This was published 13 years ago
In the name of security
How much liberty have we lost? Is the risk of terrorism so great, or a convenient cover for state control?
By Saul Eslake
THE sinking feeling came upon me as soon as I opened my carry-on bag in preparation for passing through security at Canberra Airport last Friday evening.
Rummaging around in my toiletries bag, I simply couldn't find the cap that should have been sitting atop the little bottle of shaving cream I take on overnight trips. So it was confiscated by an eagle-eyed official in the interests of ''security''.
Later that evening, I found the stray lid sitting neatly on top of a small bottle of pills, prescribed by my doctor to ''stop my nose ending up looking like J.P. Morgan's'', (a disfigurement I would perhaps willingly accept if my bank balance matched his).
This episode, though trivial, prompted me to ponder again how utterly pointless, and also how utterly wasteful in terms of time and money, is so much of the regulation imposed in the name of ''security'' since the terrorist attacks of nearly a decade ago.
What is the point of requiring passengers to remove the aerosols from their bags so that someone can confiscate them if they don't have lids or locks on them? If anyone was so inclined, he or she could easily remove the lids, or unlock the locks, immediately after passing through security.
What is the point of confiscating duty-free booze other than to boost sales at the inbound duty-free stores that we now all pass through on the way to the immigration counter?
What is the point of requiring so many passengers to remove their footwear before passing through the X-ray machine, just because some years back a person named Richard Reid struck a match on the heel of his shoe while travelling between Europe and the US, a match which, as it happened, failed to ignite?
What is the point of selecting, supposedly at random, passengers who have passed through security in order to waive a wand over them and their laptops in the belief that one day a wand might actually detect some kind of explosive residue; something none of the people who have required me to submit to this procedure have ever actually detected.
All of this is supposedly to protect us from being blown out of the sky by a terrorist.
Now I don't deny that there are some people in this world, including possibly some in Australia, who think nothing of killing large numbers of innocent civilians in the pursuit of nauseous objectives.
And whenever I feel so bold or presumptuous as to question the necessity for whatever procedure I might encounter at an airport, I am enjoined to consider what I would think if any of my loved ones were blown up by such people.
But we are never told how big this risk is, or whether the measures taken to prevent it are in proportion to the risk.
I'm almost certainly more likely to be killed in a car accident on the way to the airport, yet no one thinks it appropriate that speed limits be reduced to, say, 20km/h on the freeway.
Should I therefore have been petrified when flying to and from Flinders Island for a family holiday last month? I twice boarded planes without any security check. It did cross my mind that there might have been an uncapped deodorant on board, or a woman who hadn't had her shoes passed through an X-ray machine.
Perhaps I was just lucky that, as it turned out, there were no terrorists on the flights that I took to and from Flinders Island.
The ever-increasing security procedures people are required to undergo before getting to the departure gates have undoubtedly created a lot of jobs for people who, judging by the way some go about their tasks, would have difficulty obtaining work that called for discretion, humour, or the occasional exercise of judgment.
As an economist, I can't help but wonder whether Australia's unemployment rate would be higher, or the labour force participation rate lower, had it not been for the creation of tens of thousands of these jobs.
Certainly, having an army of these people stationed at airports has been of no help to passengers innocently caught up in outbreaks of violence such as that which occurred between members of bikie gangs at Sydney Airport a few years back. You wonder what they would do if they ever encountered a genuine terrorist.
What these procedures have done is create large crowds at peak departure times on the outer side of security checkpoints, crowds of people who could easily be killed or maimed by a suicide bomber bent on achieving his or her evil aims - as was amply demonstrated by the most recent atrocity at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport.
No doubt these security checks are intended to reassure people that governments are doing everything they can to protect them from terrorist attacks, without giving them any information as to how likely that is, and even though, as British Airways chairman Martin Broughton has said, removing shoes and taking laptops out of cases were ''completely redundant'' measures.
I can't help wondering whether there aren't some more sinister motives. Former British prime minister Tony Blair's ''Third Way'' guru, Anthony Giddens, once wrote that the real purpose of these measures was to create a climate of fear, so we accept increases in resources for security agencies and expansions in their powers over individuals, to intercept phone calls and emails without warrants, and to incarcerate them for longer periods without access to lawyers, which in a less febrile environment we would find utterly repugnant.
There's no doubt that we Australians, who supposedly pride ourselves on our rejection of authority, have meekly submitted to this erosion of civil liberties in the name of ''security'', and have been remarkably indifferent to the way our fellow citizens have been treated at the hands of our own, and other countries' governments - presumably safe in the belief that it could ''never happen to us''.
It's likewise puzzling that Americans, for whom upholding ''liberty'' against sundry tyrants is integral to the civic tradition, are so committed to defending their supposed constitutional right ''to bear arms'' - arms that are frequently used to kill large numbers of them - while blithely submitting to unprecedented expansions in the powers the state has over them through legislative outrages like the Patriot Act, as well as the obligation to ''bare arms'' and everything else through full-body scanners at American airports, an indignity to which Australians will eventually also be subjected on flights leaving from here for the US.
Isn't it time we in Australia asked why we continue to maintain these inane and pointless rituals? And whether the cost, not only in dollars but in wasted time, is really worth it?
Saul Eslake is a program director at the Grattan Institute.