What Would King Leonidas Do?

Modern political Conservatism was shaped by some of the greatest thinkers of the 18th and 19th Century. It is widely recognised that it began with Edmund Burke in Britain in the 1700s, but it was also informed by the classics of the Greek and Roman eras. What makes same sex marriage a natural ally to Conservatism lies in two of the key founding principles of Conservative thought. A belief in the primacy of Natural Law, and the importance of maintaining traditions and customs.

Support for the importance of traditions sometimes draws accusations that Conservatives are anti-progress. Clearly however, Conservatism is not a static movement and has evolved substantially within a changing society to remain a major political force today. Conservative belief sees tradition as having a role in navigating society through this constant change. Tradition and customs provide a record of where society has come from, and helps guide it through future change. By ensuring traditions adapt to the changing world, they maintain their relevance and avoid becoming lost to change.

Natural Law asserts that all humans have certain rights that are inherent in nature and do not have to be written into the laws of Government for them to be true. Central to these rights is the freedom to live, love, worship and benefit from your personal effort, as long as that doesn’t involve preventing others from doing the same. The concept of Natural Law is widely recognised in Western legal systems. Conservatives see this as universal rights, reflected in a belief that regardless of your class or status in society, all people must be equal in the eyes of the law.

A hundred years ago, homosexual relationships were illegal throughout most of Western civilization (along with lots of other things that we would find strange today). As our society has developed, these laws have not stood the test of Natural Law because they interfered in the rights of otherwise law-abiding individuals to be free of the interference of others. Once a person or thing is found to be legal, then Conservative belief holds that it must become equal under the law with all else. In this is the foundation for Conservative acceptance of same sex partnerships. It is why the law now allows same sex couples to live together, raise families and share property.

Second to the case is the Conservative belief in maintaining traditions. Some say that same sex relationships threaten the tradition of marriage, but Conservative belief would reject the creation of any legal process that duplicates a tradition that has existed for centuries. Creating equal unions outside of marriage denies the value of traditional marriage and threatens to lessen its role in society.

The tradition of civil marriage (marriage under the law), has changed numerous times over the centuries of Conservative belief. Marrying for love rather than to secure property only started to become a popular idea in the 1800s and spread across societal classes through the first half of the 20th Century. It was not until the 1960s that restrictions on mixed race marriages disappeared, and not until the 1970s that men and women became equal in marriage under the law. Conservatives don’t seek ways around tradition when these changes occur, rather they encourage whatever adaptation is required to maintain tradition.

This is why same-sex marriage recently passed the parliaments of our two closest cultural allies, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, both under Conservative Governments. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister at the time, declared “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative, I support Gay Marriage because I am a Conservative”.

The anti-same sex marriage debate in Australia is being led by churches and Religious Conservatives rather than Political Conservatives. Religious Conservatives hold many of the same views as Political Conservatives but view Natural Law as coming from God, and this can place their churches’ law at the heart of their moral code and above civil law.

The support of same sex marriage by the Left of politics also causes Reactionaries from the right to instinctively resist it. However, same sex marriage is no more a product of the Left of politics than of any other political belief, and most left-wing regimes throughout history have held homosexuality to be illegal. Yet many self-described Conservatives are preparing to ignore or reject their opportunity to right this inequality because it is being painted as a Left vs Right political battle.

Like so many popular ideas, the concept of taking away someone’s citizenship if they are deemed a threat to national security seems like a simple fix. Australian history is full of simple fixes like this. Introducing cane toads to stop cane beetles. Removing Indigenous children from their families to speed assimilation. Fighting Vietnamese nationalists to stop communists from invading Australia. Our history is littered with them, all popular ideas at the time and all spectacular failures for reasons that could have been determined with just a little forethought. In terms of the ability to cause long-term irreparable damage to Australian society however, any proposal to allow a Government minister to arbitrate on citizenship removal makes these previous failures pale in comparison.

There are many commentators currently detailing the numerous reasons why this proposal is a bad idea and they come from all walks of political life. From the Greens on the left to Cory Bernardi on the right and Amanda Vanstone in the middle. In fact, the only people without a principled stand to take on the issue appear to be the current Federal Opposition, but there are no surprises there. In academic quarters there is no shortage of highly qualified people who have written plenty about the ineffectiveness of such a policy, points well summarised by Andrew Zammit of the Monash University Global Terrorism Research Centre here. In addition, legal and human rights opinions point out the irony that the call to give a Government this power comes on the 800th anniversary of our ancestors winning the right to prevent rulers from arbitrarily treating subjects this way. Yet I cannot help feeling that supporters of this legislation are still missing out on one very important part of the whole story: while the current Government says this power will be used to fight Islamist terrorism, it will remain the power of every future Government to use against whatever ideology they find objectionable.

Australian law has a very wide definition of terrorism and it encompasses a wide range of behaviours. This provides law enforcement authorities with some advantages as it enables them to act quickly on little evidence to detain and secure someone they believe may be an immediate risk to the public. If the authorities get it wrong then citizens will eventually get access to judicial systems and procedures that provide them with due protections. The Government in this case however is seeking to remove the protection of the courts from the process and deem a single minister the sole arbiter of who gets to be Australian. Once that is in place, having such a wide definition of terrorism ceases to be a way to protect citizens and instead becomes the threat to citizens.

As an example, advocating serious harm to a person or property to advance an ideological cause can be a terrorist act.  Scroll through the social media feeds of pretty much any Facebook user or Twitter account and you will find plenty of examples of angry people advocating harm to push an ideology. Whether you are threatening someone for insulting the Koran or for burning the Australian National Flag, you could still potentially be committing a terrorist act. The law does not specify which ideology makes the intimidation ‘terrorism’ and the Constitution prevents the law from discriminating in that way. You would never come out of a court case for such a trivial offence with more than a rap on the knuckles, which is why such threats if they are ever prosecuted are done under legislation that is more tightly defined and suitable. However, ministers with the power to remove citizenship are under no obligation to apply any such mitigation.

Despite this assault on citizens rights, you may still be happy giving these powers to Minister Peter Dutton, one of the handful of MPs who refused to be part of the parliament’s bi-partisan apology to the stolen generation. If so, it is unlikely that you would appreciate those same powers being in the hands of a future Labor Government minister like Penny Wong, or maybe even Sarah Hanson-Young in some future Labor-Greens coalition? Whatever your political leanings, it is probably not that long ago there was a Government in power that you didn’t like, and you can guarantee that in the future there will be another one you don’t like. Or maybe you don’t like any of them. Either way, once the present Government has run its course all those future Governments will have these same powers to use against you and your children as they deem necessary.

Having been associated with the Australian Army in some way, shape or form for all my adult life (and some of my childhood) it should be no surprise that Anzac Day has been a particularly important day in my calendar for many years. There have been many notable Anzac Day events for me. My first Anzac Day in uniform as a 17 year old trooper, drunk as ten men and wandering around on the wrong side of the bar at a crowded pub trying to find the exit door. Having the honour of carrying the regimental guidon on parade as the very sober Sergeant Major of a unit my grandfather had served in through the First World War. Watching a clip from the movie Gallipoli at a gunfire breakfast, and realising at the part where the Commanding Officer is telling his men they are going to charge to near certain death that I was then the custodian of that man’s job. Or my last Anzac Day in uniform, spent overseas, sharing a minutes dawn silence with some of the diggers on duty.

Central to my experience of every Anzac Day has always been one thing, the memory of those who had made some personal sacrifice through their military service. Some had paid the ultimate sacrifice, and some had served yet were simply no longer around to tell the tale. Many others are still around; to share experiences, comradeship, and a few drinks with friends and family. Anzac Day to me is like some of the better wakes I have attended, a commemoration of the lives of those who had gone before us by those who shared some part of their experience. There is a public side to Anzac Day as well. People turn up at services or clap as the parade passes by. A grateful public paying their respects at the state occasions before the families retire for their more personal celebrations at various pubs and messes.

With some luck, 2016 will see all that return once the Anzac centenary is over. Until then I will sit back and watch as sport stars, celebrities, politicians and flag wearing bogans set about desecrating my memories of all the very ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives in the service of the country’s armed forces. I will stand my minutes silence while the RSL flogs branding rights to multinational corporations so they can pretend that their shitty beers, supermarkets and bakeries are still local businesses. I will watch the flag held reverently at half-mast, while some tosser wears it wrapped around his unwashed neck like the discoloured skin surrounding the head of a festering boil. I will listen to the last post and reveille, and hopefully not hear the camp Gallipoli themed concerts providing overpriced access to tacky B-list celebrities no one ever wanted to see in the first place. In my mind’s eye I will likely picture absent friends as I always do, and try to erase the images of Anzac themed teddy bears, commemorative coins, biscuit tins and coffee mugs that traded off the memories of the fallen for a quick-buck-to-be-made, cash and carry culture. As usual, I will think a lot about the lessons of war that I drew from the facts I studied over the few years’ service I had, and try not to cringe as ignorant couch potatoes take to Facebook with unintelligible drivel based on what they gleaned from jingoistic crap masquerading as news and history. I will watch the soldiers, sailors and airmen/airwomen march, those serving and those who served, maybe a nursing or Land-Army volunteer will still be there. Then I will probably make an early break from the crowd, while assorted public servants and community groups follow in the parade like some sort of incongruous tail-end Charlie tagging along to a circus carnival day out.

The Government wants to know things about your private life that you would not tell your mum. Most of us as teenagers (and beyond) have endured those post phone call inquiries from a parent: “Who was that you were speaking to on the phone?” or “How long have you been on the phone for?” or “Who’s calling you this late at night?”. Typically these queries would be met with a whiny teenage “Muuuuum, it's none of your business!”, or if you were not feeling brave enough to challenge them then a simple lie usually had the desired effect. However, we do not get that chance with our Government in Australia and we do not even get the courtesy of being asked. All that information your mum wanted is available to any Federal, State or Local Government regulatory body from ASIO to the RSPCA. They need only request it from a telecommunications company (telco) with no warrant or oversight required. Your mum still can’t get it though, and neither can you, but Government departments can and they currently make requests for it at the rate of over 500,000 times per year.

However, the information the Government currently accesses is held by private companies who only have to keep what they need to run their businesses. If the Government wants more information from your private communications they have to apply to a judge for a warrant, and to get a warrant they need to show there is a reasonable suspicion that someone is doing something wrong. The new data retention laws seek to turn this on its head. The laws will force these companies to keep the data that the Government wants on people for at least two years, and let them access it without any requirement to demonstrate a need. Now, you may be comfortable with this in a ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ kind of way. You may be the kind of person who leaves your curtains open all night and freely hands out your passwords to all and sundry. Even so, there are still at least ten good reasons why you should be against the new data retention legislation. Feel free to click on any of them if you think they sound far-fetched or if you need any further explanation.

1.  The new legislation gives the Government unlimited access to information about your day to day life.

2.  There is no evidence showing it is needed.

3.  There is no evidence to show it makes us safer.

4.  It will make Australia less safe.

5.  It is ridiculously easy to avoid if you are a terrorist or a criminal.

6.  It gives your ex-husband/wife/partner, insurance companies or any future litigant access to lots of private information about you.

7.  It gives copyright holders the ability to tie you up in expensive legal action even if you have done nothing wrong.

8.  It will make your internet access and telephone more expensive.

9.  It will make Australian businesses less competitive.

10. The people saying we need it do not understand it.

Data retention is not a political issue. There are many voices on both the left and right of politics that are against it. The trouble is so few of our politicians understand it. 

The playing out of the latest act of the David Hicks' story has brought to mind a tale of my own dating back to this story’s beginning. I have quoted people here to the best of my memory.

Around 2002 I was supporting an SAS training exercise.During a lull in proceedings I was taking a short meal break in a rudimentary rec-room where four SAS members were also resting and watching TV. The SAS were all in civilian clothes and the casual observer had no way of determining any formal rank or seniority among them. A short article came on the news about David Hicks. His capture had been public knowledge for some time and the news bulletin was discussing what his likely fate might be.

“He’s a terrorist, just fucking shoot him” says the youngest looking SAS guy in the group.

At that point an older looking guy who appeared to be more senior spoke up abruptly, “He’s not a fucking terrorist, he’s a prisoner of war and he should be treated like one”. He then continued, “If we don’t treat these guys like prisoners of war you can bet that whatever they were going to do to one of our guys when they capture them, it’s going to be worse now.”

A third SAS guy chimed in, “Yeah, this isn’t good.”

The conversation ended there and everyone packed up and got on with their work.

Aeschylus said that truth is the first casualty of war, and nowhere has this been more prevalent than in the online and media debates fought in the name of the war on terror. David Hicks enthusiastically sought training from an extremist organisation that would eventually become an enemy of the US. After that, the only fighting he saw was time spent ‘guarding tanks’ while the US were bombing them. Then he sold his rifle, tried to sneak away, and was caught by the other side. These are the sort of actions that attract ridicule, but it is drawing a long bow to grace him with the title of ‘terrorist fighter’. Terrified turncoat might seem more appropriate.

I am no David Hicks fan but I do have a strong belief in the importance of holding the high moral ground in a stoush. Morals can become a bit blurred when you are manoeuvring with a determined enemy under fire, but as the balance of power tips in your direction, then handling that power ethically has always been a sign of great leaders and great civilizations. Alexander the Great was renowned for his fair and honourable treatment of those who surrendered to him, and among the maxims of the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu are instructions to “Treat the captives well and care for them”. Nowhere in war is the power over an adversary more obvious than when you hold them as a prisoner, and our greatest warriors have always recognised that what you do with power defines your moral legitimacy.

A lot of war has gone by since then. US President George W. Bush chose to exempt the US from the Geneva Convention on the rights of Prisoners of War by inventing the concept of ‘illegal combatants’, a term never muttered before in the history of law. Torture, rendition and secret detention, which had been ruled illegitimate by most of the world’s nations for decades, formally became part of the US way of waging war for the first time in their history. There has always been an element of national security where the methods operate on the periphery of law. This is the realm of spies and espionage; national secrets known only to a select handful and shrouded in plausible deniability. The US brought these methods to their military as strategies and legitimized them. Allies, including Australia, went along without criticism even though few western allies would allow their own forces to engage in similar tactics. Countries like Britain and Canada failed to criticize but did at least seek the release of their own citizens. Australia was more servile than most, actively supporting the US in its mistreatment of Australian citizens. Eventually however, and to its credit, the resilience of US liberal democracy shone through. Fair judicial process found that these things had always been illegal in US law and remained so despite the actions of the executive branch. As a result, many politicians have been reminded that they cannot operate forever in a world outside the law.

The 26th of January has always unashamedly held a special position on my calendar. There are perhaps few national days that attract as much controversy within their own country as Australia Day does, but nothing has been able to shake the significance of this date for me and it likely never will. I was born of five generations of natural born Australians and I am the third generation to serve my country as an Australian soldier. So, while I defer to the timeless connection to any land that only an indigenous people can uniquely hold, no-one gets to wave the Australian National Flag in my face and call me unpatriotic. The 26th of January is a great day, a day of huge significance and a day that will remain important to me for years to come; because the 26th of January was the day that I was born. As far as a date to celebrate our national day however, I have to admit I think it is pretty lame.

Now I am not about to get behind any push to change Australia Day. To be honest, it commemorates an event so irrelevant to my ideals as an Australian that I struggle to raise any interest in it. Don’t get me wrong though. I like the fireworks, barbeques, the booze ups, the hottest 100, and having a public holiday in the middle of summer (though I preferred it when we celebrated Australia Day on the nearest Monday so it was always a long weekend). I also think the Idea of having a national day that celebrates all the good things about being Australian is a great idea. It is just that the events of 26th January 1788 are really nothing much that I see getting excited about as an Australian. Furthermore, I often find Australians that are clueless about why we celebrate on the 26th of January, even among the hardest revelers and Australia Day party devotees. Ask most Australians what happened on the 26th of January and there is a good chance the reply will involve something about Captain Cook, but by that time he was 8000km away in Waimea harbour naming the Sandwich Islands (after the Earl of Sandwich, not the snack that parts of Cook would eventually become).

In case you don't know, the actual event that we commemorate on 26th January is the raising of a British Flag in Sydney Cove by Captain Arthur Philips in 1788. Philips had arrived a week earlier in New South Wales, having been tasked with establishing a prison in that territory which had previously been claimed by Britain. Britain also extended its original claim so that New South Wales would consist of the whole portion of the Southern Continent that lay East of the 135th Meridian, and most of New Zealand. The flag raising happened tens of thousands of years after the first people arrived, 382 years after the first European landed, 172 years after they first mapped the North West, 146 years after they had mapped most of the rest of the continent, 18 years after the first British flag was raised to claim New South Wales, and 16 years after the first French flag was raised to claim the West Australian coast. After Philips raised his flag, it was to be another 12 days before the penal colony was founded, another 36 years before the name Australia was officially used for the continent,  38 years before Britain claimed ownership over the whole continent, 71 years before all the colonies that would eventually form States were established, and 113 years before the Commonwealth of Australia (the one with the actual Australian National Flag and constitution) would come into existence.

With all the great things that have happened to this country, and with all the amazing things its people in all their guises over thousands of years have been able to achieve, you will have to excuse me if Philips’ flag raising ceremony at the future sight of the penal settlement of ‘New Albion” fails to stir my patriotic loins. This unspectacular occasion is probably why it took anyone outside of Sydney such a long time to care very much about the 26th of January at all. Prior to federation individual colonies understandably placed more emphasis on celebrating their own origins. Shortly after federation, Australia quickly embraced the Canadian inspired Empire Day or ‘Flag Day’. This became the preferred focus for national fervour as, never ones to embrace change easily, Australians expressed their patriotism by continuing to ignore their own flag and wrapping the place in more British flags. It was not until 1946 that all State and Commonwealth governments agreed to officially renaming NSW Foundation Day as Australia Day, although it was then simply a public holiday held on the Monday nearest to the 26th. It was not until 1988 that NSW moved to holding the public holiday on the actual day and that shift was not recognised nationally until 1994. So this year we will be honouring a 21 year old tradition of nationally celebrating the second time the British flag was raised in New South Wales. Huzzah.

National days are a great idea. They should be wide and inclusive and a reason for all Australians to be happy for their achievements. I begrudge no one their desire to hold on to the 21 year old tradition that is our current version of Australia Day, however don’t kid yourself that wanting to stick to the 26th of January makes you any more patriotic than the next Aussie. That date has nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with a Sydney-centric nation that remains resistant to change.

Since the Sydney siege, there has been a bit of publicity for the idea that a greater prevalence of guns in Australia could prevent violent gun crimes. Australian Senator David Leyonhjelm showed that his faith in the US second constitutional amendment exceeded his ability to use Google, by declaring that such tragedies would not happen in Texas due to the prevalence of personally owned guns there. In an unrelated announcement, the Australian Government also recently decided to let armed Australian Customs officers join the Australian Federal Police as one of the few agencies allowed to carry guns in airports, befitting their role in collecting GST on overseas purchases in excess of $900. The logic seems to be that airports will be safer if office workers whose job description is approximately 0.001% concerned with firearms are carrying loaded guns in crowded public places. It is a little perplexing to imagine under what circumstances deadly force is justified in controlling the entry of inanimate goods into Australia, but clearly someone believes this is about keeping us safe.

A lot of opinions on where guns should fit into society are based on personal feelings, but to do the subject justice opinions need to be tested against empirical data. Certainly lots of guns seems to foretell lots of gun crime, but statistics do vary widely from country to country. There is also some evidence to suggest relaxed concealed carry laws and increased gun sales coincided with a drop in crime in the US, although these marginal drops probably do not offset the prevalence of crimes occurring simply because the guns are there in the first place. There is a wealth of data around gun crime and shootings, and both sides of the debate pour through the figures looking for correlations that can reinforce their opinions. However, correlation is not causation, and there are very few statistics that are so clearly absolute in every situation that they would be implausible to deny. Except perhaps this one; women almost never perpetrate violent gun crime.

This one statistic is the single most stand out fact in all the data about all gun crime anywhere and yet policy makers ignore it. Typically women in western countries commit only 10-15% of homicides but even then they are far less likely to use a gun than a man. When you deduct for victim initiated violence that figure falls even further. Mass shootings (according to the FBI more than four killings without any cooling off period in between) are never initiated by women. Of the 42 US school shootings in 2014 not one shooter was female. Nor in 2013 or 2012 or... Actually, there has only ever been three female school shooters in the entire US history of hundreds of school shootings and none of them were mass killings. Lone wolf terrorists? Of the hundreds of incidents examined by the US National Counter Terrorism Centre since the 1970s only two were women, both US citizens who tried to assassinate President Ford. Women don’t even kill themselves with guns as often as men do. Yet 57% of Australian women are victims of violence at some time in their lives. So if a gender that makes up over half the entire population are so obviously not a threat to others if they have guns, why are we denying them the right to carry guns for self defence? The solution to violence could be more guns, but only for that half of the population who can statistically be trusted not to misuse them; women.

Consider the benefits of a society that arms only women. Won’t the unarmed violent domestic male perpetrator, who kills on average one woman a week, think twice before taking on their potentially armed partner? Won’t he violent sexual predator, again virtually always a male, reconsider stalking his victim knowing she could be the only one in any potential confrontation that brought a gun to the fight? Would the street harasser, again only ever male, feel so tough publicly objectifying and threatening a young woman if he knows he may end up staring down the barrel of the world’s greatest equaliser and pissing his pants in front of his friends as he publicly begs for forgiveness? We agree as a society that women need protection from violence, we know men are nearly always the perpetrator of violence, and statistics show that women almost never misuse firearms for their own violent means. Arming women against men addresses these problems and brings gender power imbalance back closer to equilibrium in a non-gender biased world. Men have held an overwhelming physical superiority over women in the 0-5 metre range for thousands of years, what’s wrong with giving women the advantage over 5-20 metres in a civilized society?

Of course the elephant in the room in discussing violence against women is that men still represent the highest proportion of victims of violence. Males perpetrate that violence, so giving guns to men only makes the problem worse. However, in a society with no shortage of adequately armed women, men who want to stay safe need only ensure there is a friendly woman nearby. Men who are willing to stay sober, friendly and approachable will have no problem getting an armed woman to escort them through a dark carpark or down a dangerous street, thereby ensuring men who don’t want to risk being victims of violence don’t have to be. The statistically tiny number of women with the potential to initiate violence will easily be outnumbered by non-violent women, and unarmed violent males would represent only a minor threat. With such readily available protection, and the knowledge that women potentially posses firearms, any male who did put themselves in a position to become a victim of violence could almost be considered to be asking for it.

In the wake of the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney there has been a flurry of opinions expressed in the media on whether the action could or should be classed as a terrorist attack. Political brokens have been quick to divide along left and right lines with right wing protagonists coming down hard in favour of declaring Islamic terrorism to blame, while left wing hard-liners seem to take the ‘not terrorism but it still wouldn’t happen if we weren’t fighting them’ line. Australian Governments, both State and Federal, have taken a relatively even handed approach so far, mostly avoiding labels to focus on investigating the facts that surround the case. Even the more nuanced commentators however, currently differ. Counter terrorism expert Andrew Zammit called it on Twitter the second fatal terrorist attack in Australian history, following the attempted massacre and fatal shooting of a security guard by anti-abortionist Peter Knight at an East Melbourne fertility clinic in 2001. James Brown though, until recently a security analyst at the Lowy Institute, came down against the claim that the siege was terrorism in his recent article.

In any rush to define the act we risk losing sight of the ultimate goal; how best to prevent re-occurrence. Within hours of the Sydney siege we saw a Taliban group commit a massacre at a primary school in Pakistan. Around this time news was also breaking of mass graves containing the bodies of 150 women murdered by ISIS in Iraq. While it is possible to look for similarities between these incidents, it is obvious from the scale of the atrocities that the moral and physical capabilities required to execute them remain vastly different, therefore it is likely that the actions required to prevent them will also differ.

There is no recognised definition of terrorism in international law and the legal definition in the Australian Criminal Code is widely considered as far too open to be an effective tool for analytical purposes. Terrorism stems from a French term (terrorisme) describing acts of violence committed by state sanctioned authorities during the French Reign of Terror in 1796-97. In the mid to late 1800s it came to be used to describe violence against civilians carried out by politically motivated groups. The development of dynamite and increasingly capable handguns facilitated the use of these tactics by small groups, and since then the use of violence against civilian targets by politically motivated non-state actors has been a constant feature of the geopolitical landscape. Some of these groups, such as Zionists, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Viet Minh have arguably been successful, but most eventually fall foul of actions by states to neutralise and/or defeat them. Supporters often rationalise the actions of a group based on some form of just cause, but generally people are comfortable classing these types of organisations as terrorist groups. Australia already has in place proven effective measures to prevent attacks by terrorist groups. These range from involvement with allies in intelligence sharing and direct attack, to internal surveillance and detention. In the case of the Lindt Cafe incident however, Man Haron Monis was acting as a leaderless individual with no connection to any terrorist organisation other than his own self-proclaimed allegiance.

The practice of urging leaderless individuals to commit terrorist acts in the name of group causes can be traced to the Anarchist and Nihilist movements of the late 1800s. Around the turn of the 20th century actions by radicalised individuals were spectacularly successful, likely accounting for such high profile assassinations as an Italian King and both the French and US Presidents. The term lone wolf terrorism has recently come into use to describe this style of perpetrator, a term derived from the writings of white supremacist Alex Curtis who, along with many US extreme right wing groups in the early 1990s, advocated actions of this nature. According to the US National Counterterrorism Center, terrorist attacks worldwide over recent years were predominately carried out by Islamic extremists (although overwhelmingly in Muslim majority countries and targeted against Muslims). The 2010 Australian white paper on counter terrorism also states “the primary terrorist threat to Australia and Australian interests today comes from people who follow a distorted and militant interpretation of Islam”. However, another paper that year by the International Centre for Counter Terrorism (ICCT) suggested lone wolf attacks are far broader in scope than this, with US based attacks being far more prevalent than any other country, and white supremacists topping the list of perpetrators. While there has been high profile lone wolf attacks attributed to Islamic extremists, the majority of these individuals claimed to be inspired by the philosophies of white supremacists, nationalists, anti-abortionists and separatists that typically followed distorted and militant interpretations of Christianity to legitimise their violence. As Harvard based security lecturer Jessica Stern put it in her book Terror in the name of God, they ‘‘come up with their own ideologies that combine personal vendettas with religious or political grievances’’. A focus on Islamic extremism may be justified in combating terrorist groups, but as counter terrorism investigative expert Jason-Leigh Striegher points out this can lead to a counterproductive bias when attempting to deal with lone wolf terrorism.

Despite the broad range of ideologies claimed as motivation, similarities that may better enable detection and prevention of lone wolf terrorist attacks do exist. Perpetrators are almost exclusively male, view their beliefs and/or ideology as being superior, and view violence and intimidation as acceptable change strategies. According to the ICCT, most do not suffer from identifiable mental illness but they do suffer higher rates of psychological disturbance and social ineptitude. Yet despite their reclusion, these men typically feel compelled to explain their ideologies to the world either before, during or after an attack, and they crave the public theatre that their actions create. When we focus on these demonstrated similarities between lone wolf terrorists, rather than any claims made by the perpetrator to an ideology, they start to resemble more the typical profile of a mass shooter driven by personal grievances rather than that of an ideologically driven terrorist. By simply judging the act as terrorism we allow the disturbed, publicity-seeking criminal to style himself as he seeks to be seen; a terrorist dedicated to a cause. However, experience shows he is likely to have more in common with the bullied worker who ‘goes postal’, the aggrieved family-court litigant father who takes his children under armed siege, or the sexually unsuccessful teen who massacres random female college students.