Church attack: Anthony Albanese calls for unity amid the unease

Anthony Albanese has urged Australians to unite and acknowledged people are feeling ‘uneasy’ following a religiously motivated terrorist attack in western Sydney.

Anthony Albanese in Canberra on Tuesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Anthony Albanese says there is “no place for violent extremism” and urged Australians to unite after a 16-year-old male was ­arrested for allegedly stabbing an Assyrian Christian orthodox leader in western Sydney in a ­religiously motived terrorist ­attack.

The Prime Minister, who convened a meeting of the National Security Committee of cabinet on Tuesday morning after the attack on Monday night in Wakeley, said he understood Australians were “feeling uneasy” given the atrocity in Sydney’s Bondi Junction on Saturday where Joel Cauchi killed six people in a stabbing attack before being shot dead by police.

Mr Albanese said the attack on Monday night was being investigated by a NSW joint counter-­terrorism team that included the Australian Federal Police, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and NSW Police Force.

ASIO Director-General of Security Mike Burgess said the terrorist stabbing attack targeting well known Assyrian Christian Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and priest, Father Isaac Royel, did “appear to be religiously motivated” but there were no indications at this stage that anyone else had been involved.

“It looks like the actions of an individual,” he said. “In regards to the terrorism threat level, it remains at ‘possible’ and one incident like this does not cause us to change the threat level.”

Mr Burgess acknowledged the Gaza war and events in the Middle East did “resonate here in Australia” but these had not been factors to date in causing individuals to resort to acts of terror.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said any individuals who engaged in “tit-for-tat violence in Sydney over the coming days” would face the “full force of the law” after a riot erupted outside the church where the stabbing occurred on Monday night, resulting in injuries to police and damage to vehicles.

Strike Force Petrina has been established to investigate the stabbing. Strike Force Dribs will investigate the public order incident.

Mr Albanese said it was “not acceptable to impede and injure police doing their duty or to damage police vehicles in a way that we saw last night”.

“People should not take the law into their own hands, but should allow our police and our security agencies to do their job,” he said.

Mr Albanese also said he was alarmed at the role of social media “including the publication of videos that can be very harmful, particularly for younger people”.

AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw did not confirm whether the 16-year-old was a recent convert to Islam but said it was “disgraceful” that members of the community attacked police at the scene.

Mr Albanese said Australia was “overwhelmingly a harmonious society” and it was vital “to stress what unites us and that respect for each other be maintained at all times.”

Peter Dutton said Australians were “shocked and horrified” by the stabbing of Bishop Emmanuel and revealed he wrote to Mr Albanese on Tuesday morning “offering the full support of the Coalition on any issues that the government might think need to be addressed in the aftermath of the tragedy that we saw in Bondi, that we’ve seen in western Sydney.”

“We stand shoulder to shoulder with the government to provide reassurance to the Australian public at the moment,” the Opposition Leader said.

He also doubled down on his comparison of the Howard government’s response to the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 to the Albanese government’s response to the pro-Palestine protest at the Sydney Opera House following the October 7 attack on Israel.

“The response from the Prime Minister – in relation to October 7 and the fear that’s being experienced by the Jewish community now … it was pathetic, to be honest,” he said. “To see Australians living with that fear at the moment is truly horrible.”