OPINION: The spy agency’s threat assessments are characterised by adjectival expansion from year to year, in which the situation facing Australia keeps getting worse.
Few can argue that since 2013, the debate regarding the challenge posed by China’s rise to Australia’s security has become a defining one for the country’s present and future.
From debates over foreign interference to cybersecurity, decisions over foreign investment, ownership of critical infrastructure and defence spending, the spectre of a China “threat”, despite the “stabilisation” of the relationship since last May, retains its grip on the popular imagination and the political elite.
Some senior public servants are asking: by what authority did the head of ASIO appoint himself as the public judge and jury of the Commonwealth bureaucracy? The remark raises serious issues about what is and isn’t being said here. ASIO by its very nature conducts operations outside public visibility. That is a given. But there have been very few prosecutions of the vast funding ASIO has received from successive federal budgets.And the threat assessments are characterised by adjectival expansion from year to year, in which the situation facing Australia gets worse and worse. What was originally “unprecedented” becomes even more so every 12 months. This crescendo shows no signs of reaching its Everest.
From where Burgess sat, it felt like “hand-to-hand combat”. He also spoke of Australian “lackeys”, used by foreign intelligence agents, that were more “top tools” rather than “top guns”.
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