Bill Shorten has compared extremist organisations to paedophiles following Friday’s fatal shooting of a police employee in Parramatta by an allegedly radicalised teenager.
The opposition leader called the shooting “a dreadful, useless waste of life” and said organisations that filled young people’s heads with “murderous, crazy nonsense” were “breaching their social contract with the Australian people”.
As the Islamic community expressed relief that former prime minister Tony Abbott’s rhetoric around extremism was absent in the wake of the shooting, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, called for the Muslim community not to be vilified.
Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad, 15, allegedly shot and killed New South Wales police employee Curtis Cheng, 58, on Friday afternoon outside Parramatta police headquarters. He was then shot and killed by police.
On Monday, Shorten attacked organisations that exploited young people for criminal ends.
“If there are organisations in this country preying upon vulnerable young people, filling their heads full of murderous crazy nonsense, then those organisations are breaching their social contract with the Australian people,” he told reporters.
“I have no time for organisations fomenting dangerous, criminal thinking in vulnerable young people. These organisations preying upon young people are a sort of political or terrorist version of the paedophiles who prey upon young people too. It is just unacceptable.”
Asked if he thought Abbott’s rhetoric – such as using the term death cult to describe Islamic State – had been divisive, Shorten said he was not going to dance on Abbott’s legacy and Labor had been consistent in its view over the years.
“When I look at Muslims or Christians in Australia, I look at people of any or no faith, I see Australians first and their religion second. Dealing with communities across the whole range of faith, that is how they see themselves. I believe the more we can have leadership by including people, the more we make it difficult for the radicals and the criminal elements to try and peel people off,” Shorten said.
Lydia Shelly, a Islamic community advocate and solicitor, said Turnbull’s approaches had been welcomed and there was hope for wide and genuine consultation in the community.
“There is a collective understanding that if this had occurred under Abbott, the language that would have been used, and the actions and the leadership would be seen as [a] very different kind of leadership, one that wasn’t necessarily inclusive,” she said.
Shelly said there needed to be a very conscious, measured reaction to the shooting and that Australia was currently at a good point in community relations to do that.
“I would encourage the development to take place, our community is very diverse and I would also encourage consultation with the broader Australian community with these types of issues as well as female voices,” she said.
“This is not a Muslim issue, concerns are for all of our country, we all have a vested interest that young men don’t fall prey to Reclaim Australia and groups like that. We need to stop viewing radicalisation purely through a religious and Arabic prism.”
Turnbull had a phone conference on Saturday with the NSW premier, Mike Baird, police commissioner Andrew Scipione and seven or eight Muslim leaders to discuss the shooting.
“The Australian Muslim community will be especially appalled and shocked by this. We must not vilify or blame the entire Muslim community with the actions of what is, in truth, a very, very small percentage of violent extremist individuals,” Turnbull said in a statement.
“The Muslim community are our absolutely necessary partners in combating this type of violent extremism.”
Turnbull also urged parents to keep tabs on what their children were up to, to head off the risk of exposure to extremism.
“We all need to be aware of the way in which radicalisation can occur – communities at every level, families should be aware of what young people are doing, what influences are impacting on young people,” he said.
On Saturday , police searched the Parramatta mosque Farhad allegedly visited before the shooting. Mosque chairman Neil El-Kadomi said he cooperated with police to faciliate the search.
“They ring me, I went there, they searched, but they didn’t find anything,” El-Kadomi said. “We support the police, we work with the police, the police were happy with our support.”
El-Kadomi said Farhad had been to the mosque a few times but was not a member of their community. He said the mosque was “unconnected” to Farhad’s actions, saying, “we condemn it.”
“He is not known to us,” El-Kadomi said. “He is a boy, alone, comes sometimes to pray. A very, very limited time. And then what he did is not accepted.”
