ASIO boss Mike Burgess must tell it how it is on terror

Mike Burgess, ASIO Director-General of Security during estimates in Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Mike Burgess is an outstanding ASIO director-general. However, he has just announced a foolish mistake in the way he is going to talk to Australians publicly.

He is no longer, in general, going to use any word connected with Islam when he talks about Islamist terrorism and he is not going, generally, to use the words “right-wing extremist”. This is the mistake that his predecessor, Duncan Lewis, made a few years ago and which rightly earned him much controversy.

It involves intentionally not telling the Australian people the plain truth because ASIO, or the government directing it, thinks we can’t cope with the truth.

Here’s a secret. In a democracy, it’s always better to tell people the truth. This is deeply unsatisfactory. It’s a serious mistake even if it proceeds from the best of intentions. In one respect, Scott Morrison and his officials have been slightly but significantly less disciplined and less precise than Malcolm Turnbull was in referring to Islamist terrorism. Ministers and officials in the current government have often used the term “Islamic terrorism”.

This is a mistake as it tends to associate the whole of the religion of Islam with terrorists.

A much better term, which has the advantage of actually being accurate, is “Islamist” terrorism. This is the term Turnbull used. ­Islamism is a political philosophy and program which emerges out of a particular interpretation of Islam. It is not the majority interpretation of Islam, but it has very substantial minority support in many Islamic communities.

It need not be violent, though it is generally authoritarian. An attempt to impose Islamism by violence and coercion is Islamist terrorism. That’s the correct term.

The term which Burgess now proposes — “religiously motivated violent extremism” — is kind of ridiculous. Are we talking about Zoroastrianism gone wild? What is achieved by this mealy-mouthed nonsense other than a concession to the enemies of the West that we dare not speak their name? Similarly, the decision not to refer to right-wing extremism, apparently because some moderate right wingers don’t like their political label being attached to the word terrorism, is equally ill-advised.

One of the most important political elements in fighting terrorism is to force moderate elements of a political tendency to reject, denounce and anathematise the extremist tendencies of their side of any argument.

Thus patriotism is admirable, extreme nationalism is abhorrent. A respect for authority is ­virtuous, authoritarianism is ­repulsive. Pride in your history is reasonable, hatred of someone else’s history is wrong. In these cases the extremism is a perversion of the sensible moderate impulse. Fiddling with labels doesn’t solve the problem. And it’s not even up to ASIO to set the limits of realistic description of political and religious ideologies. The Prime Minister, and others, should use the terms Islamist terrorism and right-wing extremism, which are not, as Burgess wrongly argues, no longer meaningful. The problem is the reverse — they are absolutely full of meaning.