The decision to investigate the July 2025 attack on Melbourne defence company Lovitt Technologies “as an act of terrorism, potentially orchestrated by far-left extremists” is a watershed in Australia’s understanding of politically motivated violence.
If that assessment is confirmed, it marks more than another criminal prosecution. It would signal official recognition that Australia faces a type of ideological terrorism that has had little attention from police, intelligence agencies and policymakers.
The US and several European countries are already reassessing the growing threat from violent far-left extremism. Australia should be doing the same.
Australia’s intelligence and police services have tended not to use the term “far left” and have been cautious in describing attacks on Jewish targets as “terrorism”.
In his annual threat assessment delivered in late June, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said: “This gets surprisingly little media coverage, but Australian companies with perceived links to Israel are being subjected to repeated acts of vandalism and arson by far-left activists.”
Burgess’s observation is significant because it suggests the Lovitt attack was not an isolated incident but may represent the escalation into terrorism of a broader pattern of politically motivated vandalism and arson.
This is happening when Australia’s domestic norm against the use of violence to achieve political objectives is eroding.
The 2025 McKinnon Index – “an annual dashboard of democratic health” – found that 21 per cent of Australians aged 18 to 24 agreed that “it is sometimes justified to use extreme measures such as violence to advance a cause you care about”.
Terrorism does not begin with shootings and arson. It begins when society starts accepting that violence is a legitimate form of political argument.
The ideological motivation of the alleged Lovitt attackers is apparent from a video released after the incident. In it we see a masked individual, standing in front of a Palestinian flag along with smaller Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags.
The speaker describes the attackers as an “anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist cell”, says “Australia isn’t a legitimate country, it’s a colonial occupation of some 250+ unceded sovereign nations” and claims that “every colony will burn”.
Lovitt supplies parts for the F-35 fighter, which is flown by the Australian and Israeli air forces. “Every worker at Lovitt Technologies is complicit in genocide.”
The lines against so-called colonialism, militarism and Israel will be familiar to Australians who watched numerous pro-Palestinian protests since the Hamas attack in southern Israel in October 2023. Much of this ideological framework draws on Marxist traditions but has been reshaped through anti-colonial and “settler colonial” theories into a broad critique of liberal democratic states.
In his 2024 book On Settler Colonialism, Adam Kirsch says of far-left ideology: “Its adherents believe that the United States, Canada, Australia and Israel have a uniquely vicious ‘way of being’ responsible for a history of genocide, ecocide, sexism, racism and insatiable greed.” At its extremes the ideology legitimises violence and destructive behaviour as “resistance” against the state.
This is the ideology that has seen statues vandalised or destroyed – as happened at Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens last Australia Day – with graffitied phrases such as “the colony must fall” and “death to Australia”.
In the Australian Socialists’ newspaper Red Flag, Tess Lee Ack asks, “Do revolutions have to be violent? … The reality is that the fight for a better world will not be won without some violence.”
This view was echoed by Yasmine Johnson, a national co-ordinator of Students for Palestine, in her July 13 testimony to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
When asked about fears in the Jewish community that calls to “globalise the intifada” meant violence, Johnson said: “Well, my response to that is that I don’t hold movements for the justice of the oppressed to a standard that says there can never be any violence.”
This is not to suggest that the Australian Socialists, Red Flag or Students for Palestine are connected to the alleged attack on Lovitt. It does, however, show an ideological environment where political violence is increasingly discussed as a legitimate instrument of resistance.
Internationally, far-left terrorism is re-emerging as a significant element of the overall terrorist threat. The EU’s annual Terrorism Situation and Trend Report for 2026 recorded 12 left-wing and anarchist terror events last year compared with 24 from jihadists.
In the US, the respected Centre for Strategic and International Studies said last year that “left-wing anti-government extremism accounted for more attacks and plots in the United States than any other ideological category”. The CSIS judged that “disagreements with the Trump administration’s immigration policy appear to have been a driver of left-wing anti-government violence”.
The Trump administration has responded by placing far-left political terrorism much higher on its international security agenda. Representatives from 66 countries attended a ministerial meeting on political terrorism hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington DC on July 16.
Australia chose to send only an embassy official. We should engage at more senior levels and discuss the need to designate some far-left groups as terrorist organisations as circumstances demand.
We should also assess whether our intelligence sharing internationally and domestically can meet this threat. The focus of our agencies has overwhelmingly been on jihadist groups and violent right-wing extremists. We need to broaden our focus, in particular to test our historical knowledge of far-left groups of concern.
German think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that, following the Hamas attack on Israel, “far-left groups voiced support for terrorist attacks perceived as anti-imperialist or anti-colonial, even when terrorist groups adhered to entirely different ideological convictions”.
This explains why for some on the extreme left, a common opposition to “settler-colonial” societies such as Israel and the US overrides concerns about, for example, Hamas’s violent opposition to homosexuality.
Now the question is: what more should be done?
The biggest problem Australia faces is how to reinforce societal norms against the idea that violence can play a role in political life. This is surely an educational challenge. ASIO’s Burgess reports that individuals are radicalising at younger ages. In his 2025 threat assessment he said: “The most obvious trend is that the young are getting younger. The median age at which minors are first subject to ASIO investigation is now 15.”
We urgently need better strategies to protect young people from a destructive attraction to political extremism.
Government should look carefully at plans for an August 13 school students “nationwide day of protest” being organised around the country by leftist groups, including the already mentioned Students for Palestine.
The student protest next Thursday should be understood as a recruitment opportunity for organisations that openly advocate revolutionary political change. The Red Flag newspaper writes, “students can act as a detonator for broader social forces … Building a base among students is therefore of enormous strategic importance for any revolutionary organisation.”
We have a duty of care to our children to oppose this type of political indoctrination. For many it will be a passing phase and perhaps a good thing if it encourages critical thought about history and politics. For some, however, what starts as an afternoon wagging school could end with a destructive slide into far-left extremism.
We need to be alive to this risk and should encourage students to stay in the classroom.
The challenge for government, and indeed for Australian society, is to rebuild the democratic norm that political disagreements are resolved through persuasion and elections rather than intimidation or violence.
Counter-terrorism begins by making sure the next generation believes that violence is never a legitimate substitute for democratic politics.
