Tony Abbott has told Australia’s spy chief to “think again” about his analysis that people become terrorists because they adhere to a violent interpretation of Sunni Islam, not because they are refugees.



The former prime minister used an interview on 2GB on Wednesday afternoon to declare too many people “pussyfoot around the fact that just about every terrorist incident of recent times involves someone killing in the name of Islam”.

“We’ve had three terrorist attacks in Australia and all three of them involved either people claiming to be refugees or the children of refugees,” Abbott said. “I think that the Asio director really needs to think again on this issue.

“I don’t think public officials help the debate by denying the facts.”

The chief of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation, Duncan Lewis, has come under intense pressure from conservative commentators, including the News Corp columnist and Sky News broadcaster Andrew Bolt, after his response to questions from the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, on 26 May about whether there was a connection between terrorism and refugees.



The Asio chief told Hanson at Senate estimates last week he had no evidence of any connection. He said the source of terrorism wasn’t Australia’s refugee program but “radical Sunni Islam”.

With Bolt and Hanson campaigning, Lewis made himself available for a rare public interview with the ABC on Wednesday morning.

Lewis stood by the evidence he gave last week but provided some more context.

“We have had tens of thousands of refugees come to Australia over the last decade or so and a very few of them have become subjects of interest for Asio and have been involved in terrorist planning,” the Asio chief said.

“I’m not denying that. I’ve not said that there are no terrorists who have not been refugees or who have not been the sons and daughters of refugees born in this country.

“But the context is very important. The reason they are terrorists is not because they are refugees but because of the violent, extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam that they have adopted.”

Lewis said sons and daughters of refugees were “in the group that have resorted to radicalisation but I think it is very wrong to say that it is because of their refugee status”.

“They are radicalised for different reasons,” he said.

His observations were backed up on Wednesday by the Australian federal police commissioner, Andrew Colvin.

Colvin told the National Press Club: “The challenge that we’re dealing with is, by and large, a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam.”

The AFP commissioner said he was concerned about a tendency in Australia to reduce the conversation about terrorism to “absolutes.”

“The world we live in, the world that Asio lives in, is far more nuanced than that,” Colvin said.

Abbott, however, suggested there was no place for nuance in the debate. “Islam has to face up to this,” he said. “We can’t make excuses for this evil. It has no place in the modern world.”