The Billion-Dollar Balcony: ASIO’s Sovereignty Failure

A reply to Bernard Keane – and to the Australian people

Whilst none of this will salve the hurt, ease the trauma of those recovering in hospital, or console the families grieving the loss of loved ones at Bondi, we owe them, and ourselves, an explanation. Not platitudes, not another sombre press conference, but an honest reckoning of how two men, Sajid and Naveed Akram, father and son, could assemble their arsenal and execute Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack unnoticed by the billion-dollar intelligence estate we are told keeps us safe.

The repetition of failure

What emerges from the wreckage of the Bondi Hanukkah massacre is dreadful familiarity. The faces and headlines change, but the plot remains the same: perpetrators “known to authorities,” a catalogue of overlooked warnings, and a security bureaucracy that responds not with accountability but expansion.

ASIO’s budget now exceeds $700 million annually, a figure that has surged well ahead of inflation since 2011, when funding stood at approximately $400 million. The agency employs over 2,000 staff in its flash, Ben Chifley building, Canberra headquarters and holds powers that reach deep into Australians’ private lives. Yet, as Bernard Keane’s analysis in Crikey makes devastatingly clear, none of this prevented a suburban gun arsenal from flourishing in plain sight.

Naveed Akram, 24, had been investigated in 2019 by ASIO for his close ties to an ISIS cell in Sydney, including connections to Isaac El Matari, who identified himself as the head of Islamic State in Australia. The investigation ran for six months before Akram was cleared as presenting “no indication of any ongoing threat.” Meanwhile, his father Sajid held a valid NSW firearms licence – a privilege extended to permanent residents, not merely citizens, and had legally acquired six long guns. The weapons sat in the family home at Bonnyrigg, in Sydney’s suburban west, where planning for mass murder apparently proceeded without detection.

The intelligence void

What is the point of intelligence that can identify environmental protesters but cannot link a cache of guns to a known extremist connection? What kind of vigilance mistakes the accumulation of data for comprehension?

For years, ASIO has been granted the tools, the access and the legislative cover to surveil Australians in ever greater detail. Each failure becomes the justification for further power; each failure, another claim to exceptional funding. In August 2024, ASIO lifted Australia’s terrorism threat level from “possible” to “probable,” citing heightened risks around the Gaza conflict. Yet when the attack came, at a publicly advertised Hanukkah celebration attended by nearly a thousand people, the surveillance state watched from elsewhere.

What is sold as “learning lessons” has become ritualised immunity. Failure now carries no cost. The system is designed not to prevent catastrophe but to survive it, and then request more funding.

Mossad and the sovereignty question

And then came the admission that laid the pretence bare. In the aftermath of the massacre, Israeli intelligence confirmed it was assisting Australian authorities with the investigation. The claim, variations of which appeared across several news services, was that Mossad had warned Canberra about threats to Jewish Australians in the lead-up to the attack, possibly as recently as a month before, when it alerted Australian intelligence to Iranian-backed “terror infrastructure” planning attacks on Jewish targets.

Whether one accepts the framing or not, the symbolism is unmistakable. When another nation’s intelligence operatives are called in to assist with the “mopping up” of a domestic security catastrophe, the admission is plain: our billion-dollar spymasters cannot clean up their own mess. This is not intelligence cooperation between equals. This is dependence masquerading as partnership.

The rhetoric of sovereignty

Only months ago, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess delivered his keynote at the Lowy Institute, speaking in elevated tones of “protecting Australian sovereignty” and “defending Australia’s interests.” He recounted vivid tales of ASIO’s offshore operations, confronting foreign agents in third countries, sending pointed warnings to rival intelligence services. It was theatre crafted to project strength and independence.

Yet when disaster struck, those words shrank to irony. If sovereignty means the capacity to protect one’s own citizens from mass murder on home soil without recourse to a foreign power’s intelligence apparatus, then Burgess’s Lowy lecture was exactly what it sounded like: motherhood statements pegged to the washing line of national security, fluttering in the breeze of self-importance.

The contradiction runs deeper still. ASIO’s 2025 Lowy Lecture spoke of “safeguarding sovereignty” and “defending democracy”, grand abstractions deployed to justify expanded powers and budgets. But sovereignty is not an abstraction. It is the measurable capacity of a state to secure its territory, protect its people, and act independently of foreign patrons. On that measure, Bondi represents comprehensive failure.

The neoliberal capture of national security

There is a deeper sickness here, and it requires diagnosis. Like much else in Canberra’s official life, Australia’s intelligence apparatus has been captured by neoliberal logic; not the textbook economics of privatisation and deregulation, but the cultural logic of perpetual growth, metrics-driven performance, and the substitution of genuine competence with institutional self-preservation.

This is the phase of neoliberalism that treats sovereignty as negotiable, alliances as brands, and accountability as a threat to be managed rather than a principle to be upheld. ASIO functions less as a guardian of independence than as a franchise operator within the Five Eyes network, a model that privileges intelligence-sharing arrangements with Washington, London, and now Tel Aviv over the unglamorous work of connecting dots in suburban Sydney.

The agency measures success not by the safety it delivers but by the scale of its next appropriation. It builds its case for expanded power through the very catastrophes it fails to avert. Budget submissions cite “evolving threats” and “unprecedented challenges”, the same rhetoric deployed year after year, immune to falsification. This is not protection; it is performance, underwritten by the fiction that more surveillance equals more security.

In this model, sovereignty becomes a marketing slogan rather than a strategic commitment. The operational questions, whom we surveil, whom we trust, what risks we accept, are resolved not in Canberra but through the inherited architecture of Cold War alliance structures.

Australian intelligence does not operate in service of Australian sovereignty; it operates as a subordinate node in an Anglosphere network whose strategic priorities are written elsewhere.

The neoliberal infection manifests in the familiar pathologies: bloat without capacity, data without insight, secrecy as substitute for competence. ASIO has grown larger, louder, and more publicly visible under Mike Burgess’s leadership, yet its core function, preventing mass casualty attacks on Australian soil, has not demonstrably improved. What has improved is its ability to manage narratives, deflect scrutiny, and secure bipartisan support for budget increases regardless of performance.

This is the logic that produces a billion-dollar agency capable of tracking foreign intelligence officers across continents, yet unable to notice when a man investigated for ISIS connections lives in a house stocked with six rifles. It is a logic that prioritises the theatrical over the practical, the spectacular foreign operation over the mundane work of domestic vigilance.

Whose sovereignty, exactly?

Meanwhile, Australia’s national security doctrine still orbits Washington and London. The strategic questions: whom we surveil, whom we arm, whom we trust, are resolved long before the file notes reach Canberra. In that light, ASIO’s ritual denunciations of “foreign interference” descend into farce. How can an agency defend sovereignty when its operational DNA is written in the language of the Five Eyes alliance, when its threat assessments mirror those of its Anglosphere partners, when its protocols defer to intelligence hierarchies established in another hemisphere?

The contradiction is laid bare at Bondi. It is easy to speak of independence at think tanks and Senate hearings; it is harder when Israeli intelligence is stepping in to assist with an investigation that ASIO should have pre-empted.

This is not sovereignty. It is dependency dressed as defiance; the performance of autonomy by an institution structurally incapable of delivering it.

The debt we owe the victims

Those in mourning, those recovering, those whose lives have been shattered, deserve more than another sealed inquiry and another clenched-jawed promise to “do better.” They deserve transparency. They deserve to know how a billion-dollar agency, armed with unprecedented powers and a legislative carte blanche, missed the signs again. They deserve to know who authorised the quiet involvement of foreign intelligence in an Australian domestic security matter, and under what terms. They deserve to know why a man previously investigated for terrorist connections could live in a house full of legally acquired weapons without triggering a single alarm.

And so do we all. If sovereignty means anything; if it is more than the flag used to cover institutional embarrassment, then accountability must be its core. Until ASIO can explain what it does with our money, our laws and our trust, until it can demonstrate that Australian lives matter more than budget submissions and alliance protocols, national sovereignty will remain a performance, not a principle.

The watcher on the cast-iron balcony

Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony gave Australian literature one of its enduring archetypes: the observer, elevated and apart, watching the life of the nation unfold below with detachment bordering on disdain. It is an apt image for our intelligence establishment, a billion-dollar observer perched above the fray, cataloguing threats, compiling dossiers, watching everything; regularly putting the wind up everyone; but remote or no-show when it actually comes to protecting anyone.

Bondi has shown us again what happens when a nation mistakes surveillance for security and loyalty for competence. The watcher on the balcony can see everything yet understand nothing. The data streams in, the threat assessments accumulate, the public statements assure us all is well. And while the watcher watches, Australians bleed on the street below.

Until we reckon with this failure, not as an aberration but as the predictable outcome of a system designed to expand rather than protect; sovereignty will remain what it has become: a word we invoke when convenient, and abandon when tested.

Bondi demands better. The bereft families of the dead deserve better. Australia deserves better.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES 

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