The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, according to its latest annual report, needs more funding. It can’t address the threat of foreign interference and espionage while also dealing with the threat of terrorism, director-general Duncan Lewis warns in his review.
“… [The] higher level of espionage and foreign interference threat — combined with greater awareness among our stakeholders of that threat — has increased demand for our advice and support, which is stretching current resources. With the terrorist threat showing no signs of significantly decreasing, ASIO has limited scope to redirect internal resources to address the increasing gap between demand for our counter — espionage and foreign interference advice and our ability to furnish this assistance.”
Lewis’ warning was dutifully echoed by a Murdoch drone in The Australian. Except… if you read The Australian, the government has been doing nothing but increasing ASIO’s budget in recent years.
“Budget 2019: $570m security boost to keep nation safe”, The Australian excitedly reported earlier this year. Then there was “Foreign aid boost for spy agencies” in 2017, and “Budget 2016: Boosted ASIO warns of cyber terror risks” the year before. Tragically, you have to go elsewhere than News Corp to find out that ASIO’s budget was also increased in 2018. And if you actually look at ASIO’s funding in recent years, it has been boosted way ahead of inflation.
ASIO’s government revenue for the current financial year will be over $463 million, compared to around $400 million if its 2011-12 funding levels had simply been increased for inflation, and without any “efficiency dividend” of the kind most public service agencies are required to submit to. Its staffing expenditure has also increased well ahead of inflation as the numbers of spooks in the agency’s flash new Canberra headquarters (cost: $700 million from the Gillard government) has ramped up. Maybe The Australian should be asking why ASIO is still complaining about a lack of money when it has been showered with billions in recent years?
Thanks for yet another timely reminder Bernard. We are apparently plagued by bludging and unnecessary public servants which may be partly true. However it seems the least accountable ones are getting the big funding increases.
How many staff of what type do ASIO and similar organizations employ ? How are their workloads and divisions of labour apportioned ? Do they have good management practices and benchmarking ?
For all we know half of them sit around while the other half do all the work. More importantly how do we know they’re focusing on the right issues and people ? There is no good reason why proper external review processes shouldn’t happen. It’s not just the money. Are they doing a good job with what they’ve already got?
The van is just around the corner Mark…best you shut your mouth and desist from asking embarrassing questions.
In the USA the Pentagon, which also has regularly increased budgetary allocations, and its echoes in Congress and the media are crying about its need for more money as the largest navy in the world shrinks and the billions upon billions burnt uselessly by the F35 program fail to produce a regularly flyable product. How will they ever defend themselves against Venezuelan aggression? The more unaccountable your money pit, and that organisation has turned unaccountability into an art*, the more money you have to pour in while still they cry poor.
*One reason why the F35 is almost unusable is that the US Air Force doesn’t know what spare parts it has for them nor where they are.
Might be some Turkish spares soon on the “dark web”.
Turkey is trying to develop its own equivalent fighter. If it flies we might be able to buy some and if Trump manages to provoke them to leave NATO we might get them to throw in some of the nukes the US had stored in Turkey.
Simple. ASIO is trying to catch up to the NSA. Size gives street cred with peers at Five Eyes meetings, in between the boozing, gambling, womanising, and bribing.
According to ‘Time’, on the tenth anniversary of the ‘War on Terror’, a ‘Costs of War’ study group of two dozen academics put the total, real cost thus far at $5 trillion.
War on Terror operatives amounted to a combined workforce of 854,000 people. In Washington alone, 33 new top secret complexes were built since the 11th of September attacks – with a combined floor space of 1.6 million square metres or about 80 MCGs.
Two investigative reporters discovered that there is neither supervision nor coordination of what turned out to be more than 1,270 government agencies, almost 2,000 private companies and 854,000 people working on “counterterrorism”, “homeland security” and “intelligence” at about 10,000 locations across the country.
Only 854,000 people ? Shit ,we’ve got millions upon millions of self made selfie volunteers you could throw into the mix of surveillance..but then again, they say self conscious knowledge is power .