ASIO unit gears up to tackle foreign interference

A “foreign interference threat ­assessment centre” will be established within ASIO to tackle foreign meddling.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton before the budget speech at Parliament House. Picture: Sean Davey.

A “foreign interference threat ­assessment centre” will be established within ASIO to co-ordinate the government’s response to the growing threat of foreign ­meddling, which the domestic spy agency has said is now at “unprecedented levels’’.

The centre, which is modelled on one designed to gauge the ­severity of terrorism threats, reflects the sprawling nature of the foreign interference problem, which straddles police forces, spy agencies and government ­bureau­cracies. ASIO will receive $14.5 million over four years to meet the threat, which comes predominately from China.

The agency said the ubiquitous nature of encryption technology had placed “considerable pressure’’ on ASIO to develop technologies and capabilities to counter the threat.

The Australian Federal Police will get $6.7m in the same period, a figure that reflects the role of the AFP in investigating foreign agents and bringing them before the courts.

The Attorney-General’s Department has also set aside $8.5m in funding for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to try suspected foreign agents.

The Department of Home ­Affairs has even set aside $3.9m to support “the implementation of a diplomatic strategy to enable ­intensified co-operation with international partners’’.

The AFP emerged the big winners in this year’s federal budget, however, with the twin threats of terrorism and foreign interference set to swell the agency’s overall budget by more than half a billion dollars.

The AFP will receive an extra $512.8m, the largest publicly disclosed funding boost to a national security agency.

Most of the money will go towards enhancing the agency’s digital surveillance capabilities.

Yet the AFP’s funding boost is heavily back-loaded, with most of the money arriving in the outer years. For the 2019-20 fiscal year, the AFP will receive a boost of just $17m, and $65.4m in the year after that. The real money comes in 2021-22 when the agency will receive $162.5m and in the last year of the forward estimates it will get $184.1m.

ASIO will receive $58.6m in 2019-20 to “sustain current operations and undertake preliminary work to further enhance its future operations’’.

Despite the demise of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate and a major reduction in ISIS’s propaganda output — both major contributing factors to the high terror threat — the AFP is still struggling to cope with the tempo of counter-terrorism operations.

The additional funding reflects the high cost of monitoring the number of potential extremists in the community.

The number of people under AFP surveillance has increased eightfold in the five years since the terror threat was raised and the number of operations has increased by a factor of seven, the government says.

“In the coming years, as a ­nation, we face the dual risks of returning foreign fighters and the possible release from prison of those already convicted of planning or preparing terrorist attacks in Australia,’’ Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said.