By now Australia and Australians should be feeling amazingly safe. The latest assortment of anti-terror measures was scripted to assure all and sundry that safety is the key motivation.

Face surveillance measures, 14-day detention without charge and a clamp down on instructional manuals and terror-related hoaxes are the latest measures “to keep Australians safe”.

There’s hardly a need for a seatbelt in this flight of fancy.

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In pitching his new measures the prime minister used the word “safe” eight times in an interview on Wednesday with the ABC’s Sabra Lane. It’s also sprinkled liberally through every other statement he has made on the topic.

He has outdone Tony Abbott’s 2015 effort where the word was used seven times when the then PM outlined a spate of new security measures.

In a letter to Liberal supporters on Wednesday, the prime minister elided the Las Vegas shootings with his anti-terrrorism measures: “The tragedy in Las Vegas is a reminder that we must be relentless in our efforts to protect Australians in crowded places so that we can go about our lives safe from harm ...”

It wasn’t so long ago that Peter Dutton claimed that his prospective portfolio of home affairs would keep us “safe” – which reminds us to question, will Dutton have oversight of these latest measures?

Premiers Daniel Andrews and Gladys Berejiklian at Thursday’s Coag meeting also signed onto the safety slogan.

In 2003 the Howard government was keeping us safe with fridge magnets and anti-terror emergency recommendations (spare car keys, sunscreen, a torch, first-aid kit).

Unfortunately, improvement to our safety is something that cannot be guaranteed. It is politicians who are keen to make themselves safe by forever ramping up measures that not-so quietly chip at the foundations of freedom, democracy, civil rights, the whole bag of tricks that were once such comforting creatures of our specialness.

Making it an offence to hoax or have a terror guide book sounds pretty lame, but a nationally coordinated, real time facial recognition capacity is a new dimension with no certainty at this point who will have access to the database.

Yet, for every advance in high-tech capacity to track terror-related activity there is an available analogue response. If people don’t want to be facially identified at a sporting event or a shopping centre they are quite capable to turning up in a wig with false nose and glasses.

There’s even the frustrating possibility that people without driving licences or passports will fall outside the mass recognition net, just as some people who are up to no good avoid communicating on mobile phones or the internet.

So what’s next? What new morsel of liberty can be traded for the fantasy of safety? Maybe the security agencies could persuade the government that all citizens, and even non-citizens, should be implanted with a chip that tracks and controls. This tiny implant might even anticipate wishes, desires and expectations and relay them to the Department of Home Affairs.

As Google and Facebook have led the way with the capacity for intuitive anticipation, a personal chip could do even better. The device might be called the Safety Synchroniser, or SS for short.

As the prime minister says, surveillance capacity exists already but it is now being coordinated more effectively, just as metadata retention organises what already is available to be retained.

In the name of safety and fighting terror we can go on trading away our independence, our liberties, our identity, until nothing is left. The process of keeping us safe is infinite.

The post 9/11 Howard-era measures included beefing-up powers and resources for intelligence agencies, the introduction of control orders, penalties for advocating terrorism, the greater use of conspiracy charges, and Asio’s extended holding and questioning capability.

In 2015 Tony Abbott came up with further measures to ban terrorist organisations, to prosecute foreign fighters, to clamp down on the funding of terrorism and the suspension of passports – part of his mission in dealing with Daesh or, as the then prime minister called it, “the Death Cult”.

Since then we’ve had metadata retention, the capacity to remove people’s citizenship, street bollards and now facial ID.

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Not always are these measures effective. For instance, at the behest of the NSW police in 2016 the state government introduced laws that were designed to make it easier to restrict the movement of criminals, and even people who weren’t criminals.

In introducing the legislation for serious crime prevention orders the police minister Troy Grant said, “We make no apologies for improving community safety”. A year after the law came into effect the minister admitted to parliament that no serious crime prevention orders have been made.

The measures were more in the nature of political chest beating than an effective attempt to secure community safety.

What would be more worthwhile is a coordinated move to tighten the national firearms agreement, which Coalition governments have progressively undermined. Premiers and prime ministers are talking out of both sides of their mouth when they beat the terror drum yet conspicuously fail to make us safe from more guns.

Possibly another way of protecting the community without the constant erosion of liberties and the trampling of the rule of law is to avoid slavishly following the United States into Middle East adventures.

A bill or charter of rights also is well overdue, particularly in the context where there is currently no countervailing protection against the state’s incursion into traditional freedoms. There is a desperate need for strong mechanisms whereby the security of the nation can be balanced with the protection of liberty.