Speaker 1: Already and this is the daily This is the daily,
Speaker 1: This is the Daily oas Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 2: Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday,
Speaker 2: the twenty first of February. I'm Emma, I'm Billy. This
Speaker 2: week the head of Australia's spy agency, Mike Burgers, gave
Speaker 2: his annual Threat Assessment address.
Speaker 3: ASIO investigations have identified at least three different countries plotting
Speaker 3: to physically harm people in Australia. More recently, asio's intelligence
Speaker 3: indicated a different hostile foreign intelligence service wanted to harm
Speaker 3: and possibly kill one or more individuals. We determine this
Speaker 3: blot was part of a broader effort by the regime
Speaker 3: to eliminate critics of the foreign government around the world.
Speaker 1: So, Emma, it is the sixth year that the ASIO
Speaker 1: boss has delivered a wide ranging speech like this, but
Speaker 1: for many reasons, specific details about these threats and where
Speaker 1: they come from a kept confidential. You and I were
Speaker 1: talking about this this morning, about the reasons why they
Speaker 1: have to keep the details very confidential, and so I
Speaker 1: think an interesting question to explore today is is Australia
Speaker 1: more or less safe than it was a year ago?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so to unpack what Mike Burgess said and the
Speaker 2: role of AZO in our everyday lives, I've decided to
Speaker 2: bring in an expert for this one to help us
Speaker 2: read between the lines. Sometimes the language of these addresses
Speaker 2: can be quite complex and feel quite far away. Jennifer
Speaker 2: Parker is a defense analyst and security expert with anu's
Speaker 2: National Security College. She also has extensive operational experience, with
Speaker 2: over twenty years of service with the Royal Australian Navy
Speaker 2: under her belt, and she joins US now. Jennifer, welcome
Speaker 2: to the podcast.
Speaker 4: Hey Ema, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: We are really excited to be chatting to you today.
Speaker 2: We're talking, of course, about this wide ranging speech from
Speaker 2: ASIO Director General Mark Burgers this week. What is the
Speaker 2: significance of the Annual Threat Assessment? What is the purpose
Speaker 2: of it?
Speaker 5: Okay, I think the purpose of it is to make
Speaker 5: sure the Australian public is aware of what has been happening.
Speaker 5: So often, there's a lot of criticism of defense and
Speaker 5: national security organizations in Australia because we say they lack transparency.
Speaker 4: Well, actually, when.
Speaker 5: You look at ASIO, which is really one of our
Speaker 5: most secret organizations in Australia. I think this annual Threat
Speaker 5: Assessment is an approach to make sure that the Australian
Speaker 5: public understands what is happening and can respond to that.
Speaker 4: And I think that's.
Speaker 5: Become even more important given what has been the significant
Speaker 5: deterioration of our strategic circumstances, with conflict in Europe, conflict
Speaker 5: in the Middle East, and seeing some of that play
Speaker 5: out actually in Australia with impacts on our social cohesion.
Speaker 2: What are some of the major themes that came out
Speaker 2: out of the address this time around? Was there much
Speaker 2: that had changed or shifted from this here last year?
Speaker 5: Look, I think the first thing that's actually shifted is
Speaker 5: how ASIO have approached this Annual Threat Assessment.
Speaker 4: So in previous.
Speaker 5: Years it's kind of been a backca so it's been
Speaker 5: a look at what has happened, at what have been
Speaker 5: some of those trends. Intentionally, this year ASIO I have
Speaker 5: sent to kind of declassify elements, or they've said declassify
Speaker 5: elements of their forward looking assessment till twenty thirty, so
Speaker 5: not only say what's happened, but what do we expect
Speaker 5: to see in the next five years, What are going
Speaker 5: to be the trends, So I think that's the first change.
Speaker 5: I think the second change is that Mike Burgess ahead
Speaker 5: of Asio, was clearly at Pains to highlight the fact
Speaker 5: that we are in a really difficult time.
Speaker 4: For a whole bunch of reasons. And I'm sure we'll.
Speaker 5: Get into that, but he called it the most significant
Speaker 5: and sobering assessment, and that is something that is really
Speaker 5: something that the public should take on board in terms
Speaker 5: of the pact of how much things are changing now,
Speaker 5: what are those things that are changing. There is a
Speaker 5: discussion in it around foreign influence operations within Australia, and
Speaker 5: that's a discussion we've actually been having probably for about
Speaker 5: ten years in Australia, and Australia has taken a lot
Speaker 5: of proactive measures to put laws in place to try
Speaker 5: and reduce that. There's been discussion, of course, about the
Speaker 5: threat of terrorism. What's changed on that point is the
Speaker 5: fact that Mike Burgis highlights that the way we've traditionally
Speaker 5: thought about terrorism, the threat of terrorism in the last
Speaker 5: twenty years has started to morph and we're seeing potential
Speaker 5: terrorists people being influenced by mixed ideologies, not the traditional things,
Speaker 5: you know, We've talked a lot in the last twenty
Speaker 5: years about the influence of our CATA, certainly in the
Speaker 5: last ten years about the influence of ISIS. But actually
Speaker 5: some of the examples given in this threat assessment talk
Speaker 5: about people with you know, extreme leftist views who also
Speaker 5: support neo Nazis, which to the average person seems completely
Speaker 5: at odds. But this is this mixed ideology which is
Speaker 5: difficult to track. So the threat system of talks about
Speaker 5: that as a change. It also talks about something we
Speaker 5: talk about a lot these days, which is the influence
Speaker 5: of social media in allowing that to be propelled and
Speaker 5: how that's impacting both political violence anti Semitism within Australia.
Speaker 5: So that's a key trend change. The other trend change
Speaker 5: is I think there's a clear warning in the Threat
Speaker 5: Assessment brief about our upcoming election and the potential influence
Speaker 5: of foreign actors on trying to influence the outcome of
Speaker 5: that election through ideas of misinformation or disinformation, and that's
Speaker 5: been a common trend throughout democratic elections now over the
Speaker 5: last couple of years, something in Australia has been fairly
Speaker 5: resilient to but clearly a concern for AZEO this year.
Speaker 5: I think the other trends is there's a really over
Speaker 5: conversation about issues of espionage. Now when we think espionage,
Speaker 5: we think James Bond, we think Cold War. But there's
Speaker 5: a clear trend in the thread assessment saying that espionage,
Speaker 5: especially as Australia continues to develop some of its high
Speaker 5: tech capabilities, so orcus Australia's nuclear powered submarine pathways meant
Speaker 5: and esminagen's becoming an increasing threat. And we did see
Speaker 5: last year in fact, the Coralov case where we had
Speaker 5: a member of the Australian Defense Force who's actually found
Speaker 5: to have been spying for Russia. And then the other
Speaker 5: trend is this idea of sabotage, which is the idea
Speaker 5: that foreign actors, so foreign governments, might seek to actually
Speaker 5: impact infrastructure in Australia, and that is a trend we're
Speaker 5: seeing across Europe. So in the last twelve months there's
Speaker 5: been about one hundred sabotage attacks from subse cables to
Speaker 5: fires in warehouses to cyber attacks that have actually been
Speaker 5: attributed to Russia. So some clear changes in this threat assessment,
Speaker 5: not only in the way it's approach, but the issues
Speaker 5: that we are having to deal with, and these are
Speaker 5: trends not just impacting Australia but impacting globally.
Speaker 2: So many of the kind of threats and trends that
Speaker 2: you've articulated there really speak to emerging challenges and technology
Speaker 2: innovations and unprecedented conversations around the new face of extreme
Speaker 2: is a mixed idealogies. As you mentioned, how does AZIO
Speaker 2: kind of work to respond to and manage those threats
Speaker 2: in that evolving space? And I guess more broadly, you know,
Speaker 2: for some of our listeners, what does ASIO actually do?
Speaker 4: Yeah, look, I think.
Speaker 5: I have never worked in in ASIO, but certainly their
Speaker 5: approach seems to be first to be able to understand
Speaker 5: what is happening that involves human intelligence, which actually was
Speaker 5: mentioned a lot in the Threat Assessment report. That is,
Speaker 5: people of the general public who may work with ASIO,
Speaker 5: who might inform ASIO, and in fact, as a slight segue,
Speaker 5: the report actually talked about the sacrifices that these people
Speaker 5: make for their country and establishing a plaque to actually
Speaker 5: honor them in the AZO building. Of course, there is
Speaker 5: a huge cyber presence from Asia and now we don't
Speaker 5: know exactly what that entails. But in the threat assessment,
Speaker 5: we saw that the AZO cyber team had actually discovered
Speaker 5: a plot in the US of a young kid who
Speaker 5: was planning sadly, a school shooting in the US, and
Speaker 5: they had managed to detect that online and stop that.
Speaker 5: So AZEO managers internal security in Australia. Now they have
Speaker 5: seven key areas of security that they're meant to focus on,
Speaker 5: and that's issues from terrorism to foreign interference to protection
Speaker 5: of defense capability.
Speaker 4: But that is their broad role. Now.
Speaker 5: Of course, being a security intelligence organization, they don't tell
Speaker 5: us exactly what they do or exactly their structure, but
Speaker 5: you kind of get.
Speaker 2: The sense, I think that some of the kind of
Speaker 2: terms that we hear in these conversations, you know, foreign spies,
Speaker 2: intelligence operations, hostile nation states, it does all sound a
Speaker 2: little bit like a spy movie to a lot of US. Burgers.
Speaker 2: Didn't give too much away. He spoke about at least
Speaker 2: three different countries plotting to physically harm Australia. He mentioned
Speaker 2: another country or regime that had sought to harm individuals
Speaker 2: who were critical of its government. Why wouldn't Azio name
Speaker 2: those countries? What are the pros and cons of disclosing
Speaker 2: those kinds of details.
Speaker 5: I think that, of course, for any intelligence agency, keeping
Speaker 5: details up their sleeve is beneficial for their ability to
Speaker 5: be able to undertake their operations. Of course, there's also
Speaker 5: that diplomatic element. It's not necessarily always a good thing
Speaker 5: to publicly embarrass other countries. And we saw an example
Speaker 5: of this last year actually with the significant fallout between
Speaker 5: India and Canada, when the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau,
Speaker 5: talked about Canada's assessment that India had been sponsoring assassinations
Speaker 5: within the c community in.
Speaker 4: Canada of Canadian citizens.
Speaker 5: Now, I don't want to unpack that detail, but that's
Speaker 5: an example of when these things are exposed publicly, they
Speaker 5: can result in a significant diplomatic fallout. The other thing too,
Speaker 5: we need to be careful of when we talk about
Speaker 5: issues of security is making sure that we don't impact
Speaker 5: social cohesion. In Australia, sometimes calling out certain countries or
Speaker 5: certain groups can unfortunately result in the persecution of people
Speaker 5: or groups associated with that. You know, we can think
Speaker 5: of plenty of examples that in our history. So there's
Speaker 5: a bunch of things to balance there, and I think
Speaker 5: that you know, azo is absolutely right not to be
Speaker 5: declaring these countries, although I do know there was a
Speaker 5: little bit of a warning in the threat assessment, Mike,
Speaker 5: I just actually did say that if some of this
Speaker 5: behavior continues, they may well release it publicly. Now I'm
Speaker 5: paraphrasing dramatically, but it is a tool that they can use.
Speaker 5: But I think for the moment, I think this is
Speaker 5: the appropriate approach.
Speaker 2: Will there be kind of behind closed doors conversations or
Speaker 2: consequences for some of those unnamed countries. I mean, I
Speaker 2: know at these times people always speculate about you know, Russia, China, Iran, etc.
Speaker 2: Stuff going on behind closed doors that were not seeing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because certainly sounds like it.
Speaker 5: So it was also clear from the speech that the
Speaker 5: countries that have been found out that it has been
Speaker 5: made clear to them, and in ways that's actually a
Speaker 5: consequence enough for a country, because that's quite embarrassing to
Speaker 5: know that your spies for want of a better term,
Speaker 5: have been located or your you know, espionage activities, your
Speaker 5: interference activities have been disclosed, because that shows that you
Speaker 5: have vulnerabilities in your system.
Speaker 4: So without that.
Speaker 5: Being declared across you know, twenty four to seven media,
Speaker 5: you've actually kind of embarrassed them internally anyway, which may
Speaker 5: actually deter them from undertaking those actions because they realize
Speaker 5: how strong our security apparatus can be.
Speaker 2: It strikes me that there's so much in the unset
Speaker 2: in terms of these kinds of conversations and reading between
Speaker 2: the lines. What would be your advice, you know, as
Speaker 2: a security expert for people that don't have that level
Speaker 2: of expertise hearing terms like you know, foreign actors, abotage
Speaker 2: foreign interference, what's your advice about how we should be
Speaker 2: interpreting this language.
Speaker 4: Look, I think the.
Speaker 5: First thing is not to be alarmed. I think that
Speaker 5: sometimes especially with you know, the significant changes even in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty five on the international stage, whether we're talking
Speaker 5: about Middle East, the war in Ukraine, or we're talking
Speaker 5: about social cohesion in Australia, there can be a tendency
Speaker 5: to catastrophize everything. That's the first thing not to do, right.
Speaker 5: I think that a lot of attention needs to be
Speaker 5: paid to what Mike Burgers is saying in terms of
Speaker 5: the most significant and sober assessment. I think that Australians
Speaker 5: need to be real with the fact that the world
Speaker 5: is dramatically changing and that may impact our way of
Speaker 5: life if we don't build the architecture all the capability
Speaker 5: to buffer against that, but don't be alarmed. I think
Speaker 5: the second bit is to be aware. You know, if
Speaker 5: you are in some of the communities that are experiencing
Speaker 5: some of this coercion from foreign actors, which has talked
Speaker 5: about in the threat assessment, then that's something that you
Speaker 5: should report, and there is a National security hotline. But
Speaker 5: I think more broadly, just being more aware of how
Speaker 5: our Australia is being impacted by some of these global
Speaker 5: changes and what that might mean for our own security.
Speaker 2: Think Australia is more or less safe than it was
Speaker 2: a year ago.
Speaker 5: Look, that's a really difficult question to answer, right because
Speaker 5: in some ways it's difficult to kind of measure relative safety.
Speaker 5: What I would say is when you think about what
Speaker 5: are Australia's core interests, what are important to Australia, you know,
Speaker 5: what are Australian values? What are the things we depend
Speaker 5: on for the way of life that you know we
Speaker 5: should be pretty proud to have. I mean, we are
Speaker 5: a very lucky country. I think we often forget that.
Speaker 5: That said, we are not immune to what is happening globally,
Speaker 5: and we've seen that play out in terms of the
Speaker 5: conflict in Galza and how that's played out in Australian communities,
Speaker 5: whether that be Jewish communities or Palestinian communities. We're not
Speaker 5: immune to these global trends. And as the world becomes
Speaker 5: more unstable, which unfortunately is what is happening, there's a
Speaker 5: lot of evidence to point to that.
Speaker 4: Then we need to.
Speaker 5: Be really kind of sure of ourselves as a community,
Speaker 5: sure of believing a little bit I guess in our government,
Speaker 5: in our security agencies who are trying to protect that
Speaker 5: way of life that we get to have. Now, all
Speaker 5: that sounds a little bit corny, but as a crux,
Speaker 5: it is true. I mean, we are very lucky to
Speaker 5: live in Australia and that's something that we need to
Speaker 5: work hard to protect.
Speaker 2: Speaking of, you know, protecting what we have here in Australia,
Speaker 2: voters are of course heading to the polls this year.
Speaker 2: We know ASIO has raised some flags about election interference.
Speaker 2: What are the main concerns there and how can we
Speaker 2: get around them?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Look, this was a key theme in the the
Speaker 5: assessment report because a lot of democracies as have gone
Speaker 5: through elections and obviously twenty twenty four was a huge
Speaker 5: election year with you know, elections in India, elections, in US,
Speaker 5: elections in the UK. We have seen this trend of
Speaker 5: other countries and there are examples for example of Russia
Speaker 5: doing this of trying to interfere with the outcome. How
Speaker 5: do they do that through misinformation and through disinformation by
Speaker 5: you know, I mean to be quite frank about it,
Speaker 5: by spreading lies or by twisting truths. And Azio have
Speaker 5: really highlighted that something that they are going to watching
Speaker 5: for this election in terms of what can the average
Speaker 5: Australian do well. Part of it is just verifying. I mean,
Speaker 5: when you receive information, think about what is the source
Speaker 5: you're receiving that from. If it's someone who you've never
Speaker 5: heard of on Twitter, who seems to have no details
Speaker 5: and about two followers, then it's probably not necessarily reliable, right,
Speaker 5: So just think about the source that you're getting it
Speaker 5: from and try and verify that, especially for something who's
Speaker 5: going to influence your thinking in the lead up to
Speaker 5: the election.
Speaker 2: Jennifer, Before we wrap up, I just want to zoom
Speaker 2: out a little bit. This is the sixth annual address
Speaker 2: that we've gotten from ASIO director Mark Burgers, and you know,
Speaker 2: every year there are obviously certain priorities, but also you
Speaker 2: know a lot of information that is kept away from
Speaker 2: the public and for the reasons that you've explained. But
Speaker 2: do you think that this information that we do get
Speaker 2: is effective? Is this important kind of moment annually for
Speaker 2: national security?
Speaker 4: Look? I do think it's an important moment.
Speaker 5: I mean, there has been some criticism that if you're
Speaker 5: not going to tell us all the details, don't tell
Speaker 5: us anything. But I think if we step back and say,
Speaker 5: what is the point of this, right, the point of
Speaker 5: this is to have a degree of transparency in our
Speaker 5: security agencies, to make sure we have an informed public
Speaker 5: that understands what is going on. And the trends are
Speaker 5: not good. And again I said, don't be alarmist and
Speaker 5: don't catastrophized, but they're not good.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, I go back to those terms
Speaker 4: I've used before.
Speaker 5: The most significant and sober assessment that has been delivered,
Speaker 5: certainly in Mike Burgess's tenure so the last six years,
Speaker 5: that's something that we should stand up and pay attention to.
Speaker 4: So I think it is a really important.
Speaker 5: Part of our society and again going back to that
Speaker 5: lucky country, but not a lot of countries actually get
Speaker 5: that degree of transparency and I think that's a really
Speaker 5: important part of Australia, an important part of our democracy.
Speaker 2: Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much, Emma, that's all we have time for
Speaker 1: on today's episode. Such a fascinating chat. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: and thanks to security expert Jennifer Parker for joining us. Well,
Speaker 1: be back later today with your afternoon headlines, but until then,
Speaker 1: have a great day.
Speaker 5: My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Speaker 5: bunjelung Caalcutin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
Speaker 5: that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Speaker 5: Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres
Speaker 5: Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the
Speaker 5: first peoples of these countries, both past and present.