The federal minister Matthew Canavan has defended government support for Adani’s Carmichael mine by saying coal burned overseas will not stop Australia meeting its Paris climate commitments.

Canavan also denied the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, had politicised the defence force by using a backdrop of masked soldiers to announce plans to enable military handling of domestic terrorist threats, telling the ABC’s Q&A program it wasn’t a “campaign announcement”.

The Queensland senator was briefly confronted by an anti-coal protester on stage during the panel show on Monday, which also strongly featured discussion of responses to terrorism and the experience of Muslims in the west.

Canavan found himself in regular disagreement with British journalist and al-Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan, who said it was “madness” for government to invest $1bn in a mine project creating fewer than 1,500 jobs, and ridiculed the minister’s reference to “clean coal”, which was “a contradiction in terms”.

When Hasan said the bigger cost of opening up the Galilee coal basin was that Australia could not meet its Paris commitments, Canavan replied: “But Mehdi, we’re not burning the coal here, it’s being exported to other countries.”

Terri Butler, the opposition frontbencher from Queensland, evaded a question from host Tony Jones about whether federal Labor opposed a mine state Labor supported, saying the “role of federal Labor in this project is to form a view” on whether a government loan was appropriate – and that it was not.

Both Butler and Hasan were critical of Turnbull using Monday’s military display during his announcement of a terrorism law overhaul. Hasan said he supported authorities moving in to kill terrorists but had “a problem with using the military for internal defence”.

“Watching the prime minister today at those barracks, standing surrounded, flanked, by six special forces soldiers with masks on their faces – if that’s not using the military for political reasons, if that’s not politicising the military, I don’t know what is,” he said.

When Canadian scholar and Christian ethicist John Stackhouse said he had reservations about soldiers’ fitness for policing roles, Jones asked him if the point was to have the best-trained killers available to end terrorist incidents.

In a reference to fatal US police shootings of citizens – including unarmed Australian woman Justine Damond – Stackhouse replied: “It seems to me as I look south to the US, there are many police very good at killing people.”

Butler said there was “a bit of discomfort being expressed in the community” about how Turnbull’s announcement appeared, noting it seemed to fly in the face of “a longstanding agreement to not use people in the military for those purposes”.



She said the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, had an “open mind” on national security reforms but that the party had a record of “protecting civil liberties” and not giving rein to an “authoritarian response” that stoked fear of terrorism and was counterproductive.

Canavan said the criticism of Turnbull seemed “a little bit over the top”.

“This wasn’t a campaign announcement or anything like that,” he said. “It’s quite often when the military are involved in activities or what have you, we involve them because they’re an important part of our community.”

The federal minister took issue with the British journalist when Hasan argued terrorism was not an “existential threat” to societies such as Australia’s and that Australians were more likely to be killed falling out of bed.

“I haven’t met a bunk bed that wants to establish a caliphate and destroy western liberal values,” Canavan said.

“There is a fundamental difference between a random tragic act – falling out of a bunk bed or having a fridge fall on you or something – and the considered, ideological, strategic attempt to spread terror through our society.”

Canavan said the best thing to do to make Australians safer was “to stop the attacks from happening”, hence the need for more police resources and a military role as suggested in the wake of the Lindt café killings.

Stackhouse said he was concerned about Islam being conflated with the violence of jihadist groups such as Isis, and domestic attacks that “really do occupy too much of our imagination and too many of our resources go there when they should go to other clear and present dangers domestically”.

“I’m not worried about Islam,” he said. “I’m worried about certain people who fly black flags in the name of Islam and who disgrace Islam, and who press certain political agendas in the name of their religion.”

Is it possible that Australia could have a Muslim majority? @mehdirhasan responds #QandA pic.twitter.com/Wdtt6pLnBD — ABC Q&A (@QandA) July 17, 2017

Hasan cast doubt on an audience questioner’s proposition that population growth in Australia’s Muslim community could one day see the introduction of sharia and sectarian violence with roots in Middle Eastern countries.

A young Muslim man asked the panel whether an “Islamophobic approach to terrorism”, which he said was common in his experience, would “drive more young people to radicalism”.

Hasan said Isis “thrives off of Islamophobia” and the group loved Donald Trump because the US president “pushes people into Isis’s arms”.

Canavan said Australians were “not perfect and there are some of us who are bigots and racists and we should condemn that behaviour”.

But he said the folly of judging groups by errant individuals “cuts both ways”, and his experience of “the vast bulk of Australians is we are very welcoming and harmonious people on the whole”.

“You shouldn’t be saying Australia is a bigoted place on the basis of a few people.”