The news that the Bondi Beach gunman now faces 19 fresh charges should not surprise anyone who has watched the slow rot of Western legal systems. That Australia is now reviewing UK-style counter-terror laws is the true headline. It is an admission that the old certainties have failed.
We are no longer a confident nation. We are a nervous one, copying the desperate measures of a mother country that long ago lost its nerve. The Victorian era would have blushed at such a surrender to procedural panic.
Instead we march toward a future of endless reviews, endless charges, and endless erosion of liberty. The gunman is a symptom. The cure is worse than the disease.
