Terror is an everyday feature of our lives. The terror of losing your livelihood because of the government's new Industrial Relations laws far outweighs the terror that is created by the indiscriminate murder of people in Bali. The daily terror experienced by the people of Iraq as a direct consequence of the invasion by the 'coalition of the willing' (an invasion that had the second largest reserve of oil on the planet for Western interests than the creation of a democratic State) is something that Australian's are now beginning to understand.
The terror of having to live with laws, that allow the State and its security agencies to detain and interrogate people without charge because they may inadvertently have information that may assist the authorities in their investigations. The terror of finding out that if you don't cooperate, you can be jailed for up to 5 years, are terrors that Australians who protest against their government's policies are beginning to experience. The terror of being an asylum seeker in this country, of being legally held in detention indefinitely because nobody believes you or wants you, is a terror that's experienced daily by the refugees on the Tampa who are still being held on Nauru.
The terror of having to live on an old age pension, after a lifetime of work, knowing that your contribution to society has not been acknowledged let alone valued, knowing that you will have to sell your home to get access to a nursing home bed, is a terror experienced by many elderly Australians every day of their retirement. The terror of knowing that you have to wait for a public hospital bed in an understaffed and under-funded public hospital sector is a terror experienced by many Australians who don't have the disposable income to buy private health insurance.
The terror of being a Muslim in Howard's Australia, knowing that you will be personally blamed every time a bomb goes off in the world, by a population that's conveniently forgotten that the presence of Australian troops in invading armies in Afghanistan and Iraq may have something to do with the current spate of suicide murders. The terror of being an indigenous Australian living as an outcast on the margins of a land your people have continuously occupied for over 40,000 years, waiting for Australians to start the reconciliation process by entering into a meaningful treaty with this land's original owners, is a terror indigenous Australians have experienced for 217 years.
These are just a few of the terrors we face as individuals and as a community in Australia today. Terror is directly linked to the level of insecurity people experience and feel in their day to day life, it is not just caused by indiscriminate explosions.