Michael Burgess, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), recently said that while Australia’s National Terrorism Threat Level remained at “Probable”, we were now at “the upper level of probable” and that “the environment is a lot hotter”.

Such claims from security heads will often be dismissed as threat inflation, but the available evidence supports his warning. Take a look at the four month period from November 2025 to February 2026.

• On 5 November 2025, the Australian Capital Territory Joint Counter Terrorism Team charged a teenager in Canberra with various terrorism and firearms offences. Then on 12 May 2026, those charges were upgraded to include “[o]ne count of acts in preparation, or planning for, a terrorist act” (in other words, plotting a terrorist attack). He is alleged to have been “motivated by views aligned with nationalist and racist extremism”, which generally means far-right extremism.
• On 14 December 2025, two Islamic State supporters carried out the worst terrorist attack inside Australia in the country’s modern history, murdering 15 people at a Jewish community festival in Bondi. It was the 12th jihadist terror attack in Australia and caused more than double the fatalities of all the previous attacks combined.
• On 21 January 2026, the Queensland Joint Counter Terrorism Team arrested a PhD student and charged with him preparation for a terrorist attack. He was accused of planning to firebomb an Australia Day event to accelerate the downfall of society to bring forward “Australia’s future cybernetics government the next phase of civilization”.
• On 26 January 2026, a man threw a bomb at Indigenous Australian marchers at a Survival Day rally in Perth, which through sheer luck failed to detonate. The Western Australia Joint Counter Terrorism Team immediately became involved, and on 4 February 2026 charged the suspect with “one count of engaging in a terrorist act”, accusing him of throwing the bomb “to advance a national racially motivated ideological cause”.
• On 26 February 2026, the Western Australia Joint Counter Terrorism Team arrested a man and charged him with acts in “preparation for or planning a terrorist act.” He was accused of having “detailed intentions to attack mosques in WA, as well as WA Police Headquarters and WA Parliament House” and having “written a manifesto-style document outlining plans for a nationalist and racist ideologically-motivated act of violent extremism involving mass casualties.”

There have only been two other times this century that Australia experienced this many terrorism incidents and alleged plots over the course of a few months.

The first time was from September to December 2014, when Australia experienced five terrorist plots or attacks in the name of Islamic State: Agim Kruezi’s plot in Queensland, Omarjan Azari’s plot in Sydney foiled by the first wave of Operation Appleby arrests in September 2014, the Numan Haider stabbing in Melbourne, the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney, and the Sulayman Khalid led plot foiled by the second wave of Operation Appleby arrests in December 2024.

However, in some ways the challenge then may have been less formidable than today. All the September-December 2014 plots shared a common ideology (although the Lindt Cafe Siege perpetrator only latched on to the ideology very late in the game). They were all carried out in the name of the same movement and often involved members of a single Islamic State support network in Sydney.

In contrast, the incidents from November 2025 to February 2026 were far more ideology diverse: one jihadist, three far-right extremist, and one unclear or unusual. They had a wide range of targets including Jewish Australians, Indigenous Australians, marchers at Australia Day, Muslim Australians, and the government. They were also geographically dispersed and socially disconnected.

The other time that Australia experienced a similar number of plots and attacks within four months was from April to July 2024. These included the Wakely stabbing and alleged post-Wakely plot targeting “Jews and Assyrians” in April, the Willeton stabbing in Perth in May, Sydney University stabbing and the alleged plot against a New South Wales Member of Parliament in June, an alleged terrorist bombing attempt at Sydney’s Miranda Wesfield in July.

Two of those events (the Willeton stabbing and the Sydney University stabbing) are not legally being treated as terrorism but were allegedly perpetrated by people under CVE attention and can be considered part of the violent extremist threat environment. Moreover, these events were followed by ASIO raising the National Terrorism Threat Level on 5 August and the murder of Victoria Police officers by an anti-government extremist at Porepunkah on 26 August.

What Australia experienced from November 2025 to February 2026 has some resemblance to April-July 2024: a series of attacks and alleged plots from a range of ideologies (jihadist, extreme-right and adjacent, and ideologically ambiguous). The difference is that most of the April-July 2024 events were individual stabbings, while many of the more recent events were aimed at causing mass casualties, with devastating impact at Bondi and likely avoided by mere fortune at the Survival Day rally in Perth.

What this all means is that the ASIO Director-General’s comments about the threat level being at “the upper level of probable” and “the environment is a lot hotter” should not be overlooked as just the sort of thing a security head says. The incidents from November 2025 to February 2026 do suggest significant changes in the threat environment.

So Australia has experienced comparable spikes in apparent terrorist attacks and plots before, but this recent spike was more ideologically diverse, geographically dispersed and socially disconnected than the first (September-December 2014) and more often seeking to cause mass casualties, and proving capable of doing so, than the second (April-July 2024).

And that’s without getting into more recent events or the persistence of potential driving factors like domestic political discontent manifesting as threats of violence, international turmoil breathing new life into various violent extremist movements, and no shortage of malign actors finding new ways to project violence across borders.

On a gut level, this feels like new and somewhat unfamiliar territory for Australia, a country that had long avoided (partly through highly successful counter-terrorism efforts) deadly acts of onshore terrorism on the scale seen in much of Europe and North America. I look ahead with concern, but greatly hope to look back at this post in one or two years and find that this concern proved mostly unfounded.