The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has confirmed publicly that Iran isn’t the only foreign power interfering with a diaspora community in Australia. Responding to a question on whether India was similarly engaged (following a media report), ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess told ABC’s Insiders on 11 August ‘there is a range of countries that [commit foreign interference in Australia], not just Iran, many countries that would surprise your viewers. When [ASIO] find it we deal with it effectively.’
I’ll take Burgess at his word that those countries would surprise, as I have a suitably vivid imagination.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has previously confirmed interference by both the Chinese and Cambodian governments, and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull specifically referred to reports of Chinese covert activities when introducing foreign interference laws in 2017. And similar allegations have been raised publicly against Rwanda, Ethiopia, Myanmar and Vietnam, among others.
What should surprise no one is that the director-general of ASIO would be highlighting this threat. For there is an unspoken contract between the Australian government and those who have come to make their home in Australia and contribute to its future: they have a right to be free of the coercion, politics and prejudices of authoritarian governments they’ve left behind; and our government has a duty to safeguard the social cohesion we strive for in Australia.
So, not only did the former home affairs minister Clare O’Neil specifically call out Iran’s misbehaviour last year; Burgess used his Annual Threat Assessment in February to detail efforts by unnamed foreign intelligence services to harm—even disappear—diaspora members here.
Now it’s a fact of international politics that everyone spies on everyone else. Study of publicised espionage cases between 1985 and 2020 identifies at least 176 separate instances of spying globally, including espionage not just by major powers but by nations such as Ghana, Greece and Ecuador—to name just three that might surprise—and in those cases the spying was directed at the US. And espionage can blend into foreign interference—use of covert, coercive or corrupt activities, typically by intelligence services, to influence other nations’ politics and policies.
But what Burgess and O’Neil were referencing is a particularly pernicious variant of foreign interference, especially for liberal, multicultural societies: interference directed at Australians with links overseas, characterised by surveillance, intimidation and harassment, and spanning Australia and origin countries (where extended family can be used as leverage over Australian residents). Such behaviour is increasingly common although also more commonly countered. According to ASIO successful disruptions of interference activities in Australia have increased by 265 percent since 2020.
What are foreign governments seeking when they do this? Sometimes it’s about regime security (for example, historically in Australia by the former Yugoslavia) or clumsy attempts to police nationals temporarily abroad (for example, international students). Sometimes it’s clothed in the language of countering terrorism. In other instances it’s to enable espionage against Australia (as with South Korean intelligence activities revealed in 2013, or the ‘nest of spies’ revealed in 2021) or to subvert political outcomes (per China’s documented efforts over the past decade). Sometimes Australians are simply collateral damage (for example, when Israel used Australians’ passports in a 2010 assassination mission).
It’s also important to distinguish this behaviour from other, legitimate, influence activities by foreign governments. As O’Neil said last year,
Foreign governments try to influence politics and decision-making in other countries all the time, in perfectly legitimate ways …. But what makes foreign interference problematic and illegal is covertness, and deception. That is, the attempts by foreign governments to secretly influence our cherished democracy, and coerce people living in Australia to behave in ways that undermine that democracy, for the benefit of a foreign power.
Since 2017 successive Australian governments have adopted a bipartisan, prioritised approach to countering foreign interference. In July, the government announced further measures, including expanding and making permanent the four-year-old, and invaluable, Counter Foreign Interference Taskforce. It also established a Foreign Interference Communities Support Hub to help affected Australians identify and mitigate interference threats, and it improved immigration processes intended to manage potential espionage and interference threats from visitors.
This commitment is matched by ASIO itself. Despite some misinterpretation this month when the national terrorism alert level was raised to ‘probable’, Burgess has been clear that espionage and foreign interference and politically motivated violence are now equally ASIO’s principal focuses.
However, ASIO can’t do this without maintaining relationships of trust with diverse communities across Australia. It also needs to be complemented by non-security measures, such as addressing the danger posed by the loss of diversity in home-grown foreign language media and the resulting segregation of non-English speaking residents from the rest of the community.
Countering foreign interference is a whole of nation effort and, even if we’re surprised by which countries are culpable, we should be clear-eyed about the threat it poses to all aspects of society, from the government and democracy to the media, the information we accept as news, and the well-being of our individual citizens and communities.