Counter-terrorism laws need to be passed quickly by Canberra to contain the jihadist threat and avoid the need for more draconian measures in future, a former independent reviewer of Australia's spy agencies says.
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Rufus Black, who conducted a review of Australia's intelligence community for the former Labor government in 2011, backed the urgency with which the Abbott government is pushing its "foreign fighters" bill through the Parliament. He said the current threat was dire and needed to be managed.
"I think a timely action that targets a very small number of people who represent a threat and limits their liberties is probably a very good measure, not just to increase security but to protect liberty in the longer run," Dr Black, a noted ethicist, said.
"If we do it quickly, we won't need more severe measures … That's why I'm supportive of doing it quickly and in a targeted way."
He was speaking before Friday's expected release of a review of the sweeping counter-terrorism legislation by the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security. A vote on the bill is expected by the end of the month.
Some of the more controversial measures the committee is expected to scrutinise are new offences for "advocating" terrorism and entering terrorist "no-go zones", such as parts of Iraq or Syria, without a good reason.
The bill would also give the government grounds to ban an organisation that "advocates" terrorism – a move widely considered as an effort to outlaw the controversial Hizb-ut Tahrir group.
Muslim organisations have urged the committee to call on Attorney-General George Brandis to be more precise in defining advocacy, arguing people could be jailed for legitimate debate.
Critics have also attacked the extension on the sunset clauses on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and police powers such as control orders and preventative detention orders, saying there is still more than a year left before the current powers expire and, therefore, there is no rush to extend them.
As Fairfax Media reported on Thursday, Labor has warned of the privacy threats of a planned expansion of "biometric data" collection at airports, which could lead to the fingerprints and iris scans of millions of Australians stored by the Immigration Department.
Dr Black said the measures in the foreign fighters bill were actually "quite incremental" compared with the more drastic national security reforms of the post-September 11 and London bombing eras.
He said he was comfortable with the trade-off between liberty and security that would follow from the new laws.
"Why am I comfortable with the broad direction and some degree of urgency?" Dr Black asked. "Because we are dealing with a real and present threat of a kind that is quite a shift from the landscape that we've seen for quite a few years … The radicalisation that's occurring in-country and the self-radicalisation that ISIS is generating globally … this is a material change in the level of threat here and in other countries."
