Australia’s top intelligence chief has issued one of the country’s starkest national security warnings in years, revealing that at least three foreign nations are willing and capable of carrying out assassinations on Australian soil.
Speaking at Sydney Town Hall, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess told the Lowy Institute that hostile regimes could use “criminal cut-outs” to disguise their involvement, referencing how Iran directed recent anti-Semitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne.
“There is a realistic possibility a foreign government will attempt to assassinate a perceived dissident in Australia,” Burgess said. “We believe there are at least three nations willing and capable of conducting lethal targeting here.”
The intelligence chief described a worsening global environment in which authoritarian governments are increasingly willing to commit “high-harm operations” abroad.
Beyond the physical threat, Burgess warned that Australia’s social cohesion was “fraying” amid multiple, overlapping challenges. “Grievance is growing. Intolerance is rising. Inflammatory rhetoric and behaviour are being normalised,” he said.
He identified three groups undermining the nation’s stability — the “aggrieved”, the “opportunistic”, and hostile “nation states”. The aggrieved, he said, include alienated individuals drawn to conspiracy theories and anti-authority ideologies. The opportunistic exploit social divisions to advance extremist agendas, such as neo-Nazi and far-right groups that sought to use recent anti-immigration rallies to gain visibility.
Burgess also drew parallels between far-right extremists and the Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir, accusing both of spreading dangerous rhetoric and testing “the boundaries of legality” without explicitly promoting violence.
He further revealed that pro-Russian influencers in Australia were connected to an offshore media organisation likely directed by Russian intelligence. These networks, he said, push divisive narratives around Ukraine, immigration and the Israel–Gaza conflict to inflame tensions and “set the social fabric alight”.
Calling for a “whole-of-society” response, Burgess urged Australians to defend national unity: “Our words matter, our actions matter. We must learn to disagree with respect, and to have conversations without hatred.”
