Australia Creates Counterterror Super-Ministry

• 07.18.2017, 14:34
•  World

AP Photo/Frank Franklin II

Australia will create a Home Affairs ministry to boost anti-terrorism links between government agencies, in the nation’s biggest security shake-up in more than 40 years, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said, South China Morning Post reports.

To be led by current Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton, the portfolio will be based on the UK’s Home Office and have oversight of federal police, intelligence agencies and border forces, Turnbull told reporters on Tuesday in Canberra.

“I am announcing the most significant reform of Australia’s national intelligence and domestic security arrangements and their oversight in more than 40 years,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said.

“We are taking the best elements of our intelligence and national security community and making them better. As terrorists evolve their methods, we have to evolve our responses.

“This is driven by operational logic. You have a domestic security challenge which gets greater all the time.”

The new super-ministry, which will strip management of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation from the attorney general’s portfolio and federal police from the justice ministry, will need legislative changes to be implemented, he said.