The Australian Senate passed new powers for ASIO 26-15 on Thursday.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill (No.2) 2025 adds to the 1979 ASIO Act, raising concerns about citizen protections vis-à-vis police questioning.

Such as the broadening of ASIO’s power to include “sabotage, promotion of communal violence, attacks on Australia’s defence system and any serious threat to Australia’s territorial and border integrity.”

Under current law, this is regardless of “whether these [words or actions] were directed from, or committed within, Australia or not.”

The biggest concerns centre on the “promotion of communal violence” and threats to national integrity.

Under existing laws on adult questioning, anyone who fails to comply with ASIO when they demand information can be imprisoned for five years.

Put simply, in these cases you do not have the right to remain silent.

Ramping up those concerns is the fact that neither inciting “communal violence” nor “threats to national integrity” are properly defined.

According to section 4 of the ASIO Act, foreign interference is defined as: “activities relating to Australia that are carried on by or on behalf of a foreign power.”

Activities included anything that is “detrimental to the interests of Australia “ or involves “a threat to any person.”

Promoting communal violence is defined as: “activities that are directed to promoting violence between different groups of persons in the Australian community.”

Added here is any activity that “endangers the peace, order or good government of the Commonwealth.”

In effect, publicly questioning COVID vaccines, lockdowns, mass immigration, and multiculturalism could be considered incitement and a threat to national stability (integrity).

As could critiquing Islam, or even criticising Albonomics that is currently edging Australia’s economy irreversibly towards’ Labor’s “we’re saving the world from climate change,” Net Zero Nanny State black hole.

By far one of the bill’s most prominent opponents, Senator Alex Antic, said on X that he’s disappointed it passed.

Antic also stated that he voted against the amendment because “extraordinary powers should never become ordinary.”

The South Australian Liberal Senator then declared the law an expansion of the surveillance state.

Antic told the Senate that the bill “doesn’t merely fine-tune existing arrangements.”

“It breaks in new powers and makes permanent extraordinary intrusions on the liberty of Australians.

“Compulsory questioning warrants,” Antic argued, “allow ASIO to compel a person who may never have been charged with an offence or may never be charged with an offence to appear and answer questions under threat of criminal penalty.”

Even telling anyone about being questioned or detained is now an offence.

“These are not ordinary investigative tools,” he stated. “They sit well outside the framework of the traditional criminal justice system.”

Since 9/11, the government has repeatedly extended what were meant to be temporary powers.

That’s because they were the exception, not a permanent rule.

“As it currently stands, the bill removes that sunset clause entirely.”

Making them permanent is a problem, Antic added.

“History shows that temporary emergency powers have a long and chequered history and habit of becoming permanent features.

“Worse still, the bill actually expands the reach of adult questioning warrants.

“The definition of an adult questioning matter will now be broadened under this bill to include sabotage and, most alarmingly, the promotion of communal violence.”

Criticising the loose language, Antic rightly pointed out that “Promotion of communal violence’ is particularly elastic.

“Vague drafting is the enemy of the rule of law.”

To this he added, “What does it actually mean? What does it capture?”

“Does it capture passionate political speech, advocacy that offends certain groups, legitimate protest or religious expression that crosses an often-ill-defined line?”

Antic then asserted, “In a free society, the state shouldn’t be handed an open-ended power to compel citizens to answer questions about speech or association that falls short of actual criminality.”

Blurring lines when it comes to criminality and rights, he further argued, removes certainty about where that line is drawn.

The even greater concern here is whether or not the law could be used to detain and question people against their will.

“The bill also retains the capacity to subject children as young as 14 to these processes. On its surface, that alone should give this chamber reason to pause.

“Security which is purchased at the price of permanent, expanded and coercive powers is a false bargain.”

Extraordinary laws require use-by dates.

“The rule of law requires that the state’s most intrusive rules remain exceptional, tightly confined, regularly scrutinised and subject to genuine sunset clauses.”

They should not, Antic protested, be “quietly normalised” and “quietly allowed to creep into the norm.”

Notably, Antic joined One Nation and The Greens in opposing the expansion of ASIO’s powers.

There’s something incredibly unsettling about the growing public sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of murdering her three young children.

Clancy is currently on trial for the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. According to her defence, she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible for her actions.

Yet the bizarre reaction online has gone far beyond sympathy for a woman suffering a mere psychiatric crisis.

Women have actually begun publicly identifying with Clancy. Some have posted tearful videos with their own kids, accompanied by captions like “Same, Lindsay.”

What’s more, hundreds of women have also rallied outside the courthouse in support of Clancy, wearing pink and carrying messages such as “She Needs Help” and “End the Stigma.”

And the internet has rightly responded with indignation that a woman accused of killing her own children has become, for some women, an object of identification and solidarity.

But as murderously insane as it is, perhaps there’s some grim logic to it.

For more than a century, feminists and the women’s rights movement have fought to establish that a woman has an absolute right to decide whether her child lives or dies. Abortion has been elevated into a defining symbol of female autonomy and liberation.

And once that has been normalised—once abortion has been accepted as one of the most fundamental rights a woman can exercise—an obvious question arises: What, exactly, makes the child inside the womb fundamentally different from the child outside it?

Human life is continuous from conception until natural death. As such, there is no magical moment during pregnancy when non-human life suddenly becomes human life. The child does not become a different kind of being when he or she passes through the birth canal.

Location doesn’t determine human worth. Size doesn’t determine human worth. Degree of dependency doesn’t determine human worth. The environment in which a child exists does not determine human worth.

A child does not become more human because he or she moves from the womb to the crib. That’s why abortion and infanticide are morally distinct in law but not in the underlying question of human value.

If an unborn child is a human being, then deliberately killing that child is the intentional killing of an innocent human life. Birth changes a human being’s location, not nature.

If Clancy had aborted her children in the womb, she would be celebrated for exercising her “right” as a woman to choose whether her children live or die.

Perhaps that’s why the “Same, Lindsay” trend is so disturbingly revealing. The Western world has spent decades teaching women that killing an unwanted child can be an expression of freedom, autonomy, and empowerment.

Today, there are social media and cultural campaigns, such as “Shout Your Abortion,” which exist to “normalize abortion,” as though killing an unborn baby is something to boast about.

So, should we really be surprised when the culture begins to lose its ability to articulate where the boundary of human value actually lies? Should we be surprised when the culture that celebrates the killing of children inside the womb begins to sympathise with those who kill children outside of the womb?

A society that “normalises” the deliberate destruction of millions of unborn children shouldn’t expect that attitude towards human life to remain confined to the womb. It should be obvious that when killing becomes routine, people become desensitised to killing.

This is the tragedy of the culture of death. It not only kills the children, but it also changes the society that watches.