George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Let me give you a very specific example, Senator Hume. Among the many reforms that we passed in 2014, we lowered the threshold for arrest for Commonwealth terrorism offences from reasonable belief to reasonable suspicion. Those new thresholds allowed our law enforcement agencies to act earlier to disrupt imminent terror-attack planning. As we know, there have been 12 thwarted terrorist events in Australia since September 2014, and some of those events were conceived and planned to be mass casualty attacks of the kind we saw recently in Manchester. Because of some of the measures, including the one I have just mentioned, our authorities were able to interdict and stop such terrorist strikes at an earlier time than they would otherwise have been able to.