Where is Australia’s Promised De-Radicalisation Funding?

Australian community groups developing de-radicalisation programs are still waiting to see any of the Australian government's $13 million in promised funding, leaving a gaping hole in the country's counter-terrorism strategy. The money, part of a wider $630 million counter-terrorism package announced in August last year, was promised to community education programs. But nearly six months on, there's no sign of where this money will be allocated or how it'll be spent.

Community groups are growing impatient, and counter-terrorism experts in Australia say prioritising punitive measures over preventative strategies won't stop the radicalisation of at-risk youths. While the US and the UK have emphasised the importance of a multi-pronged approach to combating homegrown terrorism, the Australian government has so far focused on tightening security measures – issuing travel bans, confiscating passports and extending the powers of the Australian Federal Police – rather than engaging community to address the root causes of radicalisation.

Anne Aly, a counter-terrorism professor at Curtin University told VICE there was an acute need to fund more early intervention programs in the Australian community. "The very reason why people are becoming radicalised is because they're attracted to young firebrand preachers—they feel a connection with them," she said. "In order to move them away from that, you need to have somebody who is equally appealing to them, who is also young and they can connect with."

Since 2005, the Australian government has quietly run a number of initiatives aimed at countering homegrown terrorism. The majority of these have been focused on engaging at-risk youth through activities and education programs, but without consistent funding, the results have been mixed, and a number of community programs have collapsed in successive governments. Further, the widely adopted strategy of re-educating radicalised Australian Muslims by simply telling them that their interpretation of Islam was wrong, ignored key reasons why extremist views were attractive in the first place.

Studies since 9/11 have noted that young Muslim Australians feel alienated by Australian politics and the media. An article in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs showed that many young Australian Muslims hold the view that media ran an anti-Islam agenda. Dr. Mustapha Kara-Ali, a former adviser in the Howard government's Muslim Community Reference group who ran a community program in 2006 mentoring at-risk Muslim youths in Sydney, agrees that Australian political rhetoric could alienate young Muslims and push them towards extremism.

He told VICE that the biggest challenges his organisation faced was related to the identity and inclusiveness of Australia as a nation. "It was a sore point often raised about both state and federal police, that they had the crown of the British Monarchy with its cross on their badges," he wrote in an email. "This was often interpreted by Muslim youth as a blatant sign that the war against violent extremism is nothing but a cover for a renewed Crusader War that has continued since the days of colonialism. In the views of these youth, Australia needs to be more inclusive with its symbolism and not just with its economic opportunities."

There have been a number of proposals put forward in Australia to combat radicalisation, but debate over how best to prevent young Muslim Australians like Abdul Numan Haider from slipping through the cracks is far from settled within the community.

A proposal from Dr Clarke Jones at the Australian Natioanal University received recent attention but both Dr. Aly and Dr. Kara-Ali have criticized it, with the latter calling it "incoherent" and ineffective to shift the problem of extremism onto psychologists and psychiatrists. Dr. Aly is advocating instead for a family approach, involving caseworkers working closely with families and not just individuals to address problems closer to home. "A lot of the time, the first people who notice the signs of radicalisation are family members," she said. "You can't have police doing the intervention – it has to come from people who have trust in the community, who are part of the community." Dr Kara-Ali agrees. "Radicalisation is a political and religious issue. Intelligence and military force alone do not solve this problem."

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