Divisive debate has no place in Australia, Tony Burke says

The Age

a day ago

A day after tens of thousands of people marched in support of Gaza across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and in the Melbourne CBD, Burke countered claims from pro-Palestine activists that Labor had been weak on the Netanyahu government.
'We've taken sanctions against two members of their cabinet, so it's no light touch,' Burke said of the June decision to sanction far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
'That's a big deal. When I knocked back [a visa application from former Israeli minister Ayelet Shaked ], the huge thing was that this is a former minister. We've since then taken sanctions against current ministers.'
Burke spoke to this masthead on Friday in his office at Parliament House, the same office occupied by Peter Dutton when he was home affairs minister. Unlike previous governments, Burke said that Labor wanted people to feel safe but without compromising security.
'The Coalition approach on this portfolio is they want people to be safe and feel afraid. The Labor approach is you want people to be safe and feel safe,' Burke said.
'Language that's been used right back to Tony Abbott and before, had a direct impact on Muslims being abused in the street. Scott Morrison's language had a direct impact on the Chinese community.'
In 2017, Dutton become the first minister in charge of the Home Affairs mega-department that takes in police, immigration and spy agencies. It was split up by Labor last term due to concerns about handing power to one minister and worries about maintaining proper checks on intelligence agencies.
Mark Dreyfus, the former attorney-general and barrister, was a key voice inside Labor arguing against Dutton's super-sized portfolio. In Labor's first term, Dreyfus was handed ASIO and the Australian Federal Police.
But after the election, Dreyfus was unceremoniously pushed out of the cabinet and Burke's department was turned back into the all-encompassing portfolio.
Dreyfus was contacted for comment.
Burke, the member for Watson in western Sydney, is one of the prime minister's most trusted strategists on the right of the party and is considered a rival to Treasurer Jim Chalmers to one day lead Labor.
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Speaking about his expanded portfolio, Burke said the security environment described by ASIO chief Mike Burgess, characterised by online-fuelled grievances mixing rapidly to create lone-wolf actors, had strengthened the case for a central point of accountability for security inside the government.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese previously cited the Dural caravan incident, about which he was not briefed for days after the discovery of what turned out to be a planted bomb in a caravan, as justification for returning security agencies to the Home Affairs department.
'Pace is much more of an issue' in the modern era of radicalisation, Burke said, and by streamlining the department, 'you get much quicker access to a full range of risks, well before they start to be confirmed'.
Burke said the attempted hijacking at Avalon airport in Victoria in March was an example.
'The simplest example that really struck me was Avalon,' he said. 'The pace between someone coming into our orbit and action is truncated from what used to be months or years to, you know, potentially days.'
In the Avalon case, a teenager was detained by flight attendants after he allegedly boarded a Jetstar flight armed with a shotgun. The identities of foreigners the 17-year-old may have spoken to before the incident have been suppressed by the Children's Court of Victoria.