The Hon Tony Burke MP
Counter Terrorism Online Centre, online radicalisation, national security. SALLY SARA: Ahead of next week's Budget, the Federal Government has announced it will spend $74 million over two years to set up a national centre to detect and disrupt the threat of online violent extremism and terrorism. Last week an interim report from the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion found that while funding to intelligence agencies increased over the past five years the proportion of funding allocated to counterterrorism significantly declined.Tony Burke is the Minister for Home Affairs.
I spoke to him a short time ago. Welcome back to Breakfast. MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS, TONY BURKE: Good to be here.
Firstly, how do you explain the finding from the Royal Commission that the share of funding going to counter terrorism has fallen under your watch? So, the way the funding is done is effectively the Government makes a decision as to how much total funding the national security agencies should get, and they quite properly, as independent agencies, make decisions on risk assessment.
One of the challenges when you look at that risk assessment, I know it's always tempting to put everything into categories; this is counter terrorism, this is foreign interference, and to separate everything. The big feature that we have now though is convergence. So you take something like Adass Israel Synagogue, the terrorist attack there, that was something where you would call it a terrorist attack but at the same time it was conducted by organised crime and at the same time it was foreign interference 'cause it was being masterminded from Iran.
So, the different categories can be deceptive in terms of the work that the agencies are totally doing in keeping people safe. But shouldn't the overall figure be going up given the threat levels? Well, the overall figure in the commitment from Government is going up.
What the agencies are dealing with is all the threat levels are going up, the threat levels in terms of counterterrorism go up, in terms of foreign interference go up, in terms of espionage go up, in terms of cyber-attack go up, and they have to work their way through how they allocate resources. But, as I say, the different resources can't be seen as complete cocoons.
The big shift that we have in all the national security areas now is effectively this concept of convergence, where a cyber attack's not just about computers, foreign interference isn't just about other countries, counterterrorism isn't something that exists immune to the work that's done in the other areas. On the new ‑‑ As I say, those decisions in terms of resources are made by independent agencies, they're made by ASIO, they're made by the Federal Police.
You know, they're statutory agencies. What the Government has made sure of is that the total funding and resources available to them has continued to go up. On the new Counter Terrorism Online Centre, as it will be known, the Government says it will allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to intervene earlier to disrupt youth online radicalisation.
When will this centre be fully operational? The announcement says that it will take us the two years that the funding's there to be able to actually establish it and then work. So some of the work that this will do is obviously work that the agencies are already doing without the existence of a centre, so it's not like everything here is new, but to be fully established to the point that we want to get it to will take the two years, which is why that's where the announcement funding is at.
Effectively the change that we've had here, and this was when the threat alert level went up, what Mike Burgess, Director General of ASIO, made clear at the time was, we were raising the threat level not because there was a specific credible threat that was in front of us, not because the organised terror cells that we've always spoken about were at a heightened level of organisation, but more that there was this additional form of fast online radicalisation where you've got four features; online, people getting younger, mixed ideology and fast radicalisation.
And so that's the work the agencies have been doing cooperatively, but now we want to be able to take that to a centre. Because if I just take ‑ some new laws were passed a couple of years ago, hate symbols and online radicalisation, gave the police new powers. 27 people have been arrested, 15 of them have been minors, 15 of the 27. We've had one on our caseload as young as 12.
It's a real change from traditionally what people would have viewed as the counterterrorism work. The Government originally asked Dennis Richardson to conduct a rapid review of counter terrorism. He was then folded into the Royal Commission and quit, saying that he felt he was surplus to requirements.
Has the Government still been able to seek Dennis Richardson's advice and do the recommendations of the Royal Commission on counter terrorism carry the same weight in his absence? As soon as he ‑ while he was with the Royal Commission it wasn't appropriate for me to be dealing with him directly because there's a formality to that process. Once he left, it would have been within a week or something like that, that I caught up with him and worked through different issues and concerns and had really good discussions with him.
They've continued with my agencies as well, the work that we also have ‑‑ Did you receive formal advice from him, or written advice, or was it just an informal discussion? I don't think sitting down in a meeting room and working through issues of national security counts as an informal discussion, I've got to say. The report work, the written work that was done was done through the Royal Commission, and you know, he's already given interviews including on Radio National about the contribution and the concerns that he had there.
As I say, we've now got the interim report from the Royal Commission. There will be more to come, but one of the things that we wanted to make sure of was that we weren't waiting for the end of the Royal Commission in case there were recommendations about immediate changes we should make to legislation or anything like that, and while they've come back with recommendations, all of which the Government's accepted, they haven't ‑ they've made clear right at the top that there's not a need for us to be rushing through changes to the legal framework or anything like that.
Will you go beyond today's announcement and increase the total funding allocated to counterterrorism given what the Royal Commission has found so far? Well, today's announcement, like this is counter terrorism work, this centre will be doing counter terrorism work, and the money announced is ‑‑ But will that in itself increase the total funding allocated to counter terrorism?
Well, it does, like that's what this centre does. All of this money is new money, and as I say, within the work of the agencies of ASIO, the Federal Police, of AUSTRAC, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, they've got statutory obligations, they're engaging in really complex risk management, they're also dealing with that convergence issue where, while people want to talk about counter terrorism, foreign interference, cyber, as they're all completely different things in silos, that they're just not.
Tony Burke, thank you very much for joining me this morning. Good to be back on the show