Terrorism laws to be strengthened and 'modernised', says justice minister
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Version 0 of 1. Bills giving authorities greater powers to deal with terrorism will be introduced into federal parliament next week, the justice minister, Michael Keenan says. The proposed laws come after police anti-terrorism raids in Sydney and Brisbane on Thursday. While providing only vague details, Keenan said the mooted laws would “modernise” existing legislation. He shied away from saying whether they would allow police greater powers to detain suspects on terrorism charges. “The threat of the random act of violence that was acted upon on Thursday’s raids is obviously quite different to the sorts of traditional terrorist activity that we might have been targeting,” he told the ABC on Saturday morning. “We need to make sure that we’ve got a regime in Australia that’s modern and flexible.” News Corp reported that under the proposed counter-terrorism laws, radical preachers who encourage others to engage in extremist acts could be jailed for up to five years. The new powers would give the foreign minister the power to declare regions or cities in countries where terrorist groups are active as proscribed places, it said. Police would also be given the power to conduct what amounts to covert search warrants on terrorism suspects’ properties, enabling them to delay notification of a search warrant for up to six months, News Corp reported. A new offence would also make it illegal for anyone to advocate a terrorist act, even if the act did not occur. Omarjan Azari, 22, remains in custody after Thursday’s raids, Australia’s biggest anti-terrorism operation, and a man charged with firearms offences was granted bail. Twenty-five homes were searched on Thursday morning and two more that night in the Sydney suburb of Merrylands and in Menangle, south-west of Sydney. No arrests were made in the later raids. A Labor MP, Anthony Byrne, who is deputy chairman of the intelligence and security committee which oversees Asio but not the Australian federal police, said there should be increased management of the AFP if it was given extra anti-terrorism powers. “If we’re going to give the AFP additional powers then that should be matched by [fixing] an anomaly that should have been fixed some time ago, which is the committee to have the capacity to oversight the AFP and its counter-terrorism operations,” Byrne told Sky News. |