TRANSCRIPT - TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS SUNDAY AGENDA WITH ANDREW CLANNELL - SUNDAY, 29 JUNE, 2025

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS SUNDAY AGENDA WITH ANDREW CLANNELL

SUNDAY, 29 JUNE, 2025

SUBJECTS: DEFENCE SPENDING, US-AUSTRALIA RELATIONS, TERRORGRAM, PREVENTATIVE DETENTION

ANDREW CLENNELL: Joining me live now is the Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke. Tony Burke, thanks for your time. Let's start with this defence spending row. If all these other countries, such as the NATO countries, on the urgings of the US are increasing their defence spending, why does the Prime Minister not feel more pressure to increase ours?

TONY BURKE: Well, our guiding principle in all of this is ‘what do you have to do to be able to keep Australians safe?’ And so we start with the capability. We don't start with the dollars. And that's how we work with every financial decision that the government makes. You start with what's required. You don't start with, here's a number that you might spend. With those capability decisions, we are already spending more than was spent before we came to office. So, as the PM said in the clip that you just played, you know, over the shorter term, there's an additional $10 billion. Over the medium term, it's more than $50 billion extra. We're investing extra. But for us, the order of question is, what do you need to be able to keep Australians safe? What capability does that mean you need to spend money on? And then that has an answer as to what dollars are required. We don't do it in the opposite direction.

CLENNELL: Does it get to the point, though, Tony Burke, where this risks the alliance with the US? Joe Hockey told Laura Jayes last week that, quote, the danger is at the moment that we can slip from being a tier one ally of the United States to a tier three ally.

BURKE: The relationship with the United States and the cooperation that happens, particularly with a lot of the operational.. a lot of the work that happens on our continent is very important to the United States. And so, you know, there will be discussions that go back and forth, but our starting point is always about capability.

CLENNELL: So, you feel you can say no to the US on a target.

BURKE: We make decisions on behalf of Australia and on behalf of Australia's national interest. The relationship with the United States is really important. We have mature, decent, respectful conversations with the United States. But as I say, the conversation doesn't start with the dollars at our end. It starts with the capability. It is true around the world now that the world is a less stable place than it was. That means the conversations you're having now about capability are different to what you would have had in the –

CLENNELL: So, if the US asks for more capability, what you seem to be saying is if the US asks for more capability, we would consider providing that or building that up.

BURKE: Well, the starting point, yeah, but we look at it from the perspective of if Australia requires more capability. So, we look at it from the Australian national interest. Our alliance with the United States is a critical part of that. But we look at it from the perspective of keeping Australians safe. We look at what capability is required and that so far has meant over time we've been spending more money on defence than happened before Labor came to government.

CLENNELL: Would you agree it's in Australia's national interest to have a healthy alliance with the United States?

BURKE: Oh, very strong support of the alliance with the US. Completely.

CLENNELL: But what if it hinges on this question? That's my point.

BURKE: Well, you're saying what Joe Hockey has done is question –

CLENNELL: No, no, I'm saying that if the issue of defence spending, if the alliance, the strength of the alliance hinges on that, surely some consideration should be given to going forward with the US on that.

BURKE: And what I'm responding with is you've got a hypothetical there of putting the alliance into doubt. That's not where conversations are at with the United States. The alliance with the United States is strong. It needs to be. That's important for Australia's national security. It's a part of keeping Australians safe. Any conversations about what we need to do, don't start with the dollars and just say, oh, whatever you spend it on, that'll help. They start with the capability and that's a responsible way of making sure that you get the best possible outcome for the safety of Australians.

CLENNELL: Alright. As I said at the top of the show, Tony Burke, you're part of the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Does the intelligence show that the US strikes on Iran had a major effect in terms of sending Iran back in their nuclear capability?

BURKE: I won't answer in terms of intelligence, but what's already there on the public record makes clear that this is a, that well, first of all, it is in the interests of global peace that Iran does not have a capacity with nuclear weapons. Iran has been in breach of international obligations on that and the US strikes were targeted very specifically at the potential of nuclear weapons from Iran and we are glad that those setbacks have occurred.

CLENNELL: So, it's your belief that the programme has been set back because this has been the subject of some debate in the US, as you're probably aware. It's your belief that they, they were a success, those strikes, is it?

BURKE: Look, my understanding of the debate in the United States has been the extent of the setbacks, but I haven't seen anyone doubt that the US strikes on those sites has caused a significant setback for Iran's capability in terms of developing nuclear weapons.

CLENNELL: What did you make of Donald Trump's comments on Iran and Israel and they didn't know what they were doing.

BURKE: He has a way of making sure that every word he says completely cuts through. And I think what he did there was make very clear that when there's an agreement to a ceasefire, a ceasefire should hold. Australia wants a ceasefire to hold as well. It is time to be able to shift back towards diplomacy and in the interest of war, just as it's in the interest of peace for Iran to not have a nuclear weapons capability, it's also in the interest of peace for that ceasefire to hold.

CLENNELL: You announced on Friday that the Australian government would be proscribing this right wing terror organisation, Terrorgram, as a terrorist group. As I understand it, they've committed something of a terror attack in Australia already in relation to Newcastle MP, the Tim Crakanthorp. Can you take us through that?

BURKE: Yeah. So, if I sort of explain what Terrorgram is, because it's different to what most of your viewers would think of when they think of a terrorist organisation. So, normally when you think of a terrorist organisation, you think of small groups of people meeting in private venues, starting to plot, trying to recruit people to their number and then together ultimately carrying out some sort of action. Terrorgram functions internationally. All the members of it are anonymous and effectively it functions more like a giant chat group on the platform Telegram, where on that platform they have things called channels and a series of subgroups within them. But what they're doing on that group is not just spreading a whole lot of racist forms of bigotry and other forms of bigotry. They then also share how-to guides on how to conduct a terrorist attack, encouraging people to do so. And then when it comes to the moment of the attack, the person will often live stream it back into the group. That live streaming attempt is something that we saw on our own shores in the foiled attempt, but nonetheless attempted terrorist attack that you refer to. So, when it comes to these listings, I'm very conscious of wanting to prioritise the ones where there is a direct threat to Australians. Terrorgram has been shown to be a threat on our shores, as I say, different to what we normally think of when we think of terrorism, but a very direct attempted attack on an Australian Member of Parliament. And I'm very glad now that we've got the penalties in place. But just being a member is 10 years imprisonment. If you're trying to help Terrorgram, you're trying to recruit for them, 25 years imprisonment. These are serious penalties on top of the criminal offence that might be occurring with the physical action itself.

CLENNELL: And I recall at the time of that Tim Crakanthorp incident, or looking at it yesterday, that the Prime Minister revealed his family were actually threatened by the same sort of organisation or chat group. Can you confirm that? And that perhaps other public figures might have been the subject of threats?

BURKE: Look, I won't confirm more than the NSW attack on Tim Crakanthorp, because we've given that one as part of the formal reasons for the listings, but I can tell you that Australians are much safer in a situation where the moment we know that somebody is part of this group, we can charge them. Mere membership -  we're not in a situation now where we're waiting for someone to actually try to do something horrific. Mere membership of this and involvement in this organisation means we can charge people and send them to jail.

CLENNELL: How concerned are you, and this is really in your portfolio space, that we might see in Australia the sort of attacks we've seen in the US and UK on politicians?

BURKE: I'm very conscious of it and I've had this exact conversation with my UK counterpart where I'm making sure that we're getting all the information from them, because obviously they had the fatal stabbing of a member of Parliament just making herself available to the community. I don't want Australia to become a country where members of Parliament can't move around freely and engage with the community. It's good for democracy. But in the same way as I'm very conscious with New Zealand, that the attack on the Christchurch mosque that occurred where people were just wanting to pray, was conducted by an Australian. And we've seen a whole lot of attacks on places of worship, including mosques and synagogues, in recent times in Australia. The difference now is that a whole lot of the organisation for this doesn't have to start in your country, it can start internationally. And then if they find somebody and are able to recruit somebody anonymously here in Australia, then someone is being armed and told how to do it and thinks there's some sort of fame, like Terrorgram, for example. They describe that grub that committed the Christchurch massacre as a saint. Like, these people are off the charts in terms of the horror they are capable of and what's going on inside their heads. That form of international action is something that can be a real threat in a country like Australia and has been. And that's why I'm determined to make sure that we keep people safe. The fact that it's a different form of terrorism doesn't change one bit the fact that we need to act on it as seriously as we would if it were a group of people meeting in a room in a terrorist cell.

CLENNELL: Just briefly on this, because I want to move to other issues, but how much involvement is there of juveniles? We know how young people spend a lot of time online. How much evidence are you seeing or information are you getting on juveniles being sucked into these sorts of things?

BURKE: It's real. It's real. And I won't give you the exact numbers, but I get briefed on the exact numbers and I get briefed on a bit about each of the individuals who are within the orbit, who we're making sure that we're basically watching very closely and surrounding them with different levels of support. This is a new form of risk and it was described by Mike Burgess, the Director-General of ASIO, when we raised the terror threat level. So, effectively now we have a disproportionate number and if you look at where the increase is happening, it's fastest — It's teenage boys and they'll be in online, often online gaming platforms, and effectively they'll be playing with somebody who they've never met, who they presume is someone of their own age, and they'll be going through missions together. They'll feel that they're building a relationship and then that person will start to gradually try to take them down a pathway. We're not talking huge numbers, but you don't need huge numbers to be able to deal with significant risk that you'd want our intelligence and security agencies to be right onto. This is a growing form of terrorism and this is why there's a NSW programme that we'll be making a further announcement about shortly. But I referred to it a few months ago that we were going to start to try to roll it out nationally, where NSW have a programme where if parents are concerned, they don't have to — they can go somewhere other than the police to be able to get immediate support around their children. And then obviously that makes sure that from parents’ perspective, where they're just a little bit worried as to what, you know, some conversations that are just way out of kilter with what they've ever had from their child before, that there's somewhere they can go, they can get that sort of support and that way we can hopefully head some of this off at the pass.

CLENNELL: Has there been any consideration given post the Iran attacks to lifting the terror level in Australia? What's the advice on that?

BURKE: The check is done constantly. And so this is something that in regular meetings that I have with the Director-General of ASIO, we always talk about where the security and threat environment is up to. We don't have cause at the moment to raise the security threat level. But as you'd expect, the decisions that we make can often be affected by a change in how Australians are feeling, or some Australians are feeling, some bad actors are feeling based on what's happening overseas. So, whenever there's a higher level of alert coming from overseas, that causes us to watch things in a different way in Australia. But at the moment, we don't have any reason to further raise the terror threat level.

CLENNELL: Now, last week news broke that a photographer, Dominic O' Brien, had been killed by a member of the NZYQ cohort. Those detainees who were in kind of permanent detention, released by the High Court because they were criminals. This photographer was attacked at an intersection in Footscray, allegedly after a 43 year old man approached him, bashed him, stomped on him. What efforts have you been able to make so far in terms of putting this cohort in preventive detention and what's your reaction to this attack?

BURKE: Yeah, when I think I had my first interview after I took on the Home Affairs portfolio with you, Andrew, on this programme for my first TV interview, and in that interview I said about the priority I was going to go case by case because I didn't want there to be further delays in dealing with preventative detention. I've kept in that time working with the department and the reality is the legal thresholds that we are stuck with because of some decisions of the High Court are more difficult to be able to reach than I want them to be. That's why I introduced laws last year to have a different pathway and that's the pathway to say, well, if preventative detention is hard, I certainly don't want people who've had their visas cancelled to be in the community at all. Because if your visa is cancelled, you should be leaving the country. That's why visas are cancelled and that's why we've introduced the laws to allow for three third countries for people to be able to be sent to those negotiations with third countries continue. But we had the first three visas be offered and those cases are going through the High Court as they go through the High Court. We've been winning the cases, which I've been really happy about, which is giving me more confidence that we're going to be able to start getting these people offshore. You know, I know there's an argument that some people put where they say, oh, look, you get former criminals who are Australian citizens and they serve their time and they're in the community, what's the problem? My view is this. If you're on a visa, you are a guest in the country, and almost everybody who is a guest in Australia is a good guest. And a whole lot of them end up calling Australia home and becoming Australian citizens. And that's a great thing. But for people who breach that trust, you're entitled as a nation to say, well, your visa is cancelled and it's time for you to leave. For a long time in Australia, if we couldn't send people back to the country of their origin, we just put them in detention and thought, okay, well, they might stay there forever. The High Court have said, you can't do that. The High Court's made other decisions that have put a really high threshold on preventative detention. So, my priority now is getting a pathway for these individuals to get out of the country altogether. Obviously, for the person who's been accused of the murder that you've described, there'll be no fast deportation there, because you would expect that we'll end up in a process where there is a long time in jail.

CLENNELL: In February, you announced that three of those detainees were going to Nauru and obviously you're saying that that's caught up in the High Court. Do I understand what you're saying here? You do not expect to have any of these former detainees put in preventive detention. The bar is too high.

BURKE: Look, I keep meeting with the department and keep asking, ok, what people do we have at different thresholds that we can run a case? And the information that keeps coming back, they keep collecting, I've got a lot of resources that I've dedicated to this, no one has come close to reaching the threshold that is in that legislation. So, I'm not giving up. I'm going to keep doing it. But I'll tell you, to be honest, I would much prefer the individuals out of the country altogether. If your visa is cancelled, you shouldn't be in Australia. And I would rather have people out of the country altogether than have us paying for them to be in an Australian detention centre.

CLENNELL: Finally, it's the first time I've spoken to you since the Cabinet was selected and Ed Husic, your NSW right colleague, missed out. Mr. Husic came out and had a bit of a whinge about his demotion and blamed Richard Marles for it. Seems to me these are the operations of the Labor factions. What did you make of all that?

BURKE: Oh, look, all I'd say with respect to Ed, Ed's a colleague and a friend and I wish we'd been able to find a way for both him and Mark Dreyfus to be able to stay in the Cabinet, but these decisions are made, that process has now gone through and Ed's playing, still playing a constructive role in the Labor Party.

CLENNELL: All right. And finally, sorry, I'd just forgotten about this one. I wanted to ask about this incident that was reported last night. A Greens candidate for Anthony Albanese, seat of Grayndler, Hannah Thomas, so badly injured in the scuffle with police, she's said to be in danger of losing her eyesight. Do you have a reaction to that?

BURKE: Yeah, Obviously, the NSW Police say that they're conducting a review of the circumstances to work out exactly what happened. I'm told there's some video footage, but it's hard to identify exactly what's happened there. What I will say in terms of any - and obviously you never want anyone to have serious injuries in any situation. I'll also say if you're organising a protest in NSW, you go to the local police, you tell them what you're wanting to organise and you organise it cooperatively with the police. I've organised, in my part of Sydney, demonstrations against racism and demonstrations against violence against women. We go to the police station, we work out what we have to do so that you don't inconvenience the local community and it's all done cooperatively. Apparently that wasn't what happened in this situation. When people were asked to move on by the police, they should have followed the police direction. Apparently they didn't. So, my starting point is the local police are really cooperative. If someone wants to be able to make their point, to find a way for you to be able to have a demonstration without wrecking things for the local community and the issue of the injury will be dealt with by the police review. But for anyone wanting to have a protest, no one's above the law. We all work with NSW Police in the same responsible way. And I found that. And as other protesters, including protesters against me, people go to the police, they work it out, they do it constructively, and apparently none of that happened in this situation.

CLENNELL: Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, thanks so much for your time.

ENDS