Turnbull announces tough new laws to combat terrorists

AUSTRALIAN governments will aim to overcome the agility of terrorists with new powers, including extended imprisonment of extremists.

AUSTRALIAN governments aim to overcome the agility of terrorists with new powers, including extended imprisonment of extremists who defy rehabilitation.

The federal and state governments also will co-operate on measures such as control orders on suspected offenders as young as 14 to 17.

And counterterrorism authorities are boosting precautions against “lone actor attacks” like those responsible for atrocities in France and Germany recently.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today outlined targeted proposals he said would be “proportional” and would keep pace with the evolving terror threat.

It was a reassurance to the public at a time when fringe political identities were adding to anxieties and demanding blanket measures like the banning of all Muslim immigration.

“And what Australians need to know, and (what) George Brandis, the Attorney-General, and I are here to assure them, is that we are as agile as our opponents,” Mr Turnbull told reporters in Sydney.

“We are determined to ensure that as they develop new ways of threatening us, we are able to respond quickly and effectively.”

No governments can give total guarantees of safety from attacks, and over the past year some 750 people have died in about 40 attacks either in the West or against Western interests.

Mr Turnbull said the measures he announced were designed to “deter terrorism, prevent it, ensure that the nation and our people are kept safe and to provide reassurance that Australians can and should continue going about their daily lives”.

The proposals have been under discussion with the states since last December and were considered by the Council of Australian Governments in April. Senator Brandis intends to discuss co-ordinated implementation at a meeting of state attorneys general.

The Government hopes to have legislation ready in “the early days of the new Parliament”.

The measures included extended imprisonment of convicted terrorists who at the end of their official sentence had shown they had not been rehabilitated. The first sentences this could apply to will not end until November, 2019.

“One of the virtues of the post-sentence detention regime we are proposing is it provides a very powerful incentive to people who may be in prison not to participate in further radicalisation or not to renew their malevolent intents,” said Attorney-General Brandis.

“But rather (it) gives them an incentive to be genuinely rehabilitated because they face the risk that if they continue to demonstrate these attitudes, these intentions, that they may very well find themselves the subject of an application for preventative post-sentence detention.”

Similar schemes are used in cases of sex offenders in all states, and against some violent offenders in South Australia and NSW.

Senator Brandis said nationally uniform laws would apply to individuals who “continue to pose an unacceptably high risk to the community because of ... their failure to be rehabilitated as a result of a penal sentence”.

There will be medical and psychological examinations and court supervision of the process.

And extended detention decision will be reviewed and the prisoner could apply to a court for leniency.

There would be annual reporting to Parliament on the number of orders granted and a statutory review of the efficacy and need for the scheme after a period of years.

The Government also will re-introduced lapsed legislation known as the Counterterrorism Legislation Amendment bill #1 2016.

“This would extend the control order regime — restricting travel and requiring frequent reporting to authorities — to juveniles to the age of 14.

“At the moment, the lowest age at which control orders are available against a person of concern is the age of 16 but as we saw tragically, for example, in the shooting at the Parramatta Police Station last year, 16 is too low a threshold,” said Senator Brandis.

“The age of criminal responsibility is below the age of 16 in all States and, therefore, we’ve decided to introduce a special regime of juvenile control orders for people between the ages of 14 to 17.”

Prime Minister Turnbull said the rapid evolving of the threat of terrorism required “that we have all of the tools that we can provide, our legal system, our security agencies, our police service,

our intelligence services, to deal with it”.

He said that included information from the Muslim community.

“Forewarning is critically important and that’s why maintaining a strong and confident relationship with the community is critical,” he said.