For the first time commonwealth terrorism laws have been used to arrest and charge someone alleged to be a rightwing extremist, justice minister Michael Keenan said on Monday morning.

His comments referred to Saturday’s arrest of Phillip Galea, 31, from Braybrook, in Melbourne. Galea is affiliated with the rightwing Reclaim Australia movement, and was charged with collecting or making documents likely to facilitate a terrorist act and planning or preparing for a terrorist act.



“This [arrest] underlies the fact that in Australia we police the laws regardless of people’s background, regardless of people’s ideology ... We’ve spent a lot of time since we arrived in office doing or fulfilling the most important responsibility of the commonwealth government, which is to keep the Australian people safe.

“And we’ve seen the rise of violent extremists threatening that security.”

When he appeared in the Melbourne magistrates court on Sunday, Galea described the charges against him as a “conspiracy against the patriot movement” before being remanded in custody to appear before the court again on Tuesday.

On Monday, Keenan confirmed Galea held “strong links to rightwing extremist organisations”. He dismissed Galea’s comments of a conspiracy against such movements.

“We will take action against anybody who has violent extremist views who threatens the safety of anybody else within the Australian community,” Keenan said.

“And our police are very good at what they do, our intelligence community are very good at what they do, identifying people that might present a risk and taking the appropriate action which is what has again happened in this case.”

Keenan said he would not be drawn into commenting about details of the alleged plan or targets. The government and the authorities were well prepared to respond to security threats, Keenan said, referring to the government’s $2.5bn investment in defence, law enforcement and security agencies, and the introduction of increased powers for those agencies.

“The terror threat level in Australia is probable, which means a terror attack is likely to occur,” he said.

“That is the highest our terror threat level has been in Australia’s history and it’s a response to the fact that we live in a significantly worse international security environment, unfortunately, from which Australia is not immune. We have had three terror attacks in Australia, two in Sydney and one in Melbourne but, importantly, our authorities have disrupted a further nine attacks.

“And this is testament to the fact that we’ve given them the powers and resources that they need to do this, but it also reflects the fact that they are world-class agencies. No country in the world is better prepared to deal with the threat of terrorism than Australia.”

On Monday afternoon Kennan was due to fly to Indonesia for a counter-terrorism ministers’ summit, focusing on the financing of terrorism throughout the region.