A timely examination of the impact of Australia’s antiterror laws after September 11, and the new 2014 terror laws.

Over ten years after Australia’s first national laws were enacted to combat the threat of terrorism, yet more antiterrorism laws were passed in the Australian Parliament in late 2014. Yet again, powers and sanctions once thought to lie outside the rules of a liberal democracy except during wartime, have become part of Australian law.

Timely and piercing, this book asks whether Australia really needed to enact anti-terrorism laws in the first place, let alone add to them. Do the new laws pose increased threats to freedom of speech and freedomof the press? Has the first set of laws been effective in protecting the community? And most tellingly, the book asks whether seeing these anti-terror laws as normal is adanger in itself.