WORDS MATTER BUT THEY MUST SAY SOMETHING

Anthony Albanese stressed that “words matter” in Monday’s media conference announcing that ASIO boss Mike Burgess had lifted the National Terrorism Threat Level from “possible to probable”.
The Prime Minister was mostly taking a swipe against the Greens and Labor defector senator Fatima Payman for being partisan about a war where “Australia is not directly involved in what is occurring in the Middle East”.
The words used by Albanese, Burgess and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus added no clarity as to why the threat level was being changed, or the timing of the announcement or what would happen as a result.
All three speakers stressed that they had no intelligence information pointing to an imminent or specific threat. Burgess claimed that protesting in Australia was not a direct response to “tragic events in the Middle East”. He added that “Gaza is not the cause” but then said it was a “significant driver” of protest behaviour in Australia. What can that distinction possibly mean?
Violent Islamist extremism of the type promoted by Iran and their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah were not mentioned at the press conference.
The Islamic State is identified on the updated National Terrorism Threat Level web site as “certainly building on recent successes to plan and conduct further attacks with an intent to target the West, and would consider Australia a legitimate target”.
What replaces a focus on Islamist extremism is a more generic concept of “politically motivated violence”. This is intended to suggest that violence can emerge from many different sources: individuals radicalising online against all manner of different causes including anti-government, anti-authority and perceived personal injustices.
In a briefing I received from an intelligence source after the Prime Minister’s announcement, I was told a “rise in self-righteousness” was seen to be “endemic across Western democracies”, driven by social media in many cases.
Minors were “growing up online”, mental health issues were more prevalent in this group and across society people were becoming “more polarised and politicised” with a tendency at extreme ends of the political spectrum for there to be a “mainstreaming of violence and intimidation and a normalisation of provocative behaviour”.
A likely outcome is that individuals at the fringes of radical groups could embark on violent actions by themselves.
Pity poor cash-strapped and workforce-limited ASIO trying to deal with “all the threats, all at once” as well as cold-war levels of espionage and foreign interference. I fear an approach that treats all potential threat as an undifferentiated problem is one that denies a clear reality: the biggest terrorism risk since 9/11 has been Islamist violent extremism.
No doubt our society is becoming angrier and shorter tempered. In work I did on counter-terrorism for the NSW government a few years ago, security heads of major businesses and locations were sharply concerned with the rise of “zero to 100” outbursts of anger and violence in malls and public places.
This explains the flourishing of signs asking customers to treat staff with respect and the long watch lists of “fixated individuals” maintained by police forces.
Accepting that PMV is a new and dangerous reality for intelligence and law enforcement, it would be a wildly dangerous category error to conflate violent Islamist extremism into this group.
Sunni extremism remains highly organised, ideologically convincing to a large number of people, well-funded, recruiting online and globally problematic. It is not going to be understood or countered by adding it to a swirling mix of adolescent grievances bubbling to the online surface.
The next terrorist incident in Australia may emerge from an ideology that isn’t related to Islamist extremism, but the record of the past two decades suggests its more than likely the incident will be Islamist.
What ASIO’s PMV approach does do, however, is give the government a leave pass on its failure to properly manage domestic pro-Palestinian radicalism since the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023.
Let’s be clear, the single biggest source of intimidation, “normalised provocative behaviour” and “mainstreaming of violence” has come from the pro-Palestinian protest movement. This is the group defacing war memorials, blockading politicians’ offices, threatening Jews and occupying campuses.
Yet Burgess maintained on Monday that radicalism was “across the board. Yes, there’s plenty of anti-Semitism, but there’s plenty of Islamophobia at the same time. It’s kind of, almost, equal treatment. Not quite, but almost equal treatment.”
Let’s see the data that justifies that statement. On the face of what is publicly observable, I do not see this “equal treatment” between anti-Semitism and instances of Islamophobia.
What I see is a sustained and growing 10-month campaign against Australian Jews led by a violent, well-organised protest movement and inadequate responses from a politically conflicted government.
In the face of that reality, one might ask why it has taken ASIO so long to lift its National Terrorism Threat Level?
The lesson for ASIO is that it is much harder to raise than lower the threat level, but probably best to do it a few months out from serious budget preparations in Canberra. Jim Chalmers won’t want to hear it but just like Defence, ASIO cannot deal with a growing domestic security crisis without substantial extra funding.
Politically, it is probably coincidence the threat level was lifted days after ASIO left Home Affairs to return to the portfolio embrace of Attorney-General.
What a full-scale security disaster is emerging on Labor’s watch! A Defence plan that won’t produce bang for the buck until the 2030s, a “workforce crisis” as military personal leave in droves, and the seeds of PMV “endemic across Western democracies”.
Albanese’s call for Australians to “be aware but not frightened” just touches the surface of security problems we face, thus far without due thought or preparation.