A SENIOR member of parliament’s high-powered intelligence and security committee has warned a Bali-style terrorist attack is inevitable on Australian soil and the risk of an incident is “accelerating”.
Unless ASIO and other spy agencies were given the sweeping new powers they were asking for, but were being denied, security forces would be limited in trying to prevent it.
Labor MP Anthony Byrne raised the alarm in parliament yesterday, revealing the view of the intelligence community was that an attack on home soil of the magnitude of the 2002 Bali bombing — which claimed the lives of 202 people including 88 Australians — was not only possible but now probable.
In an extraordinary caution to the parliament, the senior MP and former chair of the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security said he had a “deep concern that eventually and inevitably in this country, an event will occur on this soil … on the magnitude of a Bali event or just a terrorist event.
“That event will be there to cause immense damage to the psyche of the Australian community. That will be its purpose, its intent.
“I don’t want to be part of a parliament that reacts to an event. I want to be part of a parliament that puts laws in place to prevent that event.”
Mr Byrne’s warning came ahead of a private briefing tomorrow with the heads of all the spy agencies and the Attorney-General George Brandis ahead of the introduction to parliament of legislation to grant new powers to ASIO.
The Daily Telegraph revealed last month Mr Brandis was planning to adopt up to 41 of 43 recommendations from a bipartisan report last year of the JPCIS that called for greater surveillance powers for ASIO.
But the government has stopped short of the more contentious data retention laws, which would force telecommunications and internet companies to keep metadata for two years.
ASIO is tracking a group of potential jihadists among 40 to 50 Australians who have slipped back into the local community after returningfrom the terrorist war zone in Syria.
Spy agencies have identified between 40 and 50 people known to have travelled to Syria who were already back in Australia.
ASIO said it had “deep concerns” about the activities of some of them, the majority believed to be in Sydney.
Spy chiefs are concerned the government is moving too slowly at a time when there were heightened warnings about domestic terrorist events and links to Australians fighting with jihadists in Iraq and Syria.
Mr Byrne claimed that, without the data retention abilities — similar to laws granted to spy agencies in the UK last week — our spy agencies would be hamstrung at a time when Australia was at greater risk than ever before.
Director-General of Security and ASIO head David Irvine revealed yesterday the agency had tracked a number of Australians who had already returned from the terrorist battlefields of Syria.
“We are working on the basis that probably about 60 Australians are in Syria fighting with one side or the other, predominantly on the anti-government side, and an alarming number of those people, in fact the majority we are concerned about, are gravitating toward al-Qaeda offshoots (including ISIS),” Mr Irvine said.
Source: Daily Telegraph