Tony Abbott wants you to look closely at the shocking photo posted by a jihadist, but not too closely

You’ve seen it of course. That picture. The one politics really wants you to see.



I’m speaking of the image of the child clutching the severed head of the Syrian soldier. Front page news. Television news. Twitter and Facebook news. “One of the images that has seared itself into the consciousness,” noted Tony Abbott, in London overnight, after his phone call with David Cameron.

“This image, perhaps even an iconic photograph,” noted the US secretary of state, John Kerry, grave, in Sydney, on Tuesday – “disturbing, stomach-churning, grotesque.”

Well, quite. Any human response to that picture is recoil; absolute repulsion. Anyone with children is viscerally affected – how could anyone use their own child as a prop to murder?

It brings an inexplicable foreign conflict far too close. You can’t look at it, and you can’t look away either.

But politics actually wants you to consume that picture in a very specific way: closely, but not too closely.

You are being asked, at first implicitly, and over the past day or so, more explicitly, to make some connections between that child and looming policy responses to the threat of terrorism.

You are actually being asked to look past the picture, not at it.

That picture, as Kerry made clear in his description, is presenting itself now as a focal point in a debate which has thus far lacked a focal point. Voters are being asked to make the reasonable person’s conclusion, the watercooler conclusion – this event is absolutely horrendous. This singular act might even be barbaric enough, totemic enough, galvanising enough, to warrant a significant rebalancing of civil liberties in Australia.

That’s the subtext standing implacably behind the wide dissemination of the image. It’s less fact than argument.

But that picture is not actually a symbol, or argument, or a fable. It’s a specific moment in time. It’s a fact, and an uncomfortable one, which deserves something more than an emotional reaction, or a gut instinct devoid of context.

Having being asked to look at the image, let’s comply with the request, and interrogate it. Who is in the picture? How did this event come to pass, and what light does it shed on public policy debates currently in contemplation?

According to the media outlets who have published the image, and, presumably, authenticated it, the young boy pictured with the severed head is the son of convicted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf.

You might ask how a convicted terrorist managed to get himself to Syria, the location of a bloody sectarian civil war and a global magnet for extremists wanting to hone their craft of insurgency and terror.

Well, the facts as we understand it are this. Sharrouf fled Australia on his brother’s passport late last year, three months after the Coalition took office.

Evidently a significant customs and security failure early in the life of the newly elected Abbott government contributed to a convicted terrorist and person of interest slipping out of the country and making his way to participate in an overseas conflict.

If you ask how that customs failure came to pass, as my colleague Daniel Hurst had cause to do recently, the government’s inclination is not to self-flagellate, or apologise, but blame Labor. Apparently this man took flight because Labor didn’t change the policy and it cut the customs budget.

I don’t really care about predictable political finger-pointing. I suspect you don’t either. So let’s block out the excuse and make the broader point clear: our simple picture is not quite as simple as it seems.

The image can be consumed in different ways.

It can be a piece of simple iconography: here is the poster child of modern terrorism – this far barbarism, and no further. Or it can be an emblem of a really serious bureaucratic bungle on the Coalition’s watch. Take your pick. I don’t intend to tell you how to think, just supply the backstory you could easily have missed. It’s quite obvious which version the government prefers, and why it prefers it.

It might be useful while we are in deconstruction mode to separate out the interests of the Coalition and the intelligence community because those interests are actually distinct, yet they overlap.

The Coalition right now wants to project clarity and authority and segue to a national discussion about national security in preparation for a significant change in Australia’s legal architecture, including changes that will impact on civil liberties.

The intelligence community wants to prevent an act of terror on Australian soil. Asio will take whatever tools the legislature is prepared to give it whether those tools are consistent with the basic principles of justice or not. Civil liberties are someone else’s problem.

There’s another minor curiosity in the debate being generated by that picture. There’s a strong projection of urgency around the issue of foreign fighters. Of course policymakers are confronting a lot of complex threats and challenges, and a fluid and dynamic environment, but the vibe is again somewhat out of kilter with the facts.

Asio has been warning about the domestic threat posed by Australians participating in sectarian conflicts overseas for years. And when I say years, I mean years. Just out of interest, I checked back through Asio’s last six annual reports.

Just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s some specific references. In 2007-08 – the last year of the Howard government and first year of Kevin Rudd: “Within Australia, a small but significant minority of the community hold or have held extremist views. An even smaller minority is prepared to act in support of it – including by advocating violence, providing logistical or propaganda support to extremists, or travelling abroad to train with terrorist groups or participate in violent jihad activities.”

2008-09: “The Middle East, south Asia and now east Africa are the primary sources of motivation and capability for extremists in Australia. Small numbers of Australians continue to look to conflict theatres overseas for inspiration and some aspire to participate in the violence or seek to learn from the tactics and techniques employed by extremists there.”

2009-10. “Concerns are growing at the rise of ‘home­ grown’ potential terrorists and an increase in the number of Australians seeking to travel overseas for terrorism-related purposes.”

Here, again, in 2010-11. “Some Australians continue to be drawn to the jihadist message. New extremist groups and individuals continue to emerge, and some seek to act in Australia or travel overseas to train or fight. The favoured destinations for those wishing to travel overseas include Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan/Pakistan, although the opening of any new jihadist front could attract would-be combatants.”

2011-12. “Individuals who seek to engage in violence in Australia or attempt to travel overseas to train and fight are priorities for ASIO and law enforcement investigations. Favoured destinations overseas are Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Australians who are currently training or fighting overseas may also return to Australia to engage in terrorism, use their knowledge of Australia to help others plan an attack, or engage in terrorism overseas.”

Asio’s last annual report, tabled early after the election of Tony Abbott, offered a more pointed assessment of the contemporary risks.

Syria was proving something of a step change. “The Syrian conflict has resonated strongly in Australia, partly because of deep familial ties to Lebanon that exist here. Many Australians – a significantly greater number than we have seen for any comparable conflict – have travelled to the region, including several to participate directly in combat or to provide support to those involved.”

“As at 30 June 2013, four Australians were known to have been killed in Syria. Asio is concerned about the potential for Australians in Syria to be exposed further to extremist groups and their ideology.”

This assessment was backed up in March by Bret Walker SC, the outgoing national security legislation monitor. Walker, an eminent lawyer, gave the government a specific list of changes it would have to make to existing laws to ensure any returning Australian jihadists could be prosecuted successfully on their return. That was March.

So there’s two specific warnings – one last year and one early this year. It’s now August. The government is only just now assuming battle mode, and we don’t even yet have concrete proposals on the war zone measures.

So yet more context emerges if we look at the picture rather than past it.

If you look at the evidence, it can be argued that the Coalition has not been possessed by a singular moral clarity, brimming with determination – the government has actually been pretty slow off the mark.

So why the delay?

Is this simply commendable caution on the part of a Liberal government (and the word liberal is deployed advisably in this instance) – a desire to ruminate carefully before taking action which will impact on the law abiding as well as the criminals?

Is it because action wasn’t, strictly speaking, urgent, because the problem of foreign fighters wasn’t new, and security agencies had the threat risks more or less in hand? (The departure of Sharrouf does put a slight question mark over that as a working theory.)

Did the new government divert valuable resources into its confected and highly political border protection offensive rather than dealing first with the actual security risks?

Did the attorney general waste precious time prosecuting his faux fight on the racial discrimination front rather than the terror front?

The inconsistencies are in fact, now so bleedingly obvious, that Labor has even thrown off its default conflict aversion on sensitive issues, such as national security, and begun asking some questions.

As yet, there are no straight answers.