ASIO is an expensive and blunt tool in combating Chinese interference

share_windows This article appeared in Crikey on May 14 2026.

The Bondi Beach shooting and the subsequent release of the interim report on antisemitism in Australia have put the operations of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) under the spotlight. Questions are being asked about whether ASIO’s deprioritisation of counter-terrorism has created a situation whereby “espionage eclipsed terror”.

It also became clear to the public that there is now a debate within the organisation about whether ASIO should “start ranking diaspora communities by threat level”, and while still focusing on China, deprioritising communities such as “Eritrean Australians”.

ASIO’s pivot from counter-terrorism to foreign interference and espionage since 2018 has seen funding to intelligence agencies overall rise from $10.9 billion five years ago to $14.3 billion, representing an increase of 31%.

In response to media reporting on ASIO’s possible failure to adequately police antisemitic terrorists, some people in Chinese-Australian communities are not sympathetic to the security agency’s plight. One person posted in his WeChat group: “ASIO is too busy catching spies in our community to watch terrorists.”

Others cynically see ASIO’s pivot to scrutiny of the Chinese diaspora as an effective way to secure the organisation’s continued funding and staffing. One remarked wryly in the same WeChat group: “The number of potential terrorists cannot be that high, but there are 1.4 million of us. It’s a no-brainer that they want to hype up the importance of watching us.”

ASIO’s focus on foreign interference has also been reflected in agency boss Mike Burgess’ annual public addresses over the past several years, presumably crafted carefully to convince the government and the public of ASIO’s indispensability, the danger of foreign countries’ political activities in Australia, and ASIO’s supreme competence in keeping Australia safe. Talking in 2023 about a “hive of spies” ASIO had disrupted the previous year, Burgess assured Australians: “They were good — but ASIO was better.”

Burgess seldom mentions the specific countries that ASIO targets, but China is the biggest elephant in the room. In 2017, a series of allegations surfaced about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s alleged activities in Australia: political donations, cyber-espionage, links between Chinese-Australian community organisations and the CCP’s United Front, and Chinese-Australian individuals attempting to co-opt Australian politicians to shape Australia’s political process and its China policy. In December that year, the Turnbull-led Liberal Party government introduced foreign interference legislation, citing evidence of foreign — particularly Chinese — activities. And it’s no secret that many of ASIO’s resources are dedicated to watching individuals in Australia who ASIO suspects of being political actors working on behalf of the Chinese government.

Over the years, ASIO has come to see Chinese diaspora communities in a bifurcated way. On the one hand, it sees Chinese communities as potential victims of the Chinese government’s surveillance, coercion and transnational repression. But on the other hand, it sees Chinese Australians and organisations as potential helpers in the Chinese government’s overseas political activities.

However, this approach of casting the net far and wide in the hope of catching a fish has been met with criticism from both Chinese communities and scholars. Assessing the effectiveness of the foreign interference legislation, political scientist and international relations scholar Andrew Chubb observed that “the Espionage and Foreign Interference (EFI) laws have done little to improve the situation of diaspora communities facing coercion by foreign states.”

The problem, as Chubb sees it, lies in ASIO’s misdirected approach to foreign interference by focusing on the “potential that targets could be coerced into cooperating with foreign security agencies”. The harmful consequence of this approach, he argues, is that ASIO effectively “recasts the victims as threat vectors”.

“Threat vectors” seems to be a concept that increasingly informs ASIO’s intelligence operations in countering “foreign interference”. Rather than protecting critics and dissidents of the Chinese government, Australian security agencies have approached Chinese diaspora communities primarily as potential targets for influence, coercion, espionage or political mobilisation by the Chinese state. By placing Chinese Australians in public life under a racialised political microscope, this approach has led to widespread suspicion that a significant proportion of the community is being disloyal to Australia or is aligned with the Chinese state.

It is not surprising that the security agency’s voice, amplified by the mainstream media, has led to widespread anti-Chinese racism and the questioning of the political loyalty of Chinese-Australian citizens. For four consecutive years, polling by the Australia-China Relations Institute has shown that four in ten Australians believe Chinese Australians could be mobilised to act against Australia’s national interest.

Chubb is not blind to the reality of China’s political activities overseas; indeed, he wrote a book about it. But he believes ASIO has gone about this in the wrong way. As early as 2022, he offered this advice to the then-new Labor government: