The UK's top police official in charge of deradicalisation is urging Australia to get serious about taking on right-wing terrorism, after the deaths of 50 people in two mosques in New Zealand last week.

Simon Cole is Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police and the head of the UK's national deradicalisation program.  He's warning Australia and all liberal democracies to invest in deradicalisation as examples of far-right terrorism mount up all over the world.  Australia has a national CVE (countering violent extremism) strategy, called Living Safe Together, but its funding has been low and inconsistent.

"Obviously it's a concern and we've seen in this country as you've seen on your side of the world now the consequences of some of that," Chief Constable Cole said in an interview with the ABC.  "If you think you have a problem, you need to invest in it to get upstream of it," he added, "In the long run, in plain economic terms, that will be better than dealing with the fallout of atrocities which have a financial and emotional toll which will last for years."

Right-wing extremists now account for one in five notifications to the UK's deradicalisation program.  Just in the days following the Christchurch attack, UK authorities arrested four people for offenses such as promoting the massacre and verbally abusing a Muslim cab driver; in another case, a man was arrested for stabbing a 19-year old in a fight that was "inspired by the far right".

With the frequency and intensity of far-right crime growing, Cole says the UK's domestic security service is stepping in:

"The far right had (previously) been placed as domestic extremism," said Cole, "MI5, the security services here, have moved now and they will take the lead with top-end far right as they would with any other terrorist group."