A New South Wales teenager who allegedly expressed neo-Nazi and white supremacist views is has been charged with encouraging a mass casualty terrorist attack, with police claiming he accessed material online relating to bomb-making.
The 18-year-old from Albury on the NSW-Victoria border was arrested on Wednesday morning by members of the NSW joint counter terrorism team, which is made up of officers from the Australian federal police and the NSW police force.
The arrest came as federal parliament’s powerful security committee launched an inquiry into extremist movements and radicalism in Australia – including the far right – after a referral from the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton.
AFP assistant commissioner Scott Lee told reporters on Wednesday: “The male we’ve arrested has an extremely rightwing ideology and is focused on neo-Nazi, white supremacist and anti-Semitic material.”
Lee alleged the man had been “accessing and engaging [with] extreme rightwing material” including “bomb-making materials” which he had allegedly shared “to urge others to commit terrorist acts and violence against community members”.
“The decision to arrest today was made as a result of an escalation that we saw in this male’s online behaviour which continued up until this morning, and that was why we made the decision that we did,” the assistant commissioner said.
Police said the man did not appear to have planned a specific attack and that his activities were “only occurring in the online environment”. Lee said the 18-year-old was arrested after officers observed an “escalation” in the tone of his social media posts.
“A couple of days ago what we observed was an escalation in the tone which went to a support of a mass casualty event, and potentially his involvement in that event,” Lee alleged. “There was a post in the very early hours of this morning which actually expressed support for a previous mass-casualty shooting that had occurred internationally.”
Lee said in a statement the investigation was ongoing “but we remain wary about the speed with which lone actors can progress from online activities to ones that impact the real world”.
The federal police assistant commissioner said the previous shooting was “not Christchurch related” but the teenager had allegedly “expressed support for the ideology of the individual who committed that attack”.
NSW police assistant commissioner Mark Walton alleged the teenager had expressed views against “almost anyone that didn’t look like him”.
“More specifically it’s non-whites, it’s immigrants, it’s people of the Jewish and Islamic faith,” he told reporters.
Authorities stressed on Wednesday that there was no ongoing threat to the community.
Separately, Dutton has asked parliament’s joint committee on intelligence and security to open an inquiry into “the nature and extent of, and threat posed by, extremist movements”.
The proposed terms of reference include “the motivations, objectives and capacity for violence of extremist groups including, but not limited to, Islamist and far-right extremist groups”. The inquiry would also consider whether that threat had changed during the Covid pandemic.
Dutton’s request came as the government faced a motion from Labor’s shadow home affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, for an inquiry examining the threat of rightwing extremism in Australia.
Keneally said on Tuesday an inquiry should consider whether “our proscription laws to list groups as terrorist organisations are fit for purpose and whether our counter-terrorism programs and our preventing of radicalisation will work when it comes to rightwing extremism”.
The inquiry referred by Dutton increases the scope to include “Islamist” groups, but the terms broadly align with those proposed by Labor. The inquiry may also consider “the role of social media” in “allowing extremists to communicate and organise”.
The terms of reference include looking at “further steps the commonwealth could take to disrupt and deter hate speech and establish thresholds to regulate the use of symbols and insignia associated with terrorism and extremism, including online”. The committee on Wednesday afternoon accepted Dutton’s referral.
A report by the New Zealand royal commission into the Christchurch mosque shooting was released earlier this week. It found the Australian shooter who killed 51 Muslim worshipers last year was active in far-right groups in his home country but escaped the attention of authorities.
