Calls for more AFP funding after revelations that national surveillance team was disbanded before Bondi attack

A push to give the Australian Federal Police and Home Affairs Department more counter-terrorism resources is intensifying after revelations that a national surveillance team was disbanded shortly before the Bondi attacks.

The Coalition has seized on a report in The West Australian this week that the AFP quietly wound up a Canberra based squad of officers dedicated to monitoring High Risk Terrorist Offenders (HRTO) towards the end of last year.

“This is just the latest in a series of damning revelations from whistleblowers from within the counter-terrorism system,” Shadow Home Affairs Minister Jonathan Duniam said.

“It is now clear that Australia has a counter-terrorism crisis brought on by under-resourcing and de-prioritisation of the terror threat by the Albanese Government,” he said in a statement after the Prime Minister insisted AFP funding was at “record levels”.

He is demanding the Government back the opposition’s proposals for additional resourcing to the AFP’s Counter-Terrorism Command and Home Affairs’ Counter-Terrorism Coordination Centre, as well as other national security measures.

“Under the Albanese Government, chronic under-resourcing and a pathological failure to take seriously how antisemitism was inflaming the terror threat, has left Australia’s counter-terrorism system in crisis,” Senator Duniam said.On Tuesday Mr Albanese expressed “full confidence” in the AFP and hit back at suggestions that any efforts to monitor dangerous extremists had been recently wound back.

“There is record funding for the Australian Federal Police. Record funding,” the Prime Minister said when questioned about The West’s exclusive report.

In a subsequent statement the AFP admitted “consideration was given to a reallocation in line with strategic and operational priorities”.

A senior national security figure has told The West they expect HRTO resourcing to be a focus of the current review into intelligence and law enforcement agencies being conducted by former spy chief Dennis Richardson.

The source claimed that HRTO resources would need to increase in coming years as dozens of prisoners convicted of terrorism offences over recent years are due to complete their sentences or become eligible for parole.

Other AFP figures have told The Nightly that budgets for covert operations around the country were reduced late last year, meaning that work outside of regular rostering patterns was not being completed.

Last year The Nightly also revealed that the union representing federal police warned the Albanese government weeks before the Bondi massacre that the force was suffering “chronic and worsening shortages” of counterterrorism officers.

A document prepared by the AFP Association noted that the force’s “counterterrorism operations have increased by more than 280 per cent since 2015, reflecting a shift toward proactive disruption of domestic and offshore networks.”

“Australia’s threat environment is not shrinking; it is expanding rapidly. The men and women of the AFP stand on the front line every day, and they deserve the resources required to keep doing so effectively,” AFPA President Alex Caruana wrote on November 26.