Why Australia’s spymaster is scared

For a country that's home to killer spiders and venomous everything, not to mention one of history's most humiliating military defeats against [checks notes] flightless birds, we were a little shocked to see Australia's spymaster drop such a spicy threat assessment.

Here are the four lines from ASIO boss Mike Burgess that you can't ignore, starting with…

1. “Unfortunately, we are already there”

Okay, not inherently spicy, until you recall last year he warned Australia's security environment would turn more dynamic, diverse, and degraded by 2030. So a year later, he's now warning that this darker world has arrived already, five years early.

We'll explore how that’s playing out below, but Mikey-Mike's point here is our world is accelerating in ways he wishes it wouldn't. For example...

2. “When an Australian is killed at the hands of a foreign government on Australian soil, we will be shocked – but we should not be surprised”

That is some Merciless Pepper of Quetzalacatenango levels of spice right there. Which foreign governments would do this? Burgess points to a textbook example: a duo tried to torch a bar in Bondi, then hit a nearby Jewish deli with a similar name — that initial bar hit was just a case of mistaken identity.

But it turns out this arsonist duo was being directed and paid by an anonymous 'James Bond', who cops allege was actually a crime boss taking orders from handlers in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps! It's the IRGC's classic grey zone — deniable, outsourced ops to sow fear and amplify social tensions among foes.

So that's all intriguing, but last year, Jersey Mike warned there were at least three countries sniffing around this kind of lethal targeting. So Iran is one.

Another is widely understood to be India, already caught targeting Khalistani separatists elsewhere. And yet those expelled operatives from RAW (India’s CIA) still get zero mention by Mike (and India denies the claims). Canberra wants stable Delhi ties given their shared wariness of China, so any spicy disputes still get handled silently behind closed doors.

But it’s not just nation states playing the game…

3. “Neo-Nazis are antisemitic. Islamic extremism is antisemitic… Nation states can be antisemitic… Anarchists and revolutionary groups can be antisemitic”

There’s a long history of authoritarians using antisemitism to weaken and divide their foes. But Big Mike is really here citing antisemitism as a prime example of how threats, long siloed, are now overlapping and feeding off one another — like some kind of messy Venn diagram of hate, nationalism, and ideology.

And that all makes his job much harder: a single low-fi arson attack can now be lots of things at once: a hate crime, a crime of opportunity, politically-motivated, terrorism-inspired, and state-sponsored. All while eroding social cohesion.

Then let's wrap with...

4. “Great power competition is driving an insatiable appetite for strategic advantage. As a result, espionage and foreign interference are at extreme levels"

This is the closest Iron Mike gets to uttering the c-word (China, to be clear), in an inference that becomes clearer as he goes on — he warns that hostile espionage efforts are “increasingly focused on strategic defence initiatives, including AUKUS” — the Aus-UK-US pact to supply Australia with nuclear-powered subs and counter a more assertive China.

And he cites some familiar examples, like a foreign spy posing as a consultant on LinkedIn trying to elicit insider info. At least it makes LinkedIn interesting?

But his spicier alert is really that “preparation for sabotage is growing in scale and sophistication” — Dirty Mike spells out that authoritarian regimes are now hacking into Australia's critical infrastructure networks, not to harm now, but to pre-position access in case of future conflict over (say) Taiwan: planting malware, mapping systems, and maintaining footholds in a country hosting critical US capabilities (google Pine Gap).

Again, this isn’t new, though the recent Five Eyes warning around AI capabilities suggests it's only getting worse — plus the fact it was aimed at CEOs is a stark reminder that so much of the free world's critical infrastructure is guarded not by troops, but private enterprise.

So all that to say... Magic Mike has spoken, people. And he's warning that in 2026, maybe those spiders are the least of your worries.