Home affairs minister Peter Dutton has expressed concern over copycats in the wake of the tragedy that unfolded in Christchurch while addressing a security forum in Western Australia.
Addressing a crowd of hundreds at an hour-long event hosted by Canning MP Andrew Hastie in Mandurah on Monday, Mr Dutton said agencies would be monitoring people of interest to ensure a similar incident could not take place in Australia.
"We do worry about retaliatory attacks. We worry about copycat attacks," Mr Dutton said.
"One of the things that we know now about this monstrosity is that the alleged perpetrator has spent about 45 days in Australia in the past three years. He has certainly travelled extensively over the course of the past eight or nine years.
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"[Currently] there's no advice that's available to us [to indicate] that we're at risk of seeing another attack in New Zealand or here.
"We can't take our foot off the throat of that enemy because they seek to do harm in a place of mass gathering like this. For people to go to a place of worship and not be able to do that in peace. [It's an] appalling loss of life."
The packed out forum allowed the Liberal MPs to answer questions on border and national security.
Mr Hastie, who is the chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security, labelled the acts of the perpetrators of Friday's mosque massacre in New Zealand as a "cowardly bully".
He said since the incident Facebook had worked to remove more than 1.5 million copies of the footage.
Mr Hastie said that reach demonstrated just how quickly horrific videos could spread online.
Both parliamentarians stated social media platforms, such as Facebook, needed to do more to stop the spread of hate speech.
Mr Dutton labelled usage of electronic media as "phenomenal".
"The reality of the internet is that messages can be spread like wildfire. [While] it can be used for good and it can be used for bad... it's used by people who seek to do us harm," Mr Dutton said.
"The issue for us is how we get Facebook, for example, to respond more rapidly to take down content or, more importantly, to stop that content going up in the first place.
"There's a lot of work we need to do with all the social media companies to try to identify ways in which we can remove that content that is of most concern.
"There are terabytes now that needs to be analysed. Don't underestimate how difficult that is."
Mr Dutton also stated the direct correlation between violent video games and the New Zealand attack needed to be examined.
He said the footage that emerged from the attack had "the hallmarks of somebody playing a computer game".
We can't take our foot off the throat of that enemy because they seek to do harm in a place of mass gathering like this.
- Home affairs minister Peter Dutton
Mr Dutton said the ability to download violent games from other countries without censorship or classifications from the government was concerning.
"I don't think there's a country in the world that's been able to grapple with that," he said.
The Dickson MP also took aim at Labor and the Greens over recent debate that the government had not focused on the threat of far-right extremists.
However, Mr Dutton also said far-right extremists had been on his radar since he took up the home affairs minister job.
"[Saying] that somehow white supremacy has just come on the radar of our intelligence agencies is complete nonsense," he said.
The packed out forum closed with a question and answers session, which covered Australia's intelligence, cyber attacks and national security services.
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Follow Caitlyn Rintoul on Twitter via @caitlynrintoul.