Greg Barton

They can voice their concern.

They can be expert oversight to say, well, okay, we think this is a counselling problem, or we just need some mentoring, or maybe there's just a problem with finding employment, or maybe it's mental health.

But they do an assessment, so you don't assume anything.

In rare cases, they find out that there's likely recruitment from a terrorist or a violent extremist recruitment, radicalisation going on.

Then they check with state and federal police just to check that there's no ongoing operations, de-conflict.

And if necessary, sit down and try and work out what the problem is.

And if you do that early enough, you can generally help them recognize that what they thought was true is not true and take them in a different direction.

Recruitment is all about social networks, friendships.

So if you can put something positive in some young person's life to replace what seems to be a rising negative influence, you can cut off at the chase.

Well, you know, go back to the 9-11 Commission report and we saw that, you know, one of the main takeaways there, and it's a familiar story with similar incidents and reports since, is there wasn't adequate communication between the FBI and the CIA.

So you need timely and complete information sharing there.

A coordinator, a counterterrorism coordinator, can just facilitate that, partly because it's their dedicated task, but partly because they build trusted relations and they sort of lean in and make sure stuff happens.

The particular recommendation in the report is that it's full-time, so that suggests that we've sort of had people drifting in and out of that being their focus.

And I think that's often a problem in government work, including in security areas, that people

For a period of time, we prioritize something and then it drops in priority, perhaps the funding, the budget changes.

And where you're dealing with stuff that's based on people-to-people relationships and relationships of trust, you can't afford to have any lack of continuity.

Well, generally, that working between counterterrorism teams and agencies in Australia does work well, but clearly it's not perfect.

And with all of those agencies, there are degrees of rivalries.

On a good day, you've got trusted individuals who really are comfortable working with each other.

On a bad day, you've got people who don't get along and resent somebody taking charge.