Terrorism and anti-terrorism laws

This chapter deals with acts that were perpetrated after the US events of 11 September 2001 (henceforth 9/11) in Australia and have been deemed terrorist by the state, and with the state’s juridical response to these. Although there were notorious, nation-shaking terror incidents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and there were more than a dozen terrorist attacks in the 1970s and almost as many in the 1980s, none of these pre-9/11 events gave rise to specific anti-terrorism laws. However, the Hilton bombing in 1978 led to the formation of the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation Act 1979, making the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) a statutory body and legalising their hitherto unlawful phone-tapping. Moreover, the September 1978 arrest of Croatian militia, who trained for an armed incursion into Yugoslavia, led to the Crimes (Foreign Incursions and Recruitment) Act 1978.