Minister tells security conference many people could have been killed in Invasion Day incident; Treasury working ‘full tilt’ on budget measures. It would be ignorance in the extreme for us to pretend that that is the fix. It would be reckless in the extreme for us to pretend that immigration is the solution. Where we once only had to look at radicalisation potentially being something that might come across our border, it now comes across a browser.
The Australia Day arrest in Perth, for a number of reasons, it didn’t receive the publicity that it really should have. But can I just say – we got so lucky. This was not a stunt. The person who threw the pipe bomb into the middle of a crowd of First Nations protesters believed that – if you look at what it was – this was something where there was a reasonable expectation it would have gone off, and the number of people who then would have been killed.
The fact that that didn’t happen is not through any planning. We just got lucky. Continue reading...