“This legislation will enable additional periods of imprisonment for terrorist offenders who have served their sentences but are still judged to present an unacceptable risk to the community”, Prime Minister MalcolmTurnbull said in a statement.
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A staunch US ally, Australia has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown radicals since 2014, having suffered several “lone wolf” assaults, including a cafe siege in Sydney in which two hostages and the gunman were killed.
Australian authorities have conducted 16 counter-terrorism operations with 44 persons charged since September 2014 but “we can not afford to be complacent”, Turnbull said.
High-risk terror offenders may be kept in jail after their sentences finish, Australian officials said today as they move to tighten security laws following attacks in the United States and Europe.
A total 44 people have been charged with “terrorism” offences in Australia since 2014, including some involved in the planning of mass attacks on the public, Turnbull said.
The senator explained the necessity of lowering the juvenile control age from 16 to 14, using the tragic example of a shooting past year in the western Sydney suburb of Parramatta. Jihadist group Islamic State (Isis) has claimed responsibility for both the attacks.
Attorney-General George Brandis said the extension of detention would be a court supervised process with regular reviews and reassessments. The age was lowered as recommended following the shooting of NSW police’s Curtis Cheng, a 17-year veteran of the police’s finance department who was shot dead by 15-year-old Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar in October. Five males aged 16 to 24 have also been arrested in relation to the terror attack, and are awaiting trial.
“They follow a direction I gave last week to the counter-terrorism coordinator Greg Moriarty for advice on the implications of the lone attacker terrorists such as those we saw recently, particularly in Nice earlier this month”.
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How Australia reacts to the “phenomenon” of rapid radicalization of those not known to authorities and aren’t on the “counter-terrorism radar”, and “how we prevent that, is very important”, Turnbull said, noting human intelligence is key.
