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In succumbing to a lust for the limelight, the ASIO director, Mike Burgess, is not making it easier for the government and citizens to retain confidence in him and the organisation he’s trying to run.

Unlike his predecessors, all of whom kept low profiles, Burgess has thrust himself into the public square with statements and speeches in which he’s shown an appetite for lurid half stories, boasting, questionable judgment and a fragility with evidence.

 

Paddy Gourley

ASIO's Mike Burgess and a lust for the limelight

 

In the last few years Burgess has said that:

  • the “Indo-Pacific is home to some of the planet’s fastest growing populations” – that’s not true. Indeed, a key strategic point for Australia is that the big Indo-Pacific countries have slow rates of population growth.
  • “trust in institutions is eroding” – that’s not consistent with data from the Australian Public Service Commission, more of which a little later.
  • “a former Australian politician… sold out their country, party and former colleagues to advance the interests of a foreign country” – as this politician was not named or the nature of the betrayal specified, the reputations of many were impugned with people left to fear the worst.
  • “investment” in ASIO reaped a return of $12.5 billion in 2023-24 – this claim was based on figures as woolly as Shaun the Sheep.

In early November, Burgess was at it again in a speech at the Lowy Institute in which he included the headline-grabbing claim that “there is a realistic possibility a foreign government will attempt to assassinate a perceived dissident in Australia”. According to Burgess, “at least three nations are willing and capable of conducting lethal targeting here”. Who on earth might they be? Burgess hasn’t said. Well, the US and Israel have form in this field of endeavour, so could it be they’re in Burgess’ sights? And Russia would do well to keep its stores of Novichok within its borders.

It’s possible another country might try to assassinate dissidents in Australia, yet the risk must be so inestimably low as not to warrant Burgess giving it prominence. The government and the community would do better to concern themselves more with the killing of women in their homes, now a weekly occurrence. Still, anything to snag a headline, just like the allegations about the traitorous Australian politician.

But most of Burgess’ Lowy Institute speech was given over to a befuddling consideration of “social cohesion”.

Burgess allows that “Fractured community cohesion is not one of the specific matters ASIO is empowered to investigate and assess…”. That’s right. Community or social cohesion is nothing to do with ASIO’s legal responsibilities. Indeed, social cohesion in the hands of security organisations can easily morph into social repression and the last thing citizens need is ASIO telling them who they can cohere with. If some want to chum up with Barnaby Joyce or Pauline Hanson, why not, but let’s not make it compulsory.

Yet, notwithstanding pointing out that social cohesion is not a matter ASIO “is empowered to investigate”, Burgess spent a vast amount of this November Lowy speech excitedly talking about it. Evil forces are “clawing” and “ripping” at “our social fabric”, the “threats facing our social cohesion are unprecedented” and “organised groups” are taking “advantage of weaknesses in our social fabric”.

Burgess concludes that “social cohesion is eroding” and “trust in institutions is declining”, although he doesn’t provide evidence in support of these disquieting conclusions.

Inconveniently, they’re notably inconsistent with those of other organisations with professional standing in the analysis and assessment of social cohesion and trust in public institutions. For example:

  • The Australian Bureau of Statistics says that there is now greater community acceptance of diversity, less experience of discrimination and a slight decline in the proportion of people who feel lonely.
  • The Scanlon Institute on Social Cohesion says that while “social cohesion in Australia is under pressure” it “has been resilient” and has “remained steady”. It adds that that senses of “connection and belonging” are “one of the country’s greatest strengths”.
  • The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says that “feelings about social cohesion” in Australia “are generally either similar to or better than” in other OECD countries.
  • The Australian Public Service Commission’s latest report on Australian public services says that trust in them “has increased significantly in the past year”.

There’s no sign Burgess has taken this evidence into account in forming his views about social cohesion and trust in government or, indeed, that he is even aware of it. Anyway, people can take their pick whom they believe – organisations with professional standing when it comes to questions relating to social cohesion or Burgess and the ASIO.

If Burgess’s apparent misstep on social cohesion were a one-off, allowances might be made. But there are reasons for suspecting that his incautious attitude towards evidence in this case could be part of a pattern. Indeed, in his Lowy speech he also says that “it says a lot about Australia” that he, as “the son of ten-pound Poms can become director-general of Security”. What? That says absolutely nothing of significance “about Australia”, the observation being merely a reflection of the director’s ego.

Government and public confidence in ASIO rests almost wholly on its ability, carefully and dispassionately, to gather and assess all information relevant to matters within their legal responsibilities. This will not always be easy as information will often be incomplete and come in various shades and, where that is so, the reliability or otherwise of any evidence and the weight that could be given to it should be clearly indicated. These sorts of requirements are not reflected in Burgess’ speeches with all their adamant, rhetorical, unnuanced and self-congratulatory flourishes.

The former prime minister, Paul Keating, has called Burgess “the resident conjuror” and reckons Albanese should have sacked him when the ALP won the election in 2022. Albanese has been constant in expressing confidence in Burgess and has reappointed him. Keating may be too harsh and Albanese may be too soft.

Whatever, Burgess’ speeches contain enough to cause a twinge of unease about the degree of confidence the government and citizens can have in the intelligence and information ASIO is providing. Thus, ministers should closely interrogate all advice from ASIO and fully satisfy themselves about its reliability, and the weight, if any, it should be given in policy or any aspect of government administration. Others reliant on ASIO assessments should do likewise.

Three staff of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute recently wrote that “the frequency with which Australia’s director-general of Security now addresses the public should give us pause”. It sure should, if not quite in the sense intended by the institute’s predictable worthies. Indeed, the director should reflect on the studied reticence of his predecessors and leave speeches about intelligence and security to politicians. It can be better sometimes to have people merely suspect one’s fallibilities than to open one’s mouth and prove them.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/11/asios-mike-burgess-and-a-lust-for-the-limelight/

intel failure....

 

The Billion Dollar Balcony. ASIO’s sovereignty failure

by David Tyler

 

“Bondi deserves better … Australia deserves better”. David Tyler examines ASIO’s security failure in Australia’s deadliest terror attack.

While none of this will salve the hurt, ease the trauma of those recovering in hospital, or console the families grieving the loss of loved ones at Bondi, we owe them, and ourselves, an explanation.

Not platitudes, not another sombre press conference, but an honest reckoning of how two men, Sajid and Naveed Akram, father and son, could assemble their arsenal and execute Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack unnoticed by the billion-dollar intelligence estate we are told keeps us safe.

The repetition of failure

What emerges from the wreckage of the Bondi Hanukkah massacre is dreadful familiarity. The faces and headlines change, but the plot remains the same: perpetrators “known to authorities,” a catalogue of overlooked warnings, and a security bureaucracy that responds not with accountability but expansion.

ASIO’s budget now exceeds $700 million annually, a figure that has surged well ahead of inflation since 2011, when funding stood at approximately $400 million. The agency employs over 2,000 staff in its flash Ben Chifley building, Canberra headquarters, and holds powers that reach deep into Australians’ private lives. 

Yet, as Bernard Keane’s analysis in Crikey ($) makes devastatingly clear, none of this prevented a suburban gun arsenal from flourishing in plain sight.

Naveed Akram, 24, had been investigated in 2019 by ASIO for his close ties to an ISIS cell in Sydney, including connections to Isaac El Matari, who identified himself as the head of Islamic State in Australia. The investigation ran for six months before Akram was cleared as presenting “no indication of any ongoing threat.” 

Meanwhile, his father Sajid held a valid NSW firearms licence – a privilege extended to permanent residents, not merely citizens, and had legally acquired six long guns. The weapons sat in the family home at Bonnyrigg, in Sydney’s suburban west, where planning for mass murder apparently proceeded without detection.

The intelligence void

What is the point of intelligence that can identify environmental protesters but cannot link a cache of guns to a known extremist connection? What kind of vigilance mistakes the accumulation of data for comprehension?

For years, ASIO has been granted the tools, the access and the legislative cover to surveil Australians in ever greater detail. Each failure becomes the justification for further power; each failure, another claim to exceptional funding. 

In August 2024, ASIO lifted Australia’s terrorism threat level from “possible” to “probable,” citing heightened risks around the Gaza conflict. Yet when the attack came, at a publicly advertised Hanukkah celebration attended by nearly a thousand people, the surveillance state watched from elsewhere.

What is sold as “learning lessons” has become ritualised immunity. Failure now carries no cost. The system is designed not to prevent catastrophe but to survive it, and then request more funding.

Mossad and the sovereignty question

And then came the admission that laid the pretence bare. In the aftermath of the massacre, Israeli intelligence confirmed it was assisting Australian authorities with the investigation. 

The claim, variations of which appeared across several news services, was that Mossad had warned Canberra about threats to Jewish Australians in the lead-up to the attack, possibly as recently as a month before, when it alerted Australian intelligence to Iranian-backed “terror infrastructure” planning attacks on Jewish targets.

Whether one accepts the framing or not, the symbolism is unmistakable. When another nation’s intelligence operatives are called in to assist with the “mopping up” of a domestic security catastrophe, the admission is plain: our billion-dollar spymasters cannot clean up their own mess. This is not intelligence cooperation between equals. This is dependence masquerading as partnership.

The rhetoric of sovereignty

Only months ago, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess delivered his keynote at the Lowy Institute, speaking in elevated tones of “protecting Australian sovereignty” and “defending Australia’s interests.” He recounted vivid tales of ASIO’s offshore operations, confronting foreign agents in third countries, sending pointed warnings to rival intelligence services. It was theatre crafted to project strength and independence.

Yet when disaster struck, those words shrank to irony. 

If sovereignty means the capacity to protect one’s own citizens from mass murder on home soil without recourse to a foreign power’s intelligence apparatus, then Burgess’s Lowy lecture was exactly what it sounded like: motherhood statements pegged to the washing line of national security, fluttering in the breeze of self-importance.

The contradiction runs deeper still. ASIO’s 2025 Lowy Lecture spoke of “safeguarding sovereignty” and “defending democracy”, grand abstractions deployed to justify expanded powers and budgets. But sovereignty is not an abstraction. 

It is the measurable capacity of a state to secure its territory, protect its people, and act independently of foreign patrons. On that measure, Bondi represents comprehensive failure.

Neoliberal capture of national security

There is a deeper sickness here, and it requires diagnosis. Like much else in Canberra’s official life, Australia’s intelligence apparatus has been captured by neoliberal logic; not the textbook economics of privatisation and deregulation, but the cultural logic of perpetual growth, metrics-driven performance, and the substitution of genuine competence with institutional self-preservation.

This is the phase of neoliberalism that treats sovereignty as negotiable,

alliances as brands, and accountability as a threat to be managed rather than a principle to be upheld. ASIO functions less as a guardian of independence than as a franchise operator within the Five Eyes network, a model that privileges intelligence-sharing arrangements with Washington, London, and now Tel Aviv over the unglamorous work of connecting dots in suburban Sydney.

The agency measures success not by the safety it delivers but by the scale of its next appropriation. It builds its case for expanded power through the very catastrophes it fails to avert. Budget submissions cite “evolving threats” and “unprecedented challenges”, the same rhetoric deployed year after year, immune to falsification. This is not protection; it is performance, underwritten by

the fiction that more surveillance equals more security.

In this model, sovereignty becomes a marketing slogan rather than a strategic commitment. The operational questions, who we surveil, who we trust, and what risks we accept, are resolved not in Canberra but through the inherited architecture of Cold War alliance structures.

Australian intelligence does not operate in service of Australian sovereignty; it operates as a subordinate node in an Anglosphere network whose strategic priorities are written elsewhere.

The neoliberal infection manifests in the familiar pathologies: bloat without capacity, data without insight, secrecy as substitute for competence. ASIO has grown larger, louder, and more publicly visible under Mike Burgess’s leadership, yet its core function, preventing mass casualty attacks on Australian soil, has not demonstrably improved. 

What has improved is its ability to manage narratives, 

deflect scrutiny, and secure bipartisan support for budget increases regardless of performance.

This is the logic that produces a billion-dollar agency capable of tracking foreign intelligence officers across continents, yet unable to notice when a man investigated for ISIS connections lives in a house stocked with six rifles. It is a logic that prioritises the theatrical over the practical, the spectacular foreign operation over the mundane work of domestic vigilance.

Whose sovereignty, exactly?

Meanwhile, Australia’s national security doctrine still orbits Washington and London. The strategic questions: whom we surveil, whom we arm, whom we trust, are resolved long before the file notes reach Canberra. In that light, ASIO’s ritual denunciations of “foreign interference” descend into farce. 

How can an agency defend sovereignty when its operational DNA is written in the language of the Five Eyes alliance, when its threat assessments mirror those of its Anglosphere partners, when its protocols defer to intelligence hierarchies established in another hemisphere?

The contradiction is laid bare at Bondi. 

It is easy to speak of independence at think tanks and Senate hearings; it is harder when Israeli intelligence is stepping in to assist with an investigation that ASIO should have pre-empted.

This is not sovereignty. It is dependency dressed as defiance; the performance of autonomy by an institution structurally incapable of delivering it.

The debt we owe the victims

Those in mourning, those recovering, those whose lives have been shattered, deserve more than another sealed inquiry and another clenched-jawed promise to “do better.” 

They deserve transparency. 

They deserve to know how a billion-dollar agency, armed with unprecedented powers and a legislative carte blanche, missed the signs again. 

They deserve to know who authorised the quiet involvement of foreign intelligence in an Australian domestic security matter, and under what terms. They deserve to know why a man previously investigated for terrorist connections could live in a house full of legally acquired weapons without triggering a single alarm.

And so do we all. If sovereignty means anything, if it is more than the flag used to cover institutional embarrassment, then accountability must be its core. 

Until ASIO can explain what it does with our money, our laws and our trust, until it can demonstrate that Australian lives matter more than budget submissions and alliance protocols, national sovereignty will remain a performance, not a principle.

The watcher on the cast-iron balcony

Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony gave Australian literature one of its enduring archetypes: the observer, elevated and apart, watching the life of the nation unfold below with detachment bordering on disdain. 

It is an apt image for our intelligence establishment, a billion-dollar observer perched above the fray, cataloguing threats, compiling dossiers, watching everything; regularly putting the wind up everyone, but remote or no-show when it actually comes to protecting anyone.

Bondi has shown us again what happens when a nation mistakes surveillance for security and loyalty for competence. The watcher on the balcony can see everything yet understand nothing. The data streams in, the threat assessments accumulate, the public statements assure us all is well. And while the watcher watches, Australians bleed on the street below.

Until we reckon with this failure, not as an aberration but as the predictable outcome of a system designed to expand rather than protect; sovereignty will remain what it has become: a word we invoke when convenient, and abandon when tested.

Bondi demands better. The bereft families of the dead deserve better. Australia deserves better.

 

https://michaelwest.com.au/bondi-attacks-asios-sovereignty-failure/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951

 

GUSNOTE: I WILL STAND BY THE CARTOON AT TOP — IT SHOWS ALL TALK AND WARNINGS BY BURGESS, BUT THESE ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH WHEN THE SYSTEMS HAS CLUES BUT "DOES NOT FOLLOW UP"... SIMILAR FAILURES HAPPENED IN THE 9/11 SORRY DISASTER... 

CONDOLENCES TO ALL THE FAMILIES OF VICTIMS AND BEST RECOVERY POSSIBLE FOR THE SURVIVORS, WITH THE TRAUMATIC IMPRINT BEING MANAGED FOR YEARS TO COME...... 

PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE PIG IN THE LEFT-HAND BOTTOM CORNER.... THIS IS WHAT I WAS AFRAID OF.