The supreme emergency narrative manufactures public anxiety and then profits from relieving it

Evidence

After 9/11, Australia joined other Western nations in ramping up its security measures. The National Security Information (Criminal Proceedings) Act of 2004 was followed by the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005, each building on the increased powers given to the Australian Intelligence Security Organization through the Intelligences Services Act of 2001. In addition to the usual increased capacity to intrude on citizens’ lives, potential curbs on freedom and normal legal practices were introduced. As Richard Jackson puts it, constructing the supreme emergency “creates a situation of extreme crisis … where normal politics is suspended and where the usual checks and balances on the exercise of power can be dispensed with”—the idea being to produce a sense of paranoia where the public “feels grateful to the state for relieving an anxiety which was encouraged by officials in the first place.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 358

Categorization

• XREF: The engineered-fear dynamic here parallels the manufactured moral panic mechanics underlying the reader’s study of Islamophobia as a constructed narrative rather than organic response. — connects to: Outbidders weaponize fear narratives while discounting deferred peace benefits. — Cathy Gormley-Heenan and Roger Macginty, Ethnic Outbidding and Party…, 32
• DEFINE: Gives Morey’s working definition of the ‘supreme emergency’ as a manufactured state suspending normal political checks.