Australia is considering stripping people of their citizenship if they are convicted of terrorist crimes, Prime Minister John Howard said on Thursday as parliament began debating tough new anti-terrorism laws.
The move comes two days after Australia's biggest counter-terrorism swoop in Sydney and Melbourne saw police arrest 17 men on charges of planning a terrorist attack and being members of a banned terrorist group.
Police arrested an 18th man on Thursday after stopping a car in western Sydney. The 25-year-old man will appear in court on Friday charged with belonging to a terrorist organisation.
Four other Australians are already awaiting trial in Sydney and Melbourne on charges linked to supporting and training with banned groups such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Australia, a staunch US ally with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has never suffered a major peacetime attack on home soil. The country has been on medium security alert since shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Howard said on Thursday he had asked his attorney-general to examine ways of revoking the citizenship of anyone convicted of a terrorist offences, saying there were arguments for deporting dual passport holders once they had served their sentencel.
"Once a person has served the sentence, if they have another nationality and they've proved they're not a very good Australian citizen, perhaps they should be returned," Howard told Sky television, adding that no decision had been taken.
Howard said his new anti-terror laws were needed in Australia but were not aimed at Australia's 280,000 Muslims, who remain wary of the new laws.
The new anti-terrorism measures were proposed after the July 7 London bombings and would allow police to detain suspects for seven days without charge and use electronic tracking devices to keep tabs on them. They make support for insurgents in countries such as Iraq an offence punishable by seven years in jail.
'POLICE STATE'While Britain's Tony Blair suffered his first major parliamentary defeat in eight years on Wednesday over increased police detention powers, Howard is set to push his reforms through with support from the centre-left Labour opposition.
But some members of his conservative government still have concerns about the new laws, which Australia's human rights commissioner has said would make Australia like a police state.
Backbencher Petro Georgiou said on Thursday the sedition laws could stifle freedom of expression and investigative journalism in Australia, while other measures needed to be carefully monitored to ensure they were not abused by police.
Treasurer Peter Costello supported deporting people convicted of terrorist crimes. He said those who did not like Australia could go and live in Islamic states.
"There are Islamic states around the world that practise sharia law and if that's your object you may well be much more at home in such a country than trying to turn Australia into one of those countries," Costello told reporters.
Howard wants the new anti-terrorism laws passed by Christmas, so they can be in place before the Commonwealth Games are held in Melbourne in March 2006.
The Australia Security Intelligence Organisation last week said for the first time that Australia had home-grown extremists, some of whom trained overseas. Muslims make up 1.5 percent of Australia's 20 million population. In 2004 British-born Australian Jack Roche, a 50-year-old Muslim convert, was sentenced to nine years in jail for conspiring to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra.