(Apparently the Real Terrorism Is Damaging the War Machine)
There is something deeply revealing about the Australian Federal Police’s decision to investigate the alleged vandalism of Melbourne defence manufacturer Lovitt Technologies as an act of terrorism.
The immediate reaction is to focus on the allegations themselves. A group claiming responsibility says it targeted the company because it manufactures components used in the global F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Police allege vehicles were set alight, property was damaged and threats of further action were made. Whether particular offences have been committed will ultimately be determined by the courts.
But that is not the only story here.
The decision to invoke Australia’s counterterrorism framework is itself a political act. It tells us something about what the Australian state understands to be violence, what it considers worthy of protection, and whose lives it values. It also reveals how readily the language of terrorism can be deployed against political movements that challenge Australia’s military, economic and geopolitical interests.
For years, governments have insisted that Australia’s counterterrorism laws exist to protect the public from extraordinary acts of violence. Increasingly, however, those laws appear to be serving another purpose: protecting the political and economic order itself.
What Is Being Protected?
The AFP has described those allegedly responsible as “far-left extremists” motivated by “anarchist and revolutionary ideologies.” The investigation is focused not simply on property damage, but on whether the conduct amounts to terrorism under Part 5.3 of the Criminal Code, offences that carry the possibility of life imprisonment.
That should give us pause.
Australia is currently witnessing one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century unfold in Gaza. Entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. Hospitals have been destroyed. Journalists, aid workers, doctors and children have been killed in staggering numbers. International legal bodies, United Nations experts and major human rights organisations have warned of war crimes, crimes against humanity and the plausible commission of genocide. The International Court of Justice has determined that South Africa’s claim that Israel is committing genocide is plausible enough to warrant provisional measures while the case proceeds.
Australia has not stood outside these events. It has maintained diplomatic support, military cooperation and industrial relationships that connect Australian companies to global defence supply chains. The F-35 program itself has become the subject of sustained scrutiny internationally because of the role those aircraft have played in Israel’s military operations.
Yet none of this attracts the language of terrorism.
Instead, the full force of Australia’s national security apparatus is mobilised against those accused of damaging property belonging to a company participating in that supply chain.
The contrast is impossible to ignore.
Terrorism Is Not a Neutral Category
Governments often present terrorism as though it were a straightforward description of a particular type of violence. It is not.
Terrorism has always been a political category. It reflects decisions about whose violence is considered legitimate and whose is condemned as beyond the boundaries of acceptable political conduct. States exercise violence constantly. Police use force. Prisons operate through coercion. Borders are enforced through detention. Militaries bomb cities. Economic sanctions produce humanitarian suffering. Yet these forms of organised violence are rarely discussed as terrorism because they are authorised by the state itself.
Purported legitimacy, not violence alone, determines how conduct is classified.
This is not to suggest that every act of resistance is beyond criticism or that any particular tactic should escape public scrutiny. Rather, it is to recognise that the label “terrorism” performs political work. It creates, defines and alters legal rights and duties. It delegitimises. It isolates. It transforms political conflict into a matter of national security that results in surveillance and state sanctioned violence. Once that transformation occurs, democratic disagreement no longer requires engagement. It requires policing.
From Protest to National Security Threat
One of the most striking aspects of the AFP’s statement is its emphasis on ideology. Police did not merely describe alleged criminal conduct. They specifically identified the alleged offenders as being motivated by “anarchist and revolutionary ideologies.”
That language matters.
Modern policing increasingly concerns itself not only with what people have done, but with what political ideas they hold. Ideology becomes evidence of dangerousness. Political belief itself becomes something requiring surveillance.
History should make us cautious about this development.
Governments have repeatedly characterised movements seeking profound political change as threats to public order. Trade union organisers were once described as dangerous agitators. Aboriginal resistance to invasion was criminalised from the earliest days of colonisation. Anti-war campaigners were placed under surveillance. Environmental activists have increasingly been described as extremists. Across different historical periods the language shifts, but the underlying logic remains remarkably consistent: political movements that fundamentally challenge state priorities become matters for policing rather than democratic contest.
The category of terrorism represents the furthest extension of that logic. It signals that particular political movements are no longer merely controversial or disruptive. They become existential threats to the nation itself.
The Criminalisation of Palestine Solidarity
The events in Gaza have exposed a growing willingness to treat Palestine solidarity movements through the lens of national security.
Across Australia, peaceful protesters have faced increasingly restrictive policing powers. Universities have disciplined student organisers. Governments have introduced or expanded anti-protest laws. Public officials routinely characterise disruptive protest as extremism. Phrases and expressions used at protests have been criminalised.
The investigation into Lovitt Technologies represents another step along that path.
The issue is no longer simply whether particular criminal offences occurred. The issue is whether opposition to Australia’s involvement in military supply chains is itself becoming redefined as a form of extremism requiring counterterrorism responses.
That distinction matters enormously.
Democracies inevitably contain conflict. They contain people who oppose wars, governments and economic systems. The appropriate response to political disagreement is not always agreement, but neither should it automatically become a matter of national security. When states begin framing political resistance through counterterrorism frameworks, they fundamentally alter the relationship between citizens and government. Dissent is no longer understood as an ordinary feature of democratic life, it becomes evidence of radicalisation.
The Police Are Not Neutral Participants
The AFP’s public statements present the organisation as an impartial institution protecting the Australian community from extremist violence.
That image deserves closer examination.
Police do not stand outside political conflict. Their role is to enforce the laws enacted by governments and maintain the institutional arrangements those laws produce. In practice, this means protecting recognised property rights, enforcing state authority and preserving existing political and economic structures. In this instance those structures include Australia’s defence industry, its military alliances and its participation in global weapons supply chains.
This is not an accusation of individual bias. It is simply an acknowledgement of the institutional role policing performs. The AFP cannot simultaneously protect those relationships and claim complete neutrality regarding political movements that seek to disrupt them.
Policing has always been political because law itself is political.
Whose Fear Counts?
Counterterrorism legislation is justified on the basis that it protects communities from fear, but fear is not distributed equally.
Palestinian communities in Australia have spent almost two years watching family members killed, displaced and buried beneath collapsed buildings. Many have attended funeral after funeral conducted from thousands of kilometres away because they cannot return home. Children wake each morning to news of another massacre. Families spend nights wondering whether relatives remain alive.
That fear rarely becomes the focus of Australia’s national security conversation. Instead, enormous institutional resources are directed towards protecting companies connected to military production from acts of sabotage.
The imbalance is striking.
The suffering produced by industrialised warfare is treated as a distant geopolitical issue. Damage to property within Australia becomes an issue of terrorism. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some forms of fear matter more than others.
Expanding the Boundaries of Terrorism
Counterterrorism powers have a well-established tendency to expand beyond their original justification. Measures introduced in response to catastrophic acts of mass violence rarely remain confined to those circumstances. Over time they become available for broader policing purposes. The threshold for invoking extraordinary powers gradually lowers.
Australia has already witnessed this pattern repeatedly.
Counterterrorism legislation introduced after September 11 has grown into one of the most extensive national security frameworks in the democratic world. Successive governments have expanded surveillance powers, preventative detention, secrecy offences and intelligence capabilities, almost always arguing that exceptional circumstances require exceptional responses.
The concern is not merely that these powers exist, it is that they increasingly migrate into areas of political protest.
Environmental activists become extremists. Anti-war organisers become security concerns. Palestine solidarity movements become potential terrorist investigations.
Each expansion makes the next one easier.
The Hypocrisy We Are Expected to Ignore
Perhaps the greatest contradiction in this story is the moral language employed by the state. Police speak of protecting the community from violence while operating within a political system that continues to facilitate one of the most devastating military campaigns of recent history. Australian officials condemn the destruction of property while refusing to meaningfully confront the destruction of entire civilian populations. The same political establishment that insists there is no alternative to supplying or supporting military industries now describes attempts to disrupt those industries as existential threats.
That contradiction cannot simply be explained away as consistency in applying the law, it reflects a deeper political reality. The state does not oppose violence in the abstract. It distinguishes between violence that preserves existing political arrangements and violence that challenges them.
One is normalised. The other becomes terrorism.
Democracy Cannot Survive Without Dissent
There is no democracy without protest.
There is no meaningful democracy if governments alone determine which forms of political opposition remain legitimate and which become matters for national security agencies. People will hold different views about tactics. Some will condemn acts of sabotage unequivocally. Others will argue that disrupting the machinery of war is a moral necessity. Those debates are important and should occur openly.
What should concern all of us, however, is the growing tendency to collapse political conflict into questions of terrorism.
History teaches us that extraordinary policing powers rarely remain confined to their original targets. Once governments discover that national security language is an effective means of delegitimising political opposition, the temptation to expand its use becomes almost irresistible. That is why this case matters beyond the allegations themselves.
It is about the boundaries of political dissent in Australia. It is about whether opposition to war can increasingly be characterised as extremism. It is about whether disrupting the industries that profit from organised violence is to be treated as a security threat while facilitating that violence remains legitimate statecraft. Most of all, it is about who possesses the authority to define violence in the first place. Because when governments reserve the language of terrorism exclusively for those who resist the machinery of war, while refusing to apply it to the machinery itself, they reveal that “terrorism” is no longer simply a legal category.
It has become a mechanism for protecting power.
