Australia politics live: ‘we got lucky’ with Perth attack says Burke; treasurer says economy will be ‘buffeted’

Minister tells security conference many people could have been killed in Invasion Day incident; Treasury working ‘full tilt’ on budget measures. Follow updates live

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Tony Burke considers Australia “so lucky” that an alleged attempted terrorist attack against Indigenous Australians on 26 January did no harm.

In an address at an ANU National Security College dinner last night, the home affairs minister discussed the incident at this year’s Invasion Day rally in Perth attended by more than 2,500 people.

The Australia Day arrest in Perth, for a number of reasons, it didn’t receive the publicity that it really should have. But can I just say – we got so lucky. We got so lucky.

This was not a stunt. The person who threw the pipe bomb into the middle of a crowd of First Nations protesters believed that – if you look at what it was – this was something where there was a reasonable expectation it would have gone off, and the number of people who then would have been killed. The fact that that didn’t happen is not through any planning. We just got lucky.

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