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Morrison urges Muslim community to be more 'proactive' in tackling terrorism

Police speak with the public in Melbourne on Saturday, a day after a man went on a stabbing frenzy on Bourke Street. Police declared the event a terrorist attack.
Police speak with the public in Melbourne on Saturday, a day after a man went on a stabbing frenzy on Bourke Street. Police declared the event a terrorist attack. Photograph: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

Scott Morrison has said the Muslim community in Australia must be more “proactive” in tackling the threat of terror attacks because “in many cases” imams and community leaders will know who is infiltrating and radicalising members of their flock.

Morrison said that community engagement was “the only way” law enforcement authorities could stop attacks such as the one in Bourke Street, Melbourne on Friday in which Hassan Khalif Shire Ali killed one person and injured two others.

In a round of interviews on Monday the prime minister identified the “vile presence” of radical Islam as the cause of the attack, dismissing the suggestion that mental health issues negated that primary cause as a “lame excuse”.

The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton has, linked the attack to the government’s re-evaluation of pathways to Australian citizenship and on Monday called on Labor to pass a bill to allow law enforcement agencies to break technological encryption.

Bill Shorten noted that Labor had cooperated on 10 sets of national security laws since he was leader, suggesting that Dutton “wants a headline” by raising the citizenship issue.

Shadow attorney general Mark Dreyfus said Labor would continue to consider the encryption bill through the parliamentary committee on intelligence and security, rebuking Dutton for suggesting it had taken a position against the bill:

Morrison told Sky News on Monday that although the Melbourne attack was a “serious terrorist incident”, he did not regard it as a national security failure.

Shire Ali was born in Somalia in 1988 but emigrated to Australia in the 1990s. He had his passport cancelled in 2015 and was known to authorities before he died in Friday’s attack.

Although Shire Ali was one of 400 people on a terrorism watchlist and one of 230 who had their passports cancelled, authorities could not keep everyone under observation “all the time”, Morrison said.

Morrison called on “Muslim religious communities” to increase their awareness, alertness and “proactivity”.

“Their community is the one that’s being infiltrated – and we have to say that, because it’s true, and it presents a real risk to the safety of Australia, and themselves, and their own children.”

Morrison said law enforcement authorities already get “good cooperation” from community leaders, which had helped thwart 14 terror attacks, but “more needs to happen”.

“The leaders of the community need to know what’s going on in their community and there can be no excuses for looking [the other way].”

Giving a hypothetical example of his own making about how to prevent radicalisation, Morrison said it was “not the imam, necessarily” to blame but the “shady character who is at the periphery of the mosque, the one talking to young people”.

“These people prey on vulnerable Australians, vulnerable young men particularly.

“They fill their heads full of this hate and this vile rubbish, to try and make sense of their lives.”

Morrison said that imams and community leaders “need to know who might be doing that” and stated – without evidence – that “in many cases they will” know.

The Labor MP Graham Perrett said it was “not [his] experience” that imams would know when people were being radicalised, and questioned why Morrison was “[broadcasting] to our imams via the nation”.

People who knew Shire Ali say he suffered delusions and substance abuse problems in the lead-up to his terrorist attack.

Isse Musse, an imam who was a friend of the family but not close to Shire Ali himself, told the Age on Saturday that Shire Ali had become increasingly “deluded”, estranged from his family and paranoid.

He said the 30-year-old attacker had attended his mosque “many years ago, when he was 11 years old or so”, but hadn’t attended for the nearly 20 years since.

Earlier, Morrison dismissed the idea that because the Bourke Street attacker had mental health issues he was not “really a terrorist”.

“I think that’s an excuse. This bloke, radicalised here in Australia with extreme Islam, took a knife and cut down a fellow Australian in Bourke Street,” Morrison told Channel Ten.

On Sky, Morrison said that he blamed “extremist radical Islam” for radicalising Shire Ali. “We can talk about all these other issues, but why did this happen? Why was he motivated to do this in this way? Because of what he had exposed to in his religious community.”

At a doorstop on Monday Dutton said the Bourke Street attack was “unsophisticated”, consisting of an offender who had taken “a kitchen knife and throw a couple of gas bottles on to the back of the ute”.

“There’s no level of intelligence or information that will stop that and the best way to try to prevent it is if we get tip-offs and information from the community,” he said.

But Dutton noted that law enforcement agencies have “great difficulty” with the “blind spot” created by 90% of serious criminal targets using encryption technology on messaging apps.

Dutton also said it is “much harder” to deal with Australian citizens radicalised in Australia than a visa holder, who can be deported, signalling that he would make an announcement in “due course” about that problem.

At a doorstop in Melbourne, Shorten said he did not know what change to citizenship laws Dutton was proposing, adding that it “sounds like he wants a headline”.

Shorten said the best way to respond to the incident was to “pull together” but Dutton “wants to blame this or that”, warning that Australians could “smell” when someone is playing politics with terrorism.

Shorten said that the terrorist attack was “an evil terrible tragedy” and while there was “no doubt an element of mental illness”, that factor could help explain but not excuse the incident.