Prime Minister Tony Abbott outlines moves to revoke foreign fighters' citizenship, crack down on 'hate preachers'

Updated

The Federal Government will push for tougher citizenship and immigration laws, and "clamp down" on groups inciting religious or racial hatred, in response to a review of counter-terrorism strategy.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott made the announcements in a National Security Statement at the Canberra headquarters of the Australian Federal Police on Monday.

He said the Government would seek to change the laws to enable authorities to revoke or suspend Australian citizenship in the case of dual nationals.

He said people who fight against Australia "forfeit their citizenship" and that Australian nationals would also risk losing "privileges" if they were involved in terrorism.

"Those could include restricting the ability to leave or return to Australia, and access to consular services overseas, as well as access to welfare payments," he said.

"We cannot allow bad people to use our good nature against us."

The Prime Minister also signalled tougher laws to target "hate preachers", pointing to the political group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

"Organisations and individuals blatantly spreading discord and division - such as Hizb ut-Tahrir - should not do so with impunity," he said.

Mr Abbott said the actions against such groups would include programs to "challenge terrorist propaganda" and provide online material "based on Australian values".

"And it will include stronger prohibitions on vilifying, intimidating or inciting hatred," he added.

Mr Abbott also confirmed that the Government would:

Change the current terror alert system

Appoint a National Counter-Terrorism coordinator

Develop a national counter-terrorism strategy with states and territories

Consider options to boost agency funding through the budget process

A review of Australia's Counter-Terrorism Machinery, commissioned in August by the Government, found that "Australia has entered a new, long-term era of heightened terrorism threat, with a much more significant 'home grown' element".

Mr Abbott said the threat in Australia was "rising" and "worsening".

Ninety Australians are fighting with terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria, according to the Prime Minister. Thirty have returned to Australia, and at least 140 people in Australia are "actively supporting" extremist groups.

He also revealed that ASIO is currently investigating several thousand leads and persons of concern and that 400 of these are "high priority cases".

Mr Abbott has called on Parliament to quickly pass new data-retention laws, which would require phone and internet providers to keep metadata about calls and emails for two years.

A parliamentary inquiry into the laws is due to report on Friday and Mr Abbott wants them passed within weeks.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, who has repeatedly said Labor and Liberal "are in this together" in relation to counter-terrorism, has today cautioned against rushing the legislation through.

"Haste and confusion is never the friend of good, sensible security in the future," he said.

Mr Shorten said the Opposition would "engage constructively" with the Government over the measures announced today.

Personal freedom and community safety need to balance: Abbott

The Prime Minister's statement that the Government will pursue tougher laws around vilification and inciting hatred has triggered concern about the consequences for freedom of speech.

Conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs said it flies in the face of Mr Abbott's now abandoned plan to repeal parts of the nation's racial discrimination laws.

"There is the potential from the comments today that not only will we have less freedom of speech, but we'll have restrictions on what all of us can say and that is very alarming," spokesman John Roskam said.

Mr Roskam said the Prime Minister must spell out exactly what he is planning.

"There are already strong prohibitions on intimidation, threats of violence and so on, racial hatred is a vague and ambiguous term and if we are going to give government powers of this sort we have to understand exactly what we are going to prohibit," he said.

The earlier plan to rewrite the Racial Discrimination Act also prompted passionate debate on the Liberal Party backbench, with some MPs vowing to cross the floor in any push for the repeal of the laws.

Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm said restricting people's freedoms would not make them safer.

"Law enforcement and the risk to Australia should be targeted at individuals, not at groups," he said.

"Taking away the rights of all the rest of us, sacrificing a little liberty amongst all of us in the interests of safety, it's never worked."

And he linked the Prime Minister's statements on terrorism to questions within the Liberal Party over Mr Abbott's leadership.

"I'm just a bit worried that our national security and Tony Abbott's job security are, kind of, linked a little bit too closely."

A representative of Sydney's Islamic community also criticised Mr Abbott's comments, saying the Prime Minister's address questioned the integrity of many Muslims.

Mr Abbott said he had often heard Islam described as a "religion of peace" and wished more Muslim leaders would say it more often and "mean it".

Sydney Sheikh Kamal Mousselmani said Muslims regularly describe Islam as such, adding: "We are Australians. We are citizens. And he has no right to disrespect us".

Burnside questions Abbott's motives

Leading human rights lawyer Julian Burnside QC has also questioned the Prime Minister's motivation.

"If politicians can make a country fearful and make them think that they are being protected from something fearful, they will gain political support," he said.

"So yes I think there's a real risk that he's doing this in order to play on community fears and thereby gain a bit of political popularity."

Mr Burnside said the Prime Minister's call for tighter immigration and citizenship laws in the wake of the Sydney siege were unwarranted.

"I'm not even sure you can say it's a bad judgment," he said.

"We simply do not know what facts were known by Immigration when they assessed [Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis] as a refugee in 1996, but to say that the system failed because 20 years later he turns out to be a bad egg, I think is just ludicrous."

Former national security legislation monitor Bret Walker also said there was no system failure in the lead up to the Sydney siege.

"A system doesn't fail because it did not predict something which was not reasonably predictable, and that's really what the departmental conclusions found," he said.

Mr Walker also had concerns the Government was framing the terror threat as being at crisis point.

"This is not anything in the nature of a so-called crisis, the point about counter terrorism [is] it's going to be continuing effort," Mr Walker said.

"There are not peak occasions where we can, for a very short time, trade away liberties for short-term protections. This is a permanent state of affairs and that's why the Prime Minister correctly says the debate about where to strike the balance has to be ongoing and is inevitable."

Topics: abbott-tony, government-and-politics, federal-government, terrorism, defence-and-national-security, australia

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