The number of young Australians seeking to fight with groups such as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq appears for now to have reached "something of a plateau", the head of ASIO has revealed.
While stressing he was "not declaring victory", the Director-General of Security, Duncan Lewis, told Fairfax Media he believed better community awareness of the problem was helping to put downward pressure on foreign fighter numbers.
Australians, including teenagers, travelling to fight with radical groups in Syria and Iraq have been among the most disturbing aspects of the Islamic State phenomenon. The sheer bloodthirstiness of the group and the fears that such people could return to Australia and pose a security threat here means that any ceiling on numbers is highly significant. 
"There is a current sense of a plateau," Mr Lewis said. "I don't want to be giving any sense that we are through the worst of this. I don't think that's right.
"But while it had been escalating fast, the sense is that we have plateaued a bit."
Mr Lewis also revealed that ASIO has confirmed a further three deaths of Australians on the Syrian battlefield, taking the total dead to 44. He would not say how they died.
Attorney-General George Brandis said recently that the number of Australians fighting with extremist groups, mostly Islamic State, had fallen for the first time from about 120 to 110, but it was not clear whether this was merely a temporary anomaly.
Generally the trend had been going steadily upward for more than two years.
Mr Lewis said communities and families were becoming more aware of the problem, and there could be a natural limit to the numbers of young people prone to Islamic State propaganda.
"How many young Australians are actually going to be susceptible to the violent radical messages of ISIL?" he said.
"Secondly, the public awareness has become much higher, particularly in the Islamic communities, about what their young people have been doing.
"If you were a parent who thought their children might be vulnerable, you would be paying much more attention than you would have been doing a while ago."
Mr Lewis added that new laws, in particular the ability for ASIO to more quickly advise the Foreign Minister of the need to suspend a person's passport before they left the country, had helped.
In   May, Mr Lewis told Fairfax Media that ASIO's "call to arms" was for communities and in particular parents to pay more attention to what their children were up to, including on the internet, to head off radicalisation.
This week he said that this call was being heeded, with families and communities clearly more aware of the problem than they had been in the past.
Mr Lewis also reiterated that Islamic extremism did not represent a problem with the broader religion.
"This is not about the religion other than the fact that it is being hijacked by ne'er-do-wells," he said.
Only a "tiny, tiny" proportion of Australia's 480,000 Muslims were influenced by Islamic State's messages, he said.
"We do need to keep it in perspective."
Mr Lewis will next week join Senator Brandis, Justice Minister Michael Keenan and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin for counterterrorism talks with Indonesian counterparts in Jakarta.
He said there was "always scope to do more" in intelligence-sharing and co-operation to fight terrorism networks.
Follow us on Twitter