That the crux of this argument is merely a balance of risks

The importance of our hitherto points can be made clear by a final strand of analysis for this stage of the debate. As we have said, the basis for the Proposition’s rejection of the anti-terrorism law they describe is an appeal to its potential for wider scale harms and immediate misuse. What this really is is a risk that it poses. Let us qualify that statement with another analogy. The phrasing of the prop term cleverly disguises what is a statement about the possible potential effect of something as being something which it empirically IS. They attempt to categorise ‘anti-terrorism law’ as something which ‘undermines democracy’, when what they really say is that it has the potential to do so. In the same way, I might say that the existence of a nuclear bomb might undermine international peace. What I really mean is that the potential for detonation it poses is a threat to peace, so that if somehow it was guaranteed that it could never be detonated the power it had to undermine peace would dissolve. (There may of course be ancillary detriment to peace like the indignation of other nations that I even thought to build a bomb; these equate to Props point 4 about the effects of the very presence of even un-actualised anti-terror legislation, to be dealt with separately.) So the potential for the abuse of anti-terrorism law is actually what would undermine democracy, and it is the risk of this abuse that Prop seek to avoid. Now for the crux of our reasoning that must follow from the premises we have supplied! Prop’s case has been based on the minimisation of this risk. To return to the end of our first point: “The problem only exists where the possibility of abuse of this power becomes a sufficient threat to cancel out the security value such legislation might have for those members to agree to it.” For our rational, discerning citizen body, there is definite empirical value in a voluntary agreement to forfeit certain liberties in formerly agreed situations, provided it is mutual. Prop merely point to the risk of abuse of this agreement by their external despotic body of government, which we acknowledge exists. Our case is also based on risk: the risk of a terrorist threat. The anti-terrorist legislation is removed to combat the risk of abuse of liberties by government; it is enforced to combat the risk of abuse of liberties by terrorists. So it comes down to a balance of threats. We maintain that the present existences of these laws represent the consensus that the latter is the more tangible risk, and we in opposition are part of that consensus. Not only this, but we believe the risk of abuse by government is a threat that is more easily and readily rectifiable, as well as being less likely. Abuse by government by the systematic shutting down of human rights of the kind the prop describes is more malign because it is enacted in the practical interests of a power mad despotic body. But it is in the nature of a terrorist attack to be (frequently) irrational or religious, and hence prone to random, non-rectifiable acts of extreme violence. Sudden emergency is harder to avoid or repair than an insidious attack on liberty that a state whose first step was the Patriot Act, might enact. Our risk is more tangible, more threatening, and more likely. We reckon legislation to combat it is worth it.