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| Down Under |
| Australian PM acts against terror threat |
| 2005-09-08 |
| PRIME Minister John Howard today outlined a raft of tough new counter-terrorism measures to protect Australia, including using tracking devices on suspects. He said the first initiative would be a new regime to allow the Australian Federal Police to apply to court for a 12-month control order on people who posed a terrorist risk to the community. "These will be similar to apprehended violence orders, but would allow stricter conditions to be imposed on a person such as travel and association restrictions and tracking devices," he said. Mr Howard said a special meeting of the Council of Australian Governments would consider changes to state and federal laws to fight terrorism. He said the Government proposed a new Commonwealth preventative detention regime allowing suspects to be detained for up to 48 hours. "As is the case in the UK, the focus of preventative detention is primarily about stopping further attacks and the destruction of evidence," he said. "At the COAG meeting, we will propose to the states that they legislate as they have greater power to do so constitutionally for longer detention periods and we have in mind a period of up to 14 days." Mr Howard said a new notice-to-produce regime was proposed to facilitate Australian Federal Police (AFP) requests for information to aid terrorism investigations. Powers would also be sought for greater access to airline passenger information for ASIO and the AFP. "We propose to strengthen the existing offences for the financing of terrorism, providing false or misleading information under an ASIO questioning warrant." Mr Howard called his plans "very significant changes which will further strengthen our counter-terrorism laws". State and territory leaders will meet with Mr Howard on September 27 to discuss the new counter-terrorism tools in the wake of the London bombings. |
| Posted by:phil_b |