MEREDITH Burgmann – Anglican schooled but radicalised early – says Australia has ‘‘reluctantly accepted’’ the need for security bodies like ASIO.
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But after obtaining her own ASIO file and helping dozens of others do the same thing, the former NSW Labor politician says the evidence in the files reveals the organisation to have been ‘‘incompetent, inefficient and intrusive’’.
Ms Burgmann, who served on the NSW Legislative Council from 1991 to 2007, was in Newcastle on Saturday night to speak at the 22nd annual Red Flag Dinner organised at Carrington Bowling Club by the Hunter Broad Left.
More than 120 people attended the dinner and heard Ms Burgmann range across the withering critique of ASIO contained in Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files – her new book for the University of NSW Press, which has had two more printings after being published in May.
In Dirty Secrets, Ms Burgmann and more than two dozen others – including jurist Michael Kirby, legendary Canberra Times journalist Jack Waterford and film critic David Stratton – talk about the material they found in their own ASIO files, and their reactions to finding that their lives had been under often extensive surveillance.
Ms Burgmann told her Newcastle audience that most people’s ASIO files were little more than a compilation of times and dates and places and people – the ‘‘metadata’’ of its time, as she put it.
She said innocent people had been hurt simply by associating with people who ASIO were watching, often because the targets were members of the Communist Party of Australia.
Asked whether ASIO was simply doing its job in this regard, Ms Burgmann said voters had rejected the Menzies government’s referendum to outlaw the communist party.
She said after the second Hope Royal Commission into ASIO in 1983, the organisation was told to concentrate on ‘‘politically motivated violence’’.
‘‘The young students, Christians, mothers, and unionists of the anti-Vietnam movement, land rights campaigns, gay rights action and so on, were never a danger to the government,’’ Ms Burgmann said.
She pointed out that ASIO was still following her when she was ‘‘a member of parliament with a very mainstream party [the ALP]’’.
Author Frank Moorhouse, who was 17 when his ASIO file was opened, has just published Australia Under Surveillance, in which he ‘‘takes a look at the organisation that has been watching him’’.
He and Ms Burgmann are speaking together in Paddington on December 9.
ASIO is also telling its story, with Spy Catchers, the 700-page first volume of an official trilogy by historian David Horner, covering 1949 to 1963.
