The counterterrorism response has focused heavily on detection and disruption: monitoring online activity, investigating threats, making arrests. It's necessary work, but it's downstream intervention. By the time someone is planning an attack, they're already radicalized.

What about upstream prevention? What are we doing to identify vulnerable young people before they radicalize? What support are we providing to prevent them from falling into extremist communities in the first place?

The answer, honestly, is not much. Australia has some deradicalization programs, but they're small-scale and under-resourced. We don't have comprehensive mental health support for teenagers. We don't have effective interventions for online bullying or social isolation.

So we end up arresting teenagers for terrorism offences - charges that carry decades in prison - because we failed to intervene earlier.

The specific ideology varies - Islamic extremism, far-right terrorism, incel violence - but the pattern is consistent: isolated young men (almost always men) radicalized online, planning violence as a solution to personal grievances or ideological beliefs.

For the AFP, these cases are successes: they identified a threat, investigated, and made arrests before anyone got hurt. That's their job, and they're doing it well.

But for society, each case is a failure. A teenager should not be planning terrorist attacks. What went wrong in their life that brought them to that point? And what could we have done differently to prevent it?

The Canberra teenager now faces serious terrorism charges that could result in decades in prison. Their life is effectively over before it really began. Their family is devastated. Their community is shocked. And we'll move on to the next case, the next arrest, without addressing the underlying issues.

Australia needs a comprehensive approach to preventing youth radicalization that goes beyond policing. Mental health support, social connection programs, online safety measures, family support services - the boring, unglamorous work of preventing vulnerable young people from falling into extremist communities.

Because arresting teenagers for terrorism is necessary when they're planning violence. But it's not a strategy for preventing the next generation from following the same path.

Mate, there's something deeply broken when we're regularly arresting Australian teenagers for planning terrorist attacks. The AFP is doing its job. But we need to ask what the rest of us are doing to prevent young people from reaching that point in the first place.