How to read an anti-terrorist kit: LOFA and its implications for Australian identity and security

This paper examines the anti-terrorist package Let's Look Out For Australia: protecting our way of life from a possible terrorist threat (or LOFA) sent to Australian homes in February 2003. It seeks to accomplish two things. Firstly, it critically interrogates various political and mythological strategies used in the package, arguing that it fails to reassure the public against terrorism. Instead, LOFA reveals quite the opposite: the possibility of an authoritarian state, and a code of exclusive 'Australian' values. Secondly, the response to LOFA is examined. While many Australians expressed indignation at LOFA, debate subsided in a matter of weeks. Using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, it is suggested that the reception of LOFA was ultimately marked by an acceptance by the Australian community of the doxa, or orthodoxy, of terrorism as a global phenomenon.