Australia is on “alert” for signs of violence in neo-Nazi and Islamic extremist circles as the horror in Israel and Gaza rolls on, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) chief Mike Burgess said this week.
At an intelligence summit featuring the Five Eyes coalition — spy bosses from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom — Burgess told Nine’s newspapers: “We know the neo-Nazis would be looking at this. They have it well planned as part of their awful ideology and they do not like Jewish people — and you know where that goes — so you see them firing up.
“On the other side, you would have people who are going: ‘Well, Muslims are being oppressed; this is terrible, I’m feeling bad about that,’ and that might stir up their ideology to think violence is the answer. That’s what we have to look out for.”
This followed Burgess’ warning earlier this week about “opportunistic violence with little or no warning” in Australia and his calls on “all parties” to calm their rhetoric: “Inflamed language and inflamed community tensions” go hand in hand, he said.
That Burgess also said he did not yet see any evidence of extremists planning violence as a result of the war (just that the threat level in Australia made it “possible”) raises the question: what brings ASIO heads out of the shadows (to use their favourite phrase) to publicly address a threat? And do certain threats attract more interest from governments than others?
China
No equivocation on this one. The primary reason for this week’s Five Eyes summit was to publicly accuse China of the biggest intellectual property theft in history.
“The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained, scaled and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess said. “It’s unacceptable. It’s unprecedented.” Hence, he said, Five Eyes members making their usually secret meeting public.
This follows revelations earlier this year that a Sino-Australian relations academic had his phone confiscated and was offered $2,000 to provide information during a “heavy-handed” and “counterproductive” episode which eventually saw the academic leave the country.
ASIO never seems to have any issue getting a hearing about the threat posed to Australia by China — in fact, the Morrison government was so enthusiastic with its embrace of that rhetoric in the early part of 2022 that Burgess was forced to ask it to cool it a bit, saying Coalition attacks on Labor (despite the two parties being in lockstep with policies on China) were “not helpful for us”.
Right vs left
The actual sources of terrorism threats has been something ASIO has been a bit more taciturn about over recent years.
There was an explosion in white supremacist violence, and an attendant creep of similar rhetoric into the mainstream internationally and in Australia in the years following the election in the US of Donald Trump. And while then-ASIO head Duncan Lewis had to field questions about the link between refugees and terrorism (short answer: there isn’t one), neo-Nazis infiltrated the ranks of the Young Nationals, a series of white nationalist figures were interviewed on mainstream networks, and the Senate hosted speeches calling for a “final solution” on immigration and a motion explicitly referencing a white supremacist slogan endorsed by the sitting government — all leading to the unspeakable horror committed by an Australian in Christchurch in March 2019.
Yet, in early 2021, ASIO reclassified specific terrorism threats in more general tones, relabelling Islamist terrorism and right-wing terrorism as “religious” and “ideological” respectively, with Burgess notably failing to push back during his appearance at Senate estimates when Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells dubiously argued that Nazis weren’t “right wing”.
We can’t speculate why ASIO took this position — but we will note that in early 2020, ASIO pointed to the specific and growing risks of right-wing extremist terrorism in Australia — reinforced by later statistics on the origins of threats in Australia — and in response then-Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton felt the need to call attention to “left-wing lunatics”. He counted Islamic terrorists among their number for some reason.
Indeed, ASIO could be forgiven for wondering if Home Affairs was listening to it at all — two days before the mosque shootings in 2019, then-Home Affairs head Mike Pezzullo delivered a speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute titled “Seven Gathering Storms — National Security in the 2020s”. It featured no reference to right-wing terrorism.
I seem to recall Dutton as Home Affairs Minister ignoring the advice of ASIO, AFP and others by loudly squarking that there was no right wing terrorist threat. Only left wing terrorist threats.
Burgess said “The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained, scaled and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history.” Bold claim! There must be many examples for him to draw on as EVIDENCE to bolster his claim. But no evidence is produced thus making his claim seem fanciful.
This is actually really old news. China has been one of the “one license” countries as far as software is concerned for decades.
The question is: what is the IP Burgess is referring to? Who is the owner? My guess would be semi conductor manufacture – which is already in Taiwan as far as the most advanced processes are concerned.
This does feel like something prompted by American corporate interests. You know the same ones who sacked their work forces then moved manufacturing to China (making the racist assumption “they’ll never catch up”)
The whole Huawei panic was not about spying but about China out competing American companies.
Just following on the coat tails of America again:
As if America, that self proclaimed upholder of World Democracy, (and the UK and others), does not do spying as well as China.
Spying is not the same as intellectual property theft
That depends on how privatised your military is !
Obvious really.
Get yourself on the news, state firmly and with a convincing demeanor.
“Me and My Organisation are striving day and night to keep Australia safe.
BUT, we keep finding more and more threats. I need more pay for my increasing responsibilities. Also heaps more people to think up new threats and deal with them. Mostly however we need more money, lots and lots, more money.”
“To achieve this we need to scare you the Hoi-Polloi witless, so you’ll put pressure on the Government to expand My Realm and give us Big Heaps of more MONEY”.
It’s kind of catch-22, really.
If they say nothing and no threats materialise, they can’t justifying their existence.
If they say something and no threats materialise, they’re justifying their existence but without any supporting evidence.
If they say nothing and threats materialise, then they can’t justify their existence because they not only failed to thwart the threats but failed to all empower us to factor in the risks.
If they say something and the threat materialises, then the sceptics among us will say they did it themselves to justify their existence.
… The sound of money rustling in the backdraft of ‘perceived’ threats?
More true than funny looking transnationally with many former Anglo intelligence etc. types offshore, replicating the behaviour of RW grifters and fedin into RW narratives…. and many of the same in the UK didn’t view Putin’s Russia or proxies as a threat till February 2022……
Recently ByLine Times UK shone a light on a bizarre example (2 Oct ’23) in ‘The Brexit Conspiracy Files: Top Science Journal Faced Secret Attacks
One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, Nature, was the target of a two-year-long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-level political, commercial and intelligence connections, according to documents and correspondence examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times.’
Local name in their too, which should be of some concern….
More true than funny looking transnationally with many former Anglo intelligence etc. types offshore, replicating the behaviour of RW players and feeding into RW narratives…. and many of the same in the UK didn’t view Putin’s Russia or proxies as a threat till February 2022……
Recently ByLine Times UK shone a light on a bizarre example (2 Oct ’23) in ‘The Brexit Conspiracy Files: Top Science Journal Faced Secret Attacks
One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, Nature, was the target of a two-year-long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-level political, commercial and intelligence connections, according to documents and correspondence examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times.’