Australia’s anti-terror laws aren’t harsh enough, Peter Dutton says

Immigration minister Peter Dutton wants even tougher powers to deal with terrorists returning to Australia but says Labor is blocking attempts to bring in harsher laws.

Speaking on 2GB today, Dutton confirmed a News Corp report that he and prime minister Malcolm Turnbull were looking at ways to strengthen legislation that allows the government to strip dual citizens involved in terror activities of their Australian citizenship.

 “I think there’s an argument for there to be some strengthening and the prime minister has already written to me and we’ve already spoken about ways we can strengthen that legislation,” Dutton told 2GB.

People could have their citizenship removed if their actions, legal convictions or their membership of a “declared terrorist organisation” met requirements set out under the current laws, Dutton explained.

But Australia must also be able to prove that the person has citizenship of another country, and this requires cooperation countries such as Syria or Iraq, which may not be forthcoming.

News Corp, which today first reported the government’s plan to toughen the laws, said that Australia had been warned that droves of extremists were likely to return to Australia as Islamic State’s hold on Iraq and Syria falls away.

“We have to be tough at the borders to stop these terrorists coming back to cause harm,” Dutton told 2GB.

“There are ways we have strengthened [the law] and we believe we’re dealing with the threat but the threat increases over time as people attempt to come back from the Middle East. If they’ve been fighting in those theatres they pose a greater risk when they come back to our shores because they’ve been more radicalised.”

He said that the government had brought in the toughest laws it could while retaining bipartisan support for the legislation. But Dutton warned here was a risk that, if the Coalition tried to introduce harsher laws, the legislation wouldn’t pass, largely because it would be blocked by Labor MPs, with Dutton singling Mark Dreyfus as a particular block to ramped-up anti-terror legislation.

Dreyfus, a Queen’s Counsel who was attorney-general for seven months in 2013, has long been a critic of attempts to bring in tougher terror laws – he campaigned against attempts to keep convicted terrorists in jail after their sentence was finished if they were deemed to pose a continuing threat to Australia.

SBS reported, however, that Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese said the opposition would be amenable to changes in the law,

“If there are any amendments to legislation required, we will be co-operative as we have been the whole way through,” he said, according to SBS.

Dutton did confirm that the current terror laws had been used to strip one person, whom he declined to name, of their Australian citizenship. That person is thought to be Khaled Sharrouf, who in 2014 posted pictures on social media of his young son holding the decapitated head of a Syrian solider.

The Daily Telegraph reported today that Australia could act in the Sharrouf case because Lebanon, where the terrorist also held citizenship, cooperated with the government to do so.

Do you think tougher anti-terror laws are needed? Do you believe that Labor is blocking attempts to bring in tougher laws? What else should Australia do to counter the threat of returning extremists?