Special forces veteran Duncan Lewis wins bipartisan support for top job at spy agency ASIO

FORMER Special Forces chief Duncan Lewis will be the new ­director-general of the Aus­tralian Security Intelligence ­Organisation.

FORMER Special Forces chief Duncan Lewis will be the new ­director-general of the Aus­tralian Security Intelligence ­Organisation.

Mr Lewis, who is currently based in Brussels as ambassador to NATO and the EU, will take up the position in mid-September.

He will replace David Irvine, who has run the ­intelligence agency since March 2009.

Tony Abbott and Attorney-General George Brandis will make the announcement today.

Mr Lewis’s promotion is expected to ­receive widespread bipartisan support, with Bill Shorten having been consulted on the appointment.

Federal cabinet formally approved Mr Lewis’s appointment to ASIO in the past few days.

He will represent Australia at a NATO summit in early September before he returns to his new position in Canberra.

Mr Lewis is recognised as an outstanding figure in the Aus­tralian national security community and was appointed head of the Defence Department under the Gillard government.

It was widely reported that Mr Lewis was dismayed at the continual cuts to the defence budget.

He is reported to have told close associates he was appalled at the instability and unpredict­ability of the defence budget under the Gillard government.

At a high-level meeting in the Pentagon in Washington DC in July 2012, Mr Lewis, then Defence Department secretary, was told by his US counterparts of American concern at the radical decline in Australian defence spending.

Under Julia Gillard’s prime ministership, defence spending fell to 1.56 per cent of gross domestic product, the lowest level since 1938.

Mr Lewis left the Defence Department after little more than a year to take up the much less significant post in Brussels.

None of the national security agencies suffered budget cuts on Tuesday.

ASIO’s budget for 2014-15, of $606 million, was not changed after the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook statement in ­December.

The figure consists of a baseline allocation of $407m, plus nearly $200m carried over from the year before, largely reflecting costs associated with ASIO’s new building in Canberra.

Mr Lewis is regarded as a strong personality and a strong leader. In a stellar career in the army, he commanded Australian troops in East Timor and the Middle East, and was defence ­attache in Jakarta.

His appointment, following that of Peter Cosgrove as Governor-General, indicates the high regard the Abbott government holds for senior Australian military leaders.

This regard for the military has not always been universally shared, however. Mr Lewis once recalled that as a new military cadet in 1972, towards the end of Australia’s military involvement in the Vietnam War, he was spat on in Canberra’s Garema Place.

Mr Irvine is regarded as having done an outstanding job at ASIO. Before taking over ASIO, Mr Irvine had been director-general of Australia’s overseas spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and before that ambassador to Beijing.

Mr Irvine, who had served in Indonesia and written a book about Indonesian wayang puppetry, is in style a more urbane and owlish mandarin than Mr Lewis, but he also has a razor-sharp mind and an ability to speak with great bluntness when necessary. One of his most important pieces of advice to the former and current governments was that it would be prudent to exclude the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, a private company set up by a former Chinese military officer, from participation in core elements of the National Broadband Network.

The decision was widely applauded in the US and greatly resented in Beijing.

The Abbott government reconfirmed the decision shortly after it was elected in September.

Mr Irvine also oversaw a deepening ASIO involvement in cyber-security issues, supplementing its traditional concerns of counter-terrorism and counter-espionage.