Malcolm Turnbull has warned against over-hyping the threat posed by Islamic State, arguing it is important not to lend any credibility or currency to the grandiose “delusions” of the jihadists.

The communications minister used a speech delivered at the Sydney Institute on Tuesday night to make a plea for civility, calm and proportionality in Australia’s national security debate.

Tony Abbott has recently delivered an explicit warning that the Daesh death cult is “coming for us”, however, Turnbull argued it was important not to get sucked into the Isis strategy “and ourselves become amplifiers of their wickedness and significance”.

The foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has previously made a direct comparison between the rise of Isis and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, but Turnbull reasoned Daesh was “not Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan or Stalin’s Russia”.

Turnbull said on Tuesday night it was vital not to underestimate the security threat posed by Isis, but it was important also to preserve a sense of perspective given the organisation’s resorting to Hollywood techniques to “amplify its significance”.

“Its leaders dream that they, like the Arab armies of the seventh and eighth century, will sweep across the Middle East into Europe itself,” the communications minister said on Tuesday night.

“They predict that before long they will be stabling their horses in the Vatican. Well Idi Amin wasn’t the King of Scotland either.”

“We should be careful not to say or do things which can be seen to add credibility to those delusions.”

In addition to the “coming for us” reference, the prime minister used the occasion of a Magna Carta lecture delivered in late June to note that Isis “currently dominates an area about the size of Italy with eight million people”. In the same outing, Abbott added that: “Islamist terrorism confronts the world with a chilling choice: submit or die.”

Turnbull’s intervention at the Sydney Institute was a wide-ranging contribution which traversed the importance of the rule of law and also revisited some of the philosophical territory he invoked during the government’s recent internal debate about its citizenship-stripping proposal.

An ambition by the prime minister and the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, to bypass the courts and allow citizenships to be revoked at the discretion of a minister ran aground when a number of cabinet ministers, including Turnbull, objected to that proposal on the basis that it was likely to be unconstitutional.

Turnbull referred to the recent dispute explicitly, noting the government in the end chose to build on existing legal provisions “instead of proceeding with a proposal which would give the minister the discretion to revoke Australian citizenship if he believed the person affected had engaged in terrorist activities”.

“The rule of law is respected because a person whose citizenship ceases in those circumstances has full recourse to the Australian courts under the constitution to contest the matter on its merits,” he said.

Isis coming for us, says Tony Abbott after Tunisia, France, Kuwait attacks – link to video . Source: ABC news

The communications minister opened his address by arguing that in a policy sense, the Abbott government had got the balance between security and individual liberty “right”.

But he cautioned the national conversation about security policy needed to proceed “in a considered manner respectful of the views and experience of others”.

Echoing the principles he articulated during the citizenship policy debate, Turnbull told the Sydney Institute the Australian constitution empowered the courts for good reason.

To further nail the point, he quoted the founder of the Liberal party, Robert Menzies, from a speech from 1942, making the point that the law exists to protect individual freedom – even in a time of war.

“If the day is to come when the courts are to be closed to the aggrieved citizen, when the King’s writ is not to run because popular uproar wills it so, when the appeal to the law is to be an occasion of scoffing, then that day will cast a black shadow across British freedom,” Turnbull quotes Menzies as saying. “The law’s greatest benefits are for the minority man – the individual.”

The communications minister noted that it could be hard to strike the right balance between the imperatives of delivering security for the citizenry and ensuring basic rights and liberties were not comprised.

“We need to recognise that getting the balance right is not easy, not least because the balance may shift over time, and we are more likely to do so if there is a thoughtful and well informed public debate weighing up the reality of the national security threat, the effectiveness of particular proposed measures and then asking whether those measures do infringe on our traditional freedoms and if so whether the infringement is justifiable,” Turnbull said.

“It is important to remember that people and societies with an equal determination to defeat terrorism can have different views on what is the right balance and, indeed, what the right measures are.”

Turnbull noted it was “stupid” to brand critics terrorist sympathisers if they questioned the effectiveness of national security policies – a description “as stupid as describing those who advocate them as ‘proto-fascists’”.

He said security and liberty were a complex balancing act, “not an easy left/right divide”.

On Tuesday evening, Turnbull was yet to rule out appearing on the next edition of Q&A program.



Despite a ban on Coalition MPs from appearing on the show, Turnbull is scheduled to take part in next week’s panel and says whether he does will depend on the circumstances.



“Time will tell – stay tuned,” he said.