MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator ANANDA-RAJAH (Victoria) (16:38): The safety of Australians is vitally important and we should talk about it, but those opposite—the coalition and One Nation—are not entering this discussion in good faith. They are peddling this notion, this wrongful assertion, that this government somehow allowed these ISIS brides, who made a woeful, terrible decision to go overseas, to come in when they know full well that from day one the Prime Minister said that he would not lift a finger to help these people back.
They know that. And he has been consistent in that position. In peddling this nonsense, they are actually distracting from the main game, and the main game in Australia when it comes to terrorism is actually youth radicalisation.
This was raised in a joint report by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US—the Five Eyes analysis—which was released in December 2024, titled, Young people and violent extremism:acall for collective action. ASIO stated in 2024 that around one in five of their priority counterterrorism cases involved young people. This is a sobering report.
In every one of the terrorist attacks, disruptions or suspected terrorist incidents that they prosecuted in 2024, the alleged perpetrator was a young person—in every single instance. What we are finding is that people are now being radicalised online. They're being radicalised fast.
They have a mixed ideology, meaning religious, political, racist—you name it; it's all jumbled up there in this kind of politics of grievance and hate—and they are overwhelmingly young. This is what ASIO boss Mike Burgess said just in May this year: I continue to be extremely concerned by the number of young people, particularly young men, who are being radicalised online and mobilising to violence relatively quickly with little to no warning … People who self-radicalise online … often show few … real-world indicators they are mobilising to violence.
In the past two years, since we strengthened counterterrorism legislation—which by the way, One Nation voted against—we have had 31 individuals who have been charged with violent extremist material offences, of whom three in five are aged 17 years or younger. Three in five are children. They are minors.
As of 30 June this year, only a few weeks ago, 298 people were enrolled in counterterrorism interventions to deradicalise them. This was up 18 per cent on the year before, and the overwhelming majority—92 per cent—were men and boys. This is a problem of young people, and it is overwhelmingly a problem of boys and men.
The issue here is that once it reaches the purview of ASIO and the AFP—the Australian Federal Police—it's too late. So what the ASIO boss actually said was that we need a whole-of-society effort. We have to understand why it is that we are losing our boys and our children to terrorism.
What is happening here is that kids are being exposed to violent extremist content. The algorithms bombard them with this stuff, and then, on top of that, they are falling prey to groomers—to terrorist adult groomers, sometimes from overseas, sometimes domestic, who are preying on their vulnerabilities, their need for acceptance, their need for friendship and their need for validation.
These are vulnerable children. So this is why we stood up, in May of this year, $74 million towards a new counterterrorism centre to bring together these agencies—the AFP and ASIO—to work with local and international law enforcement authorities to try and identify these networks and disrupt them and save our kids. This is also why we have brought in the social media ban.
We don't talk about the dirty, dark secret of online extremism and radicalisation, but this is part of the reason this government has acted, and 20 countries have fallen like dominoes behind us, because we realise the threat of youth radicalisation. (Time expired)