Gloominess And Magical Thinking: The Comical, Frightening Mike Burgess

Never allow intelligence chiefs to speak publicly. Their prerogative lies in lying, their reassurance, cool deception. While the attractions of transparency are powerful, the result of a garrulous spook is always going to be unreliable.

In Australia, a comically looking individual by the name of Mike Burgess terrorises and terrifies the local populace as head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic spy agency. It will surprise no one familiar with this approach that it resembles several that have come before. Keep them frightened, soften them for the next encroaching round, and await ever larger budgets for the already fattened calf known as the national security state.

In his 2025 threat assessment, the chief tries to be bracingly calm and reassuring, even as he delivers the frightening blows. “Fortunately, I was born with the glass-half-full gene.” He tells us the agency is “always looking ahead”, which is encouraging. Prior to making that point, he says that he had “focused on past and present threats.” With pointless contradiction assured, the theme is set for clotting clichés, grammatical torments and trying formulations. “This year’s Assessment is future focused. And I think it’s fair to say it’s the most significant, serious and sober address so far.”

Those wishing to waste their unrecoverable time listening to the address then realise that the agency has become a victim of public relations capture and trend shopping. Sections have been created that would make your run of the mill moronic university manager sigh. There is, for instance, a “Futures Team” (think “Future Fellows” or “Deans of the Future” – their reality is never the now but always deferred) that supposedly “pours over classified intelligence, reviews open source information, consults experts and uses structured analytical techniques to develop in-depth assessments about future trajectories and vulnerabilities.”

The only thing missing from this froth is the use of artificial intelligence (appropriate for ASIO), which is bound to do the job as competently as any in the “Futures Team”. For all we know, this is already being done, the machine component triumphant, the human minds lazily tempted.

The predictable banalities follow in the Burgess show. “Australia has entered a period of strategic surprise and security fragility.” If so, Australia has been entering for a very lengthy period, given the number of addresses Burgess has given. Like an academic who rises to the top on the strength of one idea and one paper eternally rewritten, the director can be relied upon to bore with ideas that have come before, ribboned and stringed for effect. “Over the next five years, a complex, challenging and changing security environment will become more dynamic, more diverse and more degraded.”

The Australian public, it would seem, is not playing along with the authorities. How dare they question and debate the norms they have been told are so sacred to servile stability? “Social cohesion” – a vacuous term – is apparently eroding. Institutions are no longer trusted, while intolerance grows. Truth is being assailed (Burgess is a true comic as spy chief), “undermined by conspiracy, mis- and disinformation.” For an entity that specialises in all three, this is fabulously funny.

The terrifying world, it would seem, is replete with “multifaceted, merging, intersecting, concurrent and cascading threats.” He is concerned “about young Australians being caught up in webs of hate, both religiously and ideologically motivated”. There is a sense that individuals are seeking “hybrid beliefs”, cherry-picked from a garden of tempting varieties. Environmentalists of the left commune with Hitler in their beliefs. Islamic State propaganda converses with neo-Nazi dogma. Students of history will hardly find these couplings odd, but looking ahead will do that to you.

In terms of concrete threats, one is singled out as numinous. One can only cringe at the identification of what Burgess calls “the A-team”. This mysterious “Australia team” is supposedly dedicated to combing “professional networking sites for Australians with access to privileged information, and then use false, anglicised personas to approach their targets.” Their targets are offered “consulting opportunities” and generous sums for reporting on Australian trade, politics, economics, foreign policy, defence and security. This does really sound like money poorly spent by the “A-team”, but who are we to judge? Some people are evidently living it up.

Magical thinking also figures in domestic spy land. We find that questioning the imbecilic foreign policy decision by Australian governments to purchase and construct fantasy nuclear-propelled submarines as servitors of the US empire is bound to be the product of “foreign interference”. The agency “has identified foreign services seeking to target AUKUS to position themselves to collect the capabilities, how Australia intends to use them, and to undermine the confidence of our allies.”

In his 2024 address, Burgess quotes the words of Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley to the Australian Parliament after establishing ASIO: “It is not usual to discuss the detailed activities of a security service. Much of the value of such a service lies in the fact that it works quietly. Members of the organisation should not be unduly prominent at cocktail parties, but should devote themselves to the tasks allotted to them.”

Burgess, ever the funny man, then takes a stab at humour, claiming to be more permissive than the former Australian PM: “given the work my people do, I would never begrudge them the odd cocktail party now and then”. If only his agents, and Burgess, spent more time at such events and less time babbling on the stage, we would all be better off.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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