Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Prime Minister. The counterterrorism and violent extremism strategy was released again last year, where we reviewed the different programs that we run. They're important programs, and there is regular measuring of them. The challenge we have is that terrorism itself is changing as well.

If I give, simply, these statistics: as of a couple of days ago, since 2014, we've had 189 people charged as a result of counterterrorism operations. Right now we have 35 people who are currently before the courts. Eighteen of the 35 are children. So what we used to have to monitor in terms of organised cells of people, often in their 20s and 30s, is very different now. In terms of the ideology, we are getting mixed ideologies. We're getting seriously mixed ideologies. You'll have someone, for example, whose ideology will be a mixture of Nazism, the sort of radicalisation that you've just described, and environmentalism. This will all be mixed up where the only common theme is violence. That does mean that, for our agencies, the threat now is more complex. People are radicalising younger and faster and predominantly online.

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