The Cairns Post

Having absolute secrecy

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THERE has been a lot of massive advertisin­g about security laws lately, with good cause.

The reason to have such absolute secrecy, is to let others do treasonous things they should not, illegally, and prevent people from doing anything about it. These very laws, are the things a dictatorsh­ip would set up to do so, and must be drasticall­y curtailed to stop a future errant government from using them to do so.

We would then have something far away from the “Liberal democracy” that the government talks about.

We cannot have it both ways, and even now our democratic rights have been well eroded. We should have a test to preserve secrecy concerning illegal acts and identity, to only do so when it is actually functional­ly reasonable to do so for an actual reasonable objective in the better public interest, which includes their reasonable rights.

Notifying, complainin­g and reporting about contrary things to this, or in a way that is in the best interests for the public, and in reasonable good timing for an operation passing the above test, must be protected by law.

If we don’t, scum, and scum behaviour, will only take advantage of this to move in. All the old people I’ve known in intelligen­ce, would agree.

Wayne Morellini, White Rock

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