Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the Manchester terrorist attack and what the government is doing to keep Australians safe, including in my electorate of Berowra?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. I spoke with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, last night, and I conveyed to her the heartfelt sympathies and condolences of the Australian people to the people of Britain and to the victims of this shocking criminal attack and to their families. I reaffirmed to her the resolute solidarity of Australia with Britain, partners now as we always have been and always will be in freedom's course. Prime Minister May thanked me and thanked this parliament for the solidarity we showed yesterday as the Leader of the Opposition and I spoke in unison, united in our solidarity and our sympathy for our friends in the United Kingdom.

This was a shocking, criminal attack on innocence. At least 22 people have been murdered and 59 injured—many of them children, as we know. This was a children's concert. This attack was designed to kill children. What could be more vile, more reprehensible, more criminal than this crime? It was committed by a coward.

Brave men and women—Australians and Britons alike—will not be cowed by terrorism, wherever it occurs. We will not change our way of life and we will continue to fight together, as Prime Minister May and I reaffirmed last night, to defeat this scourge of terrorism in our homes and around the world. The Director-General of Security has advised me that Australia's threat level remains at 'probable'. There do not appear, at this stage, to be direct links between the attack in Manchester and threats in Australia. But we must remain vigilant at home, always, where the threat remains very real—the threat level is 'probable'.

Today, the New South Wales Coroner handed down his report into the Lindt cafe siege. Our heartfelt sympathies go out once again to the families of Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson, as well as all the brave hostages who survived that siege. Their lives were changed forever. The government will consider the recommendations carefully and continue to strengthen arrangements where needed.

Our first priority is to keep Australians safe. Our agencies, with whom I and my ministers are in constant touch, are constantly upgrading, reviewing and adjusting our response measures. We must be more agile than those who seek to do us harm. We will always work tirelessly to keep Australians safe, and we do that by destroying Daesh in the field in the Middle East and by destroying their networks here at home. We will keep Australians safe. We have the best agencies and the best intelligence services in the world. There are no guarantees, of course, but, since September 2014 when the threat level was raised, there have been 63 arrests for terrorism offences, with another one just this week, and 12 major plots have been disrupted. And we continue to use every avenue at our disposal to provide additional resources, whether they be financial or legal and whether it relates to signals intelligence, human intelligence or hard power. We will do all we can, as we always have, to keep Australians safe and to defend the liberty that this parliament is established to preserve.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition, on indulgence.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If I may, I will briefly associate myself with the heartfelt remarks of the Prime Minister. Yesterday we were operating on those early fragments of information, but the more that we learn the worse it gets. It is clear that Manchester has been an act of evil terror. It is a crime of cowardice; it was aimed at innocent people and innocent children—people having innocent fun. Now we have seen the face of the evil perpetrator, and we have also now become witness to the faces of some of those who were lost. In associating myself with the Prime Minister's remarks, I want to share the comments of Ms Charlotte Campbell. She spoke to the media, and her words could be the words of any of us in this House who are parents, or, indeed, of any Australian:

I'm at home phoning everybody: hospitals, police, the centres that the children have been put in. Her dad's in Manchester looking for her. I've got friends looking for her. I've got people I don't even know looking for her, people messaging me, saying we've got her photo, looking for her, we'll get in contact if we see her. And I'm just hearing nothing. … They've basically told me to stay put and wait for a phone call.

Very soon after that, Ms Campbell had her phone ring with the worst possible news. Her daughter, Olivia, was only 15 years old. In time, the shock will fade and the news will move on, but for families the grief will remain. We will retain our shared determination to defeat terrorism. Like the Prime Minister, despite the fierce arguments we might have on other matters here, all of us in Australia stand alongside the United Kingdom as friends, as family and as partners in this conflict.