What brings ASIO out of the shadows?

Australia is on “alert” for signs of violence in neo-Nazi and Islamic extremist circles as the horror in Israel and Gaza rolls on, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) chief Mike Burgess said this week.

At an intelligence summit featuring the Five Eyes coalition — spy bosses from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom — Burgess told Nine’s newspapers: “We know the neo-Nazis would be looking at this. They have it well planned as part of their awful ideology and they do not like Jewish people — and you know where that goes — so you see them firing up.

“On the other side, you would have people who are going: ‘Well, Muslims are being oppressed; this is terrible, I’m feeling bad about that,’ and that might stir up their ideology to think violence is the answer. That’s what we have to look out for.”

This followed Burgess’ warning earlier this week about “opportunistic violence with little or no warning” in Australia and his calls on “all parties” to calm their rhetoric: “Inflamed language and inflamed community tensions” go hand in hand, he said.

That Burgess also said he did not yet see any evidence of extremists planning violence as a result of the war (just that the threat level in Australia made it “possible”) raises the question: what brings ASIO heads out of the shadows (to use their favourite phrase) to publicly address a threat? And do certain threats attract more interest from governments than others?

China

No equivocation on this one. The primary reason for this week’s Five Eyes summit was to publicly accuse China of the biggest intellectual property theft in history.

“The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained, scaled and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess said. “It’s unacceptable. It’s unprecedented.” Hence, he said, Five Eyes members making their usually secret meeting public.

This follows revelations earlier this year that a Sino-Australian relations academic had his phone confiscated and was offered $2,000 to provide information during a “heavy-handed” and “counterproductive” episode which eventually saw the academic leave the country.

ASIO never seems to have any issue getting a hearing about the threat posed to Australia by China — in fact, the Morrison government was so enthusiastic with its embrace of that rhetoric in the early part of 2022 that Burgess was forced to ask it to cool it a bit, saying Coalition attacks on Labor (despite the two parties being in lockstep with policies on China) were “not helpful for us”.

Right vs left

The actual sources of terrorism threats has been something ASIO has been a bit more taciturn about over recent years.

There was an explosion in white supremacist violence, and an attendant creep of similar rhetoric into the mainstream internationally and in Australia in the years following the election in the US of Donald Trump. And while then-ASIO head Duncan Lewis had to field questions about the link between refugees and terrorism (short answer: there isn’t one), neo-Nazis infiltrated the ranks of the Young Nationals, a series of white nationalist figures were interviewed on mainstream networks, and the Senate hosted speeches calling for a “final solution” on immigration and a motion explicitly referencing a white supremacist slogan endorsed by the sitting government — all leading to the unspeakable horror committed by an Australian in Christchurch in March 2019.

Yet, in early 2021, ASIO reclassified specific terrorism threats in more general tones, relabelling Islamist terrorism and right-wing terrorism as “religious” and “ideological” respectively, with Burgess notably failing to push back during his appearance at Senate estimates when Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells dubiously argued that Nazis weren’t “right wing”.

We can’t speculate why ASIO took this position — but we will note that in early 2020, ASIO pointed to the specific and growing risks of right-wing extremist terrorism in Australia — reinforced by later statistics on the origins of threats in Australia — and in response then-Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton felt the need to call attention to “left-wing lunatics”. He counted Islamic terrorists among their number for some reason.

Indeed, ASIO could be forgiven for wondering if Home Affairs was listening to it at all — two days before the mosque shootings in 2019, then-Home Affairs head Mike Pezzullo delivered a speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute titled “Seven Gathering Storms — National Security in the 2020s”. It featured no reference to right-wing terrorism.