TRANSCRIPT - SPEECH TO NATIONAL SECURITY COLLEGE CONFERENCE - 24 MARCH 2026

MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS, TONY BURKE: Thank you very much. Thank you, acting Vice-Chancellor Rebekah Brown. I acknowledge my ministerial colleagues. There're too many parliamentary colleagues to mention everyone. I'm worried I haven't clocked everybody who's here, but I know Pat Conroy and Peter Khalil, as ministerial colleagues are here and obviously my counterpart, the shadow minister Senator Jonno Duniam.

And the challenge of this venue, when we're here meeting on the lands of the Ngunnawal people, is this speech has to complete with a view, which is pretty spectacular right now which you get and I don’t.

I apologise that I haven't dined with you tonight, and that I'll leave after the speech. Rather than create a scandal, I'll let you know why.

As minister for Arts, I also run the pub rock band for the Labor Party and we have a rehearsal strictly every Tuesday night. And we are the greatest pub rock band in the Federal Parliament. So I apologise that I will take off.

But I want to thank the ANU for holding tonight and as I look around the room, there's a lot of you I’ve met in many different situations. You are all busy and you’ve all given your time because national security is something that affects every single one of us.

I have in my portfolio in the order of 30,000 people who I'm allowed to count and a whole lot of other people who we don’t officially count, who have dedicated their professional lives to making sure that Australians are safe.

But the reality is they then rely on an entire Australian community to work with us, to trust us, and to provide us with information that is of critical importance.

When I hear the word as the theme of resilience, it's a reminder of what I want to chart through in this speech today. The concept that, reporting is critical to people's safety, but we also need to be honest about the full range of threats that we want people to report, because they are much broader than what the public narrative would often describe.

And secondly, the concept of resilience is significant for all the community leaders who are in this room, because there is a direct line between the temperature in society and the likelihood of attacks. A very direct line.

I think Australia realised this very strongly in the debate that followed the horrific terrorist attacks at Bondi, where immediately Australians understood that the antisemitism that had become louder and louder and had affected people in so many ways, increased the likelihood of the attack.

There are two reasons largely why Mike Burgess, the Director-General of ASIO, advised us to raise the threat alert levels shortly after I became Minister for Home Affairs from possible to probable.  It wasn't because we had information of a particular cell that was about to act.  It wasn't because there was a particular group that we thought they are definitely going somewhere.

 It was because everything that had already been there was still there.  All the normal work of ASIO in dealing with terrorist groups and doing the monitoring that everybody would expect us to do was there.  But there were two new things that were happening.

First, the temperature was rising. The temperature in the community was rising and antisemitism was not the only area where it was rising, but it was the one that we were the most alarmed about.

And secondly, we had the challenge that there was a whole new form of radicalisation that was quite different to any of the terrorist cells that we’d dealt with in the past.

And this is where, if we go through the different natures of attacks, because there has been a good and healthy discussion, which has been really important, about the dangers of antisemitism. And as I say for our authorities, that is the one where we have been most concerned that there was a closeness to the leap to violence.

But let me go through a series of attacks.

Bondi, Australia Day in Perth, the later Perth arrest, the Adass Israel Synagogue and Lewis’ Continental Kitchen and Christchurch.

I include Christchurch on the list even though it wasn't on Australian soil, but simply as my New Zealand friends when I go to Five Eyes meetings always remind me, while wasn't on our soil, it was committed by an Australian.  And in terms of the number of people slaughtered, was by far the largest terrorist event caused by an Australian and out of respect to our New Zealand colleagues, I always make sure I include that as well.

Bondi, antisemitism. Australia Day in Perth, anti-First Nations. The later Perth terror arrest, anti-Muslim and anti-authority of parliament and police. The Adass Israel Synagogue and Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, antisemitism, but the antisemitism to cause those events was in Iran.  And the actors in Australia were simply fee-for-service criminals. And then obviously Christchurch, anti-Muslim.

To go through each of those, the Bondi attackers, the Akrams, their story has been horrifically published and obviously we have a Royal Commission and there's limits to what I'll say during the course of that Royal Commission.

But I think the public already has a reasonable sense of the deep evils, of the dehumanising views that those people held.

The Australia Day Arrest in Perth, for a number of reasons, it didn't receive the publicity that it really should have, but can I just say we got so lucky.  We got so lucky.  This was not a stunt.  The person who threw the pipe bomb into the middle of a crowd of First Nations protesters believed that, and you look at what it was, this was something where there was a reasonable expectation it would have gone off and the number of people who then would have been killed.  The fact that didn't happen is not through any planning.

We just got lucky.

In terms of the further arrest with respect to Perth, the planning that was there was not about to happen.  But this was a person who it’s alleged had access to multiple firearms and plans about mass slaughter.

The Adass Israel Synagogue, crime for service.  So this is one of the things which has really changed in the environment.  So if you go back 20 years, if someone wanted to conduct that sort of terrorist attack, they needed from Iran to have boots on the ground in Australia.  They needed to have an entire cell network of people where they could pass on, they could do the preparation, and then they would be able to go off and commit the horrific action.

With fee-for-service criminals through organised crime, it's a series of phone calls, a series of cut-outs.

The person ultimately conducting the crime doesn't necessarily know the nature of what they're doing in terms of the actual motivation and certainly has a series of barriers between them and knowing who is in fact behind it.

But the fear that it causes in the community is identical, absolutely identical to if it were being done in the more, let's say, traditional way of the sort of ways that we would have imagined and thought about terrorism some 20 years ago.

And Christchurch, the one thing to remember with Christchurch was that individual had been highly engaged back then at a time when the internet was a much quieter place than it is now, very heavily engaged with hate groups.

And this is where that line between the temperature and the action is directly relevant.

Effectively, When I talk about the threats of the past, I don't want any of this to imply that they have gone. They have not. But effectively, where we once only had to look at radicalisation potentially being something that might come across our border, it now comes across a browser.

Where radicalisation used to involve that you might have to go to a training camp in Afghanistan, it now comes to you in an algorithm.

With the border, previously you would presume foreign interference could only happen with people who had made it to Australia.

Foreign interference is now possible through cutouts and agents through organised crime.  And obviously through cyber.

We talk about and have always talked about and still do incredibly good work and effective work with Border Force in terms of intercepting firearms at the border.

But there is nothing at the border that intercepts the software that then provides the material to use a 3D printer in Australia to print the firearm here that can cause the exact same sort of damage as what we may have successfully stopped at the border.

And similarly with immigration, we always need to make sure, and I have people dedicated, making sure that we prevent people who we know to be of significant risk to Australia and stop them at the border.

But let's not pretend that stopping someone from having a visa solves the whole problem, because we also can't stop somebody from seeing a video.

Of the criminals who I went through, Christchurch, Perth on Australia Day, the subsequent arrest in Perth, Bondi. For each of those four examples, we have a person in prison. In every one of those instances, they were born in Australia.

So there is an obligation for us to make sure that we are using the immigration system, as we do, to be very careful in who we let into Australia.

But it would be ignorance in the extreme for us to pretend that is the fix.

It would be reckless in the extreme for us to pretend that immigration is the solution.

It is something, it is one of our tools.

But the only the only way you deliver national security is to deal with facts and risks as they present themselves, not as you might want them to be.

To give an example of how caseloads are changing, for the people we have right now in our countering violent extremism programs… this is people who we have identified, and this gives you a sense of the changing profile.

Once again, 20 years ago, overwhelmingly the people would have been in their 20s and 30s. Now half of the caseload is under 24.

31 per cent of the caseload is under 18.

8 per cent of the caseload is aged between 10 and 14.

People are getting radicalised younger. And the nature of the radicalisation is shifting as well.

In terms of the media and in terms of some of the commentary that you'd hear, people will continually go to one form of extremism and that is those terrorists who want to claim their terrorism as an article of Islamic faith.

That's how they want to claim it.  That religiously motivated group, within our countering violent extremism programs represents 30 per cent. 30 per cent. 

40 per cent now is ideologically motivated.

30 per cent is mixed and unclear ideology.

We've had people, for example, there's one that Mike Burgess often refers to, where it was a mixture of an ISIS form of radicalisation with a neo-Nazi form of radicalisation combined with an environmentalist ideology as well.  All of that in one person, hard to imagine, but the willingness to turn that to violence was real.

And the reason I go through this is because sometimes the public argument would lean people to think the only time you should call the national security hotline is when you see or are worried about a particular form of radicalisation.

The number that we have, 1-800-123-400. Easy to remember, but no one has to remember it because you start on any search engine, national security, and up comes hotline as a suggestion.

Easy to remember, but no one has to remember it because you start to type - on any search engine - national security and up comes the hotline as a suggestion. It'll come up really quickly for people. But we want people to know the full range of the risks so that they know when to report.

For example, we've heard the different stories subsequently about the alleged terrible white supremacist views of someone who was arrested in Perth, the terrible anti-First Nations views that person had. Yet, because it hasn't been considered in part of Australia's conversation about terrorism, I can sort of understand why people didn't think that was something to report to a national security hotline and yet we just got lucky in there not being a mass casualty event in Perth.

As part of online, there are two areas that I want to refer to for people to be aware of in terms of the changed nature of risk.

One is a home of radicalisation online and the other is a home of blackmail online, both of which carry very real national security risks.

With the home of radicalisation online, you think, how on earth do they get access to kids aged 10 to 14? The answer really simply is online gaming platforms. For anyone who's had a child who's been immersed in this world, and we've got one. It's not like where - and I’m showing my age - you'd go to the shop, you'd buy a game, you'd take it home, you'd run it onto the computer with your disks, and you'd play it on your own.

Now, obviously it's all online, but also there's constant conversation happening. In terms of that conversation, the nature of it is you don't know how old the person is you're talking to; you don't know their nature and increasingly you have no idea what their accent or even what language they might be talking in.

We should never forget that organisations like ISKP, the Khorasan Province version of ISIS, is now using artificial intelligence to be able to constantly live translate their news broadcasts into multiple languages. You hear the voice they want you to hear. You build the trust they want you to build.

On an online gaming platform, you go through the adventure together and form that layer of trust as though somebody is a friend and then they take you from the gaming platform to other sites where someone's been identified on a potential path to radicalisation.

The other pathway is the one of blackmail. We have all sadly heard stories of very young people thinking they are adopting a romantic relationship online, or maybe they are with a friend, and the concept of swapping photographs, which would otherwise be unlawful to be of a child, is something that many children sadly will engage with. Very often, the person they're engaging with is not a child. Very often, within a short space of time, the threat comes back from a third person, who's probably actually the first person, saying, I'm now going to send this to all your friends, unless you do X. Once they've got the first piece of blackmail, they've got the person on the hook.

There is now a global network with a name that they want me to use, so I won't, and the Police Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, doesn't use it either. But there is now a significant international network that we are working with our Five Eyes partners to disassemble every chance we can, where that blackmail pathway that I spoke of at the start turns into a game for the lead participants. A game for the bad actors, where they then go through and compete with each other on what they might be able to blackmail someone into doing. It leads to significant examples of self-harm and sometimes it leads to third-party violence. The deeper someone gets in, the more they are blackmailed, the more power the person believes they have over them. These online worlds are a very real threat, and this is happening to young people, in homes around Australia.

This is why we've started to engage internationally. There's a UN pilot program on counter terrorism in the region, dealing specifically with gamers and moderators and some of our regional partners are engaging with this as well in the Asia-Pacific.

We've got the Extremist Gaming Research Network, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and of course, The Christchurch Call.

Separate to this, the Department of Home Affairs is engaging with TikTok, trying to work through ways of how we can engage so people get off ramps if they start going down a path that is dangerous to them and dangerous to others.

Effectively, in all of these pathways, we're dealing with the moment you're in an online world with a fundamental change to how communication has happened for most of our lifetimes. Most of our lifetimes have been in an age of broadcasting. An age of broadcasting that basically began with the printing press and is disappearing during our lifetimes. Broadcasting still exists; broadcasting always will, but it has always had a moderating impact because a broadcaster overwhelmingly needs to appeal to the biggest possible audience and that has had a gravitational pull towards the centre.

When people start getting their information from algorithms, algorithms don't naturally gravitate to the centre, they gravitate to the strongest reaction. It doesn't matter what platform you're on, the way a post goes further is the more directly people interact with it, whether it's by commenting, whether it's by watching the whole thing through, whether it's by clicking a reaction to it, the more you interact with it, the further the post will go. That pushes things to the edges.

That fundamental shift from broadcasting to the algorithm is part of the raising of the temperature that is the national security risk. It's part of the pathway that makes it so easy for people who would want to cause us harm to start to send young people down a particular rabbit hole of misinformation.

There is good work being done to be able to deal with this. Sites like AAP Fact Check have been extraordinary in finding posts, many of which I've never seen. They are AI generated and produced from overseas, deliberately there to make Australians angry with each other, that are deliberately there to be dehumanising, that are part of raising the temperature.

In all of this, there is the role for my agencies, whether it be the Department of Home Affairs and its overarching policy role. Whether it be ASIO and its intelligence role or the Criminal Intelligence Commission, in its criminal intelligence role. Whether it be the Australian Federal Police, which has both an intelligence role and a law enforcement role, or whether it be AUSTRAC that is charged with following the money.

They all have a very significant role, and their professionalism is second to none. Australians should have absolute confidence in these agencies and the oversight mechanisms that exist for these agencies.

But as community leaders, which you all are, the agencies can only deal with the threat as it arrives. They don't have the same role in building resilience. That resilience needs us to acknowledge the full range of the threats that are there, needs us to be honest about the fact that hatred doesn't only shift to violence if it's a particular form. The moment people are in the business of dehumanising; they're in the business of opening the doors for others to be violent.

This is where - and while we didn't get the laws that we wanted with respect to hate speech - whether you use the criminal law to deal with it or not, we all have an obligation to try to steer people away from it. We all have an obligation to try to turn down the temperature. Will there be, in an online world, a capacity for Australia to shut out the fact that the temperature is being raised everywhere? Of course we can't shut that out.

But one of the things that is starting to happen is as information online, largely - but not exclusively - because of artificial intelligence, becomes less reliable. The face-to-face contact that people have, the role of community leaders, the role of people who are known, becomes more significant and more important than ever. We need to make sure that if people see something, they have enough confidence in our authorities, that they will notify, that they will report.

Sadly, the nature of national security reporting often means we don't get to call back and say, this is what we've done, this is what we've checked out, ASIO doesn't do that sort of thing, and I think we all understand why. But we do need people to have confidence in our agencies so that the reporting happens.

We do need ourselves as community leaders to play our role in helping turn the temperature down. Lives do depend on our capacity to do that.

We have been through different waves as a nation of national security emergencies. As a nation, we have been through a range of circumstances where we have seen horrific attacks, and we have wondered how on earth is this happening in Australia.

Now, the world beyond our borders has many ways of reaching us that don't involve the border. We need to keep our discipline at the border. We need to keep our discipline with our border force role, both in terms of its traditional customs role and its traditional immigration compliance role. We need to do all of that. But we also need to ensure that we never lose sight of the fact that borders are diminishing compared to browsers when it comes to pathways for ideas and plans to reach our country. In dealing with that, we need to make sure that we play our role in turning the temperature down, whether it's in our interests, for publicity or whatever, to do so or not. It will save lives. It will build Australia.

If there's anything that has characterised our nation, it's that covenant, which is that the problems of the rest of the world have always been there and traditionally people have come here and found a way to just get on with each other. That principle, which is part of why we all love Australia, is at stake. That principle is something where there are forces that will not help us and we need to lead back to the centre to turn the temperature down because there is a direct line between doing that and keeping people safe.