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The national strategy on counterterrorism has collapsed, with the states walking away and dysfunction hobbling Home Affairs. By Jason Koutsoukis.
Exclusive: States abandon federal terrorism ‘clusterf--k’
State and territory governments have taken the unprecedented step of abandoning the Albanese government’s planned national strategy to fight terrorism in favour of individual approaches.
“At all levels, this is a clusterfuck,” a senior Albanese government official told The Saturday Paper. “It shows complete ineptitude, and, more than that, it shows a lack of understanding of the political risks here.
“To run a counterterrorism enterprise without the states and territories, who are the first response in a counterterrorism incident, simply beggars belief. And, what’s more, countering violent extremism, around which the whole strategy is based – those programs are all delivered by the states, not the Commonwealth, so the whole thing is a nonsense.”
The collapse of a national approach to countering terrorism has shocked Australia’s national security community, with senior policy experts despairing at the Commonwealth’s lack of focus, especially after the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s director-general, Mike Burgess, raised Australia’s national terrorism threat level from “possible” to “probable” in August.
At the time, Burgess said ASIO’s decision to raise the threat level reflected the degrading security environment.
A threat level of “probable” means that, in ASIO’s assessment, there is a greater than 50 per cent chance of an onshore terrorist attack or terrorist attack planning in the next 12 months.
“You have heard me say many times that espionage and foreign interference are our principal security concerns,” Burgess said on August 5. “ASIO’s intelligence suggests that is no longer accurate.”
Burgess added that his agency was seeing a rise in extremism. “More Australians are being radicalised, and radicalised more quickly. More Australians are embracing a more diverse range of extreme ideologies, and more Australians are willing to use violence to advance their cause.”
The development of a new national counterterrorism strategy has been under way for the past two years, an acknowledgement of the fast evolving threat landscape. The last counterterrorism strategy was developed by the Morrison government and released ahead of the May 2022 election.
“It’s difficult to overstate how problematic this is,” a senior national security academic told The Saturday Paper. “It is unprecedented to even get close to the point of the states not getting on board.”
Albanese government insiders have pointed to the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination within the Department of Home Affairs as “ground zero” for problems surrounding the development of the new counterterrorism strategy.
One adviser said a lack of trust in the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination and its leadership meant key national security agencies including ASIO and the Australian Federal Police were no longer exchanging vital information with the centre, undermining its ability to lead Australia’s counterterrorism framework.
Another national security policy expert with close ties to the government said making matters worse was the fact that “immigration is burning a hole in Home Affairs”, suggesting immigration is dominating the time of department head Stephanie Foster.
With the proposal to release a Commonwealth counterterrorism strategy without the states yet to go to cabinet, a senior government official told The Saturday Paper it was possible the prime minister and other members of cabinet’s national security committee remained unaware there was a problem, or even whether Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke himself was fully up to speed with what happening inside his department.
However, The Saturday Paper understands Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who as the minister responsible for ASIO and the AFP will be a co-signatory to the counterterrorism strategy, is concerned at the lack of expertise being shown by Home Affairs and is not heavily invested in the new strategy.
“From the point of view of the states, it’s a frustration with the Commonwealth and particularly Home Affairs over the way this strategy has been developed, which has been backwards and forwards, on again off again, that sort of thing, and I think eventually the states and territories just thought, ‘Well, fuck it,’ ” a senior government official said.
“Apart from the foundational reasons as to why this is a very poor strategy, it’s also very poorly put together. It reads badly, it’s a lightweight strategy that reflects a real lack of expertise in Home Affairs.”
The New South Wales Minister for Police and Counter-terrorism, Yasmin Catley, tells The Saturday Paper the forthcoming counterterrorism strategy “is a Commonwealth-led strategy which all states and territories – including NSW – are involved in. We all work collaboratively, and will continue to do so, on this very important issue”.
“What that means is, it’s a Commonwealth strategy,” says a government adviser. “It’s not a national strategy, because the states don’t want to be part of it. They are being consulted on its development, but nonetheless they have not signed on to it.”
A spokeswoman for Victoria’s minister for police, Anthony Carbines, said, “This is a matter for the Commonwealth and we are always willing to work with them on any matters required.”
“Another bizarre aspect of this is that almost all the states and territories are Labor governments,” the government adviser says, “and the Commonwealth can’t even get Labor government agencies and Labor governments across the line.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs told The Saturday Paper Australia’s national counterterrorism arrangements remained mature and robust.
“Our ability to respond to the evolving threat environment is strengthened by the continuous collaboration between the Australian Government and states and territories. Australia’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy and National Counter-Terrorism Plan ensure that Australia is one step ahead of terrorist acts,” they said.
“In February 2024, the Australian Government released the 5th edition of the National Counter-Terrorism Plan that outlines the arrangements, governance and operational responsibilities of the Australian governments and agencies involved in counterterrorism and countering violent extremism.”
In an article published last month by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s analysis and commentary site The Strategist, the institute’s executive director, Justin Bassi, and the head of its strategic policing and law enforcement program, John Coyne, raised concerns that the decision to move ASIO back to the Attorney-General’s Department in the July reshuffle meant multiple ministers now had counterterrorism responsibilities.
Bassi and Coyne wrote that the centralisation of counterterrorism efforts in the Home Affairs portfolio was being “gradually unpicked”, while at the same time the national security functions had not fully gone back to the attorney-general, leaving them spread over portfolios and leaving Australia with an unsatisfactory foundation for effective national security.
They noted the counterterrorism coordinator position was originally established within the prime minister’s department but moved to the Department of Home Affairs in 2017 along with the AFP and ASIO, thus maintaining separate lines of effort on counterterrorism policy and operations, but within the same portfolio and responsible to the same cabinet minister as the key agencies.
In June 2022, the new Albanese government moved responsibility for the AFP from Home Affairs back to the Attorney-General’s Department, for the first time splitting the peak law enforcement agency from the primary security agency, ASIO. In July this year, ASIO was also returned to the attorney-general’s portfolio.
“This latest shift has left the CT Co-ordinator and CT policy functions within Home Affairs isolated from the key agencies and lacking direct insight into the immediate issues faced by the key operational agencies,” Bassi and Coyne wrote. “The reality of the bureaucracy is that agencies within one portfolio will keep their minister informed of issues before they advise other portfolios.”
The lack of clarity surrounding who has control over counterterrorism, Bassi and Coyne wrote, highlights the need for an update to Australia’s counterterrorism strategy, with the delay over the release of a new framework creating concern in an increasingly complex terror environment.
“The fact that ASIO has been effective in preventing individual attacks does not diminish the urgency of updating the strategy,” Bassi and Coyne wrote.
The main argument for a national counterterrorism strategy that is fully inclusive of state and territory governments is based on the fact that not only are state government law enforcement agencies the first responders in the event of a terrorism incident, but they are crucial when it comes to identifying people displaying worrying behaviour, whether it be through secondary schools, psychology support programs or countering violent extremism programs that are run by the states.
“The people who are conceiving ideas linked to violent extremism, who are joining these movements, actually don’t often come to the attention of law enforcement through security processes. They come to their attention through education and health – state-run programs,” a senior national security policy expert tells The Saturday Paper. “So you must be hard-wired with the states and territories. You cannot have a Commonwealth counterterrorism strategy. The notion of going it alone is absolutely nuts.
“The political risk here also has to be considered, because if a major terrorist incident was to occur, after ASIO has raised the terrorism threat level from possible to probable and this government has been found not to have put in place a proper national counterterrorism coordination strategy, then Anthony Albanese is going to get the blame for that. Peter Dutton and James Paterson will be all over this.”
The policy expert added that the broader story behind the Commonwealth’s failure to develop a national counterterrorism strategy, and the isolation of the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination, was the incremental hollowing out of the Department of Home Affairs.
Speaking specifically to the merits of having a national counterterrorism strategy in place, Lydia Khalil, program director for transnational challenges at the Lowy Institute, tells The Saturday Paper that while such high-level documents tend to be removed from general public awareness, they are incredibly useful for helping governments prioritise programs and spending.
“The best strategies are ones that are evidence-based and that rely on either gathering research or expert evidence or coalescing the collective knowledge of what government agencies and policymakers are observing across the board,” Khalil says.
Because the world we are living in now is constantly changing in terms of terrorism and violent extremist threats, Khalil says, it is important that counterterrorism strategies were regularly updated.
“In an ideal situation, and this is the idea behind them, we’ve gained some experience in terms of what works and what doesn’t work so you’re not relying on things that you might have pointed to in the past as a priority area,” Khalil says.
“The thing that makes the development of a new strategy a priority is when we’re seeing shifts in the violent extremism and terrorism landscape in general, and that goes beyond a heightened threat level. If the global context is shifting, which it always does, and understanding how that then interacts with the national and domestic situation, then that also requires a refreshed look at a new strategy.”
This article was amended on September 30, 2024, to include comment from a Victoria Police spokesperson.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 28, 2024 as "Exclusive: States abandon federal terrorism ‘clusterf--k’".
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