The Australian government has received specific information about a terrorist threat on its soil and will rush an urgent amendment to anti-terrorism laws through Parliament to help counter it, Prime Minister John Howard said on Wednesday.
”The government has received specific intelligence and police information this week, which gives cause for serious concern about a potential terrorist threat,” Howard told a news conference.
He refused to give any details about the information, saying only that the amendment to existing counter-terrorism legislation would help the authorities deal with the threat.
The attorney general was to introduce the amendment to Parliament later on Wednesday and the government would press for its approval through the evening before recalling the Senate on Thursday to pass it into law, Howard said.
”The government is satisfied on the advice provided to it that the immediate passage of this Bill would strengthen the capacity of law-enforcement agencies to effectively respond to this threat,” he said.
”The government is acting against the background of the assessment of intelligence agencies that a terrorist attack in Australia is feasible and could well occur,” he said, referring to a report by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio), which was presented to Parliament on Tuesday.
”In Asio’s recently released annual report, a warning is contained that specifically cites the threat of home-grown terrorism. Asio also warned that attacks without warning are feasible,” Howard said.
The official terrorism-threat level, which stands at ”medium”, will not be raised.
The amendment will add further grounds for banning militant organisations and ”clarify that, in a prosecution for a terrorism offence, it is not necessary to identify a particular terrorist act”, he said. ”It will be sufficient for the prosecution to prove that the particular conduct was related to ‘a’ terrorist act.”
The amendment is part of tough new anti-terror laws that the government has drafted in the wake of the London transport bombings by British-born Muslims in July in which more than 50 people were killed.
The complete package of new legislation will be introduced in Parliament soon and the government hopes it will be passed by Christmas, Howard said, while the specific changes proposed on Wednesday ”have taken on a greater degree of urgency”.
The spy agency Asio said in its report that some Australian Muslims believe there is ”a battle between Muslims and infidels”.
They feel ”a sense of hostility and isolation towards the broader Australian society”, with some viewing the United States-led invasion of Iraq — to which Australia contributed troops — as an attack on all Muslims, the report said.
The philosophy ”extends to support for violence against the ‘un-Islamic’ governments, against perceived Western invasion of countries and against countries they believe are attacking Islam and oppressing Muslims”.
”This support can extend to funding and terrorist training activity as well as participation in overseas conflicts.”
The report said ”some of the more extreme individuals Asio has identified and investigated are Australian-born. Some have participated in terrorist training overseas, while others have never travelled abroad.”
The package of new laws, which includes detention without charge for up to two weeks, house arrest and fitting suspects with tracking devices, has been widely criticised as infringing on civil liberties. — AFP
