Meaasuring the threat
"Were Australians shocked to hear of the alleged terror plot?" a number of presenters in London have being asking, as we have continued to cover the counter-terrorism operation in Melbourne. The answer, I think I am right in saying, is an emphatic no. But I would like to hear from you if you think we got that wrong.
Admittedly, this is a difficult subject on which to blog because the case is now active - that's to say men have been charged with terror-related offences and we cannot publish anything, including your comments, which would prejudice their trial (the same rules would have applied, by the way, had they had been charged with shop-lifting). But we can talk more generally about perceptions of the terror threat in Australia.
Clearly, terrorist violence on Australian soil is extremely rare. There was an unsolved attack in 1978 near the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, but not attacks have been carried out here since 9/11.
Still, many Australians have been killed abroad since then, most recently in the hotel bombings in Jakarta last month - the latest in a series of attacks in Indonesia.
Having not been here for the 2002 Bali bombings - back then I was covering the Bush administration's response to 9/11 in Washington - it's hard to get a clear sense of the full enormity of their impact. Speaking on the first anniversary of the attacks, in which 88 Australians were killed, the then-Prime Minister John Howard argued that the attacks had altered the "psyche of the nation," and "ended any sense of careless abandon that Australia may have had". The Australian Federal Police notes on its website: "The attacks in Bali then made it clear to Australia that we could be a target of a major terrorist incident - something most Australians would previously have dismissed."
Commonly, Bali is referred to as "Australia's September 11," but that may have more to do with the journalistic desire for a neat and simple headline rather than an accurate statement of fact. Again, I would like to hear your thoughts.
John Howard used the domestic threat of terrorism to justify his government's support for the Bush administration, and the presence of Australian diggers in Afghanistan and Iraq. In March, 2003, in an address to the nation announcing Australia's participation in the Iraq war, he argued: 2Australia has been a terrorist target at least since the 11th September 2001. Australia is a western country with Western values. Nothing will or should change that. That is why we are a target. Remember that Bin Laden specifically targeted Australia because of our intervention to save the people of East Timor."
Some will doubtless argue that his comments were borne out by the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta in September 2004. Others would contend that his unrelenting support for the Bush administration made Australia more of a target.
Some will argue that the Howard government was correct to bring in new anti-terror laws, which were minted into legislation in 2005, since the Australian Federal Police had warned that the present statutes could not protect Australians against London-style suicide attacks. But others will argue that there was a political motive behind these measures: to heighten the climate of fear at a time when national security issues benefited the Liberal-led coalition more than Labor.
Certainly, Australia has witnessed a number of homegrown terror plots. In 2006, a Sydney court sentenced Faheem Lodhi to 20 years in prison for plotting a bomb attack on Sydney on an unknown target, possibly the electricity grid. Last September, six men were , whose potential targets included the Aussie Rules grand final in Melbourne, the city's rail network, and John Howard.
Still, Australia has seen no need to raise its current national security threat level. Currently, the level is at moderate, as it has been since 2003 when the alert system was introduced. That indicates that an attack is feasible.
Without going into the case now before the courts, I wonder what is your sense of the threat?
I'm 
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