Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Justice and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Counter-Terrorism. Will the minister update the House on what the government is doing to prevent Australians from joining terrorist groups at home and overseas?

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Robertson for that question. Members will have seen the report on the front page of The Australian today about Australian children being exposed to the horrors of ISIL. Regrettably, we know that extremist groups threaten the peace and cohesion of our society and they continue to actively target Australians, particularly young Australians, for recruitment. As the Director-General of Security reminded the Senate this week, the age of Australians fighting in Syria continues to get younger and younger.

In reality, if somebody chooses to fight alongside ISIL it means that they will be treated in a highly expendable way and they will occupy dangerous and low-level positions. If you as a young Australian go to fight with ISIL, your life will be nasty and it will probably be short. ISIL systematically target communities that refuse to join them—Christian, Yazidi, Shiah and Sunni. They use sexual slavery against women and young girls as an instrument of terror, and they brutalise the populations under their control in the most medieval of ways.

The government's message is clear and emphatic: if you join the conflict in the Middle East then your life and the lives of others will be at risk. Supporting ISIL harms you. It harms your family. It harms your friends. Joining ISIL is not going to be the experience you think it might be. ISIL leaders—and this is a documented fact—view naive young Australians as cannon fodder. Any Australian who is identified as fighting alongside or supporting ISIL will be investigated by our agencies.

Since 2014 the government has invested an additional $1.3 billion in support of those efforts. The government has also enacted a very broad range of laws designed to give our law enforcement and security agencies the tools that they need to combat terrorism. Significantly, those efforts have meant that six planned terror attacks since September 2014 have been thwarted in Australia.

It remains the case that ultimately our best defence against terrorism will be to stop people from becoming radicalised in the first place. We have invested $40 million in our countering-violent-extremism efforts to make communities more resilient to radicalisation, to intervene and to deter people who might be going through a process of radicalisation and to make sure that, if you are searching for things on the internet, terrorist propaganda has been torn down and you receive better messaging.

At the COAG meeting in December 2015, all state and territory governments agreed with the Commonwealth to forward a range of initiatives that support families, schools, youth and communities who might be vulnerable to violent extremism. This government remains committed to stopping Australians from being radicalised, stopping Australians from joining or supporting ISIL, and doing everything in our power to keep Australia safe.