Spy agency Asio has vowed to follow terrorism threats regardless of the source, insisting investigators won’t be hampered by the relatively low number of rightwing groups officially listed as terrorist organisations in Australia.
The director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, said on Monday some groups were “very clever” and were very careful to do things to avoid getting formally designated, but his agency would focus on anyone who believed “violence is the answer”.
“I can assure you, where we know about them we prosecute them to the fullest extent of our capabilities and law,” he told a Senate estimates committee hearing. “We will – my agency will – go where the threat is.”
In broader remarks, Burgess said Asio had “a very productive year last year removing espionage and foreign interference problems from this country”.
Answering questions from senators about his agency’s priorities, Burgess reiterated his position that espionage and foreign interference had “supplanted terrorism as our principal security concern”.
“Australia is the target of sophisticated and persistent espionage and foreign interference activities from a range of hostile foreign intelligence services. These activities are an attack on our way of life,” Burgess said.
He said despite his decision late last year to lower Australia’s terrorism threat level from “probable” to “possible”, the threat had not evaporated: “Possible does not mean negligible.”
The Greens senator David Shoebridge asked about the fact that there were only three rightwing extremist groups out of the 29 listed terrorism organisations in Australia and whether this is disproportionate to the threat.
Burgess said the threshold for formal listings was strictly laid out in law and it was a matter for parliamentarians if they wanted to amend that law.
But he said where Asio put its resources was not driven by which groups were on the public list and which were not. He also pushed back at the idea that Asio may be playing down the threat of rightwing extremism.
He said he had used his first annual security threat assessment speech to inform the public “that Asio had seen a rise in nationalist and racist violent extremism, so it was my agency that called this out”.
The share of what Asio categorises as ideologically motivated violent extremism – mostly nationalist and racist violent extremism – reached a peak of about 50% of the agency’s priority domestic counter-terrorism caseload in the last couple of years.
But Burgess said that had since reduced. “It did get to 50:50 with our religiously motivated violent extremism cohorts but actually [it] has since moderated. So we’re in the territory of 70:30 – 70% religiously motivated, 30% ideologically motivated.”
Shoebridge said after the hearing: “It’s frustrating to hear that there are some unspecified legal reasons that are preventing rightwing terror groups being listed. These technicalities didn’t seem to be an issue when it came to listing 25 existing religious extremist groups.”
In December, the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, suggested Australia’s counter -terrorism laws could be overhauled to better target the threat of rightwing extremism, saying current legislation may not capture the types of “lone wolf” or less sophisticated acts that are of concern to security agencies.
This month the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, confirmed that this work was under way and “substantial”.
Burgess also commented specifically on people who were “agitated by Covid measures” and “the small number of those that might think violence is the answer”. He observed that there was “less angst these days”.
“It is true there are less people in this country who want to conduct acts of violence in the name of their cause [but] there is still volatility in the mix with people who have a range of grievances around social, economic or some conspiracy theory-driven grievance, and a small percentage of them think violence is the answer,” Burgess said.
Burgess said “nationalist and racist violent extremists – or neo-Nazis” had sought to exploit that dissatisfaction and angst about Covid measures “as a potential recruitment mechanism”. But he did not believe it had been “a bumper campaign for them” because of the overall decline in the threat level.
A number of senators focused their questions on security threats from China.
Burgess said the threat of espionage and foreign interference “comes from a range of countries” and believed it would be “unhelpful for me to call out specific countries”.
He also made clear that members of diaspora communities in Australia were “not the problem”. He said foreign governments and foreign intelligence services were “the focus of myself and my agency”.
The Liberal senator Alex Antic asked about “the incursion of the CCP [Chinese Communist party] spy balloon over the United States” and whether Asio was aware of any attempted incursions, threats of incursions or actual incursions of such balloons over Australia.
Burgess said he did not comment on operational matters but added drily: “In my experience that is not the principal means by which people are spying on this country.”
When asked for comment last week, a Defence spokesperson said: “Defence remains unaware of a similar balloon over Australia. However, we monitor such issues closely.”
