Labor considering changes to laws to address ‘rightwing terror’
Guardian Australia’s very own Josh Butler asks about rightwing extremism.
Where does this issue rank in terms of threats that you have to address in your portfolio and what work is being done in this area generally and specifically about hate speech and radicalisation online?
O’Neil:
One of the trends I just referred to earlier is this proliferation of ideologies that are driving people to violence. We see big groups of people who are still on a religious fundamentalism pathway but now a very large group of people who are of interest who subscribe to various forms of rightwing nationalism, Nazism, those sorts of things and it’s obviously enormously concerning.
We had the Christchurch bombing which was an Australian committing a heinous act of terror in Christchurch and New Zealand and so this is a problem that I do take very seriously.
We are actually looking at the way we think about and manage terrorism in Australia to consider whether it is appropriate for these new forms of terrorism that we are seeing.
There was a lot of legislation passed in the second half of the last decade which was very targeted at a specific type of terrorism and some of the elements or features of the criminal law require features that are not present in the way that rightwing groups organise themselves.
Mark Dreyfus and I are working together to look at some of those laws and see whether there are legal changes that will be needed to capture violent conduct in the rightwing terror world which perhaps isn’t being caught by what is going on in religious fundamentalism.
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Daniel Hurst
Australia raises concerns with Indonesia after Bali bomb maker’s release
The Australian government has sought assurances from the Indonesian government that Bali bomb maker Umar Patek will be subject to ongoing supervision and says his release from prison will “deeply hurt” many Australians.
The government also says it has raised concerns about Patek’s release with the Indonesian government numerous times.
Patek, 55, was jailed for 20 years in 2012 after being found guilty of mixing bombs that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in 2002. He was released from prison in Surabaya yesterday morning.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has issued the following statement:
Many Australians will be deeply hurt by the release of Umar Patek. Today our thoughts are with the victims and survivors of the Bali bombings and their families.
We have registered our concerns about Umar Patek’s release with the Indonesian Government on multiple occasions.
Umar Patek’s release is a matter for the Government of Indonesia and its domestic legal processes, but we have sought assurances from the Indonesian Government that he will be subject to ongoing supervision and monitoring, in accordance with Indonesia’s approach to de-radicalisation.
Australia condemns acts of terrorism and those who perpetrate violence on innocent victims, and will continue to work closely with the Indonesian Government on counter-terrorism cooperation.
Earlier, the minister for home affairs, Clare O’Neil, told the National Press Club it was a “horrible” day for families of the Bali bombing victims. Australians would be feeling aggrieved by the development, she said.
Natasha May
With those adorable images of Pocock with baby animals, I bid you adieu and leave you in the excellent hands of Josh Taylor.
Pocock supports inclusion of native forestry logging in new environmental laws
ABC’s Ros Childs also asked David Pocock about two of the issues that the Australian Conservation Foundation flagged they wanted to see the government go further on – applying the laws to all industries, including native forest logging, as well as the need for a climate trigger to give the minister the option to block fossil fuel projects.
Pocock is on the same page as the ACF, saying he would support both.
On logging:
That was very clear in the Samuel review, we have to ensure that our regional forestry agreements are brought under our environmental laws. It is potentially something that can be done relatively quickly while the big consultation and drafting process happens. I would absolutely support that. There is a whole bunch of species that are now endangered that rely on habitat that could potentially be logged.
On a climate trigger:
I’m on the record saying that the minister should absolutely have that ability. So many of our endangered species are heat sensitive. You look at something like the greater glider – climate change is and will affect them. The Great Barrier Reef affected by climate change. Graeme in his review, his view was that a climate trigger or that sort of mechanism could be elsewhere. We currently don’t have it elsewhere so it would make sense even in the meantime to include that environmental law while we do the bigger piece of work drafting environmental laws that are fit for purpose.
We have to be looking after environment for future generations, Pocock says
We brought you the news earlier of David Pocock’s response to the new federal environmental laws, urging the Albanese government to commit enough funds to deliver on the environment minsiter Tanya Plibersek’s promises.
In his interview with ABC News, Pocock said committing funds to stop extinction is an investment in the future.
It’s a sentiment that was underscored for him at a press conference he held specifically on the occasion of the release of the Samuel Review, which featured baby wombats, possums and humans.
Pocock told the ABC:
Seeing the way that kids light up when they see our wildlife up close, we have to be looking after it for future generations.
We are [only] spending about 15% of what we need to spend to halt extinctions.
It’s a bold commitment but it is something that we absolutely should be doing.
Nathalia warned to stay indoors as chemical hazard warning issued
The town of Nathalia in northern Victoria is being warned to stay indoors after a chemical hazard warning was issued by authorities.
‘We stood up to a bully and we won’: home affairs minister on Medibank hacker
O’Neil is asked about the Medibank hacker group’s last upload to the dark web saying it was the final tranche of stolen information.
I think the best evidence that we have at the moment is that the hackers have dumped the remaining data and walked away, seeing that they are not going to get payment out of the attempted situation that they tried to create. But one of the most disturbing aspects of these incidents is that once stolen, the data is gone. And this is the same with Optus.
However, she goes on to praise the way the nation reacted to the attack:
As cybersecurity minister, I felt so proud of how Australia handled that situation.
There was data circulating about Australians that was extremely sensitive and hurtful. I did not see any of it printed in newspapers, didn’t see it circulating on social media, and I didn’t see anyone seriously argue that Medibank should have paid the ransom and then we could have all gone off into our fairyland thinking that would solve the problem.
From my perspective we stood up to a bully and we won.
Labor considering changes to laws to address ‘rightwing terror’
Guardian Australia’s very own Josh Butler asks about rightwing extremism.
Where does this issue rank in terms of threats that you have to address in your portfolio and what work is being done in this area generally and specifically about hate speech and radicalisation online?
O’Neil:
One of the trends I just referred to earlier is this proliferation of ideologies that are driving people to violence. We see big groups of people who are still on a religious fundamentalism pathway but now a very large group of people who are of interest who subscribe to various forms of rightwing nationalism, Nazism, those sorts of things and it’s obviously enormously concerning.
We had the Christchurch bombing which was an Australian committing a heinous act of terror in Christchurch and New Zealand and so this is a problem that I do take very seriously.
We are actually looking at the way we think about and manage terrorism in Australia to consider whether it is appropriate for these new forms of terrorism that we are seeing.
There was a lot of legislation passed in the second half of the last decade which was very targeted at a specific type of terrorism and some of the elements or features of the criminal law require features that are not present in the way that rightwing groups organise themselves.
Mark Dreyfus and I are working together to look at some of those laws and see whether there are legal changes that will be needed to capture violent conduct in the rightwing terror world which perhaps isn’t being caught by what is going on in religious fundamentalism.
Albanese government still committed to Redspice cyber security investment
Circling back to the national press club address, O’Neil is now taking questions.
David Crowe chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age asks:
You had some quite alarming figures there on the number of cyber-attacks we are seeing. Can you put, in a budget perspective, because over the last couple of years there has been more money allocated to cyber defence of Australian federal budgets, $9.9bn in this year’s budget. There were projects such as Redspice.
Are you banking that money and repurposing it all and putting it toward other functions? Is any money being returned to consolidated revenue or are you keeping the funding being given there to your department over time, and given the scale of the challenge you have outlined, are we going to need to spend more money on this overtime?
O’Neil:
I’m not in the habit of lavishly praising the former government but one important thing they did was make this Redspice investment run through the Australian signals directorate and important thing for the security of our country and our government is 100% committed to it.
We are not spending enough on cyber defence at the moment so one of my challenges is how will we address that problem.
One of the elements of this is that it is going to be expensive as securing government infrastructure.
We talked a lot and thought a lot in the public sphere in recent months about cybersecurity in the private sector, will have to come at that discussion with a bit of humility because government has its problems as well, so part of the cyber strategy, one of the four goals is to establish how we’re going to lift and fund the security of Australian government infrastructure, and it is going to require more money.
Benita Kolovos
Pesutto wants to deliver policies with broad appeal
New Victorian Liberal leader, John Pesutto, is now holding a press conference after he was elected by the party room this morning.
He says his priorities is improving the Liberal party as an organisation and delivering policies with broad appeal:
Organisationally, we will work hard to make sure that we build our membership and our presence across the Victorian community, not just in inner city seats and suburbs but the outer suburbs, the regions and rural areas. We will work hard to make sure we are a strong presence right across our state. On policy, we will take the time that’s available to us to work every day to make sure we present the Victorian people with good constructive alternatives when we face the serious challenges that we have. And as a leader, I will be consultative, and I will work with my colleagues to make sure we push ourselves to be our very best.
RBA review submissions published and some responses from the central bank
Peter Hannam
The review into the Reserve Bank has generated a lot more interest than when it was formally launched after the May election.
Let’s say the RBA’s popularity – and that governor Philip Lowe – has been on the slide with each interest rate hike, and of this week we’ve had eight in as many months.
The government, which is expecting to receive the review’s final report by March – has today published 78 submissions. (No sign of one from the federal opposition, unless I missed it.)
And as part of the data release, the RBA itself has published an 84-page report of its responses to requests for information. There’s a bit to go through but among the perhaps expected points, the bank remains in favour of maintaining its 2%-3% target range for inflation over time.
“A higher target has been seen as running the risk that inflation will affect decision-making, as occurred in previous decades in Australia when inflation was higher,” it said. “Changing the target (in either direction) could damage long-term credibility if it were not done in an appropriate way.”
Again, they admit the increase in inflation since mid-2021 “has been a very large surprise relative to earlier expectations”. In August 2021, the RBA was forecasting that inflation over 2022 would be 1.75% and it now expects it will be 7¾%.
“Other forecasters have recorded similar forecast errors for inflation, with a similar experience across most advanced economies,” it says (not without reason).
Submissions and comments about the review have stressed the need to examine the make-up of the board and whether the ratio of votes in favour of the monthly rate decisions should be published (as is the case in some other nations).
The bank noted, however, that at “each of its meetings over the past decade the Board has voted in support of the recommendation made by the staff”. In other words, the bank’s own view has carried the day for the past 100-plus meetings (the RBA board meets 11 times a year on rates).
As for the media’s view of the RBA, sentiment has been “largely neutral”, except when it wasn’t, and then coverage was “more negative than positive”. The central bank gets about 3000 enquiries a year from the public with about 6% complaints. Odds favour that ratio rising.
Something else on the rise are global temperatures. To that end, the bank “has recently created a Climate Analysis & Policy section to bring together climate-related streams of work and created two new dedicated positions”. That’s a section likely to be expanded in the future.
O’Neil says Australia needs to stand up for our system of government
We cannot allow the global debate to settle into the lazy thinking of equivalency is where somehow or political systems are morally equal. They are not. People should choose their leaders. To me, to us, that is a truism. But democracy is not just a political system, it is a mindset about community, pluralism, tolerance, rationality, choice and freedom. And yet, trust in democracy is in substantial decline in Australia and around the world, and populism and polarisation are on the rise.
And we cannot stand by and do nothing. I have had many discussions with global democracy experts over the last months. This is a much admired problem. Many can explain the shapes and contours but no one seems to know what to do and in this, I want Australia to lead the way. What can we do, concretely, about the problems our democracy faces so Australia can be the light on the hill.
Home affairs to investigate resilience of democracy
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, announces two new reviews.
The first review will examine national resilience. That will be the home front implications of the climate and security environment Australia faces.
The second will focus on the resilience of democracy, which O’Neil says is a national security issue.
In our quest to keep Australians safe in the coming decades, our democracy will be our biggest national asset and we need to protect our national asset. And because competitor countries are seeking to undermine our democracy, and we need to fight back.
Their intention is to justify authoritarianism by making it look like democracies are inherently dysfunctional, and to weaken countries like ours and constrain us from responding to global events that our adversaries may create.
The taskforce will be completed in 2025 and will be undertaken in partnership with University of Canberra’s director of democracy, Prof Mark Evans.
O’Neil says foreign interference, misinformation and disinformation are on the rise, and the review will look at what government can do with tech companies to reduce the spread of polarisation and falsehoods.
Australians can get pretty down on our democracy. There are good reasons for that and indeed a bit of Australian scepticism in the world of politics is a very, very healthy thing. But politicians like me need to tell a better story about Australia’s world-leading democratic history. We are the sixth oldest democracy in the world.
We are the great democratic innovator, the inventor of the secret talent, one of the first countries in the world to give women the right to vote. We have very high participation in our democracy and a strong and independent Electoral Commission and politicians do their part and respect the results.
We have a brilliant independent media which despite its many challenges does a bloody good job.
Disaster management needs to be a well practised function of government: O’Neil
O’Neil says disaster management under the Albanese government is a centralised, well-coordinated function of the Australian government.
It is time for us all to stop feigning shock at supposedly once in a generation floods and fires and storm. The world has witnessed a tenfold increase in the number of natural disasters since the 1960s and this is going to get worse as the world warms further.
We need disaster management to be a routine, seamless, well practised function of Australian government so that when multiple disasters strike, government and the community are not completely consumed by them.
Australia is the developed country in the world most at risk from the warming climate and the former government’s unwillingness to acknowledge this reality of climate change was flawless, dogmatic and reckless.
O’Neil singles out former home affairs minister and current opposition leader, Peter Dutton, for approaching the portfolio he created with “a posture that was reactive to the issues and reactionary and the politics”.
It didn’t make us any safer and I would like to change it. We know a lot about their national security environment we are heading into.
Almost one million unprocessed visas when Labor came to government: O’Neil
O’Neil says when Labor came to government, there were almost one million unprocessed visas waiting while Australia is in the middle of the “biggest labour shortage we have experienced since the second world war”.
The result was large numbers of temporary lower-skilled workers were brought in and churned through the labour market and Australia now has a “large underclass of undocumented migrant workers” who are extremely vulnerable to exploitation, she says.
That is not what a world-class migration system looks like and it’s completely out of step with Australia’s hugely successful historical focus on migration based on permanency, on citizenship and on fair rates for workers no matter where they come from the determining who should be invited to join us in our national endeavours is one of the most important thing is that the Australian government does and we are going to take a run at fixing it through a big piece of work being led by former secretary of the treasury and prime minister and Martin Parkinson.
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