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spying under the radar and hidden in the bushes......For the last few Februaries the Director-General of the ASIO, Mr Mike Burgess, has delivered an “annual threat assessment” by way of a speech to as many worthies as he can gather before him. He’s no doubt got the 2024 edition well in the works and invitations to the event in the post. Potential invitees should brace themselves by building up their reserves of patience because if he’s true to form Burgess will test them to their limit. Mike Burgess’ “annual threat assessment”: Testing our reserves of patience By Paddy Gourley
In 2023, Burgess said that threat assessment speech was “driven by the triple T’s of Threat, Trust and Team. I want to improve awareness of threats, enhance trust through transparency and build our team by recruiting the best and the brightest.” The speech did little to improve awareness of threats or “enhance trust through transparency” although the “best and the brightest” in recruitment land might be attracted by a sense they would have plenty of scope to help Burgess and the ASIO improve the intelligence caper, including in the drafting of speeches. Burgess’s 2023 oration is textually and logically shambolic. It abounds in largely unevidenced assertions, patronises those who dare to question what the ASIO is up to, makes mountains from molehills and is in parts misleading. It is rich in self-congratulation and it needs all the exegetic help it can get. Burgess claims “Australia is facing an unprecedented challenge from espionage and foreign interference…”. That’s ambiguous, ambiguity being a cardinal failing in those providing intelligence. If Burgess means the “challenge” is merely different from previous times, that’s likely although so proverbial as to be not worth saying. Happily, six or seven pages in Burgess clarifies his meaning saying that ”Australians are being targeted for espionage and foreign interference more than at any time in Australia’s history.”. Yet he offers only scraps of evidence in support of that claim, gives no comparisons with earlier eras and gets nowhere near his promise to “detail the scale and scope of the threat”. Thus he:
In all these, and in most other instances, some of which seem trivial, there is none of the promised scaling or scoping and the claims are left without dimension, an essential component in useful intelligence. Burgess lets the snippets flow until he gets to the bottom of the barrel claiming that “defence employees [were] approached in a Canberra bar by two women who wanted to know everything about Pine Gap.” Here fear, anxiety and outrage bubble over – the horror, the horror. Thank goodness the defence employees reported the approach and didn’t spill their guts on the Gap. A close shave to be sure. If he wants to be convincing, Burgess should (a) provide details and evidence in support of his claims and (b) turn down his hectoring/lecturing tone. And he needs to be consistent. “Words matter” he says. Of course they do, so it would be better if he avoided distracting pejorative terms like “lackey”, “top tool” and “hive of spies”. He’s supposed to be giving a threat assessment not writing a gaudy spy thriller. He also should be less dismissive and patronising to those who don’t share his estimate of the threats of espionage and foreign interference. He too much looks down his nose at “individuals in business, academia and the bureaucracy” who he says tell him “ASIO should ease up” on its operations for various reasons he sees as “flimsy”. These people Burgess piously says “should reflect on their commitment to Australia’s democracy, sovereignty and values.” Sensitive souls could well think it a bit rich to be lectured to by the ASIO about the country’s democracy, it being an organisation whose secrecy and limited accountability is a discount on democratic ideals. And while governments might want to promote certain values, public servants like Mr Burgess should refrain from doing so. Citizens don’t need sermons from spooks on values for God’s sake. Indeed, they should be free to have such values as they wish with governments confining their expectations of citizens to living with the law. Burgess says “the Indo-Pacific” is home to some of the planet’s fastest growing populations”. This is notably misleading, another cardinal sin in the intelligence world. If he had consulted information published by his colleagues in the CIA, Burgess would have found that, with the exception of several countries on the African east coast of little strategic significance to Australia (for example, Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia) and Afghanistan, Papua-New Guinea and East Timor, almost all countries in the Indo-Pacific, including Indonesia, have population growth rates lower than Australia’s. Big, important ones like China and Japan are going backwards. This is not a trivial point as population growth rates are of great strategic importance and the policy concern from Australia’s point of view should be that population growth rates in the Indo-Pacific are low, not high. Burgess’s 2023 speech ended on a discordant note. He said that “some of the most rewarding feedback I received last year came from several adversaries.” They apparently complained “about how difficult it’s becoming to operate in Australia. One spy whinged to a colleague ‘I picked the wrong posting, the security service makes this one impossible.’” That observation sits uncomfortably with Burgess’s assertion that “more Australians are being targeted for espionage and foreign interference than at any times in Australia’s history”. If our intelligence services are making things impossible for foreign spies, why would they much bother? A former Secretary of the Department of Defence, Sir William Cole, once observed that “It’s easy in the public service to be pre-occupied with contemporary challenges and to imagine these are new and different. But that says more about the way memory discounts the past than anything else – the latest problem is always the worst.” Burgess should reflect on Sir William’s humble sagacity and, if he must persist in public speaking in ways that didn’t occur to any of his predecessors, he should adjust his content and tone accordingly. If he can’t, those receiving invitations to his next “threat assessment” speech might like to prioritise their attendance against the need to take the dog to veterinarian, visit a hairdresser or go to the pub and risk being asked about Pine Gap.
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labor divided.....
Not since the DLP split in 1955 has Labor been so divided on foreign and defence policy. And always for the same reason.
Members are wide apart on how Labor, State and Federal, can keep its promises for social progress while continuing to give tax cuts to those who don’t need them. Labor has to meet its CO2 reduction goals while supporting coal and gas exports. Labor has to pay for decent schools and healthcare while subsidising the bloated private system. And more.
But on foreign and defence policy, Australians across the political spectrum are more divided and confused than since Vietnam. A nation that is notoriously ill-informed about events in much of the world has been easily led in one direction over Ukraine, in another over China, a third over Gaza, and a fourth over Yemen. And always by the US.
Much of the Australian media provide slimmer pickings on international affairs every day. All of them have unquestioningly backed Ukraine since 2022; Nine cranked up a Sino-phobic Red Alert last year; and now as always, Murdoch vociferously backs Israel.
Yet today’s splits in Australian opinion are of Labor’s own making. The Prime Minister could have reversed them if he brought vision and conviction to foreign relations like Whitlam or Keating or Crean. Instead, Anthony Albanese appears more concerned to keep his ratings up and win the next election or by-election than to improve Australia’s reputation abroad, its independence, and security.
Creditably as Albanese has performed at foreign gatherings, including those President Biden didn’t manage to get to, when he’s travelling he has largely left Labor’s factional division over war and peace to his Defence (right) and Foreign Minister (left) to resolve. They differ on essential issues: Australia’s sovereignty (which Richard Marles repeatedly acclaims) and Australia’s independence (which Penny Wong occasionally asserts). Neither of them can reconcile those positions with the ALP’s declared commitment to the US alliance.
It must be hard for an intelligent and diligent Australian Foreign Minister, born in Malaysia and brought up as a Christian, to have watched for years the colonisation by Israeli settlers of more and more Palestinian territory. She knows that Malaya was a British colony, that Australia’s majority population are the descendants of British invaders and colonial settlers, and that the same applies to Australia’s other three Five Eyes partners: the US, Canada, and New Zealand.
Penny Wong’s Labor predecessor, Bob Carr, fought and won for ‘abstain’ over ‘oppose’ in the UN Security Council about a Palestinian state, only to have that overturned by his Coalition successor. Perhaps with this in mind, Wong managed in the UNGA on 12 December to reverse Australia’s earlier ‘abstain’ and join 152 nations in condemning the ‘catastrophic situation in Gaza’. She led Canada and New Zealand in making a joint statement condemning Hamas ‘terror’ attacks of 7 October, in calling for release of hostages (not mentioning Palestinian prisoners in Israel), recognising Israel’s right to exist and defend itself (but not Gaza’s), and saying Hamas should not (but not saying who should) have any role in the future governance of Gaza.
The three nations added support for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and to re-occupation of their territory, and of course for a two-state solution, which after Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza will not be possible. They even-handedly condemned rising anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment in their own and other countries.
Soon after the 12 December UNGA non-binding resolution on Israel, Richard Marles announced Australia’s support for the US and UK against the Houthis in Yemen. As the ICJ met to consider South Africa’s submission about Israeli genocide, the Prime Minister said Australia would not intervene because he was ‘focussed on a political solution’, whatever that may be. Penny Wong agreed that Australia did not accept the premise of South Africa’s case against Israel.
Neither she nor Albanese explained why, when Ukraine took Russia to the ICJ, Australia rushed to support Ukraine. In her Whitlam Oration (13 November 2022), Penny Wong spoke of Russia’s illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine, causing ‘unspeakable human suffering, including death, injury, destruction and sexual violence as a weapon of war’. She called for more international pressure to be applied to Russia. She added that ‘All of us have a responsibility. We can’t just leave it to the big powers to decide our fates. And we cannot be passive when big powers flout the rules. We are more than just supporting players in a grand drama of global geopolitics, on a stage dominated by great powers’.
Well said, but with the US and UK now bombing Yemen, Australians have not been asked or told why the ADF should again be involved in acts of war unauthorised by the UNSC, in breach of international law, which support Israel’s accused acts of genocide.
https://johnmenadue.com/as-australia-joins-the-us-war-on-yemen-labor-is-a-house-divided/
SEE ALSO: ‘A frightening precedent’: New Zealand to send military personnel to target Houthis
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