Australia has changed radically since last week though it might not look like it on the surface.Late Thursday night the Senate passed the National Security Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014 giving unlimited power to spies and secret police.
The laws have been maimed.
Unimaginable things can happen now, things that Australians have only read about in books.
Not books like Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man. Those principles have been thrown away.
Books like Stasiland, by Anna Funder, where the "puzzlers" of East Germany piece together secret police files shredded when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Strand by strand they find the secret horrors done to missing people.
They will never finish.
Germany now has a glass cupola over its Reichstag. The symbol was deliberate: the government is transparent and the people walk above them.
Sunlight disinfects the debating chamber of the Bundestag below.
East Germany learnt what happens when you give up individual liberty and privacy to the state...
Australia has just voted in the opposite direction.
Now officials can break the law with immunity from prosecution - and without having to answer to a court.
They can act in total secrecy.
They will decide what they do and to whom and when.
They do not have to ask permission.
They will choose when to interfere in your life and when they won't.
They can dip into your most private communications and they don't need a warrant to do so.
Sometimes they will do it because it is necessary to fight crime. Sometimes because they enjoy it.
Nobody will be watching them.
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Armed police patrolled the halls of Parliament in the days leading up to the vote so the Senators and MPs could physically see their lives were protected from imminent danger.
A sense of urgency was deliberately created by the media wing of the security forces to get the powers they want.
Media Watch exposed how NSW Police director of public affairs Strath Gordon's office provided professional video footage and photographs of massive Sydney terror raids to the media in the week before the vote.
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The much-maligned PUP Senator Jacqui Lambie at least noticed the coincidence.
"We would not be in this position, where there are armed guards on high alert patrolling our national Parliament and where we are debating legislation that undermines personal rights and freedoms, if we had cracked down and taken a harder line with the enemy we face today - the sharia law extremists of 10 years ago," she said.
She correctly grasped a nettle avoided by the rest of the world since 2001 - and for which she has been attacked.
The war on "terror" is a euphemism for the war on "Islamist fascism".
The fear of inciting hatred against moderate, secular Muslims �-- who are themselves the first victims of Islamist fascists �-- has caused the entire Western polity to avoid the truth for more than a decade with the weasel word "terror".
Politicians have preferred to destroy civil liberties ahead of offending minorities no matter how reasonable or necessary to limit the spread of a theocratic, totalitarian, violent political ideology.
Islamist fascists Hizb-ut-Tahrir, banned across the Middle East, are free to roam Lakemba. Despite openly declaring itself as a political party with an ideology of Islam that is trying to establish a Caliphate under Sharia, Australia has not banned them.
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