ASIO director–general Mike Burgess says the agency has disrupted 16 potential terror threats and four more serious plots since the Bondi Beach attack. Those numbers are designed to get the attention of the public but they also demand an explanation. What is meant by a “disruption”? How close were the threats to becoming attacks? Without enough detail to understand the claims, Australians are being asked to treat a headline figure as proof that ASIO is working well, and there’s nothing to see here.
Intelligence agencies cannot publish every lead or expose their sources, that’s the nature of their business. But secrecy cannot resolve every question about performance, especially after an attack that killed 15 people.
A former ASIO informant known as “Marcus” says he warned the agency about Naveed and Sajid Akram years before Bondi. The public doesn’t yet know exactly what was reported, how it was assessed, or whether it could have changed the outcome in 2025. This is information that should be further examined by the current Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
The same standard should apply when Burgess speaks publicly about the possibility of Iranian threats to prominent Jewish Australians. Protecting people is the first priority of any agency and the public also needs to understand the distinction between a credible immediate threat, a broader intelligence concern and a possibility that cannot be ruled out. Otherwise, alarming warnings can shape political debate without giving people a way to assess their meaning and relevance.
This episode examines ASIO’s public claims alongside the questions raised by Bondi, its counterterrorism priorities, the Dural caravan hoax and Burgess’s previously undisclosed meeting with Israeli president Isaac Herzog. As ASIO’s resources and public profile grow, scrutiny of its decisions matters more. National security requires trust, and trust requires more than a running tally of threats the public cannot assess.
