Recently, three agency heads within Australia’s national intelligence community (NIC) had made public statements on Australia’s threat environment, all highlighting the interplay between international events and local security challenges.

• Andrew Shearer, Director-General of the Office of National Intelligence, delivered a statement to Senate Estimates on 7 October 2025.
• The new Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett addressed the National Press Club on 29 October 2025.
• Commissioner Barrett also delivered testimony to Senate Estimates on 8 October 2025 and you can read the resulting discussion from page 177 onwards here.
• Michael Burgess, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, delivered a lecture to the Lowy Institute for International Policy on 4 November 2025.

Regular readers of this blog may know that I tend to have favourable views of Australia’s intelligence services, albeit with some reservations, so it won’t be a surprise that I think these statements are well-founded. It is particularly pleasing to see open discussion about ways that inter-state strategic competition can influence violent extremism within Australia, as I’ve previously argued that Australia’s national security conversation failed to fully acknowledge that relationship (see my 2022 ASPI chapter “What strategic competition means for counterterrorism“).

It is similarly pleasing to see more discussion about transnational repression, which I’d previously contended should be seen as the most serious form of foreign interference experienced in Australia:

The dangers of foreign interference are most apparent when it involves transnational repression (authoritarian regimes operating across borders to coerce, blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten, assault, kidnap, torture or murder dissidents). This is the most visceral form of foreign interference, far removed from the grey zone where there can be reasonable debate about what distinguishes legitimate influence from illegitimate interference (something Justice Hope had to wrestle with in his second Royal Commission into Australia’s intelligence agencies).

Yet until relatively recently, transnational repression (and the crossover with terrorism) did not feature heavily in Australia’s political discussions over foreign interference, despite events like the Russia’s poisoning of Skripal in the UK, Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi or Iran’s assassination and kidnapping plots in multiple countries.

At the same time some aspects of these NIC statements make me apprehensive, particularly the parts about youth involvement in violent extremism. It is certainly a real problem, but I worry deeply that some elements of the response (such as the 2023 criminalisation of possessing violent extremist material) will themselves cause great harm. It is truly vexed because children are indeed being targeted by some of the most reprehensible networks imaginable like 764.

There’s a lot more to dig into in these statements, but I’ll just share some academic and grey literature on a few of the topics raised.

The sources all provide detailed information on international examples of threats mentioned in the above statements by NIC leaders, which can be drawn on to understand how these threats can manifest in Australia:

• Alexander Dukalskis et al., “The Long Arm and the Iron Fist: Authoritarian Crackdowns and Transnational Repression“, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 68, Issue 6, 2024.

• Ardavan M. Khoshnood, “The Islamic Republic of Iran’s use of criminal intermediaries for extraterritorial assassinations and covert violence: a gray zone strategy of outsourced repression“, Small Wars & Insurgencies, published online 3 September 2025.

• Networks of Harm: A Victim-Centric Information Resource on the 764 Sextortion Network, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2025.