Australia must do “a lot better” in tackling far-right extremism, online radicalisation experts warn amid hopes that a parliamentary inquiry will help halt the accelerating threat.
“It’s important and probably long overdue,” Lydia Khalil, a research fellow and extremism expert at the Lowy Institute, told The New Daily
The probe into right-wing extremism was coincidentally launched just hours after a teenager from Albury with alleged neo-Nazi views was arrested by Australian Federal Police following claims he encouraged a mass casualty terrorist attack.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on Wednesday asked the federal Parliament’s powerful Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to open an inquiry into ‘extremist movements and radicalism in Australia’.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation said recently right-wing terror accounted for up to 40 per cent of its current workload, and that an attack was possible in Australia.
The inquiry’s terms of reference ask politicians to probe both far-right and Islamist terrorism, but Labor’s Kristina Keneally – who led the charge for the investigation – said the inquiry would focus largely on the far-right.
“The responsibility we have in the parliament is to explain right-wing extremism to the community and engage the community to help us keep Australians safe,” she said.
The inquiry will investigate how extremism has been affected by the COVID pandemic, which experts say has supercharged some radical groups. It will probe whether Australia’s framework to list organisations as terror groups – which currently does not include any far-right groups, despite all other ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence partners doing so – is fit for purpose to deal with this threat.
Read the article by Josh Butler in The New Daily.