Australia and border protection : morphing racial exclusion into terror[ism]

Australia is a nation whose relative isolation has produced conditions where the threat or act of terrorism has always been minimal, and indeed as a material event has been non-existent, as the following statement from a recent federal government discussion paper mentions: “Australia can draw little from its historical experience with terror to understand and meet the current challenge. Unlike many European and Asian countries, twentieth-century Australia lived relatively free of the scourge of terror” (Commonwealth of Australia 2004, vi)