The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment: ASIO makes the case for ...

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess called on Wednesday night for national security that’s truly national. Only through such a broad-ranging and joined approach across governments and society can Australia navigate the deteriorating security outlook to 2030, as assessed by ASIO.

Burgess was delivering his sixth public Annual Threat Assessment. Since he introduced them in 2020, the annual assessments have become something of a genre—deadly serious yet interspersed with humour. They present concrete facts in a circumspect but calculated way, acknowledging that adversaries are also a target audience and sometimes even addressing them directly. It’s not how the public service usually talks, and that’s by design.

From the outset, Burgess intended to use these statements ‘to move beyond the bureaucratic language of annual reports and help everyone understand the significant threats we see directed at Australia and Australians’. Since then, it’s become increasingly clear that the operative word was ‘everyone’.

Over the past six years, Burgess’ public statements have tracked the shift in ASIO’s foremost concerns, from the war on terror to the reemergence of espionage and foreign interference. At the same time, he has made the case that today’s violent extremism can’t be thought of, or fought, with concepts and methods inherited from last decade’s fight against Islamic State. As he said last year, ‘threats, circumstances, technologies and people all change’.

But a persistent through-line has been the emphasis he places on security responsibilities beyond ASIO’s walls. That’s an emphasis Burgess has deepened and extended over the years.

In 2020, he chose to underscore how ASIO’s officers are not apart from, but part of, the Australian community: ‘The point is’, he said, ‘we are you’. This time, he might well have said ‘you are us’.

The message was clear that it’s no longer appropriate to think of national security as something a security agency provides for the public. National security is something the Australian public provides for itself, and ASIO is just one, though an important one, of many ways in which the Australian public does that:

You cannot arrest your way to social cohesion. You cannot regulate your way to fewer grievances. You cannot spy your way to less youth radicalisation. In this environment, national security is truly national security—everybody’s business.

That business is unfortunately not in a downturn. This year’s assessment, as the director-general noted, was ‘the first of its kind’. In previous years he’d spoken about ‘past and present threats’; on this occasion he declassified part of a strategic outlook produced by ASIO’s Futures Team, charting broader trends out to 2030. The outlook is unpromising: more security surprises, more threat diversity and fewer effective norms to constrain state and non-state behaviour.

The future Burgess paints is one that is under pressure from great-power competition, the diffuse post-Covid-19 constellation of anti-authority grievances and ever-mutating radicalisation pathways, all accelerated by technological advances. The most confronting thing about this future is not any particular security concern, but that there may be no particular security concerns. Australia in 2030, this outlook suggests, will find it far more difficult to establish security priorities at a strategic level, readily trading emphasis on one source of threat for de-emphasis on another.

The ASIO Act includes seven ‘heads’ of security:

—Espionage;

—Foreign interference;

—Politically motivated violence (of which terrorism is a subcategory);

—Promotion of communal violence;

—Sabotage;

—Attacks on Australia’s defence system; and

—Serious threats to border integrity.

The first three, according to Burgess, are ‘already flashing red’. Excluding threats to border integrity, which he expects to remain manageable under current policy settings, the others are all trending upwards.

Burgess noted the ‘normalisation of violent protest’ following recent events in the Middle East as an example of the increasing ease with which overseas conflicts resonate in Australia as violence between, or consciously targeted at, particular communities.

He identified sabotage, a major concern in the early Cold War, as primed for a comeback. While physical sabotage never goes out of style, cyber-enabled sabotage of critical infrastructure ‘presents a more acute concern for Australia’. Meanwhile Defence, already a priority target for foreign intelligence agencies, is expected to become more so as the AUKUS submarine project matures.

Burgess argued that this security environment of ‘everything, everywhere all at once’ requires a whole-of-society—not just an ASIO—response, and urgently.

When Burgess said ‘we cannot leave our responses too late’, it was clear that the ‘we’ meant all Australians, not just those with ‘security’ in their job title.

ASIO’s outlook, as presented, doesn’t make for pleasant reading. The director-general described it as his ‘most significant, serious and sober address so far’. Indeed, he seemed less inclined to spin yarns or make wry asides than in previous years.

Fortunately for his audience, Burgess ended on a positive, rousing note.

I can assure you ASIO will use all of the tools we have available to identify and counter these threats. Our powers are significant, our capabilities are exceptional, our resolve is resolute.

Now the challenge falls to us as a nation—individuals, communities, governments and security agencies alike—to make good on ‘national’ security.