Australians urged to report suspicious behaviour
The Australian government has unveiled a new advertising campaign that encourages people to report “suspicious behaviour” to an anti-terrorism hotline.
The national security hotline is staffed by call centre operators who will pass on relevant information about suspicious behaviour to police and other government agencies. The hotline – 1800 123 400 – will be able to process up to 2000 calls an hour.[...]
Starting tomorrow, the TV campaign will tell Australians to work together to preserve our peaceful way of life. The campaign, “Let’s Look Out For Australia”, takes the appearance of a community service announcement, containing no images of terrorist atrocities.
– The Australian, Suspicious behaviour terror ad target.
The advertising campaign has met with criticism from the opposition, the Islamic community, civil libertarians, and academics:
Clive Williams, director of terrorism studies at the Australian National University, said the portrayal of Australia as safe, peace-loving and democratic was accurate but not informative.[...]
The Islamic Council of Victoria called on the Federal Government to punish anyone falsely reporting suspicious activity. President Yasser Soliman said the ads should carry warnings of penalties for false reporting, as the system was open to abuse by those seeking to settle petty feuds.
He said the first ad was well balanced and responsible, but future ads must also avoid discriminating against Muslims.
– The Age, Alert campaign find itself under heavy fire.
The Labour opposition party has claimed it will increase alarm across a country already nervous after the bomb attacks in Bali, in October.The message of the three-month campaign is for Australians to be “alert but not alarmed”.
Labour claims it will achieve the exact opposite.
[...]
Civil libertarians are worried the campaign will encourage vigilantes, who may attempt to apprehend possible terror suspects who have not done anything wrong.
– BBC, Australia anti-terror drive criticised.
It seems that the hotline is more likely to be a money waster than the advertising campaign, however. The hotline has already taken 500 calls in its first few days of operation. The government admits many of those calls will be hoaxes or inaccurate information.
Mr Howard today admitted many of the calls would lead nowhere and said some of the callers had apologised for wasting the call centre’s time. But he said he wanted to assure those people they were not wasting time if they had genuine concerns, although hoaxes were a different matter. “Already some 500 people have used the hotline to report things. Now many of those will be completely unexceptionable events,” he told Channel 9. “Quite a lot of them will be (time wasting) but that is the case with all work and activity of this kind. – The Australian, Terror hotline takes 500 calls.