Peter Greste on the just passed metadata bill

Even if we wanted to live in a police state, history suggests that we can never really truly deal with terrorism.
And that perversely, the best way to tackle extremism of any sort is to keep an open, accountable society with a free media, able to do its job, interrogating not just governments, but those whose opinions tend to drift off into the political extremes...
Obviously there’s been a lot of discussion and debate about the metadata legislation and I haven’t been in the country long enough to really get involved at a personal level.I would like to take a closer look and see what we can do with that, but I think that we need to, as I said, hold to those principles and have a bigger debate about what the relationship should be between the press and the government.Which way do we want to go with this? Do we want to head towards more authoritarianism or head towards more accountability? That’s the way the slider works. It seems to me to be quite binary and we need to be conscious of that dilemma.That’s the discussion that the nation needs to have

Peter Greste calls for universal charter of media freedoms