Her meeting with the royal commission on Wednesday, following in the footsteps of Nato boss and former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, largely focused on her work as an academic at Curtin University researching how to counter violent extremism, she said.
New Zealand's lack of experience of terrorism actually left the country in a good place to take effective action, she says, as disjointed layers of institutional response elsewhere often made genuine reform difficult.
"There's real potential for New Zealand to be a model, because you're starting from scratch. It's really important to get the structuring right, and put a comprehensive strategy in place.
"I think New Zealand is in a really good place, because you have the opportunity to set up something right from the beginning ... There's the opportunity here to have something that integrates soft power, a legislative framework, that harness civil society figures."
Law changes, and hard enforcement action and intelligence work, were part of the answer, but only a small part, she said.
"You can't arrest your way out of this," she says, pointing to work such as that of her NGO People Against Violent Extremism, which aimed to address misconceptions about what terrorism and extremists looked like.
There was also a role for Exit programmes - which use former white supremacist radicals to offer advice and a way out for current members - and while there was a branch set up in Australia they had yet to cross the Tasman, she said.
"It would be great to set up Exit NZ," she says.
Aly also held talks with the Office of Film and Literature Classification, the agency which shortly after the attacks classed the gunman's manifesto as objectionable, making possession and distribution a criminal offence. But the emergence in Ukraine this week of a publisher selling copies of the manifesto online again illustrated the limits of legislation.
"The problem with social media and the internet is that each country can only legislate within its borders, but there's no co-ordinated way to have an international effort on this. Because this is an international issue, all countries need to get together to decide on standards and a judicial response."
When Aly took office for the first time in 2016, it was as the first Muslim woman to take a seat in Australia's Parliament. And while her parliamentary career has not yet been long, her first term gave her a ringside seat to the turbulent and mayfly-like political career of Fraser Anning.
Anning, who squeaked into the Australian senate as a reserve candidate for far-right party One Nation in 2016, managed to quit that party and another before becoming internationally infamous and later egged after blaming the Christchurch mosque shootings on Muslim immigration.
In April 2019 he exited Australian politics after his attempt to contest elections with his own party saw him lose heavily.
The result was a relief for Aly and she was "glad" to see him exit political discourse: "It really helped us all to understand how important political discourse can be."
"The fact he didn't get back in showed Australia's level of tolerance for outspoken white supremacy is very low. I think it was a blip, and I hope we don't see the rise of someone like Anning again."
