Australian Security Intelligence Organisation on Warning Time in the Current Strategic Era

The frequency with which Australia’s director-general of security now addresses the public should give us pause.

Before Director-General Mike Burgess, leaders of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) rarely spoke beyond closed briefings. Today, those speeches have become annual fixtures, and are increasing in frequency. This year alone, there have been three: the Annual Threat Assessment in February, the Hawke Oration on counting and countering the cost of espionage in July, and his Sydney Town Hall lecture on 4 November.

There are some immediately evident reasons for this shift, as Burgess himself noted this week. Security intelligence—ASIO’s mission—is fundamentally a social enterprise. Detecting foreign spies, stopping terrorists, countering foreign interference and preventing communal violence all depend on building trust with the communities most exposed to those threats. Public engagement strengthens ASIO’s social legitimacy—its licence to operate—by showing transparency about purpose and proportionality.

Further, the director-general of security holds a uniquely empowered position with explicit authority under the ASIO Act to ‘communicate intelligence’. That authority allows Burgess to explain security threats directly to the public and to demystify the work of national security in ways most other public servants would be constrained from using, even if they were equally inclined. At a time when trust in institutions and national pride is waning, Burgess’s clear articulation of ASIO’s mission also serves as both a reminder of purpose and a call to the nation’s best and brightest to answer the call of public duty.

And there’s an added benefit: it doesn’t hurt to frequently and publicly warn off hostile foreign intelligence services targeting Australia.

But this shift goes deeper than that; it signals something more profound about the tempo and texture of Australia’s security environment, which is unfortunately right now an insecure one.

Burgess’s warning earlier this year that, ‘Three of ASIO’s heads of security are flashing red: espionage, foreign interference and politically motivated violence’ and that ‘In the next five years … three more could join them’ is not hyperbole; it is a message that vigilance needs now to be collective.

His increasingly open engagement reflects both the scale of the threat and the need for national coherence in response. We are being told explicitly, security can no longer be the exclusive domain of government—whether we like it or not.

As Burgess made clear this week, ‘Your business might not be in national security but that doesn’t mean national security is not your business.’ This demands a refreshed social compact across industry, academia and civil society alike.

The goal here is not to alarm Australians but to strengthen our structural resilience in an era where adversaries—both state and non-state—act with sharpening intent, sophistication and impunity.

But reassurance cannot come at the expense of awareness. Shielding the public from confronting truths is not the same as keeping them safe. The threats we face now are too real, and too persistent, to be treated as distant or abstract.

From foreign interference in our democracy to the targeting of individuals, we are being told that we can no longer allow these to fade into the background noise of everyday life—work, school, families—quietly normalised rather than deliberately countered. National resilience begins not with fear but with understanding, honesty and readiness.

Threats, like online content, are everywhere all at once—relentless, overlapping, amplified by the same connectivity that defines modern life.

This presents a two-fold challenge.

First is to ensure Australia is both protected from and prepared for the next crisis.

Australia has had several wake-up calls in recent years, yet each time we seem to have hit the snooze button. Too often, we move quickly to the next urgent task or news story—or become distracted by the sensational—instead of stopping and confronting the new reality that Australia’s security and sovereignty is under sustained and sharpening pressure from foreign governments, their intelligence agencies and proxies. As Burgess noted this week, Australia’s tyranny of distance does not mean distance from tyranny.

We have grown so accustomed to scrolling past information on our online feeds that we are now at risk of doing the same with real-world threats. Instead of glancing briefly, we need instead to confront vulnerabilities through sustained, persistent and adaptive action.

Real protection demands not only vigilance but also the discipline to prioritise the difficult or costly over what merely captures attention. It also means thinking and acting like citizens, not just consumers or residents. We should expect that one day we will face a crisis that we cannot absorb or contain—and the only antidote to that is sustained investment in prevention and preparedness.

The second part of the challenge is to resist anxiety or paralysis and instead embed agility.

That requires a shift from a threat-based to a risk-based mindset.

A threat-based mindset focuses on what could harm us—the actors, capabilities and intentions that generate danger. It catalogues the hostile, the malicious, the emerging.

A risk approach goes further: it focuses on how we respond, adapt and endure. Where threat is about exposure, risk is about capacity—specifically, the capacity to act with clarity and confidence, to reduce the likelihood of harm or to limit its consequences when it occurs.

These offer two sides of the same coin. One secures our foundations; the other sharpens our response. Together, they define what it means to be a resilient nation.

Openness about national security challenges as Burgess is showing is therefore not merely transparency or an effort to bolster ASIO’s social licence in the eyes of the Australian public.

This is a deliberate strategy. Openness, even about threats and risks, unifies by fostering shared awareness, confidence and readiness. Our adversaries seek the opposite: to see us closed off, divided and demoralised. And it is not just three foreign regimes pursuing that goal. What matters less is who they are, and more that their efforts are real—and so must be recognised and resisted.

That level of foresight and preparedness, long familiar in counter-terrorism through a constant public threat level, now needs to extend to the full spectrum of national security threats.

Let’s not as a society wait each year for ASIO’s next threat update as if it were the latest sequel in a film series—because, just as most sequels get worse, the threats are getting worse, too.

James Corera is director of ASPI’s Cyber, Technology and Security program. Justin Bassi is ASPI’s executive director. Chris Taylor is head of ASPI’s Statecraft and Intelligence Policy Centre.

Published by ASPI on November 7, 2025.