Canberra has spent the ten months since the Bondi massacre rewriting its counter-extremism rulebook. Parliament passed new hate-group laws, the government banned Hizb ut-Tahrir and a neo-Nazi network, and a royal commission will report in December. Still missing from the national debate, however, is the place of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Australia’s closest partners have stopped waiting. In January 2026, Washington designated the Lebanese Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization and sanctioned the Egyptian and Jordanian chapters for material support to Hamas. The Sudanese branch followed in March, accused of feeding fighters into Sudan’s civil war.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has made clear that any move against a group under the new hate laws must start with the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.
Europe is moving in the same direction. On October 8, the European Parliament voted 381 to 167 for a European Union strategy against Brotherhood “entryism.” Lawmakers asked the Council to list Brotherhood-linked entities where they meet the European Union’s terrorism criteria and called for tighter control of foreign funding tied to Qatar and Turkey. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates banned the movement more than a decade ago.
Canberra, by contrast, has never listed the Brotherhood in any form. The omission is hard to square with the treatment of Hamas, banned since 2022, whose own 1988 charter describes the group as a wing of the Brotherhood in Palestine. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has made clear that any move against a group under the new hate laws must start with the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. That is sensible. Several steps, though, need not wait.
As Washington and Brussels tighten their rules, Australia could become the next place Brotherhood money goes. Canberra already has the tool to respond. The Charter of the United Nations Act obliges the foreign minister to sanction any entity found to take part in or facilitate terrorist acts. Adopting Washington’s designations would freeze the chapters’ assets in Australia, criminalize funding them, and align Canberra with the Five Eyes partner on whose intelligence it leans most. Because the targets are overseas branches, not local community groups, the domestic fallout would be slight.
The second step is for ministers to ask the Australian Security Intelligence Organization for a formal assessment of Brotherhood-linked networks in Australia, measured against the standards Parliament set in January: conduct that heightens the risk of violence, or advocacy of hate crimes. Some groups may meet that test; many will not. Either way, a finding beats the current vacuum, which Family First has filled so far, whose call for a ban named no local groups. Brussels is also scrutinizing foreign funding of religious and educational bodies, starting with whether Australia’s foreign-influence transparency laws even cover it.
On designation, however, Europe’s hard-liners are the wrong model, and geography explains why. Unlike Brussels, Canberra sits beside Muslim-majority democracies where Brotherhood thinking entered mainstream politics decades ago. Brookings scholar Joseph Liow found that Malaysia’s Islamic Party and Indonesia’s Prosperous Justice Party both modeled their struggle on the Brotherhood’s. A former Islamic Party leader has also acknowledged that IKRAM, a Malaysian Islamic organization, sympathizes with the movement.
Both parties are legal, contest elections, and draw millions of votes. A blanket designation of “the Brotherhood network,” as some European conservatives want, would be heard in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur as a verdict on those voters. Propagandists would seize on it, and Canberra would risk regional ties built over decades.
Southeast Asian governments will cooperate more readily on terrorist financing if they are not asked to judge parties in their own legislatures.
Targeting chapters for what they do, not what they believe, avoids that trap and could strengthen Australia’s hand. Southeast Asian governments will cooperate more readily on terrorist financing if they are not asked to judge parties in their own legislatures.
Critics will object regardless. In Strasbourg, the Parliament’s left-wing blocs voted against the resolution, and the European Network Against Racism called it a stain on the institution. Canberra can answer such charges by publishing the reasons for each listing, leaving every decision open to review by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and saying clearly that Muslim Australians are not the target. That committee cleared Hizb ut-Tahrir’s listing in May.
The clock is running. Former High Court Justice Virginia Bell delivers the royal commission’s findings on December 14, which may push Canberra to examine the ideas feeding antisemitism and extremism. Moving now, in step with Washington and Brussels and mindful of Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, gives the government room to get the details right. Another attack would take that room away.
