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In a wide-ranging account of the threats facing Australia, the ASIO chief revealed hostile actions from state actors, extremists and, increasingly, adolescents. By Jason Koutsoukis.

ASIO ratchets up the warnings

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess.

Credit: AAP Image / Mick Tsikas

Before he took the stage at ASIO headquarters in Canberra on Wednesday night, a tracking camera beamed Mike Burgess’s lone silhouette walking along a shadowy corridor onto a giant screen inside the Ben Chifley Building auditorium.

“That had to be done,” the ASIO chief quipped as he arrived at the lectern to deliver his sixth Annual Threat Assessment.

A ripple of laughter swept through the 200-strong audience of security, intelligence, law enforcement officials and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, along with high-profile members of the diplomatic community. Impossible to miss, in full view of the television cameras, was China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian.

The speech that Burgess, 59, went on to deliver was an at times alarming account of a world rapidly transforming. In this sixth iteration of the intelligence community’s flagship event, Burgess outlined a complex, challenging and changing security environment that will inevitably become more dynamic, diverse and degraded over the next five years.

“Australia is facing multifaceted, merging, intersecting, concurrent and cascading threats,” said Burgess. “Major geopolitical, economic, social and security challenges of the 1930s, ’70s and ’90s have converged. As one of my analysts put it with an uncharacteristic nod to popular culture: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

His warnings come in the same week that three Chinese warships were detected along Australia’s east coast, and following the encounter over the South China Sea in which a Chinese fighter jet released flares in front of an Australian military plane. Burgess did not directly mention China in his speech – he did later say that he was pleased to see the Chinese ambassador accepted his invitation to attend.

In a wide-ranging assessment that covered international and homegrown concerns, Burgess noted that multiple countries will continue to target Australian defence personnel as they relentlessly seek access to information detailing Australia’s military capabilities.

“Some were recently given gifts by international counterparts. The presents contained concealed surveillance devices,” said Burgess. Some of this activity, he said, was positioned to glean information on the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, which will eventually see Australia acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines as well as a range of advanced military technologies set out in pillar two of the AUKUS agreement.

“ASIO has identified foreign services seeking to target AUKUS to position themselves to collect on the capabilities, how Australia intends to use them, and to undermine the confidence of our allies,” said Burgess. “By 2030, as the submarine project matures, intelligence services are more likely to focus on foreign interference to undermine community support for the enterprise and potentially sabotage if regional tensions escalate.”

With authoritarian regimes more willing to disrupt or even destroy Australia’s critical infrastructure such as energy, communications and transport infrastructure in order to impede decision-making, damage war-fighting capabilities and sow social discord, Burgess emphasised that cyber-enabled sabotage presented an acute concern.

“Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future,” Burgess said.

As the crossover between state and non-state actors increases, and ASIO’s more aggressive counterespionage work makes it more difficult and expensive for foreign spies to operate in Australia, Burgess sketched out the ways in which foreign adversaries are increasingly turning to proxies to do their onshore dirty work.

“Proxies put distance between the foreign regime and its activities, granting governments a degree of deniability,” Burgess said. “In some cases the proxies are unwitting – private investigators being hired to conduct surveillance, for example – in others, they almost certainly know what they are doing and who they are working for.”

Australians should not consider themselves immune to hostile nation-states such as Iran undertaking acts of security concern on our shores or within our near region, Burgess warned. He outlined some of the plots that ASIO had recently uncovered involving three different countries attempting to physically harm people living in Australia, to the extent that ASIO held grave fears for the lives of the people being targeted.

“In one operation, a foreign intelligence service wanted to silence an Australia-based human rights activist,” said Burgess. “The scheme involved tricking the unsuspecting activist into visiting a third country, where the plotters would be waiting. They planned to arrange an ‘accident’ that was anything but accidental, with the objective of seriously injuring or even killing the activist.”

Last year, Burgess revealed, ASIO uncovered a plot by a foreign intelligence service to harm and possibly kill one or more individuals on Australian soil. “Working with our international partners, we determined this plot was part of a broader effort by the regime to eliminate critics of the foreign government around the world – activists, journalists, ordinary citizens. The regime considers them opponents; we would call them human rights advocates,” he said.

Beyond those egregious examples of foreign interference, Burgess opened up on other ways that multiple foreign regimes are continually attempting to monitor, harass, intimidate and coerce cooperation not just from Australian citizens but also foreign citizens who live in this country.

This includes trying to strongarm people to report on other members of their diaspora community, threatening perceived dissidents and their family members with violence, and coercing people in Australia to return to the country of their birth to face questioning or charges – or possibly worse.

Then there are what Burgess called attempts at coerced repatriations, where foreign governments apply so much pressure to targeted individuals that the victim believes they have no alternative but to leave Australia, irrespective of the consequence.

“ASIO is aware of at least four countries that have plotted this sort of despicable behaviour in Australia,” said Burgess. Attempts at coerced repatriation in Australia included cases where local community members and businesses were secretly recruited, paid and manipulated to track down targets. Victims faced relentless late-night calls from foreign officials, demanding their return, while regimes also pressured spouses, parents and friends to urge compliance. Some victims saw their relatives’ savings and assets seized overseas, with the threat they will remain frozen until the victim returns home.

“While coerced repatriations can have dire consequences for the individuals being victimised, they also have a broader chilling effect on diaspora in Australia,” he said. The effects were individual and community self-censorship, disengagement from political activities and a “culture of fear” that creates “a perception that a hostile foreign government’s reach extends across the Australian border”.

Among the escalating threats in today’s polarised, grievance-rich environment is the growing strain on social cohesion. Burgess said Australians can expect spikes in communal violence, something the Jewish community here is seeing firsthand.

“Anti-Semitism festered in Australia before the tragic events in the Middle East, but the drawn-out conflict gave it oxygen – and gave some anti-Semites an excuse,” said Burgess. “Jewish Australians were also increasingly conflated with the state of Israel, leading to an increase in anti-Semitic incidents,” he said, adding that he remained concerned such attacks “have not yet plateaued”.

While religiously motivated violent extremism still represents a significant threat, the dynamics are very different from a decade ago, Burgess said. “Of all the potential terrorist matters investigated last year, fewer than half were religiously motivated. The majority involved mixed ideologies or nationalist and racist ideologies.

“Almost all the matters involved minors. All were lone actors or small groups. Almost all the individuals were unknown to ASIO or the police and it is fair to say they allegedly moved towards violence more quickly than we have seen before,” he added. “Importantly, none of the attacks or plots appear to be directly inspired by the conflict in the Middle East or directed by offshore extremists.”

Of serious concern to law enforcement authorities were details of the speed with which Australian minors from as young as 12 years of age are being radicalised, with recent cases involving a 12-year-old allegedly wanting to blow up a place of worship, and a 17-year-old allegedly watching Nazi propaganda and Ku Klux Klan videos and scrawling “gas the Jews” on the walls of a classroom.

“The median age at which minors are first subject to ASIO investigation is now 15,” said Burgess. “Our minors case load is overwhelmingly male – around 85 per cent. It is also overwhelmingly Australian-born. Fewer than 17 per cent of the minors we’ve investigated were born offshore and, of those, the median age when they first arrived in Australia was four-and-a-half years old.”

Seeking to reassure voters concerned over the possibility that foreign actors may try to interfere in the upcoming federal election, Burgess made clear that ASIO already has specialist teams embedded within the Australian Electoral Commission to monitor suspicious activity. “We will be watching. If a foreign regime tries to meddle in the election by pressuring diaspora groups, directing foreign language newspapers, spreading disinformation on social media or using any of the other tactics sometimes seen overseas, we will know,” said Burgess. “And we will act.”

According to Justin Bassi, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, rather than downplaying them, a frank discussion of the threats facing Australia should give the public confidence that the government and the authorities have our safety and security as the top priority.

“The world has multiple fires simultaneously and they are not burning out but rather are growing and getting worse. That’s why Mike Burgess explained the trend and what the future might look like, instead of just recounting what had been happening over the past year.”

Bassi summarised the ASIO chief’s message as a warning that the world is not stable.

“You don’t want to stoke fear, but you need to recognise that people actually feel more alarmed when they don’t know what’s going on,” Bassi says.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 22, 2025 as "Proof of Burgess".

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