Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today, as has been noted by many in this House and elsewhere, marks the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It is almost four years since the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 88 Australians, and on Saturday we passed the second anniversary of the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. It is almost one year since the 2005 Bali bombings that killed four Australians. There was an aborted threat against the Australian High Commission in Singapore, and similarly the Australian Embassy in Dili was temporarily closed some four years ago under the pall of the threat of terrorism.

These events highlight the ongoing threat of international terrorism and the nature of the battle ahead for Western countries like Australia in confronting this vile reality. Mainstream Australia knows the fight that we are fighting. It is not a conventional war and it is not a war that will be won tomorrow, next week, next year or perhaps even in the next decade. But it is a war that Australia, through its history, geography and values and through sheer necessity, must be involved in and must do its bit to succeed in. With terrorism we are not dealing with what we are used to, with conventional armies and tanks moving across territorial boundaries and claiming victory. Terrorism is a different type of war. To combat it we need to be as prepared as possible, and that does mean bolstering our intelligence agencies and beefing up our laws to strengthen the ability of our law enforcement agencies to more effectively combat the threat.

Therefore the comments by Melbourne’s civil libertarian clique that the control order slapped on Jack Thomas, which was variously described as ‘silly’, ‘disturbing’ and ‘retrospective punishment’, show little understanding of recent legislative changes and scant regard for the threat we face. It shows that these self-appointed spokespeople are not taking the threat of terrorism seriously at all. Whilst community sentiment is hardening on a whole raft of criminal activities, be it gang rape in Indigenous communities or domestic violence in our suburbs and towns, for some inexplicable reason the aiding and abetting of terrorist activities in Australia or abroad is not serious enough for these people to condemn.

The team at The Chaser on the ABC made light of the Jack Thomas case in their final episode last Friday night but really, jokes aside, it was and continues to be no laughing matter. Joseph Thomas, or Jihad Jack as he wanted to be known when he gave himself a Muslim name on conversion, invited the TV cameras into his house to see him play with his children and sprinkle Milo on their cereal. The details of his case, however, are no nursery rhyme or fairytale; they are a horror story. Thomas went from the humble beginnings of his family’s Californian bungalow home in Williamstown to become involved with the Australian disciples of Jemaah Islamiah. On his travels he met Abu Bakar Bashir, Jack Roche and even Osama bin Laden.

He undertook military training with terror groups, which he flippantly described on the ABC’s Four Corners as ‘paintballing games’, even though these so-called games involved practising military drills and firing live weapons. These camps are hardly an example of an innocent weekend of fishing with the boys. When asked what this jihad training was all about, Thomas replied:

Well, I suppose everyone knows that jihad is a military, you know, it can be considered a military struggle. And part of jihad is fighting.

By 2001 this seemingly innocuous guy from the western suburbs was willing to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan. There he met bin Laden, not only once but three times, whom he described as ‘very polite and humble and shy’. He trained for months at this al-Qaeda camp, Thomas himself perversely describing it as ‘like a diploma in the school of hard knocks’. He met a fellow Aussie traveller, none other than David Hicks, who he described as ‘a top, blue-singlet wearing Aussie’. I would hardly describe either of these individuals as top blokes or particularly Aussie—the sort of people who train to maim and kill those who do not agree with their medieval concept of a civil society.

Thomas watched videos of the al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, where 17 American sailors were slaughtered. The mastermind of that bombing was Khallad bin Atash, a stalwart of the al-Qaeda crew. He was told, in Thomas’s own words:

Osama bin Laden would like an Australian white person to work for him in Australia.

When asked what bin Laden wanted this Australian to do, Thomas suggests that ‘it was definitely involved with terrorism’. On a further visit to Thomas, bin Atash plied the white Australian Muslim convert with $3,500 in cash and a plane ticket to Australia, with an email address, a telephone number and the instruction to make contact in six or 12 months time.

If we believe the civil libertarian groups, the path to Islamic terrorism for Thomas was an innocuous and harmless road and the Victorian Court of Appeal that freed Thomas had ‘righted a great injustice’, as Liberty Victoria’s president gleefully gushed at the news of the court’s overruling of Thomas’s convictions. Interestingly and unsurprisingly, a former president of Liberty Victoria was one of the three judges of the Victorian Court of Appeal that freed Thomas on the basis that it was ‘contrary to public policy’ that he be convicted. Perhaps that says something about the appointment policies of the current Labor government in Victoria.

Never mind that Thomas was a fellow who went to Afghanistan, trained with al-Qaeda, participated in terrorism training both here and abroad, accepted a wad of cash from a leading al-Qaeda operative and a plane ticket thrown in for good measure, along with an email and telephone contact with the plea to get back in contact within a year. Never mind the fact that Thomas was travelling on a falsified passport that the Australian police learned was to cover up his association with al-Qaeda. Thomas’s tale is no fairytale, nor a story that makes a homely tale. These are the actions of a dangerous and menacing figure who clearly had the capacity and the contacts to do immense harm to Australia and her citizens.

We can laugh at The Chaser’s skits; we can be seduced by the politico-legal speak of the civil rights brigade, who must live in an alternative reality; we can pretend that the terrorist threat is not real; and we can hope that it goes away. But unless we get serious about the threat of terrorism in our own suburbs and abroad we will continue to live in a fool’s paradise and will eventually live in the sort of very threatening society that we see in some parts of Europe today. As President Bush said in this very chamber in 2003:

No country could live peacefully in the world that the terrorists would make for us. No people are immune from the sudden violence that can come to an office building or an aeroplane or a nightclub or a city bus. Your nation and mine have known the shock and felt the sorrow and laid the dead to rest, and we refuse to live our lives at the mercy of murderers.

On the occasion of that address to the Australian parliament, he was howled down by Senator Nettle, who is from the other chamber—the same person who backed Jihad Jack and claimed last month:

‘Control orders’ are instruments of totalitarian regimes and have no place in a liberal democracy like Australia.

This parliament did vote for those laws, and I am glad that the coalition parties and not the lunatic Greens have the balance of power in the Senate at the moment. Only the Australian Greens and the tiresome civil libertarians would put their distorted view of human rights ahead of justice for the victims of terrorists. Only they would try to turn into victims people who willingly and ably volunteered to maim and kill innocent civilians.

On this day, we should reflect on our good fortune to live in this great, free and prosperous nation. We should never be ashamed to stand up for who we are and, in doing so, roundly condemn those who accept our generosity and come to our shores only to fight against the very freedoms on which our nation was founded and has flourished. To do otherwise is to squander the heritage of freedom, democracy and a civil society that we fought for and enjoy. To do otherwise is to appease and to give in to deadly totalitarianism. Today we remember the events of September 11, 2001, indelibly etched into world history, and steel ourselves with a steady resolve to fight terrorism in the years ahead.

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