Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke: ‘No space for anti-Semitism in Australia’

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SHARREN HASKEL, ISRAELI DEPUTY FOREIGN MINISTER:  The attitude of the current Australian Government towards Israel is inflaming a lot of these emotions, and is giving, I guess, some acceptance when you do not fight it. Words are not enough. We’ve passed that, a long time ago.

LAURA TINGLE, PRESENTER: It comes as at least nine people have now been arrested in connection with a string of anti-Semitic attacks across Sydney. 

More sensationally, AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw has revealed that security agencies are investigating the possibility that overseas actors or individuals have paid local criminals in Australia to carry out some of these crimes. 

I was joined earlier by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke. 

Tony Burke, first of all, could I ask you about the comment by the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister who said the attitude of the current Australian Government towards Israel is inflaming anti-Semitic emotions and that the Government has not been doing enough to address anti-Semitism.

TONY BURKE, HOME AFFAIRS MINISTER:  The resolutions where we voted at the General Assembly, more than 150 countries have voted the same way as Australia, and that’s included Canada, it has included the United Kingdom and it has included New Zealand, so I think that’s a really important thing for context there. 

But additional to that, we’ve got legislation in the front of Parliament now on hate crimes. We brought the laws in making it an offence to engage in doxing. We brought in the legislation to make it a criminal offence to be using symbols of hate, including Nazi symbols and Nazi salute and we’ve established the special envoy for anti-Semitism in Jillian Segal. 

So, this government has been acting and we will continue to. There is no space for bigotry in this country. There is no space for anti-Semitism and the people who are engaging in this need to know that they are completely out of step with the rest of this country, and they have no place in it.

LAURA TINGLE:  We seem to be seeing an escalation in anti-Semitic activity here in Australia, even as we have got a fragile ceasefire in the Middle East. In the last 24 hours, both the AFP and state police forces have come out to document arrests. Do you believe we know enough yet about what lies behind these attacks? Are they overwhelmingly organised and sophisticated or the random attacks of individuals?

TONY BURKE:  As you would see from the length of time that the investigation is taking, there is a lot of information for us to be able to get through here and for our authorities to be able to work through. 

There is a natural impatience from all of us that we want people to be charged and imprisoned as soon as possible and I understand that completely. 

That’s a natural reaction from all of us, but the police are making sure that they are doing everything and using all their resources, not simply to find who did this, but to make sure if there is someone different behind it, to make sure that they are charged as well.

LAURA TINGLE:  AFP Commissioner Rhys Kershaw has spoken of overseas actors paying local criminals to carry out some of these crimes. Are we talking about state actors here?

TONY BURKE:  I’m not going to add to what the Australian Federal Police have put out there publicly. They make serious calculated decisions in an investigation like this as to what they should be making public. There has been a call from the Opposition, a random call, without an understanding of what’s behind it, just calling for more information. My view is very strong. We should let the Australian Federal Police determine what should be released and when it should be released.

LAURA TINGLE:  The Opposition has described this as “the most serious domestic security crisis in peace time in Australia’s history”. What proportion of the attacks are believed to be linked to such activity?

TONY BURKE:  I don’t see attacks like this as some sort of competition, as some sort of race between other events. For people who whose lives were lost and went through the terror of the Lindt siege, I don’t want them, for example, to be told that somehow what they went through is less than what is happening now. 

It is not a competition. All that is matters is that what is happening at the moment is unacceptable, it needs to be stopped and we need to make sure we put all our resources into it, which we are.

LAURA TINGLE:  You released a new counterterrorism and violent extremism policy last week but the nature of the attacks here have generally been described as criminal rather than terror. It is hard not to notice that the details of those charged to date do not generally suggest they are linked to people who might regard themselves as on the other side of the conflict in Gaza. Is this a different form of terrorism?

TONY BURKE:  Look, the reason that there has been a delay in specific labels is you often can’t do that until you’ve actually apprehended the perpetrator, because the definition goes quite specifically to the motivations of the individual and until you’ve apprehended the individual you tend to not go to those exact labels, although the Prime Minister hasn’t hesitated to refer to likely terror, for example, with respect to the Adas Israel synagogue which I have visited twice in Melbourne. 

So, the label, I think, is secondary. What matters is the terrorist threat in Australia is fundamentally different to what it used to be. All the concept of organised groups remain. 

So, whatever used to be a threat still is but we now have processes where people can be radicalised, radicalised fast, online – it’s happening for people who are younger, and it’s happening faster. 

So, previously you would be, have our authorities working through various cells of information and the beginnings of plans and you would have lead time. Now the concept of lone wolf attacks for somebody who has a mixed ideology, some of the different ideologies they might have are sometimes contradictory and it not being the more traditional ideologies that people would have thought about when they thought about terrorism a decade ago. 

So that’s the change, and that’s why, in the counter-terrorism strategy, when the threat changes, we need to change our approach to counter it.

LAURA TINGLE:  The Opposition has been critical of the PM for only calling a National Cabinet meeting on this yesterday afternoon. Isn’t it important to at least have the symbolism of unity amongst leaders that you get at such a meeting?

TONY BURKE:  In terms of the symbolism, the symbolism isn’t just in meetings, the symbolism is also in actions. The symbolism of us bringing in those anti-doxing laws mattered and the action of the Liberal Party and Peter Dutton in voting against those laws is something that I will never understand. 

Similarly, the symbolism when Peter Dutton and James Paterson were last in government of them spending 10 years trying to weaken our hate laws. They don’t like to talk about it now, but their position while in government was that our laws against hate speech were actually too strong. 

So, if they had their way, we would have now even fewer protections against anti-Semitism than where we are, and I’m glad that Labor joined with the crossbench in the Senate and stopped those changes to the Race Discrimination Act. 

This government does not believe what the previous government did. The previous government, regardless of what Peter Dutton says now, their policy was that you have a right to be a bigot. 

Our view is bigotry is not something that belongs in Australia. Anti-Semitism needs to be stamped out. All forms of bigotry are unacceptable, and our policies and our laws are geared to make sure that those who engage in hate crimes are found, are charged and are jailed.

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