James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Cyber Security) Share this | Hansard source

Social cohesion has been tested in Australia, more than at almost any time in our history, since the events of 7 October. Hamas's decision to launch a terrorist attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping hundreds more, has had profound reverberations here. On one level, that is natural and understandable. The Jewish community is, of course, deeply distressed by these attacks, which saw the most Jews killed on a single day since the end of the Holocaust, and the continued holding of innocent hostages in Gaza. It's also understandable that Australians with connections to Gaza are also greatly concerned by the loss of life there, including of innocent civilians, as the IDF has attempted to remove Hamas from power and free the hostages. In a pluralistic, multicultural democracy, conflicts overseas always have the potential to be flashpoints for domestic disharmony and contention. But our ability to navigate these differences of opinion is made much harder by extremist groups who seek to weaponise foreign conflicts for their own reasons.

One such group is Hizb ut-Tahrir. Thanks to the investigative reporting by Nick McKenzie and his colleagues at 60 Minutes, we now have a much better understanding of the operations of this group. They have successfully infiltrated the pro-Palestinian protests in Australia since 7 October, especially the university based encampments. They are using them as an opportunity to recruit and radicalise students with extreme rhetoric and their hateful ideology. They have propagated vile antisemitism, and they openly seek to undermine our democratic institutions.

For many years, it has been argued that this group and their conduct are awful but lawful, that they might be extremists but they are non-violent. If that ever were true, there is good reason to doubt it now. One imam associated with Hizb ut-Tahrir is Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun. On 8 October, long before any IDF response in Gaza, he spoke at a rally in Western Sydney to celebrate Hamas's attacks. He said:

I'm smiling and I'm happy. I'm elated. It's a day of courage. It's a day of pride. It's a day of victory. This is the day we've been waiting for.

He's not alone in that view. As Alexi Demetriadi of the Australian revealed last week, Hizb ut-Tahrir issued a media release in Arabic on 7 October. It has since been deleted from their website, but it praised the brave Muslims of Palestine and urged Israel's neighbouring Muslim countries to attack and eliminate Israel.

Australia's counterterrorism laws are clear. It is of course an offence to directly participate in a terrorist attack or recruit or fundraise for a terrorist organisation, but the criteria to be listed as a terrorist organisation is also broader than that. It includes advocacy of terrorism. As the Attorney-General's Department explains, advocacy includes someone who counsels, promotes, encourages or urges the doing of a terrorist act, someone who gives instruction on the doing of a terrorist act or someone who directly praises the doing of a terrorist act whether there is a substantial risk that that praise might lead someone to engage in a terrorist act. It is for reasons similar to this that our close partners in the United Kingdom took the decision to list Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organisation under their own regime in January. As UK home secretary James Cleverly said, HUT is 'an antisemitic organisation that actively promotes and encourages terrorism, including praising and celebrating the appalling 7 October attacks.'

Disturbingly, on Sunday in the Herald Sun, James Campbell reported HUT was shifting its activities from the UK to Australia because we had inadvertently become a safe haven for their global activities by failing to proscribe them. It is for these reasons that the Australian government must urgently commence its own investigation into whether HUT meets the criteria for terrorism listing here. On behalf of the coalition, I offer the government bipartisan support for listing Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organisation. If the government believes that our current terrorism proscription regime is not fit for purpose and can't capture groups like HUT, we should immediately consider reforming them so that it does. We would of course work with the government in a bipartisan way to address this. But, if the government does not act, we will, because nothing less than our social cohesion is at stake.

I also want to address the comments by Senator Walsh directed to Senator Scarr during this debate. I'm very happy to compare my credentials or Senator Scarr's to anyone opposite on supporting our security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. But we're a liberal democracy. We are not a security state, and it is entirely appropriate for the elected representatives of the people in this place to give voice to their concerns over these issues and to ask questions about whether or not our laws need to be reformed to better protect our country. That's exactly what we're doing.

Question agreed to.