Never has an Australian government talked so much about freedom while doing so much to undermine it. When it comes to national security and refugees we are increasingly pathetic, writes Ben Saul.

The Abbott Government is waging a relentless war on our most precious human rights. Never has an Australian government talked so much about freedom while doing so much to undermine it.

The Government's stocks are rising as it takes advantage of public anxiety about terrorism to ram through new laws. To be sure, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria needs to be combated to protect civilians there. But the threat in Australia is modest and the Government is overcooking it.

The Government speaks in inflammatory terms of a "death cult" that "hates our freedoms". But if you look at recent events as ordinary crimes, and avoid labelling them as "terrorism", you get a very different picture. There were two attempted murders, an early conspiracy to murder someone unidentified, and some "chatter" about Parliament House. Perhaps 60 Australians are fighting overseas. Of those who may come back, a few might pose a threat here. So far, that's about it.

Listening to our politicians and some media, you would think that we are under siege, like French Algeria or Indochina in the 1950s, or Iraq at the height of the insurgency, plagued by daily suicide bombings. We need to take a deep breath, get a grip, and get some perspective.

Terrorism here is not an existential threat. Nazism, imperial Japan, and nuclear holocaust in the Cold War were existential threats. Terrorism in Australia is a minor irritation. Your own furniture is more likely to kill you.

The Government says it is not targeting Muslims and that this is about crime, not Islam. But there is certainly a lot of dog-whistling. The Prime Minister's divisive rhetoric about being uncomfortable with the burqa, or everyone having to be on "Team Australia", are cases in point. This from a man born in England to an English father, telling us how to be Australian.

When our Prime Minister subordinates the magical diversity of what it means to be Australian to some absurdly jingoistic, reductive view of national identity, it is no surprise that others take it further: from hateful graffiti, to calls to halt Muslim immigration or ban the burqa, to Islamophobic attacks on Australian women wearing headscarves.

Talk of Team Australia is precisely un-Australian: careless, stupid, repressive talk that has no place here. My family has been in this country for more than two centuries, coming as convicts, and falling at Gallipoli. As among the oldest of white Australia, I can say that Tony Abbott does not speak for us. Human rights and mutual respect are our values. Politicians should champion them.

Governments are always tempted to reach for new laws when security is threatened. Intelligence agencies never say they have enough power or stop asking for more. Excessive laws are virtually never wound back.

The truth is that Australia already has enough laws to deal with terrorism. Since 9/11 the Parliament has been amongst the most hyperactive and invasive counter-terrorism law-makers on the planet. Much of it is never used, or goes too far - from preventive police detention, to ASIO's incommunicado detention of non-suspects, to control orders.

The new laws also go too far. They criminalise innocent travel to places the Foreign Minister does not want you to go. They criminalise free speech. They criminalise whistleblowers and the media that report them. They allow mass surveillance of innocent Australians on the internet. They deny procedural fairness. They violate the right to social security and therefore potentially leave people destitute.

All of this comes without the binding human rights safeguards that every other self-respecting democracy imposes on its security agencies.

More powers are not the answer. Good policing, constructive work with communities, and efforts to address the root causes of alienation are most effective. National security cannot be allowed to stand on the shoulders of everything else. Otherwise our hard won liberties dissolve into the muck of doing whatever it takes.

Overreaction is also endemic in our response to refugees. Last month's bill aims to take decisions as far outside the rule of law as possible, by narrowing the refugee definition, cementing "fast track" processing; excluding natural justice; limiting review; extending and immunising powers to detain and expel at sea; and pre-empting High Court challenges.

The bill also erases references in our law to the Refugee Convention. The Immigration Minister spat the dummy on international law, saying: "This parliament should decide what our obligations are under these conventions - not those who seek to direct us otherwise from places outside this country", such as foreign courts or the United Nations. The Minister assured us that Australia would comply with its international obligations - which is presumably not difficult if international law is now simply whatever the Government says it is.

The rest of the miserable story of Australian refugee policy is well known. Protracted and even indefinite, illegal detention. Cruel, inhuman and degrading detention conditions, where refugees suicide, are beaten to death, or die from treatable infections. Detention factories that manufacture mental illness. Naval interceptions and offshore processing based on grand lies about queue jumping, people smuggling, and saving lives at sea. Shifting our burden onto and bribing poor neighbours like Papua New Guinea. Coddling dictators in Cambodia and war criminals and torturers in Sri Lanka. Undermining constitutionalism in Nauru. Our system punishes refugees and tries to stop them coming at whatever the human cost.

If I were to sum up the whole diabolical field of Australian refugee policy, it would be this: Australia is monumentally stingy. In the Middle East, small, poor countries like Lebanon and Jordan are bursting at the seams with epic influxes of millions of refugees from Syria and Iraq. About half of Jordan's population are refugees. In the past month alone, Turkey has received 150,000 refugees - more than Australia received in a decade. That is on top of a million already there. That is a real emergency and still those countries do not close their borders.

Australia receives a few thousand boat people and our politicians - on both sides - some of our media, and many Australians go into meltdown. We have no sense of proportion or perspective, like a child that cannot control itself. Stinginess, selfishness, paranoia, and racism have become defining characteristics of our nation. We are increasingly pathetic.

The major parties are in lock-step on many of these abuses, whether on refugees or terrorism. Many Australian politicians are either hostile towards human rights or indifferent. They prefer to govern by marginal seat focus groups than to show courage or leadership.

Some of the great light of human rights is fading in Australia. It is a cause of sorrow, and shame, that our institutions are incapable of arresting it. Our country has become, in the words of our bush poet Randolph Stow, "a desert of broken quartz", wracked by the crow.

This is an extract of a speech delivered at the NSW Council for Civil Liberties Annual Dinner on Sydney on 26 September. View the full speech here.

Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at The University of Sydney. View his full profile here.