Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was created by a directive that Prime Minister Ben Chifley signed on 16 March 1949, acting on a recommendation from the Defence Committee. Its first director-general was Justice Geoffrey Reed, a South Australian judge, and the organisation began in modest Melbourne offices before consolidating in Canberra. The statutory basis today is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979, whose section 17 sets out the functions: to identify and investigate threats to security, wherever they arise, and to advise government on protective measures.

ASIO sits in the Attorney-General's portfolio and is one of the core agencies of the National Intelligence Community, alongside the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation and the Defence Intelligence Organisation. Its output is intelligence rather than enforcement: threat assessments, security clearances, protective security advice and briefings. Officers collect human and signals intelligence and conduct surveillance under warrant, and the organisation can seek warrants for interception and for compulsory questioning and detention. It has no arrest powers; operations requiring arrest are carried out with the Australian Federal Police or state and territory police.

The headquarters is the Ben Chifley Building in Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle, a A$630 million purpose-built facility opened by then prime minister Kevin Rudd in July 2013 and named for the prime minister who founded the organisation. ASIO keeps offices in each mainland state and territory capital and employs roughly 2,000-plus staff. Mike Burgess, a former director of the Australian Signals Directorate's cyber operations and a former UK GCHQ officer, has been Director-General of Security since 2019 and delivers the annual Director-General's Threat Assessment in public, a practice begun in 2020. [edit]