Australia does not, by world standards, face major threats from terrorism or public disorder. Although the response to the terrorist threat has been measured and appropriate, the response to outbreaks of disorder has been overly authoritarian and unimaginative. The rush to form and deploy specialist public order squads within police forces has precluded a wide analysis of options for dealing with disorder. The infrequency of major disorders poses a danger of using public order units in ways which inflame or provoke disorder. There may be a tendency to use more aggressive tactics to resolve armed incidents in an effort to justify the existence of police antiterrorist units. In an actual terrorist incident, there may also be problems in using police instead of the Army's Special Air Service Regiment, which is a full-time unit on standby to deal with terrorist incidents. The overall assessment is that the development and deployment of police public order and antiterrorist units must be carefully controlled to prevent the development of paramilitary police forces. 16 footnotes.