Counter terror experts fear Australia needs to reexamine its deradicalisation policy framework, saying it is unlikely to succeed.
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Australian National University's Dr Clarke Jones said Australia's Live Safely Together program mirrored the Prevent strategy scrapped by the UK government in the wake of the Manchester bombings.
Dr Jones said policy framework branded "too top-down" and "toxic" overseas had been shown to alienate the very people governments aimed to reach.
The visiting fellow, who worked on national security programs with the federal government for 15 years, is working to secure funding for an expert hub based at ANU to support communities to co-design initiatives that build cohesion to mitigate young people's vulnerability to extremist ideology.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham said Prevent had created "a feeling in the Muslim community that it is being spied upon and unfairly targeted" in the UK and that far from tackling extremism it risked "creating the very conditions for it to flourish."
Dr Jones said the Australian government had so far been reluctant to make changes to existing counter violent extremism (CVE) strategy here.
He pointed to the Attorney General's department pushing on with creating a resource pack to help educators identify those vulnerable to radicalisation and violence, despite backlash to an almost identical move in the UK from teachers who said the policy created distrust in the classroom and forced them to be the "secret service of the public sector."
Continuing to finance discredited strategies in Australia could do more harm than good, Dr Jones said.
"Things have got to change," he said. "I'm not suggesting we are going to experience the same level of terrorist attacks here in Australia. But I am saying we are vulnerable to this problem with flawed policies."
While he felt some aspects of current programs were useful, but the government needed to go back to the drawing board regarding community relations and bring government and community programs closer together.
"We have to be careful the programs the government is doing are not going to further stigmatise or create further relationship difficulties," Dr Jones said.
"We have worked very closely with a broad cross-section of muslim communities to develop programs. We don't come in an replace those community level approaches, we try and enhance them by understanding them and providing capacity they may not have."
Dr Jones said the university was well-placed to support this necessary but complex shift, drawing on a range of experts in criminology, psychology, sociology, communications and more.
The hub aimed support the delivery of more tailored and successful interventions and improve program evaluation - something critics feel is absent from the current landscape of CVE programming.
Dr Jones hoped to work hand-in-glove with all levels of government and authorities in creating co-designed community interventions that had a pro-social rather than an enforcement focus.
The ANU intervention hub has sought funding through non-government channels and hopes to secure resources before years' end.
