
We do not know exactly what Sir John Barry would have made of the history of
contemporary governments responding to terrorism. But in spite of Barry’s pre-war
resistance to a conservative government amending the Crimes Act in ways that affronted
his sense of liberty (Finnane, 2007: 80–83; Waghorne and Macintyre, 2011: 13–14),
he was ready to serve on the government’s committee advising on the scope and mech-
anisms of wartime internment of aliens. In that task he brought to the table an acute
sense of what was just, as well as desirable, in managing that era’s domestic security
anxieties.
One story from that time might signal the kind of intervention that Barry might have
made in debates of the last decade over the law’s role in countering terrorism. The
Australian approach to internment in wartime was straightforward – lock up enemy
aliens first and then release progressively those who were not a threat (Bevege, 1993;
Neumann, 2006; Saunders, 1992). As is well known, many of those classed as ‘enemy
aliens’ were in fact refugees from Nazi Germany. In 1943 the Commonwealth Director-
General of Security queried the need to reassess the status of all enemy aliens to establish
who were properly refugees. He regarded the benefits of such a reassessment as not likely
to exceed the ‘mental satisfaction’ of the refugees concerned. To this Barry and other
members of the Aliens Classification and Advisory Committee strongly objected. The
reputation of the Commonwealth, relative to the standards applying in other Allied
countries, was dependent on this issue. After all the Allied powers were fighting for
‘the preservation of certain real and essential human values, and... amongst these is
justice to the individual’.
We feel, therefore, that there is involved far more than the ‘mental satisfaction to the
individual of knowing he was a refugee’. We insist that there is also involved one of the
essential features of the ideology we fight to preserve, namely, the recognition of the right
of every man to an opportunity to be judged justly and in accordance with the fact.
(Finnane, 2007: 112–113)
The pretext of terrorism?
In the account given by its principal historian, Australia’s counter-terrorist state was the
product of a determined grasp of executive control by political forces limiting our dem-
ocracy and individual rights. In her well-researched but partial account of the emergence
of terrorism as a labelling practice that signalled the triumphant resurrection of ASIO
(the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) out of a decade of ignominy, Jenny
Hocking argued not once but twice, before and after 9/11 and Bali, that terrorism was a
pretext for ASIO’s institutional recovery in the 1980s (Hocking, 1993, 2004). This she
suggested was made possible by the compliant and befuddled review of domestic security
of the Hope Royal Commission (1974–78) and the Protective Security Review
(also chaired by Hope) of 1979.
Two events are critical to Hocking as to others: the Murphy ‘raid’ on ASIO in March
1973 and the Hilton Bombing in February 1978. The former in her view was a disaster
160 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 46(2)
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