Subjects: ASIO Director-General Annual Threat Assessment; Antisemitism; Opposition attempting to silence Attorney-General
SALLY SARA: Plots by foreign governments to harm or even kill critics of their regimes living in Australia have been revealed by ASIO's Director-General Mike Burgess overnight.
- ASIO DIRECTOR-GENERAL MIKE BURGESS: The scheme involved tricking the unsuspecting activists into visiting a third country where the plotters would be waiting. They planned to arrange an accident that was anything but accidental, with the objective of seriously injuring or even killing the activists.
SARA: Quite extraordinary revelations in the threat assessment. Mike Burgess made these revelations during the annual Threat Assessment address in Canberra. Mr Burgess also said he fears the recent spike in antisemitic attacks in Australia will have, quote, not yet plateaued and that it's conceivable that Russia could target Australia with sabotage because of Australia's support for Ukraine. Well, the Federal Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, was in attendance last night and is my guest in the studio this morning. Attorney-General, welcome back to Radio National Breakfast.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL MARK DREYFUS: Very good to be with you Sally.
SARA: What did you make of the threat assessment last night? What concerns you most?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: The Director-General said Australia has never faced so many different threats at once, but that the threats are not insurmountable. And I took it that the Director-General is sharing this information to make Australians aware of the security environment in which we live and also reassure Australians that it is working every day to protect them. The cases Mike Burgess outlined last night were successes. They demonstrate that ASIO, and indeed all of our police and our intelligence agencies, are working together to protect our security and our democracy.
SARA: There were some quite remarkable examples. Was the Federal Government made aware of these reported attempts to harm or even assassinate people living in Australia? And will you identify the countries involved?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: We are kept aware, and as the ASIO Director-General has made clear, there are a number of countries engage in interference activity here. Mike Burgess has said what he thinks he needs to say and I'm not going to interfere in the important work that ASIO is doing, so I won't be adding to the comments of Mr Burgess on this point. But I want to make this clear we will not tolerate the surveillance, harassment or intimidation of anyone, anywhere in Australia. We will protect our democracy. Our agencies will protect from harm anyone who seeks to do them harm.
SARA: Have we confronted those nations, if not in public, in private about these specific incidents?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Oh, those countries know who they are. And I'm not going to add to that.
SARA: The outgoing Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, publicly accused the Indian Government of involvement in alleged murders on Canadian soil. Would Australia only publicly challenge a foreign government after the fact of an attack?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Well, they were extraordinary events in Canada, and governments will make judgments from time to time depending on the events. But that was an attempt to murder on Canadian soil.
SARA: A successful attempt.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Yes, indeed.
SARA: Looking at the threats that have been outlined by Mike Burgess, and he's saying, there'll be increase in the difficulty in the second half of the decade, do our security agencies need more resources, in your view?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: We're very confident in ASIO's ability to respond to security threats, and indeed, the ability of our police. ASIO has significant powers, it has exceptional capabilities, and it has the resources that it needs to maintain security.
SARA: Mr Burgess said that he fears that antisemitic attacks are yet to plateau, and he also said that the normalisation of violent protests and intimidating behaviour had lowered the threshold for potentially violent attacks. What do you think about his assessment on that issue?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Jewish Australians, my community, are concerned about the rise of antisemitic actions. It's something which should concern every Australian. Mr Burgess also said that antisemitism existed before the 7th of October. It's an age old hatred that's been exacerbated by recent events. And the Director-General said we need to take the temperature down. We need bipartisanship. We need to end this being used for political purposes. There is no place in Australia for antisemitism, for hatred and the violence that we've seen recently. It's despicable. It won't be tolerated. That's why our government has taken a series of actions to crack down on antisemitism. And of course, I'm concerned to hear the Director-General saying it hasn't yet plateaued.
SARA: There's more to come, unfortunately. On the subject of antisemitism, this is your first interview since the incident in Parliament last week when the Opposition moved a motion to silence you when you were talking about efforts to tackle the surge in antisemitism. You're the most senior Jewish politician in the country. Has anyone from the Opposition come to you to express any regret over how that incident played out in the House?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: An extraordinary number of Opposition politicians have actually approached me or contacted me in a range of ways. I'm not going to make their lives difficult by identifying them, but they saw that what happened in Parliament was a mistake, and they've apologised to me for it.
SARA: Has Michael Sukkar apologised?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I have not had an apology from Michael Sukkar, but it was, I'll say it, it was an extraordinary thing to gag. The gag is used very rarely in Parliament. To seek to gag the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth, me, when I'm talking about a subject as serious as this and a subject as personal and as close to me as this was, was wrong. And I think that everyone in the Opposition realises it, even if not all of them have had the courage or the good grace to apologise.
SARA: Watching that unfold I was wondering for you as the Attorney-General, but also as a member of the Jewish community, as a grandson and a great grandson of those who, some survived the Holocaust, others did not how difficult is it for you to juggle those two roles or to manage what that must be like for you?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I'm proud of my role. I'm proud to serve as the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth, and I hope that I'm managing to balance those difficulties, but it is personal. We must never forget the Holocaust. I'll keep saying that. I've just come back from the 80th anniversary, the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a place where my great-grandmother died, was murdered by the Nazis, and it is very personal, but so it is for every member of the Jewish community. And I think that Australians stand with the Jewish community against antisemitism and stand with the Jewish community in wanting to remember the Holocaust and wanting to say never again.
SARA: Many Muslim groups feel that years of discrimination that they have faced, particularly women wearing hijabs, has not been addressed in the way that more recent antisemitic attacks have. What do you think of that?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: We condemn Islamophobia, we condemn the kind of attacks that we saw in the Melbourne shopping centre this week, and I don't think I can make this clearer, we stand against all acts of hatred and violence. Our Hate Speech law that passed the Parliament in the first week of the sittings that we've just had is the strongest hate speech law that Australia has ever had, and it deals with hatred based on Islamophobia just as much as it deals with hatred based on antisemitism. We don't draw a distinction here. That kind of violence in a shopping centre directed at someone because they were dressed in distinctive Muslim dress is abhorrent.
SARA: Attorney-General, thank you for coming into the studio this morning, I appreciate it.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Thank you for having me, Sally.
