When the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation speaks, people tend to listen. And in his annual threat assessment address last night – his seventh – Mike Burgess was speaking to multiple audiences, including those threatening Australia’s security and the public in whose name ASIO acts.

For the former, his message was a warning: ASIO has their number. For the latter, the message was more mixed: they should be reassured about ASIO’s capabilities; shocked but not surprised about the grim security threats Australia faces.

Before Burgess’s inaugural 2020 address, ASIO directors-general rarely spoke beyond closed-door briefings. Now the annual threat assessment is a public event, reported widely and attended by Canberra’s national security and diplomatic luminaries. It’s also an opportunity to illuminate the big picture of Australian security.

In Burgess’s telling that’s a security environment in which threats are increasingly interconnected and diverse. It’s one in which the ancient hatred of antisemitism drives both anarchist and Nazi, Christian fundamentalist and Islamist. It’s a world in which traditional demarcation between countering terrorism and countering foreign intelligence threats is less relevant. It’s where ASIO’s counter-terrorism cases cue counter-intelligence investigations and vice versa. Or where a synagogue’s firebombing ‘can simultaneously be criminal arson, foreign interference, the promotion of communal violence and politically motivated violence.’

Worryingly, it’s also a ‘permissive environment for violence’ as cross-ideological extremism, social fragility and an information environment geared to outrage increasingly normalise politically motivated violence.

But it’s also a security environment that shouldn’t allow for pat prioritisation choices between countering terrorists on one hand and foreign intelligence services on the other.

This was a clear message to those commentators and politicians who have focused their attention on the relative resourcing of security threats before the 14 December attack on Jews at Bondi last year. That focus has distracted from the actual nature of the terrorist threat faced (and its social and policy underpinnings) and the actions or non-actions of agencies before the attack (an aspect also obscured by the pending criminal trial).

Referring to an apparently average week in ASIO, where ‘every week is “one of those weeks”’, Burgess asked rhetorically whether ASIO should sideline more than 40 priority counter-terrorism cases underway or ignore such other threats as:

—A 10-year-long intimidation campaign against an individual whom a foreign government was seeking to coercively repatriate;

—Iran’s proxy arson campaign against Jewish targets in Australia;

—Foreign hacking of critical infrastructure in preparation for sabotage; or,

—An attempt to cultivate an Australian security clearance holder to betray AUKUS and other defence secrets?

For those tempted to suggest ASIO should pivot wildly from ‘single threat to single threat’, Burgess was insistent his organisation ‘must counter multiple threats simultaneously’.

Resourcing decisions are not based on mathematical formula or arcane budget rules; they are continuously responding to a dynamic security environment. If we [ASIO] know about a serious threat, we address it. And if we have concerns about a developing threat, we inquire and investigate.

This wasn’t Burgess’s only message to the government. He also floated the inadequacies of the long-standing terror threat levels, pointing out how inadequate the current ‘Probable’ level is in accurately capturing the present security environment and how the next level up – ‘Expected’ – applies only when ASIO knows of a specific attack. In the subsequent Q&A he confirmed that ASIO was in talks with Home Affairs about reform of this system.

As in previous years, the director-general also had sharp messages for those foreign intelligence services targeting Australia, whether they were engaged in ‘coercive repatriation’ and intimidation of diaspora communities, hybrid operations with local criminals, cyber-attacks or old-fashioned espionage.

Similarly, Burgess took the opportunity to provide a case-study of ASIO successfully disrupting foreign intelligence operations targeting Australia. In this account, ASIO, with the invaluable assistance of the security clearance holder mentioned above, first confronted the intelligence officer doing the cultivation under cover of a consultancy – and then the foreign intelligence service for whom they were working.

And in case [that service] did not report it up [to their government] – I’m confirming it now.

‘Message received’, indeed!

And a message not just for the foreign spies. Burgess’s invocation of the helpful clearance-holder reflects yet another audience for his speech, namely those in possession of the nation’s secrets and prime targets for espionage.

Indeed, there were multiple other audiences for Burgess’s remarks.

For Australians who might be tempted to look the other way in the pursuit of a dollar, for example private investigators or lawyers engaged by a foreign government: ‘understand this: ignorance is no excuse. You could be aiding and abetting foreign interference.’

While reassuring the targets of foreign interference in Australia that they should contact authorities if subject to coercion and that ‘you do have a choice’.

Even journalists were singled out for advice: ‘By all means report the news, but consider how you report the news’ (in the context of lowering the temperature of the security environment).

And there was the obligatory plug for ASIO as an employer to potential new recruits.

Finally, for the broader Australian public, Burgess’s message was similar to that of past years: ASIO is a capable and effective security service but national security is the nation’s problem, not just ASIO’s, and requires a whole of community response.

What’s more Australia cannot become complacent or simply resigned to the serious security threats we face. It’s all too true but when the next outrage occurs (and Burgess included in this the real prospect of an Australian being killed by a foreign government on Australian soil) we will be shocked – ‘but we should not be surprised’.

A sobering message indeed. Here’s hoping it’s understood by the audience.