A person who likes a tweet supporting the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel will not pass a security assessment for an Australian visa, the head of the Asio spy agency has said.
Mike Burgess used an interview with the ABC’s 7.30 program on Tuesday to hit back at people who had “distorted” what he had previously said about the security vetting process for Palestinians seeking to come to Australia.
Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday the Coalition should “stop undermining” Asio, but the opposition has insisted it was never questioning Burgess’s integrity.
The question of support for Hamas was elevated as a major political issue by the Coalition, which chose to make Gaza visa security checks its main topic of attention during the most recent parliamentary sitting fortnight.
The Coalition elevated the issue despite figures showing the government had rejected significantly more visa applications than it had approved and that no one was coming now because the Rafah crossing out of Gaza had been closed since May.
More than 40,000 Palestinians are reported to have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s military offensive responding to the 7 October Hamas-led attacks, when about 1,200 people were killed in southern Israel and about 250 others were taken hostage.
In an interview on ABC’s Insiders program in August, Burgess weighed in on how support for Hamas might be assessed. He said if visa applicants expressed “just rhetorical support, and they don’t have an ideology or support for a violent extremism ideology, then that’s not a problem”.
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Those comments were seized upon by the Coalition, which demanded the government clarify whether it could rule out allowing anyone who supported Hamas to come to Australia.
In a preview of the 7.30 episode set to air on Tuesday night, Burgess said he had “watched with interest over the last couple of weeks how people have chosen to distort” what he had said.
“I said that if you support a Palestinian homeland that may not discount you [from entering Australia] because that by itself is not a problem,” he said.
“But I also said if you have a violent extremist ideology, or you provide material or financial support to a terrorist organisation, that will be a problem.”
Burgess told 7.30 that explicit support for Hamas would prompt Asio to issue an adverse security assessment.
“If you think terrorism is OK, if you think the destruction of the state of Israel is OK, if you think Hamas and what they did on the 7th of October is OK, I can tell you that is not OK, and from an Asio security assessment point of view, you will not pass muster,” Burgess told the program.
“Is it a one-off comment? If it’s a tweet that actually – or reinforcement or liking of a tweet – that says the 7th of October was acceptable, that’s going to be a problem for that person.”
Hamas is designated as a terrorist organisation in Australia, but it has ruled Gaza since 2007 and has not allowed elections since it expelled rival Fatah from the territory.
Albanese said the opposition should listen to Burgess, who was appointed by the Coalition and reappointed by Labor.
“Mike Burgess is a big boy – he can speak for himself and he has,” Albanese told reporters in Perth.
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The prime minister said it was “extraordinary, frankly, that the Coalition went into question time day after day” to pursue questions that effectively called into question Burgess’s “determination to keep Australia safe”.
Albanese said the issues at stake were more important than to descend into “some political game of point scoring”.
“[Burgess] has my total confidence and the Coalition should stop undermining that and should support the work that he does,” Albanese said.
Peter Dutton continued his line of attack on Tuesday, insisting that the government had taken a “reckless” approach to people from Gaza and should have applied more stringent security checks.
“Now, maybe 100% of those people are law-abiding, wonderful citizens who just want to make Australia home, but we don’t know whether that’s the case or not,” Dutton told reporters on Tuesday.
From 7 October 2023 to 12 August 2024, Australia has granted 2,922 visas to people from the occupied Palestinian territories and has rejected 7,111 applications.
Only an estimated 1,300 Palestinians who had been granted these visas had so far been able to make it to Australia.
The opposition’s home affairs spokesperson, James Paterson, said on Tuesday that the Coalition did not take issue with Asio’s approach.
“In not a single [interview] have I ever criticised Mike Burgess or Asio because I didn’t think that he thought it was a good idea to bring Hamas supporters into our country,” Paterson told Sky News on Tuesday.
“My criticism, and the opposition’s criticism, has always been focused on the government.”
Additional reporting by Kate Lyons