TRANSCRIPT - RADIO INTERVIEW – ABC RADIO NATIONAL WITH SALLY SARA - 1 AUGUST 2025

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC RADIO NATIONAL WITH SALLY SARA

FRIDAY, 1 AUGUST 2025

 SUBJECTS: THREAT OF FOREIGN INTERFERENCE, MEETING WITH KASH PATEL, CHILD PROTECTION WORK, AUSTRALIA’S STANCE ON PALESTINE.

 SALLY SARA: Australia's top Spy Chief has revealed foreign espionage is costing the nation at least $12.5 billion a year. During a speech in Adelaide last night, ASIO Director-General, Mike Burgess, provided a detailed account of the scale of the threat of foreign interference, including one example where foreign cyber spies stole nearly $2 billion worth of trade secrets and intellectual property from Australian companies and businesses in the last financial year. Mr Burgess is now calling for more to be done, warning the threat from espionage will only intensify. Joining me now in our Parliament House studio is Tony Burke, the Minister for Home Affairs. Minister, welcome back to Breakfast.

TONY BURKE: Morning Sally.

SARA: What's the government going to do to try and bring down this $12.5 billion toll of espionage in Australia?

BURKE: Well, the first thing to recognise, and you know, Mike Burgess doesn't make comments often, but when he does, everybody pays attention, and so one of the things that he has drawn attention to, yes, there's the 12.5 billion, secondly though, through our actions, tens of billions have been saved through actions the Government's already taken. We've invested in the order over four years of $70 million in this exact area, so there's action being taken. But I think one of the most important things from the speech last night is to let people know that it's not simply for the government to provide the protection at the end; there's things that everybody can do on the way through. So the work that I already do in the cyber security role with businesses is critically important, but added to that, he's taken it right down to the personal decisions that people take in their social media accounts, to make sure that we at every level are making it harder and harder and harder; we need to be clear-eyed that this is going on, we need to be clear-eyed that there are people wanting to steal secrets, some of them government, some of them commercial, and when you're clear-eyed about what's happening, you can then sensibly take the measures to make it as hard as possible for them to do that.

SARA: For those who are members of the Public Service and have security clearances or maybe working on things like AUKUS, and they're putting this on their LinkedIn profile or on other sites, what action is government going to take against those individuals?

BURKE: Two things on this: first of all, it's better than it was. So since Mike Burgess first raised this a few years ago, the number of people who are publicly declaring they have a security clearance has fallen by 85 per cent. So the progress is there, but it is obviously not a problem that's been eliminated yet. And so - and I think Mike flagged in the interview that was played earlier on AM, that one thing that we are now doing as the security clearance for top secret migrates across to ASIO is it will become a condition of a security clearance that you are not socialising it on social media. But I'd also say it's not simply whether you have a security clearance. There's a series of profiles that were referred to in that speech, where people will provide other information that shows they have access to secrets, and I get that people on their profiles want to make themselves as employable as possible for the next job, but the best way to show that you are worthy of future work is to be worthy of keeping secrets, and that means, you know, you just must not be putting that sort of stuff up on social media. For people who want to engage in espionage and foreign interference, their methods should not begin with a simple Google Search to see who are the people who they would need to contact.

SARA: On a separate issue, Minister, why did you wait until Question Time yesterday to make public that you had met up with and dined with the FBI director, Kash Patel?

BURKE: Oh, so that was something which was asked of me by an ABC journalist, and so I answered the question, but the visit to New Zealand was a public visit, the visit to Australia was a personal visit where he also engaged with a number of government authorities, and so there are simple security reasons why you wait sometimes for somebody to be out of the country. But can I say, the meeting was really good, and the dinner that we had together with Reece Kershaw, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, was a great discussion of the different ways in which we keep people safe. I'm really confident about the cooperation with the United States. There's a whole range of issues we cooperate on, from things that people would think about in terms of counterterrorism, but right through to some issues of foreign interference, but other issues of child protection; the cooperation is very real, very strong. But the nature of my portfolio, and it sort of goes to what we were just saying with respect to people keeping information confidential, I certainly don't issue a media release every time I talk to one of my counterparts, particularly in the Five Eyes.

SARA: Did Australia give any undertakings to Kash Patel?

BURKE: Oh, this was a conversation over dinner, it was wide-ranging, but it was warm and it reflected - you know, sometimes with these meetings when you meet as a government minister with your counterparts, the strength of the relationship between the countries gives you an incredible basis, and the relationship with the United States, what happens for all the people who work for the agencies that I'm in charge for, and for Kash Patel, for the people who work for the FBI and the various security agencies of the United States, that cooperation is so strong and so tight, and every day is acting to keep people safe in both countries.

SARA: But Mr Patel is a controversial figure in some ways, he's called some of those jailed over the January 6 capital riots in the United States as political prisoners. Do you hold issue with some of these views; is that a trusted partner?

BURKE: Yeah, I saw David Shoebridge, the Greens spokesperson on the issue took issue with me meeting with Kash Patel at all because of those sorts of comments. Can I say there will never be a day where I have the choice between building a relationship to keep Australians safe and making political points about what happens in another country where I don't choose to keep Australians safe. Whenever I have that choice, my obligation as the Home Affairs Minister for Australia, is to keep Australians safe, and that's exactly - exactly what our relationship with the United States does.

SARA: Australians working with the United States - the safety of Australians, part of it is also in the hands of officials who may hold very different views and priorities.

BURKE: Yeah, well, you know, when I've just gone through issues from counterterrorism all the way to child protection, through to what we do in the interception of drugs coming into Australia. The cooperation keeps Australians safe, and there are a number of Australians, a good number, who are alive because of that cooperation, and I intend to continue to build the partnership.

SARA: When you're talking about keeping Australians safe, child safety's been a big focus, particularly in the past couple of months. In the past couple of days, we've had revelations of an alleged child sex offender in Sydney in childcare and other settings. This case, a number of media outlets were fighting to have these details made public. Are there other cases in a similar situation around the country where these kinds of crimes are being investigated in childcare and they are yet to be made public?

BURKE: I don't have information to be able to give you specifically on childcare, but I will say there is child protection work that we do that hits every profession around the country. I wish this was a far more narrow thing than it was, and a whole lot of the work that we do in this area is becoming increasingly difficult and increasingly complex. The capacity of people within their own cyber security to try on the dark web to keep this information secret, coupled with the fact that while the material is equally illegal and unlawful, and equally horrific, the use of AI-generated images now means that a whole lot of the rescue work we used to do for children, so for example, children in the Philippines, there's great rescue work that Australia's cooperated with with our Five Eyes partners and other countries in getting children around the world out of horrific dangerous situations, and now when we look at the images, the starting point is we don't know whether we're looking at a real child.

SARA: If we're turning to the matter of Palestinian statehood, the Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, has reiterated that it's a matter of when and not if the government will recognise Palestine; we've had similar comments on 7.30 from the Prime Minister. Do you expect that Australia will make a declaration at the UN General Assembly in September that we will recognise the State of Palestine?

BURKE: I think that - well, the way the Prime Minister described it last night is that, you know, we have always supported a two-state solution, which means a situation where both Israel and Palestine are recognised as states and both operate in a secure way for the security of their people, and it's an announcement you only get to make once, and we are wanting to make sure that whatever we do is done in a way that most helps to bring about a lasting peace, and to deal with the horrific situation that we're seeing on our streams.

SARA: Tony Burke, Minister for Home Affairs, thanks for coming into the studio this morning.

 BURKE: Great to be back, Sally.