Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion and I rise to speak on the member for Latrobe's motion. I join him in acknowledging the excellent work being undertaken by Australia's law enforcement and security agencies to keep our community safe and our nation secure. Much is often said about the important role of national security legislation in ensuring that our law enforcement and security agencies have the powers they need to keep Australians safe, and Labor has consistently taken a bipartisan approach to such legislation. But it must also be recognised that there are limits in the ability of the criminal law to provide a thoroughly adequate response to the threat of terrorism. While terrorism is frequently referred to as a criminal matter, it is a far more complex issue than traditional crimes and it does require a multifaceted response. The traditional criminal law enforcement framework is not by itself equipped to respond to the threat of terrorism.

As a society, we aim to reduce crime. Our general approach is to involve police after a crime has been committed so that investigation and prosecution can occur, criminal sanctions can be imposed to deter and punish criminal activity and, ideally, so that criminals can be rehabilitated. But when it comes to terrorist conduct or a terrorist offence, given that the potential losses are so grievous and the perception of harm caused to society so serious, our paramount objective should be ensuring that our agencies can stop terrorist attacks before they take place and that is why the suite of policies that are often described as countering violent extremism are so important. These policies are essential to responding to the terrorist threat as it now exists because they aim to prevent people from becoming radicalised in the first place.

Our security agencies have advised repeatedly that community harmony is an essential element in helping to prevent the conditions from which terrorism arises. We must focus on increasing social cohesion and on reducing the kind of social isolation that turns people towards radicalism. That is why fostering Australia's multicultural ethos is important for countering violent extremism. We must do all that we can to reject racist discourse in Australian society because that discourse seeks to divide our community by fostering hatred against particular groups. We must also remember that anything we do to increase divisive attitudes towards Muslims is playing into the hands of terrorists. As the former director of ASIO, David Irvine, has said:

… the tiny number of violent extremists does not represent the Islamic communities of Australia – we are talking about a few hundred aberrant souls in a community of nearly half a million – and it is grossly unfair to blame Muslims, who see themselves as a committed component of Australia’s multi-cultural society, for the sins of a tiny minority. Our fight is with terrorism, not with Islam or with our Muslim community.

We should also recognise that the strongest defence against violent extremism lies within the Australian Muslim community itself.

We must work with the Australian Muslim community to identify people at risk of radicalisation and prevent them from going down that path. People who are around those who are marginalised can respond by alerting those who need to know—parents, teachers, community leaders and those within our government—and security agencies who are able to respond. If we focus on prevention—CVE programs that aim at negating the conditions in which radicalisation occurs—we have a much better chance of keeping Australians safe. We will be safer if we can inoculate our young men and women against radicalism, extremism and violence in the first place. That is why in government Labor set up a range of programs under the countering violent extremism initiative, including in particular a program of grants for building community resilience. These programs were entirely preventative in focus and designed to encourage people to resist or disengage from intolerant or radical ideologies.

Unfortunately, the Building Community Resilience program was still in its infancy when the Abbott government came to power and cut all funding. At the time, this seemed to indicate that the government did not consider countering violent extremism to be an important part of Australia's counterterrorism work; however, the following year the government accepted that it had made a mistake and restored funding. We are still to see exactly what that restored funding has produced, but it is encouraging that that has occurred. Australia will be safer if we can promote a cohesive society that fosters inclusion instead of division. We must ensure that all members of our community are valued and treated equally.

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