Trust-Fall – The Crisis of Representation, Dissent and State Legitimacy.
By Nick Chugg
Abstract
This article develops a political sociology critique of contemporary Australian claims that increased protections for politicians are justified by a rise in “politically motivated violence.” It argues that the dominant governmental and security framing relies on a category error: it aggregates physical violence, threats, harassment, protest activity, online hostility, ideological expression, intelligence classifications and terrorism-related assessments under the broad label of “politically motivated violence.” Drawing on Weberian legitimacy theory, Marxian political economy, Durkheimian accounts of social cohesion, Habermasian communicative legitimacy, Foucauldian disciplinary power, Tilly’s work on state coercion and capacity, and Beck’s theory of risk society, the article argues that contemporary Australia is experiencing not simply a crisis of security, but a crisis of legitimacy, representation, rights and classification.
The article proposes a sequential model: structural inequality produces unequal political responsiveness; unequal responsiveness erodes perceived legitimacy; declining legitimacy produces increased expressive dissent; social media expands the visibility, traceability and emotional intensity of that dissent; security agencies, police and legal frameworks increasingly classify dissent through broad categories of threat; and the resulting rise in recorded “threats” is narrated as evidence of rising political violence. This model does not deny that threats exist or that some threats may be serious. Rather, it argues that the state’s aggregation of expressive and coercive behaviours obscures the distinction between dissent and violence, producing statistical and political inflation.
The paper further examines post-2001 counter-terrorism expansion, epistemic opacity in security statistics, institutional incentives in risk governance, rule-of-law and human-rights legitimacy claims, managed protest rights, recent hate-speech and hate-crime legislation, and international legitimacy controversies such as Gaza, Iraq and Australia’s role in wars abroad. It concludes that democratic systems risk deepening legitimacy loss when they treat dissent primarily as security risk rather than as evidence of representational failure.
1. Introduction
The article published by Sydney Criminal Lawyers under the title “Protections for Politicians Enhanced Due to Rise in Politically Motivated Violence” reflects a broader governmental and security narrative now emerging in Australia: that politicians require enhanced protection because threats, harassment and politically motivated violence are increasing. The article cites Australian Federal Police figures indicating that politically motivated threats against federal parliamentarians increased significantly, and it relies on the broad definition of “politically motivated violence” contained in section 4 of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cth). That definition includes “acts or threats of violence or unlawful harm” intended or likely to achieve a political objective. It also encompasses terrorism and other serious forms of politically directed violence (Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026; Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cth), s 4; ASIO, 2025).
This paper does not deny that some politicians face serious threats, nor does it suggest that intimidation, stalking, bomb threats or genuine threats of violence are trivial. The central claim is different. It argues that the category being used by government, police, intelligence agencies and media commentary is analytically unstable. It collapses speech, online hostility, threats, vandalism, protest disruption, ideological expression, terrorism-related conduct and physical violence into a single security category. This produces a misleading narrative in which increased visibility and recording of dissent are interpreted as increased violence.
The key problem is not merely empirical. It is sociological. The state is not simply observing political violence; it is classifying political behaviour through institutional categories. Once the state defines a wider range of expressive or oppositional conduct as part of a “politically motivated violence” environment, the statistical appearance of violence increases even where actual physical violence remains rare, episodic or disproportionate to the reported rise in “threats.” In this sense, the question is not only whether threats have increased, but what kinds of behaviour are being counted, how they are being classified, and what political narrative is produced through that classification.
The central model of this article is as follows. Structural inequality, as described by Piketty and the OECD, contributes to unequal political responsiveness of the kind identified by Gilens. Unequal responsiveness erodes perceived democratic legitimacy in Weberian terms. Declining legitimacy produces increased expressive political dissent, including speech, protest and online hostility. Social media dramatically expands the visibility and traceability of this dissent. Security agencies, police and legislatures then classify an increasing share of this observable dissent under broad categories such as “politically motivated violence.” The result is a statistical increase in recorded threats without necessarily a proportional increase in physical violence. This produces the narrative shift: “rising political violence” (Piketty, 2014; Gilens, 2012; Weber, 1978; OECD, 2024; ASIO, 2025).
This model is not intended to deny the existence of genuine threats. Rather, it insists on analytical separation. Threats are not the same as assaults. Online anger is not the same as terrorism. Protest disruption is not the same as assassination. Vandalism is not the same as mass-casualty violence. A democratic society that fails to maintain these distinctions risks misrecognising dissent as violence and legitimacy crisis as security crisis.
This paper is therefore written as a counter-analysis to governmental claims that enhanced political protection is a straightforward response to a rise in political violence. It argues instead that what is being described as “political violence” must be disaggregated and situated within a wider legitimacy crisis. That crisis is driven by structural inequality, unequal political responsiveness, declining trust, rights-affecting legislation, managed protest regimes, social media visibility and expanding security classification systems. When these forces interact, the appearance of rising political violence may partly reflect the state’s expanded capacity to detect, classify and narrate dissent as threat.
The paper proceeds in sixteen sections. Following this introduction, Section 2 establishes the theoretical framework by drawing together Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Habermas, Foucault, Tilly and Beck. Section 3 outlines the methodology and hypotheses. Sections 4 and 5 examine structural inequality, unequal responsiveness and legitimacy crisis. Section 6 analyses social media as a transformation in expressive capacity. Section 7 argues that “politically motivated violence” operates as a category error when threats, expression and physical violence are aggregated. Sections 8 and 9 examine terrorism, counter-terrorism expansion, epistemic opacity, measurement regimes and institutional incentives. Section 10 analyses rule-of-law breach, human rights and sociological legitimacy. Section 11 examines protest, surveillance and managed rights. Section 12 considers Gaza, war crimes and international legitimacy as amplifiers of domestic legitimacy decline. Section 13 provides an empirical illustration distinguishing threats from physical violence. Section 14 addresses counterarguments. Section 15 outlines policy implications. Section 16 concludes by arguing that Australia’s problem is not simply rising political violence, but a deeper crisis of legitimacy, classification and democratic representation.
2. Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework of this paper integrates Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Habermas, Foucault, Tilly and Beck. These theorists are not used as ornamental references, but as conceptual tools for analysing the relationship between inequality, legitimacy, dissent, surveillance and state classification.
Weber’s contribution is central because legitimacy is not simply a matter of formal legality. For Weber, authority is stable when people believe it to be rightful. A government may possess legal power and still lose legitimacy if citizens no longer believe that its exercise of power is justified. This is essential to the argument developed here. The question is not only whether Australian laws are technically valid within domestic constitutional arrangements. The sociological question is whether people experience those laws, institutions and political actors as legitimate (Weber, 1978).
Marx provides the structural political economy foundation. If economic power is concentrated, political power is likely to follow. In capitalist societies, formal equality at the ballot box can coexist with deep material inequality in influence, access and policy responsiveness. Piketty’s work on capital accumulation and wealth concentration provides an empirical extension of this Marxian insight. Gilens’ work on unequal policy responsiveness provides a further mechanism: when preferences diverge, government policy tends to align more closely with wealthy or elite preferences than with those of ordinary citizens (Marx, 1976; Piketty, 2014; Gilens, 2012).
Durkheim adds the problem of social cohesion and anomie. When institutions no longer reflect the moral expectations of the population, social solidarity weakens. People experience a gap between the official claims of democracy and the lived realities of exclusion, precarity, surveillance and political non-responsiveness. Expressive dissent is then not an irrational deviation from normal politics; it is a symptom of normative dislocation. From this perspective, hostility toward political institutions may be read not only as individual deviance but as evidence of weakened integration between citizens and the political order (Durkheim, 1897; Durkheim, 1984).
Habermas provides the communicative dimension. Democratic legitimacy depends on the ability of citizens to participate in public reasoning and to see political decisions as justified through communicative processes. Where governments use accelerated legislation, opaque security classifications, secrecy, bipartisan closure, guillotined debate or administrative filtering of protest, legitimacy erodes because the communicative basis of law is weakened. A political order cannot maintain legitimacy merely by passing laws. It must be able to justify those laws within a public sphere that citizens experience as open, rational and responsive (Habermas, 1975; Habermas, 1996).
Foucault explains how modern power operates through classification, surveillance and discipline. The key point is not only that the state uses force, but that it produces categories through which behaviour becomes visible, measurable and governable. “Politically motivated violence” is therefore not a neutral description. It is an administrative category that transforms a range of behaviours into objects of security governance. Once dissent is rendered legible as threat, it becomes available for monitoring, classification, intervention and control (Foucault, 1977; Foucault, 2007).
Tilly completes the framework by situating the state as an institution that manages coercion, legitimacy and capacity. States do not only protect populations; they also expand, maintain and justify their capacities. In the post-2001 counter-terrorism context, Australian security agencies, police powers and surveillance systems expanded substantially. The question is whether this expansion reflects proportional increases in realised violence, or whether it also reflects institutional adaptation, risk governance and the production of new threat categories (Tilly, 1992; Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2015; Hardy and Williams, 2022).
Beck’s risk society thesis further explains why contemporary governance increasingly shifts from responding to actual harms to anticipating possible harms. In a risk society, low-probability but high-consequence events justify expanding systems of monitoring, prediction, prevention and pre-emption. This is where the concept of anticipatory governance becomes especially important. Anticipatory governance changes the meaning of political behaviour itself because behaviour is increasingly assessed not only for what it is, but for what it might become. In its most troubling form, this approaches a pre-crime or thought-crime-adjacent logic: belief, association, expression, identity, online conduct and ideological curiosity become treated as security-relevant before any physical offence has occurred (Beck, 1992; Zedner, 2007; McCulloch and Pickering, 2009).
Taken together, these theoretical traditions provide the framework for the paper’s central argument. Structural inequality and elite influence weaken representational legitimacy. Weak legitimacy produces expressive dissent. Social media increases the visibility and traceability of that dissent. Security institutions then classify increasing amounts of visible dissent as threat. The outcome is not simply a rise in political violence, but a transformation in how political conflict is produced, observed, classified and narrated.
3. Methodology and Hypotheses
This paper uses a structural-interpretive political sociology methodology. It does not attempt to provide a complete quantitative test of all causal relationships. Rather, it develops a theoretical and empirical framework for interpreting the Australian state’s claims about politically motivated violence.
The analysis proceeds across four levels. First, it examines structural conditions: inequality, elite influence and political responsiveness. Second, it examines legitimacy: trust, perceived fairness, rule-of-law expectations and human-rights alignment. Third, it examines communicative transformation: the role of social media in making dissent more visible, permanent and measurable. Fourth, it examines classification: the way state agencies, laws and security institutions define and record political behaviour (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1996; Foucault, 1977; OECD, 2024).
The approach is interpretive because the paper is concerned not only with objective political events, but with the meanings attached to those events by institutions and citizens. It is structural because it does not reduce political hostility to individual psychology or personal extremism. Instead, it asks how inequality, institutional responsiveness, legal architecture, surveillance capacity and classification systems shape the political field within which anger and dissent are expressed.
The methodology also treats official statistics as socially produced data rather than transparent reflections of reality. This is especially important in relation to security and intelligence data. Ordinary crime statistics are already shaped by policing practices, reporting patterns, legal categories and institutional incentives. Counterterrorism and politically motivated violence statistics are even more complex because they are often produced within partially classified systems, where definitions, thresholds and operational details may not be fully available for independent scrutiny (Foucault, 1977; Zedner, 2007; ALRC, 2010; ASIO, 2025).
The main variables are as follows. Inequality refers to income and wealth concentration, particularly asset-based inequality and capital accumulation. Responsiveness asymmetry refers to the divergence between the preferences of ordinary citizens and the policies actually enacted by government. Legitimacy refers to the belief that institutions are rightful, fair, accountable and representative. Expressive dissent refers to speech, protest, symbolic opposition, rhetorical hostility, online anger and other non-physical political expression. Classification intensity refers to the breadth and frequency with which institutions classify expressive or oppositional behaviour as security-relevant, threatening or violent (Piketty, 2014; Gilens, 2012; OECD, 2024; ASIO, 2025).
The central hypotheses are as follows. First, higher structural inequality is likely to increase responsiveness asymmetry because wealth concentration provides disproportionate access to political influence. Second, responsiveness asymmetry is likely to reduce perceived legitimacy because citizens experience formal democracy as substantively unresponsive. Third, declining legitimacy is likely to increase expressive dissent, especially where citizens feel excluded from meaningful representation. Fourth, social media increases the visibility, volume, traceability and emotional intensity of expressive dissent without necessarily increasing physical violence. Fifth, expanded security classification systems convert more visible dissent into recorded “threats,” thereby creating a statistical increase in politically motivated violence categories. Sixth, the narrative of “rising political violence” is partly produced by the interaction between legitimacy decline, digital visibility and institutional classification (Gilens, 2012; Habermas, 1996; Foucault, 1977; Zedner, 2007; ASIO, 2025).
The paper therefore advances a legitimacy-classification model rather than a simple violence-escalation model. It does not deny that politically motivated violence exists. Nor does it deny that threats can be serious. Its claim is that political violence statistics must be interpreted through the systems that produce them. A rise in recorded threats may reflect a rise in dangerous conduct, but it may also reflect expanded surveillance, broader definitions, heightened reporting, social media visibility, institutional incentives and shifting classification thresholds.
This methodological distinction is central to the paper’s critique of the Australian government’s narrative. If the state reports an increase in politically motivated threats, that statistic cannot be interpreted without asking what counts as a threat, who reports it, how it is classified, whether categories have changed, whether social media has increased visibility, and whether increased monitoring has expanded the pool of recorded behaviour. Without these questions, public discourse risks treating a measurement system as if it were a direct mirror of reality.
4. Structural Inequality and Unequal Responsiveness
The structural foundation of the argument is inequality. Advanced capitalist democracies have experienced significant wealth concentration, especially through asset inflation, housing markets, capital returns and intergenerational accumulation. Piketty’s central thesis is that when returns to capital exceed growth, wealth concentration tends to intensify across generations. In Australia, the consequences are visible in housing unaffordability, wage stagnation relative to asset values, intergenerational inequality and the rising distance between capital-owning and non-capital-owning citizens (Piketty, 2014; OECD, 2024; Productivity Commission, 2024a).
Inequality is not merely economic. It has political consequences. Wealth shapes access to lobbying, donations, media influence, think tanks, elite networks and policy formation. The result is not necessarily the abolition of democracy, but the hollowing out of democratic responsiveness. If citizens experience politics as formally open but substantively captured, legitimacy erodes because democracy appears to operate in form while failing in function (Gilens, 2012; Stiglitz, 2012; Piketty, 2014; OECD, 2024).
Gilens’ work is important because it demonstrates that in the United States, when the preferences of ordinary citizens diverge from the preferences of wealthy citizens, policy outcomes tend to reflect the latter. Although Gilens’ core dataset is American, the framework is highly relevant to comparable liberal democracies such as Australia. The precise Australian equivalent requires further empirical testing, but Australia is not structurally immune from elite influence, lobbying, property interests, donor access, media concentration or party discipline (Gilens, 2012; Bartels, 2008; Martin, 2015; Sawer, 2016).
This produces a representational contradiction. Citizens formally possess equal political rights, but materially possess unequal political influence. The ballot remains, but responsiveness is stratified. The result is a democratic form that may increasingly fail in democratic function. This is the structural ground upon which distrust, anger and expressive dissent develop (Marx, 1976; Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1975; Gilens, 2012).
The Australian context gives this contradiction particular force. The legitimacy of parliamentary democracy depends not only on elections, but on the belief that elected representatives are responsive to the people. Where citizens perceive that major policy settings favour asset holders, corporations, donors, developers, finance, resource interests or party insiders, democratic authority becomes vulnerable to accusations of capture. Whether all such accusations are empirically correct is less important sociologically than whether they are widely believed and experientially reinforced. Legitimacy is shaped by lived political judgement, not merely by institutional self-description (Weber, 1978; Beetham, 1991; OECD, 2024).
This is why inequality must be understood as a legitimacy variable. A system may remain formally democratic while becoming increasingly difficult for ordinary citizens to experience as representative. Housing insecurity, declining real living standards, insecure work, unequal access to justice, declining trust in institutions and perceptions of elite impunity all function as legitimacy pressures. They create the conditions under which anger toward politicians becomes more understandable, not as spontaneous extremism, but as a response to perceived structural exclusion (Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2012; OECD, 2024; Habermas, 1975).
5. Legitimacy Crisis: Weber, Marx, Durkheim and Habermas
Legitimacy is the central variable in this paper. The issue is not whether people are angry simply because they have been radicalised, polarised or manipulated. The deeper issue is whether citizens believe the system still represents them.
In Weberian terms, a government loses legitimacy when citizens no longer believe that its authority is rightful. This loss does not require revolution or institutional collapse. It can manifest as cynicism, distrust, disengagement, anger, contempt, protest or refusal to accept official narratives. A state may remain legally operational while becoming morally and socially illegitimate in the eyes of many citizens (Weber, 1978; Beetham, 1991; Habermas, 1975).
From a Marxian perspective, legitimacy declines when the state appears to serve capital rather than the people. If citizens believe that politicians represent donors, corporations, property interests, security agencies or foreign allies rather than the electorate, then legitimacy is eroded at the structural level. The perception of elite capture is not merely an emotional reaction; it is a political judgement grounded in lived experience (Marx, 1976; Piketty, 2014; Gilens, 2012; Stiglitz, 2012).
From a Durkheimian perspective, legitimacy decline produces anomie. People experience disconnection between the moral order they were taught to expect and the institutional reality they encounter. They are told they live in a democracy, but experience cost-of-living crisis, unaffordable housing, environmental inaction, broken promises, opaque lawmaking, restricted protest and political decisions that seem detached from public will (Durkheim, 1897; Durkheim, 1984; OECD, 2024).
From a Habermasian perspective, legitimacy requires communicative justification. Laws and policies must be publicly justifiable through processes that citizens can recognise as open, fair and rational. When legislation is rushed, guillotined, hidden within omnibus bills, justified through security rhetoric, or insulated from meaningful scrutiny, legitimacy declines because the communicative basis of law is weakened (Habermas, 1975; Habermas, 1996; Dryzek, 2000).
This is why public anger toward politicians cannot be understood merely as pathology. It may also be an index of legitimacy failure. When a government presents anger as violence without asking why anger has become so widespread, it displaces responsibility from political structure onto individual expression. That displacement protects institutional authority by defining the citizen’s response as the problem while leaving the state’s conduct comparatively unscrutinised (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1996; Foucault, 1977; Tilly, 1992).
Legitimacy also has a temporal dimension. Citizens do not judge government action in isolation. They interpret present laws, police actions, security warnings and political claims through accumulated historical experience. Broken promises, corruption scandals, failed inquiries, foreign-policy deception, austerity, housing failures, rights encroachments and selective enforcement of law accumulate as legitimacy injuries. Each new security claim is therefore received within a wider memory of state conduct (Beetham, 1991; Habermas, 1975; OECD, 2024).
This accumulation helps explain why state claims about political violence may be met with suspicion. If citizens already believe that government has become less responsive, less transparent and more coercive, then new claims about threats to politicians may not be heard as neutral security information. They may be interpreted as self-protection by a political class that refuses to address its own legitimacy failures. This is not merely an irrational conspiracy response. It is a predictable sociological consequence of declining trust (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1996; OECD, 2024; Foucault, 1977).
The legitimacy crisis therefore cannot be solved by redefining dissent as risk. Such redefinition may produce compliance, but it does not restore belief in rightful authority. Indeed, when citizens see criticism, protest or anger treated as a security issue, they may experience the state as even less legitimate. The result is a feedback loop: declining legitimacy produces anger; anger is classified as threat; classification justifies further control; further control deepens legitimacy decline (Habermas, 1975; Foucault, 1977; Beck, 1992; Zedner, 2007).
6. Social Media and the Expansion of Expressive Capacity
Social media is not a peripheral variable. It is central to the model.
Before social media, much political anger remained private, local, oral or ephemeral. Citizens complained at home, in pubs, at union meetings, in letters, at rallies or in small networks. These expressions were not easily searchable, countable, archived or classified. Today, citizens can directly address politicians, post public anger, comment on political events, circulate accusations and organise protest in real time (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Castells, 2012; Papacharissi, 2015).
This does not necessarily mean that people are more violent. It means that expressions of anger are more visible. Social media lowers the threshold for political expression. It increases the number of citizens able to participate in political discourse. It amplifies emotional content. It makes outrage searchable. It creates permanent records of statements that would once have disappeared. It enables institutions to monitor, classify and report speech as threat-relevant (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Papacharissi, 2015; Tufekci, 2017; Foucault, 1977).
This creates a visibility-classification feedback loop. More people speak. More speech is recorded. More recorded speech is monitored. More monitored speech is classified. More classified speech appears in threat statistics. Those statistics are then cited as evidence of rising politically motivated violence. The crucial distinction is between visibility and incidence. An increase in visible dissent is not automatically an increase in underlying violent behaviour (Tufekci, 2017; Zedner, 2007; ASIO, 2025).
The state may be measuring more expression and calling it more violence. This does not mean there are no real threats. It means that visible anger, recorded hostility and physical violence must be analytically separated if democratic societies are to understand what is actually occurring (Foucault, 1977; Beck, 1992; ASIO, 2025; Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026).
Social media also changes the relationship between citizens and politicians. Politicians are no longer insulated by institutional distance to the same degree. Citizens can speak directly to them, criticise them, tag them, accuse them, ridicule them or confront them publicly. This can produce genuine abuse and distress. But it also democratises expression. What governments may interpret as new hostility may partly be the visibility of hostility that previously had no channel. The existence of anger is not new; the infrastructure of its expression is new (Castells, 2012; Tufekci, 2017; Papacharissi, 2015).
The danger arises when this expanded communicative capacity is interpreted primarily through security frameworks. In Habermasian terms, social media expands the public sphere, albeit imperfectly and chaotically. In Foucauldian terms, it also expands the archive of visible conduct available for surveillance. In Beck’s terms, it creates new risk signals. These three processes occur simultaneously. The democratic capacity to speak expands, the state capacity to monitor expands, and the institutional category of threat expands with them (Habermas, 1996; Foucault, 1977; Beck, 1992; Zedner, 2007).
The result is not simply “polarisation” or “radicalisation,” although both may occur. The deeper transformation is that political expression becomes data. Anger becomes searchable. Dissent becomes classifiable. Grievance becomes an intelligence signal. Once this occurs, the state can claim that it is observing a rise in threat, when it may also be observing the consequences of its own expanded capacity to monitor expression (Bigo, 2002; Foucault, 1977; Zedner, 2007; ASIO, 2025).
This is why social media must be placed at the centre of the paper’s causal model. Without it, the argument risks appearing to claim that declining legitimacy directly produces increased threats. With it, the model becomes more precise. Declining legitimacy produces expressive dissent; social media makes that dissent visible and durable; surveillance systems classify it; and political narratives translate classification into claims of rising violence.
7. Politically Motivated Violence as a Category Error
The Australian legal and intelligence definition of politically motivated violence is broad. Section 4 of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cth) defines it to include acts or threats of violence or unlawful harm intended or likely to achieve a political objective. ASIO’s public explanations similarly describe politically motivated violence as including violent acts or threats intended or likely to achieve political objectives, including terrorism, violent protest or attacks on symbolic political targets (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cth), s 4; ASIO, 2025; Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026).
This breadth matters. It means that official claims about politically motivated violence are not necessarily claims about physical violence alone. They can include threats, vandalism, protest-related conduct, extremist rhetoric, terrorism-related conduct and other behaviours. The official category is therefore not a clean empirical measure of physical violence. It is a composite administrative category.
The category error occurs when public discourse treats this aggregated category as if it were equivalent to actual physical violence. A threat is not the same as an assault. Vandalism is not the same as homicide. Online abuse is not the same as terrorism. Protest disruption is not the same as assassination. Ideological expression is not the same as material preparation for violence. These distinctions matter because democratic systems must distinguish between coercive harm and contentious political expression if they are to maintain legitimacy (Foucault, 1977; Habermas, 1996; Zedner, 2007).
This does not mean threats are irrelevant. A credible threat can cause serious harm, fear and disruption. Threats against public officials may require investigation and, in some cases, criminal prosecution. But analytically, threats must be separated from physical violence. If they are not separated, the public is presented with an inflated and emotionally charged picture of “violence.” The problem is not that governments record threats. The problem is that threats, harassment, online expression, protest disruption and physical violence are often narrated through a single escalating security frame (ASIO, 2025; Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026; ALRC, 2015).
The Sydney Criminal Lawyers article is useful precisely because it reveals this problem. It reports increases in threats and then situates them within a very broad statutory definition that includes terrorism, attacks against governments, hostage-taking, hijacking, foreign incursions and other serious offences. The effect is to place online threats against politicians within the same conceptual architecture as terrorism and political violence more broadly (Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026; Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cth), s 4; ASIO, 2025).
That is the misclassification problem at the heart of this paper. The issue is not whether threats exist. The issue is whether government, media and security institutions are maintaining adequate distinctions between qualitatively different kinds of conduct. Without such distinctions, a rise in recorded hostility can be misrepresented as a rise in violence, and political anger can be reframed as a threat to the state rather than a symptom of legitimacy loss.
The broad definition also produces a political effect. When the state frames hostility toward politicians as part of a politically motivated violence environment, politicians become the objects of protection while citizens become potential sources of danger. This reverses the ordinary democratic relationship. In representative democracy, politicians are accountable to citizens. Under security framing, citizens become risks to politicians. This does not abolish democracy, but it changes its emotional and institutional orientation. The governed become subjects of suspicion, and the governing class becomes a protected security category (Weber, 1978; Foucault, 1977; Tilly, 1992).
This is particularly significant where the underlying anger arises from perceived non-representation, inequality, rights erosion, foreign-policy hypocrisy or democratic exclusion. If citizens are angry because they believe political institutions are illegitimate, then treating that anger primarily as threat confirms the legitimacy problem. The state appears less interested in hearing the complaint than in classifying the complainant (Habermas, 1975; Habermas, 1996; Beetham, 1991).
The concept of “politically motivated violence” therefore performs classificatory work. It does not merely describe a pre-existing reality. It organises reality for governance. It tells police what to monitor, intelligence agencies what to classify, politicians what to fear, media what to report, and citizens how dissent will be interpreted. This is why the category itself must be interrogated as part of the political process (Foucault, 1977; Bigo, 2002; Zedner, 2007).
8. Terrorism, Security Expansion and Epistemic Opacity
The post-2001 counter-terrorism environment is essential to understanding the present. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, Australia greatly expanded its counter-terrorism laws, surveillance powers, intelligence capacity and security architecture. A 2015 review of Australia’s counter-terrorism machinery reported that ASIO’s budget increased more than five-fold from 2001–02 to 2013–14, while the Office of National Assessments almost quadrupled over the same period (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2015).
Legal scholarship has documented the proliferation of Australian counter-terrorism legislation after 2001. Ananian-Welsh and Hardy note that before 11 September 2001 Australia had no national counter-terrorism laws, but by September 2021 it had enacted 92 federal counter-terrorism laws, amounting to more than 5,000 pages of powers, offences and rules. This figure excludes many state and territory laws, as well as broader surveillance, secrecy, migration, policing, cybersecurity and public-order measures that operate adjacent to the counter-terrorism framework (Ananian-Welsh and Hardy, 2021; Hardy and Williams, 2022; Williams, 2011).
The Australian Law Reform Commission has separately identified extensive Commonwealth encroachments on traditional rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of association, procedural fairness, fair trial rights, legal professional privilege, access to courts, property rights, retrospective laws and reversals of the burden of proof. The ALRC’s report is important because it demonstrates that rights encroachment is not an imaginary or purely ideological claim; it is an acknowledged feature of the Commonwealth statute book (ALRC, 2015).
This legislative expansion matters because it has not merely added new tools to an otherwise stable legal system. It has transformed the relationship between state, citizen, risk and suspicion. Counterterrorism law increasingly operates through prevention, pre-emption, secrecy and classification. Its central concern is not only what has occurred, but what might occur. This shift from post-offence adjudication toward anticipatory governance changes the meaning of political behaviour itself. In the most troubling cases, governance drifts toward a pre-crime or thought-crime-adjacent logic, where beliefs, speech, associations, online identities, ideological curiosity and expressions of grievance become security-relevant before any physical offence has occurred (Zedner, 2007; McCulloch and Pickering, 2009; Hardy and Williams, 2022; Foucault, 2007).
The epistemic problem is intensified by secrecy. Intelligence statistics are not produced in the same way as ordinary crime statistics. Homicide data, for example, is recorded through comparatively stable public systems. By contrast, terrorism and disrupted-plot figures are often reported as aggregated intelligence claims, without case-level public datasets or transparent thresholds for inclusion. ASIO and related agencies may report numbers of attacks, disrupted plots or individuals of concern, but the public generally cannot inspect how those categories were applied, how close a “plot” was to execution, whether a matter involved operational capability or merely ideological expression, or whether the classification threshold has shifted over time (ASIO, 2025; AIC, 2026; Hardy and Williams, 2022).
This opacity is not incidental. It is built into national-security governance. Section 35P of the ASIO Act criminalises certain disclosures relating to special intelligence operations, while the special intelligence operations regime also grants immunity from civil and criminal liability for authorised conduct within those operations. Legal submissions regarding section 35P warned that the provision posed serious risks to press freedom and public accountability because it criminalised disclosure of information relating to special intelligence operations. The ALRC has also emphasised that secrecy offences should be confined to information that genuinely requires protection and where disclosure is likely to harm the public interest (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cth), ss 35K, 35P; Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law, 2015; Law Council of Australia, 2015; ALRC, 2010).
The sociological problem is therefore not merely that the public knows less than the state. It is that the state is able to produce, classify and narrate security knowledge under conditions where external verification is structurally limited. This produces epistemic asymmetry. The state can cite security risks that citizens cannot fully inspect. Citizens are asked to trust institutions whose legitimacy is already contested (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1975; Foucault, 1977; Zedner, 2007).
A serious illustration of this problem is the case of Thomas Carrick, a pseudonym used in Victorian Children’s Court proceedings. Carrick was 13 when the police investigation began. He was autistic, socially isolated, intellectually vulnerable and had developed a fixation on Islamic State. His parents approached police seeking help. Instead of the matter being handled purely through therapeutic intervention or de-escalation, he became the target of an undercover Joint Counter Terrorism Team operation involving the AFP, Victoria Police and ASIO. The Victorian Children’s Court ultimately granted a permanent stay of the proceedings. Public reporting noted that the court found the operation had exacerbated or further radicalised the child’s fixation rather than de-escalating it (Children’s Court of Victoria, 2023; The Guardian, 2024a; The Guardian, 2024b; ABC, 2024).
This case is of profound relevance to the argument of this paper. It shows that security agencies do not merely detect radicalisation from outside. Under certain operational conditions, they may participate in the escalation, shaping or production of the very conduct later classified as terrorism-related. This does not prove systematic fabrication of terrorism cases. It does, however, provide concrete evidence that the boundary between detection and production is not always clean. Where undercover officers, covert personas, informants or special intelligence operations interact with vulnerable people, there is a real risk that state activity may intensify rather than reduce risk (Children’s Court of Victoria, 2023; The Guardian, 2024a; The Guardian, 2024b; ABC, 2024).
The Carrick matter therefore sits directly at the intersection of epistemic opacity and institutional incentives. It demonstrates why the public must be able to distinguish between threats discovered, threats disrupted, threats escalated, threats classified and threats partly produced through state conduct. Where secrecy prevents those distinctions from being made, legitimacy is weakened. A democratic state that claims to protect society from terrorism while participating in the escalation of a vulnerable child’s fixation cannot maintain public trust through secrecy and assertion alone (Habermas, 1975; Weber, 1978; Children’s Court of Victoria, 2023; ALRC, 2010).
The Carrick matter was not merely a media controversy; it was repeatedly examined through Senate Estimates and parliamentary oversight processes. The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee’s Additional Estimates report confirms that the matter was discussed across ASIO, IGIS, CDPP and AFP evidence, including ASIO’s involvement in the charges brought against Carrick, IGIS reviews into ASIO’s management of investigations relating to minors, the CDPP’s conduct of the prosecution, and the AFP’s major controlled operation against Carrick. Further Estimates hearings in November 2024 and February–March 2025 returned to the Carrick matter, including questions regarding AFP involvement, Operation RYE, and reviews into the Carrick family matter. This parliamentary record is significant because it shows that concerns about escalation, undercover operations, minors, autism and counter-terrorism policing were not merely speculative or journalistic. They were raised within formal parliamentary scrutiny processes (Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, 2024a; 2024b; 2025a; 2025b; 2025c; Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, 2024).
This does not require a claim that agencies systematically fabricate events. The stronger and more defensible claim is that the security state operates within a measurement environment where detection, escalation, classification and justification can become entangled. Once this entanglement exists, official threat statistics must be interpreted with caution. They may measure not only independent danger but also the consequences of institutional intervention, surveillance sensitivity and classificatory expansion (Bigo, 2002; Beck, 1992; Zedner, 2007; ASIO, 2025).
9. Measurement Regimes, Institutional Incentives and the Production of Security Threat Data
Security agencies do not need explicit quotas to produce statistical inflation. There is no publicly available evidence that ASIO operates formal quotas for terrorism cases or politically motivated violence. However, modern public administration operates through performance reporting, risk management, capability demonstration, budget justification and institutional relevance. Agencies must demonstrate that they are necessary, effective and responsive to the threat environment (Weber, 1978; Merton, 1968; Hood, 1991; Tilly, 1992).
This matters because institutions designed to identify threats tend to find more threats as their surveillance capacity expands. This is not necessarily conspiracy. It is detection bias, classification expansion and organisational self-reproduction operating through bureaucratic structures. The more an agency monitors, the more it detects. The more broadly a category is defined, the more cases can be placed within it. The more political and budgetary attention a threat category receives, the more institutional resources flow toward discovering it (Foucault, 1977; Beck, 1992; Zedner, 2007; Bigo, 2002).
The mechanism is straightforward. If more online spaces are monitored, more concerning speech will be found. If the definition of politically motivated violence includes threats as well as acts, more speech can be classified as security-relevant. If politicians, staff and agencies are encouraged to report threats, more reports will be generated. If security funding and institutional legitimacy depend on demonstrating a worsening threat environment, rising threat counts become institutionally useful (ASIO, 2025; Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026; Foucault, 1977; Hood, 1991).
The Carrick case adds a further and more disturbing dimension. It demonstrates that security data may not always be generated through passive detection of pre-existing threat. In some cases, operational engagement itself may shape the behaviour later classified as threat-related. The Victorian Children’s Court proceedings and subsequent reporting indicate that a vulnerable child whose family sought help became the subject of an undercover counter-terrorism operation that the court found had worsened or further entrenched his fixation. This case reveals a methodological danger: when security agencies intervene in the life of a vulnerable person, the resulting “threat” cannot be analysed as a purely independent social fact (Children’s Court of Victoria, 2023; The Guardian, 2024a; The Guardian, 2024b; ABC, 2024).
This is the core of the measurement problem. Security data may combine several distinct phenomena: independently emerging threats, threats amplified by online ecosystems, threats detected because surveillance increased, threats classified because definitions expanded, and threats shaped by operational intervention. If these are reported under a single category, the public is not receiving a clear measure of violence. It is receiving a measure of the interaction between social conditions, institutional monitoring, legal definitions and state activity (Foucault, 1977; Zedner, 2007; Beck, 1992; ASIO, 2025).
This dynamic may be described as classification amplification. Classification amplification occurs when broader definitions, expanded surveillance, increased reporting pathways, operational interventions and institutional incentives combine to produce rising recorded incidents without necessarily proving proportional increases in underlying physical violence.
This framework also explains the apparent shift from international terrorism toward domestic terrorism, grievance-based extremism and politically motivated violence. As the salience of large-scale transnational terrorism changed, security attention increasingly turned inward toward domestic actors, lone actors, ideological hybrids, online radicalisation and anti-authority grievances. This may reflect genuine changes in risk. But it also reflects the broadening of what counts as terrorism-adjacent conduct. The ontology of terrorism has shifted from a comparatively bounded category of organised violence toward a diffuse risk field embedded in speech, identity, alienation, online conduct and dissent (ASIO, 2025; Hardy and Williams, 2022; Zedner, 2007; McCulloch and Pickering, 2009).
This is why the paper does not simply ask whether terrorism has increased. It asks what is being counted, by whom, under what definition, through what surveillance capacity, and with what institutional incentives. In political sociology, this is the difference between treating security statistics as neutral reflections of reality and treating them as products of measurement regimes (Foucault, 1977; Bigo, 2002; Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1975).
The thought-crime-adjacent dimension of this problem becomes clearer at this point. When the state expands its focus from completed offences to beliefs, associations, expressions, ideological signals, online behaviour and inferred future risk, it shifts the boundary of governance from action to potentiality. This is the defining feature of pre-crime governance. The state no longer waits for harm; it seeks to identify the person who might become harmful. In democratic terms, this creates a profound legitimacy problem, because citizens may come to believe that they are being judged not only for what they do, but for what they think, say, read, share, resent or politically oppose (Zedner, 2007; McCulloch and Pickering, 2009; Foucault, 2007; Beck, 1992).
The most serious risk is not that every security assessment is wrong. It is that a governance system built around prediction, suspicion and risk classification may produce a permanent expansion of threat categories. Once a person’s expression, grievance or political identity becomes part of an intelligence risk profile, the distinction between democratic dissent and security suspicion becomes unstable. This instability is itself legitimacy-destroying, because democratic citizenship depends on the ability to oppose government without being treated as a proto-criminal or future offender (Habermas, 1996; Weber, 1978; Foucault, 1977; Zedner, 2007).
10. Rule-of-Law Breach, Human Rights and Sociological Legitimacy
A central addition to this paper is the distinction between formal legality, normative legality and sociological legitimacy. Governments often claim that a law is legitimate because it has been validly enacted. That is not sufficient. A law can be passed by parliament and still be experienced by citizens as unjust, oppressive, contrary to the rule of law, contrary to human rights, or illegitimate in the deeper social sense (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1996; Beetham, 1991; ALRC, 2015).
This paper therefore rejects the idea that state legality is the final measure of legitimacy. Governments can pass bad laws. Governments can pass laws that reverse or weaken the presumption of innocence, constrain speech, restrict protest, expand surveillance, limit procedural fairness or place unreasonable burdens on citizens. The fact that the state has power to enact such laws does not mean citizens experience them as legitimate. Formal enactment may establish domestic legal force, but it does not resolve the sociological question of whether people experience that law as rightful, just or consistent with democratic values (ALRC, 2015; Hardy and Williams, 2022; HRLC, 2025; Law Council of Australia, 2025).
This is not a rejection of legal analysis. It is a rejection of legal positivism as an adequate account of political legitimacy. Law is interpreted by governments, courts, lawyers, scholars, affected citizens and the broader public. Each interpretive community may assess the same law differently. A government may claim lawfulness because parliament enacted the measure. A court may interpret its validity narrowly. Legal scholars may criticise its compatibility with rule-of-law principles. Citizens may experience it as unjust, oppressive or illegitimate. These interpretations matter because legitimacy is not produced solely inside courts; it is produced in the relationship between state power and social belief (Weber, 1978; Beetham, 1991; Habermas, 1996; Durkheim, 1984).
The Australian Law Reform Commission’s Freedoms Inquiry is directly relevant. The ALRC was asked to identify and critically examine Commonwealth laws that encroach upon traditional rights, freedoms and privileges, including freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of association, fair trial principles, property rights, procedural fairness, access to courts, client legal privilege, retrospective laws and reversal of the burden of proof. The report identified extensive encroachments across the Commonwealth statute book and treated such encroachments as requiring careful justification (ALRC, 2015).
The ALRC’s discussion of the presumption of innocence is especially important. It noted that a number of Commonwealth laws reverse the legal burden of proof on some elements of criminal offences and may interfere with the principle that a person is presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law. It further noted that reversal of the legal burden on an issue essential to culpability arguably provides the greatest interference with the presumption of innocence and requires the strongest justification (ALRC, 2015).
Since 11 September 2001, Australia has enacted an unusually large body of counter-terrorism and national-security legislation. Legal scholars have counted at least 92 federal counter-terrorism laws by September 2021, excluding many state and territory laws and broader surveillance, secrecy, migration, policing and cybersecurity measures. The ALRC has separately identified extensive Commonwealth encroachments on traditional rights and freedoms. (Ananian-Welsh and Hardy, 2021; ALRC, 2015; Hardy and Williams, 2022; Williams, 2011).
The legitimacy issue is not merely cumulative quantity. It is qualitative departure from rights-based governance. Where legislation weakens procedural fairness, reverses evidentiary burdens, restricts speech, expands secrecy, criminalises disclosure, limits protest, broadens surveillance or imposes mandatory penalties, citizens may experience such laws as illegitimate even where they have been formally enacted by parliament (ALRC, 2015; Law Council of Australia, 2015; Law Council of Australia, 2025; HRLC, 2025).
Australia also lacks a federal bill of rights. The Australian Human Rights Commission notes that, unlike many comparable liberal democracies, Australia does not have a national Bill of Rights, and that rights protections are dispersed across the Constitution, legislation and common law. This fragmented rights architecture matters sociologically. Citizens do not assess legitimacy only through constitutional doctrine. They assess it through lived experience. If legal recourse is too expensive, courts are inaccessible, oversight bodies are underfunded, ombudsmen are overwhelmed, secrecy is normalised and parliamentary scrutiny is weak, then formal rights may not be experienced as real rights (AHRC, 2021; Law Council of Australia, 2023; ALRC, 2015).
This is especially important in relation to recent hate-crime and hate-speech legislation. The Law Council of Australia criticised mandatory sentencing for hate crimes and terrorism offences, warning that mandatory sentencing is not the answer and undermines judicial discretion. Human Rights Law Centre commentary has argued that recent federal and state hate-speech and vilification laws may have a chilling effect on democracy while failing to properly address hate and discrimination. The Australian Human Rights Commission has also explained that new national and NSW hate-crime laws significantly expand criminal-law responses to hate conduct (Law Council of Australia, 2025; HRLC, 2025; AHRC, 2025).
The sociological concern is not that hate, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia or vilification should be tolerated. The concern is that governments increasingly respond to social fracture through criminalisation, mandatory penalties, police powers and speech regulation rather than through democratic repair, social policy, education, redistribution, community trust-building or institutional accountability. When social conflict is criminalised without adequate procedural safeguards, the state may suppress symptoms while leaving structural causes untouched (Habermas, 1996; Durkheim, 1984; Foucault, 1977; HRLC, 2025).
This has direct relevance to the pre-crime and thought-crime-adjacent concerns identified above. Hate-speech and hate-crime legislation may be justified as protection against real harm, and in some cases such protection may be necessary. However, where laws move toward regulating perceived intent, ideological meaning, symbolic expression or socially controversial speech without full procedural fairness and robust legal protections, they risk intensifying the drift from conduct-based law toward suspicion-based governance. That drift further erodes legitimacy because citizens may experience the state as policing permissible thought and expression rather than protecting equal democratic participation (Zedner, 2007; McCulloch and Pickering, 2009; Habermas, 1996; HRLC, 2025).
When governments enact chilling or coercive laws in response to social conflict, they may deepen the very legitimacy crisis they claim to address. Laws that restrict speech or protest without strong procedural safeguards do not merely regulate behaviour. They shape the relationship between citizen and state. They teach citizens that the state sees them not as democratic participants but as risks to be monitored, classified and managed (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1975; Foucault, 1977; ALRC, 2015).
This links directly to the main thesis. A government that erodes rights, expands secrecy, increases surveillance and restricts dissent cannot then credibly treat public anger as an inexplicable rise in political violence. Such anger is partly produced by the state’s own legitimacy failures (Habermas, 1975; Weber, 1978; Beetham, 1991; OECD, 2024).
11. Protest, Surveillance and the Managed Rights Regime
Australia does not possess an absolute right to protest in the sense often imagined in political theory. Protest is mediated through public order law, police discretion, permit or notification systems, move-on powers, anti-obstruction laws, bail conditions, surveillance practices and state-specific legislation. These mechanisms do not necessarily abolish protest, but they structure protest through state approval, administrative control and policing discretion (HRLC, 2022; ALRC, 2015; Foucault, 1977).
A managed rights regime is not the same as a free rights regime. Where citizens must notify authorities, seek permission, comply with route restrictions, avoid disruption, avoid interference with business activity or face arrest for unauthorised protest, the right to protest becomes conditional. The legal system may describe this as regulation. Many citizens experience it as permission. This distinction matters because legitimacy is shaped by social experience as well as formal legal doctrine (HRLC, 2022; Habermas, 1996; Weber, 1978).
This matters for legitimacy. A right that can only be exercised safely with state approval increasingly resembles a privilege. When protest against state policy must itself be approved, managed or contained by the state, democratic expression becomes structurally constrained. The problem is not merely whether protest is technically legal. The problem is whether citizens experience protest as a genuine democratic right or as an activity tolerated only when it remains convenient, non-disruptive and administratively compliant.
This is especially important in the context of climate protest, anti-war protest, labour protest and protest against genocide, apartheid, police violence or corporate power. Governments often frame disruptive protest as a threat to order, business, public safety or social cohesion. But protest is often disruptive precisely because ordinary communicative channels have failed. In Habermasian terms, protest becomes necessary when institutional communication no longer appears responsive. In Tilly’s terms, contentious politics emerges when claims cannot be resolved through routine channels of representation (Habermas, 1996; Tilly, 1992; Tufekci, 2017; HRLC, 2022).
When the state responds to protest through surveillance, pre-emptive policing, harsh penalties and security language, it deepens the perception that dissent is managed rather than heard. This is not merely a civil liberties issue. It is a legitimacy issue. A democratic state that treats protest primarily as a public-order or security problem weakens the communicative basis of democracy itself (Foucault, 1977; Habermas, 1996; Weber, 1978; Zedner, 2007).
The managed-rights framework also interacts with the broader classification problem identified in this paper. If protest is increasingly treated as a risk field, protest activity becomes more likely to be documented, monitored and interpreted through public-order or security categories. This does not mean protest becomes violent. It means protest becomes more available for classification as disorder, risk, extremism, threat or politically motivated violence. The result is another form of classification amplification: the more the state manages protest through risk, the more protest appears as risk (Foucault, 1977; Bigo, 2002; Zedner, 2007).
The legitimacy consequences are severe. If citizens believe that they cannot meaningfully influence policy through voting, lobbying, consultation, parliamentary debate or protest, then the system’s democratic claim weakens. In such conditions, expressive anger becomes more likely, not less. A state that narrows the space for legitimate dissent should not be surprised when dissent becomes sharper, more hostile or more publicly confrontational. The correct response is not to classify anger as violence, but to ask why so many citizens no longer believe ordinary democratic channels work (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1975; Tilly, 1992).
12. Gaza, War Crimes and International Legitimacy as Amplifier
The Gaza conflict, Iraq, Afghanistan and Australia’s broader foreign-policy alignments should not be treated as the core driver of the paper’s model. They function instead as legitimacy amplifiers.
The core thesis remains domestic: inequality, unequal responsiveness, declining legitimacy, digitally amplified dissent and expanded classification systems produce a narrative of rising political violence. However, international legitimacy matters because citizens judge governments not only by domestic policy but by moral consistency. When governments claim to defend democracy, human rights and international law while supporting or enabling wars, occupations, sanctions regimes, military alliances or states accused of grave international crimes, citizens may experience this as hypocrisy (Habermas, 1975; Chomsky, 2003; Said, 1978; Human Rights Watch, 2024).
In the case of Gaza, many Australians, international legal scholars, human-rights advocates and UN-associated experts have argued that Israel’s conduct raises genocide, war-crimes or international humanitarian law concerns. Australia’s diplomatic, military, trade or political alignment with Israel is therefore experienced by many citizens as a form of complicity or moral participation, even where formal legal adjudication remains contested (International Court of Justice, 2024; Amnesty International, 2024; Human Rights Watch, 2024; United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2024).
The sociological point is not dependent on a final court ruling. Legitimacy is shaped by what citizens believe their government is doing and what moral standards they believe the government is violating. If large numbers of citizens believe Australia is assisting, excusing or minimising atrocities, then legitimacy is damaged regardless of whether domestic legal institutions acknowledge that damage. This is not a claim that courts are irrelevant. It is a claim that courts are not the only site where legitimacy is judged (Weber, 1978; Habermas, 1975; Beetham, 1991; Durkheim, 1984).
This distinction is crucial. A government may insist that its foreign-policy conduct is lawful, proportionate or strategically necessary. Citizens may nevertheless judge that conduct as immoral, unlawful in the broader human-rights sense, or incompatible with the state’s claimed democratic values. Such judgement is politically consequential because it shapes trust, compliance and willingness to accept official narratives. Legitimacy is therefore not exhausted by formal legal adjudication. It is also produced through moral evaluation, public belief and collective memory (Beetham, 1991; Habermas, 1996; Weber, 1978).
The same applies to Iraq. The absence of weapons of mass destruction and the catastrophic consequences of the invasion remain central to many citizens’ understanding of government deception, war-making and elite impunity. When governments are perceived to participate in unlawful or immoral wars without accountability, domestic legitimacy declines. The memory of Iraq shapes how citizens interpret later government claims about security, terrorism, extremism and national interest (Chilcot Inquiry, 2016; Chomsky, 2003; Habermas, 1975; Beetham, 1991).
This international layer strengthens the paper’s model. It shows that legitimacy is not only about domestic responsiveness. It is also about whether the state is believed to respect life, human rights, truth and international norms. Where a government appears to apply human-rights language selectively, condemn some violence while excusing allied violence, or criminalise domestic dissent while tolerating foreign-state violence, legitimacy is further weakened (Said, 1978; Chomsky, 2003; Human Rights Watch, 2024; Amnesty International, 2024).
The relevance to politically motivated violence discourse is direct. A population that sees the state as morally inconsistent or complicit in grave international harm may express anger toward politicians and institutions. If that anger is then classified as threat without addressing the underlying legitimacy grievance, the state again misrecognises the political meaning of dissent. In this way, Gaza, Iraq and related foreign-policy controversies do not replace the domestic model. They intensify it.
13. Empirical Illustration: Threats versus Physical Violence
The empirical issue is whether the reported rise in politically motivated violence reflects increased physical violence or increased recorded threats, harassment and expressive hostility.
Recent reporting indicates that threats against federal politicians have increased substantially. Reports have cited AFP data showing violent and menacing threats against federal politicians increasing markedly across recent years. The Sydney Criminal Lawyers article similarly relies on the reported rise in politically motivated threats. These reports are important, but they must be interpreted carefully (Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026; AFP, 2024; ASIO, 2025).
Threat reports are not the same as physical violence. Australia does not appear to maintain a clean, publicly accessible, longitudinal dataset of physical politically motivated violence separate from threats, harassment, vandalism, terrorism-related intelligence activity and protest-related conduct. The Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Homicide Monitoring Program provides a contrast. It reported 279 homicide victims in Australia between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025 and describes the NHMP as Australia’s only national data collection on homicide incidents, victims and offenders (AIC, 2026).
This does not directly measure political violence, but that is precisely the point. General homicide is systematically monitored, while physical political violence is not clearly disaggregated in the same way. The rise in threat reports cannot automatically be treated as a rise in physical political violence.
A useful disaggregation is as follows:
| Category | Operational meaning | Typical examples | Measurement issue | Relationship to physical harm |
| Threats | Expressed intent to harm for political purposes | Death threats, bomb threats, online threats | Often counted in AFP/security reports | Serious but not equivalent to actual violence |
| Harassment and abuse | Hostile non-physical conduct | Online abuse, stalking, doxxing, intimidation | Increasingly visible and reportable | Psychological/social harm, usually no physical injury |
| Protest activity | Collective political action | Marches, blockades, sit-ins, disruption, vandalism | Fragmented police/public-order data | Usually low physical harm, sometimes clashes |
| Physical political violence | Direct physical harm for political ends | Assault, assassination, terrorist attack | No clean long-term public dataset | High severity but rare |
| Terrorism/intelligence incidents | Attacks, plots, radicalisation, disrupted activity | Attacks, disrupted plots, preparatory conduct | Partly classified, aggregated | Variable; often opaque |
The analytical conclusion is not that threats are harmless. It is that the state’s chosen categories combine behaviours of very different severity. That aggregation enables increases in threats and online hostility to be narrated as increases in violence. The result is an empirical and conceptual distortion that strengthens the state’s security narrative while weakening democratic understanding (AIC, 2026; ASIO, 2025; Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 2026; Foucault, 1977).
The distinction between threat and violence is especially important because security narratives tend to move from possibility to certainty. A threat may indicate risk. A pattern of threats may indicate rising hostility. But neither automatically proves an equivalent rise in physical violence. If a democratic society treats all hostile expression as part of a violence continuum, it risks normalising pre-emptive suspicion and expanding security governance over political life itself (Zedner, 2007; McCulloch and Pickering, 2009; Beck, 1992).
This empirical illustration therefore supports the broader thesis. Recorded threats may be increasing, but that increase must be interpreted through changes in communication technology, reporting behaviour, policing practices, political sensitivity, legal categories and intelligence classification. Without disaggregation, the public is not being shown a clear picture of violence. It is being shown a broad security category and asked to accept the political interpretation attached to it.
14. Counterarguments
A strong counterargument is that threats may be leading indicators of physical violence. Security agencies are responsible for preventing violence, not merely counting violence after it occurs. From this perspective, online threats, ideological hostility and grievance-based mobilisation may be early warning signs. The logic is not irrational. A threat does not need to have already become an attack before it becomes relevant to public safety (ASIO, 2025; Zedner, 2007; Beck, 1992).
This argument has force. It would be irresponsible to claim that all threats are merely expressive or that none indicate danger. ASIO’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment warns of a volatile security environment, ideological diversity and threats that include politically motivated violence. The national terrorism threat level is also framed by government as reflecting a vulnerable security environment shaped by social cohesion problems, online radicalisation and declining trust in democratic processes (ASIO, 2025).
However, this does not defeat the paper’s argument. It confirms the need for disaggregation. Risk potential is not the same as realised violence. A leading indicator is not the same as an event. A threat is not the same as an assault. A classification is not the same as a crime. The fact that some threats may become serious does not justify collapsing all threats, expressions, grievances and protest activity into the language of violence (Foucault, 1977; Zedner, 2007; ASIO, 2025).
Another counterargument is that underreporting may obscure physical political violence. This may be true for some lower-level assaults or intimidation. However, serious politically motivated violence—terrorist attacks, assassinations, mass-casualty incidents—is difficult to hide in Australia’s media and policing environment. The absence of a clear proportional rise in such events remains analytically significant (AIC, 2026; ASIO, 2025).
A third counterargument is that expanded surveillance has prevented violence, so low violence rates may reflect successful security policy. This is plausible. The paper does not deny that some security interventions may prevent harm. The point is that prevention cannot be used to justify indefinite expansion without transparent distinctions between violence, threats, expression and classification. A state cannot simply say “violence is low because surveillance works” and then use that same surveillance-generated threat data to justify endless expansion. Such reasoning becomes circular unless it is accompanied by transparent oversight, independent scrutiny and clear category distinctions (Zedner, 2007; Beck, 1992; Habermas, 1975; ALRC, 2010).
A fourth counterargument is that the Carrick case is exceptional and should not be used to generalise about the security state. This paper does not claim that the Carrick case proves systematic fabrication. It uses the case to demonstrate a possibility that must be accounted for in any serious methodology: state operations can sometimes shape, escalate or produce the threat behaviours they later classify. That possibility is sufficient to require scrutiny, especially where secrecy prevents independent verification (Children’s Court of Victoria, 2023; The Guardian, 2024a; The Guardian, 2024b; ABC, 2024).
A fifth counterargument is that hate-speech and hate-crime laws are necessary to protect vulnerable communities. This is also partly correct. Racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of hatred can produce serious social harm and may contribute to violence. A democratic society has legitimate reasons to protect people from targeted abuse, intimidation and dehumanisation. The issue is not whether hatred should be ignored. The issue is whether the state’s response preserves procedural fairness, proportionality, free expression and legal safeguards, or whether it expands criminalisation and censorial control in ways that further weaken legitimacy (HRLC, 2025; Law Council of Australia, 2025; AHRC, 2025; Habermas, 1996).
A sixth counterargument is that protest regulation is compatible with democracy because all rights are subject to reasonable limits. This is formally true. But it does not resolve the sociological issue. A right may be formally preserved while being practically weakened. If protest is legal only when pre-approved, non-disruptive, easily policed and harmless to business or state convenience, citizens may experience the right as hollow. The question is therefore not merely whether protest is regulated, but whether regulation preserves the democratic function of protest or transforms it into a managed privilege (HRLC, 2022; Habermas, 1996; Tilly, 1992; Foucault, 1977).
These counterarguments strengthen rather than weaken the paper’s central claim. They show that the issue is not simple denial of threat. It is the need for sharper analysis. Threats exist. Some threats are dangerous. Some security interventions may be justified. Some hate-speech laws may protect vulnerable groups. Some protest regulation may be legitimate. But none of these points justifies the aggregation of expressive dissent, protest, online hostility, threats, classified intelligence assessments and physical violence into one politically charged narrative of “rising political violence.”
The paper’s core position is therefore not absolutist. It is disaggregating. It insists that democratic governance must preserve distinctions between speech and violence, risk and event, dissent and threat, legality and legitimacy, prevention and pre-crime, and security protection and political self-protection. Without those distinctions, the state’s response to legitimacy crisis risks becoming a further cause of legitimacy crisis.
15. Policy and Democratic Recalibration
The policy implication is not that threats should be ignored. It is that democratic governance requires sharper categories, greater transparency and renewed legitimacy.
First, public reporting should distinguish between actual physical violence, credible operational plots, threats, harassment, vandalism, protest disruption and online expression. Aggregated figures should not be used to imply that all categories represent equivalent violence. Where governments cite politically motivated violence statistics, those statistics should be disaggregated by severity, type, medium, target and outcome. A democracy cannot have an informed public debate if the public is not told whether “violence” refers to assault, online abuse, vandalism, preparatory conduct or a classified intelligence assessment (AIC, 2026; ASIO, 2025; ALRC, 2010).
Second, politically motivated violence statistics should include severity gradations. A credible bomb threat, an angry social media post, vandalism of an electoral office and a terrorist attack should not be flattened into a single political narrative. Severity gradation would not weaken security response. It would improve democratic understanding and reduce the risk of political inflation.
Third, intelligence and policing agencies should improve epistemic accountability. Full disclosure of classified material is impossible, but public reporting can still clarify definitions, thresholds and category changes. Independent oversight must be strengthened where secrecy prevents ordinary public scrutiny. The problem is not simply secrecy itself, but secrecy combined with broad categories, legal immunities, criminalised disclosure and public narratives that require trust in institutions whose legitimacy is already contested (ALRC, 2010; Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law, 2015; Law Council of Australia, 2015).
Fourth, there should be specific scrutiny of undercover and online engagement operations involving vulnerable people, children, neurodivergent persons, socially isolated individuals or people experiencing mental health crises. The Carrick case demonstrates that operational intervention can escalate rather than de-escalate risk. A legitimacy-preserving system must distinguish therapeutic intervention from intelligence cultivation, and prevention from production. Where parents, families or communities seek help, the state’s first response should not be covert escalation into a terrorism case (Children’s Court of Victoria, 2023; The Guardian, 2024a; ABC, 2024).
Fifth, protest rights should be protected as democratic rights rather than managed primarily as public-order risks. Disruptive protest should not be automatically securitised. A democratic system must preserve space for anger, disruption and dissent, especially where citizens believe ordinary channels of representation have failed. Protest regulation should be assessed not only against convenience or public order, but against the democratic function of protest as a corrective to institutional non-responsiveness (Habermas, 1996; Tilly, 1992; HRLC, 2022).
Sixth, legislative processes should be slowed and strengthened, particularly where bills affect speech, protest, surveillance, detention, procedural fairness or human rights. Guillotining debate on rights-affecting legislation deepens legitimacy loss because it confirms the perception that law is being imposed rather than justified. Parliamentary sovereignty does not by itself produce legitimacy. Legitimacy requires public justification, scrutiny, proportionality and rights-consistent lawmaking (Habermas, 1996; ALRC, 2015; Law Council of Australia, 2025).
Seventh, hate-speech and hate-crime legislation should be drafted with particular care to preserve procedural fairness, judicial discretion, clear definitions and protection for legitimate political expression. Laws intended to protect communities from hatred should not become tools for suppressing political dissent, controversial moral speech, protest against state violence, or criticism of foreign governments and political ideologies. The legitimacy of such laws depends on precision and safeguards, not merely on the moral seriousness of the harms they seek to address (HRLC, 2025; Law Council of Australia, 2025; AHRC, 2025).
Eighth, governments should address the structural drivers of anger: inequality, housing insecurity, elite influence, political donations, corruption perceptions, lack of responsiveness, environmental failure and foreign-policy hypocrisy. Security responses may manage symptoms. They do not restore legitimacy. If the conditions producing public anger are not addressed, the state will continue to encounter rising expressive dissent and will be tempted to classify more of that dissent as threat (Piketty, 2014; Gilens, 2012; OECD, 2024; Weber, 1978).
Ninth, democratic governance should avoid drifting from conduct-based law toward suspicion-based governance. Pre-crime logics may appear efficient in security contexts, but they are dangerous when extended into political expression. A democratic state should punish unlawful conduct, not ideological curiosity, association, reading habits, grievance, symbolic speech or dissenting identity. Where the state begins treating citizens as future offenders, it undermines the moral foundation of democratic citizenship (Zedner, 2007; McCulloch and Pickering, 2009; Foucault, 2007; Habermas, 1996).
The broader policy principle is therefore democratic recalibration. Security institutions must be subordinated to legitimacy, not allowed to substitute for it. The goal should not be merely to protect politicians from citizens. It should be to restore conditions under which citizens believe political institutions represent them, respect them, hear them and remain accountable to them.
16. Conclusion
This paper has argued that Australian claims about rising politically motivated violence require significant sociological and methodological scrutiny. The central problem is not simply whether threats against politicians have increased. They appear to have increased. The deeper question is what kind of increase is being measured, how it is classified, and how it is narrated.
The paper has shown that “politically motivated violence” is a broad legal and intelligence category that includes both acts and threats. When this category is used without disaggregation, it risks conflating expressive dissent, online hostility, protest activity, harassment, vandalism, terrorism-related conduct, intelligence classifications and physical violence. This produces a misleading public narrative in which increased visibility and recording of political anger are interpreted as increased violence.
The more persuasive explanation is structural. Rising inequality and unequal political responsiveness erode legitimacy. Declining legitimacy produces anger, distrust and expressive dissent. Social media makes that dissent visible, permanent and traceable. Expanded surveillance and security classifications then convert more dissent into recorded threat data. The result is not necessarily a proportional increase in physical political violence, but an increase in the state’s capacity to detect, classify and narrate dissent as threat.
The post-2001 security environment intensifies this problem. Counterterrorism law has expanded dramatically, secrecy has deepened, intelligence categories have broadened and preventive governance has shifted attention from offences already committed to risks imagined in advance. In its most troubling form, this becomes pre-crime or thought-crime-adjacent governance, where belief, association, expression or ideological curiosity become security-relevant before physical harm occurs.
The Carrick case demonstrates why this matters. It shows that state agencies may not only detect threats but, under certain operational conditions, escalate or shape the behaviours later classified as threat-related. This does not prove systematic fabrication. It does prove that security statistics cannot be treated as neutral reflections of independent social reality. They are produced through institutional systems that include surveillance, intervention, classification and secrecy.
The rule-of-law and human-rights dimensions further deepen the legitimacy crisis. A law may be formally enacted and still be experienced as unjust, oppressive or illegitimate. Australia’s extensive post-2001 counter-terrorism legislation, the ALRC’s documentation of rights encroachments, the absence of a federal bill of rights, managed protest regimes and recent concerns over hate-speech and hate-crime legislation all contribute to the perception that the state is increasingly willing to manage dissent through control rather than democratic repair.
The danger is democratic. When governments misrecognise dissent as violence, they avoid confronting the reasons people are angry. They shift attention from representation to protection, from legitimacy to security, from democratic repair to threat management. This shift may protect political actors in the short term, but it risks deepening the very distrust and hostility it claims to address.
If governments want less anger, the answer is not simply more security for politicians. It is more legitimate government: greater responsiveness, stronger rights protections, real accountability, reduced inequality, transparent lawmaking, respect for protest, procedural fairness, international moral consistency and a clearer distinction between dissent and violence. A democracy cannot restore legitimacy by classifying its citizens as threats. It can only restore legitimacy by becoming worthy of trust.
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This article was originally published on Nick’s Substack page
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