An advice hotline to help families worried about radicalisation has not been established almost a year-and-a-half after the state government announced it as part of a package of measures to fight violent extremism.
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The $47 million suite of initiatives was announced in November 2015, weeks after 15-year-old schoolboy Farhad Jabar shot police accountant Curtis Cheng in an Islamic State-inspired attack.
The support telephone line, to be run by a non-government agency at a cost of $6 million, was one of 14 promises.
Others included 200 new school counsellors, training for teachers and other frontline workers to identify vulnerable young people and specialist school crisis support teams.
Some initiatives are not up and running after 16 months.
Silma Ihram, a Muslim educator who was consulted as part of the 2015 response, said she was alarmed that law enforcement measures, such as tougher parole laws and criminal punishment, seem to have been implemented much faster than measures to help the community.
"The Muslim community is aware of many initiatives that need to be put in place that we have the skills and expertise to put in place but we are resource poor," she said.
"We're surprised that, considering the amount of government resources being allocated to counter-terrorism that the preventative strategies have not been supported anywhere near as much as they should have been."
However, academic Clarke Jones, a member of the Premier's Countering Violent Extremism Council established in 2015, said he was confident that the time taken to set up the advice line was necessary.
"There is a lot of consultation going on, it's not a straightforward process," he said. "We've got to be careful that any strategy has buy-in by the communities and that's a very difficult process because there's not a lot of trust in government."
He assessed the NSW government's approach to counter-terrorism as "very positive" and said it was taking time to build relationships.
Measures that have been implemented include $4 million in grants for grassroots programs, the specialist school support teams and a Community Cohesion Ambassadors' Program with the Sydney Thunder cricket team as ambassadors.
However, training to upskill school counsellors has been done using existing resources and budget, government records show.
Newly-appointed Minister for Counter Terrorism, David Elliott, said the creation of a dedicated portfolio "shows how seriously the Government takes these issues, and delivering the countering violent extremism programs is one of my early priorities".
"This early development work has included mapping of relevant services and further analysis will occur for the frontline worker training program," he said.
"The phone service is in the final stages of development with community stakeholders."
Labor MP and shadow attorney-general Paul Lynch said the government "seem to enjoy making media headlines around these serious issues but don't seem capable of delivery".
"The government's rhetoric on counter-terrorism is enormous," he said. "Their actual performance is very ordinary."
