Transcript

How do we balance effective national security laws with protecting individual rights and democratic freedoms? 

Where is the line between legitimate foreign influence and foreign interference? 

How well do Australia’s espionage laws protect journalism and political discourse? 

How should Australia’s terrorism laws respond to a threat environment increasingly involving children and different forms of violent extremism? 

In this episode, Sharryn Parker speaks with Jake Blight – Australia’s Independent National Security Legislation Monitor –about whether Australia’s national security laws are keeping pace with the changing nature of espionage, foreign interference and terrorism.

Transcript

(This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.) 

Sharryn Parker

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm your host, Sharryn Parker, a Senior Policy Advisor at the National Security College. I acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and their connection to land, water, and community as traditional custodians of Canberra, the land on which we record today. Today's podcast is about espionage law. Foreign interference, undue influence, intellectual property theft, and sabotage have destructive and deleterous and cascading effects. This is not the stuff of Hollywood. It is real. In his November 2025 threat assessment, the Director General of ASIO said that there have been multiple attempts to breach critical infrastructure in Australia, targeting our water, our transport, our telecommunications, and our energy networks. So we know it's real. We've taken a look here on the podcast at some of Australia's critical infrastructure, and we instinctively understand that we need to protect our national wealth and our intellectual capital. But while we also have an institutional desire to maintain that, we want to maintain our democracy and our national identity without undermining our freedom to act in our best interests. So here's the question. Imagine, if you will, being handed thousands of pages of national security legislation and being asked a deceptively simple question. Are these laws necessary? Are they effective and are they proportionate? Today's guest is Mr. Jake Blight, the person who answers exactly that. As the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, he reviews the most powerful security laws in the land to determine whether they strike the right balance. This includes immunity granted to our intelligence community and considers the complexity of telecom interception powers. Designed, of course, in a different era to the Internet age in which we live. To put a bow on his time in office in June of 2026, he delivered a review on the espionage and foreign interference aspects of Australia's criminal code. Jake Blight, welcome to the National Security Podcast. Look, I guess we can start with the idea of the Foreign Espionage Interference and Related Offences Act that sits in front of you and the review that sits in front of you. There's a solid five hundred pages of it there. Can you explain what it is and what you do?

Jake Blight

Sure. Well, our espionage laws are lengthy and complex, and I think that's a good summary of Australia's national security laws overall. Just to give you some figures, when my role was first created, it was a role to look at Australia's national counter-terrorism and national security laws. About 400 pages of legislation came into jurisdiction. Today, core jurisdiction for my job is 2,640 something, with another 2,000 or so on the side. We're talking about thousands and thousands of pages.

Sharryn Parker

So I wasn't wrong.

Jake Blight

You weren't wrong. And Australia is a great legislator. We make a lot of law, far more than any of our Five Eyes counterparts. Our law is complex, it's detailed, and it infringes on rights. And that's where my role comes in. It's not to look at how the agencies are operating, but it's to look at that law, that giant body of law, and try to sift through it to make sure that it's necessary, proportionate, and effective. Often these laws are made quite quickly, but it takes a long time to review them carefully. So these espionage laws we're talking about today were made in 2018. We've had to let them sit for a few years to see how they operate, and then we've had a really detailed look at how they're working now and how they're going to work into the future with the threat that we have.

Sharryn Parker

Why do you think then that Australia has so much more legislation than the rest of the Five Eyes community or a you know, the community that consists of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the US?

Jake Blight

Some of it's just a different style of legislating, different style of government. But also, Australia's the only one of those countries that doesn't have constitutional rights or underpinning human rights instruments. So we don't have the same limits on our ability to make laws that other countries do. Some of our surveillance powers that you mentioned in the introduction are just unimaginable to the Americans or British. They're just inconsistent with their fundamental frameworks. So we have the ability to reach further, and sometimes that's good. It lets our agencies do more. But sometimes we have to be really careful that in empowering our agencies to protect us, we're not undermining the rights we want them to protect. So that's where this role comes in. I don't make the laws, I don't have a stake in that. My job's to quietly and independently review them, to access the classified material, to go through in a lot of detail and come up with recommendations for government to consider to improve our laws.

Sharryn Parker

So how do you then decide what you actually look at?

Jake Blight

Well, it's a couple of things. My office exists under an act of its own. We love acts. And what it does is it says, some things get given to me by the Parliament, so the Parliament writes it into my act, you must do a review, and the espionage and related laws is one of those. Sometimes the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee refers things, sometimes the Attorney or the Prime Minister. And if I haven't got any of those on my plate, then I get to use my own motion powers to review things. And when I exercise those, I think about how important the law is, how often it's used, how central it is, how invasive it is. And we'll probably come to it later, but that's why I picked the definition of terrorism as an own motion review. It sits right at the heart of our counterterrorism laws.

Sharryn Parker

Yeah, definitely. Let's talk about the Terrorism Review, but we'll park it for the moment. I just want to get too to the nub of what you actually do when you conduct a review and what the steps are to actually do that first.

Jake Blight

To each monitor how they do it, but the way I've approached it is to do some research first and then put out an issues paper. And I'm really big on wide consultation. I think to make good law you have to really engage with people. So I spend a lot of time with that issues paper speaking to Government agencies, to the intelligence, to the police, to the prosecutors, policy agencies, but equally importantly to civil society groups. Civil society groups might be multicultural groups in some cases, legal groups, human rights advocacy groups, whole range. In the Terrorism Review we've consulted hundreds of different groups and people. I think it's terribly important to do that consultation to understand the impact laws are really having in the community, as well as the intelligence and policing perspective. So step one, research and issues paper, step two, consultation. I'll often hold a public hearing. Law reform should be a very public process. And then ultimately you'll form some views, write it down in a report, a public report that gets tabled in public.

Sharryn Parker

And how does it get how does it get tabled in Parliament and how do you protect some of those issues that the intelligence community, for example, would be very concerned about?

Jake Blight

So I do have the ability to give a classified report, but I do think fundamentally law reform is a public process. And so while I take classified evidence, I'll summarise it in the reports and I'll show the agencies how I've summarised it and make sure they they're comfortable with that and listen to any objections they have before I provide it to the Attorney. And for example, in the Espionage Review, you know, the agencies made some claims in their public statement and I said, okay, show me the intelligence that backs that up. I want to see the actual reports. I want to see the intelligence. And then I can say something general in my report, whether the intelligence supported or didn't support the claims they made. And that's all I need to say. I don't need to say where it came from or what the source was. So I think I'm trusted both by the agencies and by civil society groups to be able to communicate the things that we need to get the law reform.

Sharryn Parker

And are those civil society groups, you know, comfortable with this idea that you're the bridge between them and the intelligence agencies? And the security agencies?

Jake Blight

Look, you'd have to ask them, but you'd have to ask them, but what they certainly tell me is that they welcome engagement and they welcome the opportunity to sit down with someone who is part of the national security architecture, someone whose role is you know, I have an independent role, I'm appointed by the Governor General, but I'm part of that architecture of national security. But my job is to listen and to carefully consider all of those things. So I've had really positive and constructive engagement. You know, my office is very small and I leverage the expertise of these non government groups and take their views and their advice very seriously.

Sharryn Parker

So what surprised you most when you first came into the role?

Jake Blight

How much you can do with such a small team. So I'm the first full-time monitor. All my predecessors were part time. They were generally barristers or retired judges. I come from a government background. I've worked in the sector. I've also been an academic. I have an understanding of how Canberra works, but it's still a very small office. And what surprises me, you know, the Secrecy Review that we put out, which was the first review, that was me and a research assistant that I borrowed from the Australian National University and employed. That was really two people who did the Espionage Review, three people did that. This Advanced Technological Capabilities Review, which we call the surveillance legislation, identify and disrupt one, three people did that. So you can do a lot with a small number of people when you take the time to listen and look carefully at laws.

Sharryn Parker

Do you feel that Government particularly is actually looking at the reviews that you've put out there, that they are listening to the advice you're giving and being responsive to some of the suggestions you're making?

Jake Blight

Well, I know they are, because my first review, the Secrecy Offences Review, there's a bill in Parliament that will, if it's passed by the Parliament, implement, if it's passed by the Parliament, implement most of the recommendations of that review. So for me, having that effect is really important. I mean they didn't agree with everything I said, but they carefully considered them, responded, and most of it's in a bill. The Advanced Surveillance Capabilities one, I was looking at three specific warrants, and the Government acknowledged that all of the points I'd made about the failures in safeguards apply to electronic surveillance more broadly. So they're picking that up in the broader electronic surveillance review. The Espionage Review has only just been given to government. I know they're considering it. It'll take a little time. It's a lengthy and complex review. But I didn't take this job on to write reports nobody's going to look at. I took this job on to have impact, to bring our laws into this century to make sure we have the most effective and proportionate laws we can have in this important sector.

Sharryn Parker

I said I said in the introduction, you know, with the Telecommunications Act, it was actually written for the Cold War, and written for that period of time when in fact we now live in the Internet age and so much has actually changed. You know, are you being effective? Is this going to be handed over to, say, the next Independent Security Monitor? How do you manage all of those issues?

Jake Blight

Electronic surveillance reform is overdue and essential. The reason I haven't picked that up as a review is that the Department of Home Affairs is currently reviewing that and they have been since twenty nineteen, with an imminent report since twenty nineteen. It is critical, it's overdue. Our architecture for the law is based on copper wires and bulldog clips, not on the high speed internet that we now live on. But so are our safeguards. Our safeguards are premised on, you know, people typing things and recording them on cassettes and it being difficult to communicate. We haven't got safeguards appropriate for the high speed sharing we do now. We have a warrant system that's a hundred years old and is really premised on a physical search and seizing a couple of documents. Now our warrants are covert and they seize massive amounts of data. So our warrant system and our safeguards are just as out of date as the powers. And that was the point of that high tech surveillance review I did. We need to modernise our safeguards if we're going to have these high tech.

Sharryn Parker

Has that been well received?

Jake Blight

Well, I think they're still working on it. It's certainly been well received in civil society. I know it's been considered carefully by Government because if we're going to have more modern and powerful warrants, we need warrants that are issued by people who have time to consider them, expertise, independent technical advice so they understand what they're issuing.

Sharryn Parker

And I think I would I would offer that you know, all of these are fantastic ideas, but of course all of these fantastic ideas cost money and they cost us in human power. Are you part of that conversation as to how many people would be required to actually fulfil the requirements that you're asking of these agencies?

Jake Blight

Not on the espionage laws, but again I come to my point. You can do a lot with a small number of people if you're efficient and careful about it and you consult widely. I think that is something we might have lost a little in government is the ability to genuinely consult with civil society and community groups, with industry. You can get a lot from that consultation.

Sharryn Parker

Can we go back to 2018 then, when Australia actually substantially overhauled its espionage and foreign interference laws? What were those reforms trying to do?

Jake Blight

So I think what they were trying to do was broaden the concept of espionage. I think they went a bit far with that. They were trying to introduce this idea of foreign interference as a crime. We hadn't had foreign interference as a crime before. They were gonna trying to broaden and effectively broaden our sabotage laws, because historically sabotage had really been tied to Defence and Government-owned things, and the reality is that most of our critical infrastructure is privately owned. And to recognise that the theft of trade secrets can be a criminal matter, not just a civil matter. So it was a real broadening of those laws. And I think they also wanted to make it easier to prosecute. I mean, would you like to hazard a guess at in the hundred years since we've had espionage laws, up until the last two years, how many prosecutions do you think we've actually had for espionage? How many people have gone to jail for espionage if you count the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War?

Sharryn Parker

Not gonna steal your thunder here. What is it, Jake?

Jake Blight

One. We've very rarely use these laws. Even then we've got more people before the courts now than ever before with these new offences, but it's still a tiny fraction of the number of disruptions. ASIO and the police talk about doing hundreds of disruptions. You'll hear Mike Burgess talk about nests of spies. Prosecution is a tool, but with foreign interference and espionage, it's not always the most effective tool. We have to remember that when we're looking at the laws. Much as I love the law, it's not the only answer here.

Sharryn Parker

Do you think then that we're taking it seriously?

Jake Blight

We're certainly taking those offences seriously. We're certainly taking that threat seriously. And I think the criminal law has a role to play. In my review, I've identified some gaps where I think we need to do a little bit more. And I've identified some problems where I think our laws go too far or they're just too confusing to use. We need laws that are clear for them to be effective.

Sharryn Parker

And everything is moving at such a pace now that you must see things that you've recommended in the last three years actually becoming almost irrelevant as you put them out there. How do you respond or prepare for the next stage of review when that occurs?

Jake Blight

Well, I don't think that's the case with the recommendations I've made, because they're really principled based. I think even the technology-based ones, which was that high tech surveillance review, they're not obsolete because they're about a system for issuing warrants to bring them into the Twenty First Century. That is a forward looking system. So I don't think I don't think the recommendations are obsolete and I don't think our espionage foreign interference laws are obsolete. I think some of them are problematic and can be improved. I think we've got some gaps. And an example is transnational repression. So in 2018, that wasn't a focus of these laws. It was very much a focus of submissions to my review. And I've identified at least three gaps in our legal framework where we can do more to deal with transnational repression that's occurring inside Australia.

Sharryn Parker

Are you able to actually expand on what they are and how we can actually patch those gaps?

Jake Blight

Sure. Well I've got three sort of main points there. One is we've got this specific problem with coerced repatriation. People who are being pressured, usually by threats to their family in another country, to leave Australia, to go back to another country, to face who knows what there. And we don't actually have an offence that covers that coerced repatriation. We've got people trafficking laws, but they're not a good fit. So we need a specific coerced repatriation law to deal with that very specific one. The second is that we have a foreign interference law that protects the democratic rights of Australians in Australia. I think that should protect the rights of everybody in Australia. So this means things like being able to protest, to protest even things that happen in other countries inside Australia. And our laws should protect those people equally. So I think that's important. We've also got a problem here with crime for money. So foreign powers are paying people in Australia to commit crimes. Now, what those people do is a crime, they can be punished for that, but there's an extra layer of harm that comes from a foreign government paying people. So I've recommended a general offence that will effectively increase the penalty. If you do a crime in Australia at the behest of a foreign principal, like being paid by a foreign government, you should go to jail for longer because there's the harm to the people you harm directly and the harm to our sovereignty. So there's three recommendations that I think will strengthen non legislative measures as well to combat transnational repression, and that's part of this review.

Sharryn Parker

So underlining some of that very obvious subversion activity that's going on, there are some tensions with espionage law between the legitimate advocacy for a foreign government and then the conduct that actually crosses into foreign interference. Where do you think that line is and where are some of the tension points between the two areas?

Jake Blight

So we've got this difference between foreign influence and foreign interference. And the line is when the conduct becomes covert, deceptive, or threatening. And the word covert there does most of the work. Like what does covert actually mean?

Sharryn Parker

Does Australia have a definition for that?

Jake Blight

No, we don't, but I recommend we do. I think we need one to be clear that it's about hiding, concealing, keeping secret, and disguising the influencing conduct. It's not just being secretive generally or using an encrypted app generally. I mean, you know, my mother uses an encrypted app to call me. That isn't a crime in itself. It's doing things to deliberately deceive and mislead. Now, of course, people do keep things secret in business. Journalists keep their sources secret. Diplomats are very confidential about what they do. Those things are legitimate. So we need to make sure that in defining covert, we're clear that it doesn't include the ordinary business of people engaged in commerce, journalism, or diplomacy. I think if we have a clearer definition, we'll provide much safer guardrails for our free press and for business and journalists and diplomats going about ordinary work.

Sharryn Parker

And I guess that legitimate public interest journalism you know, does bubble to the surface there. Do we actually have to put these laws into play and then test them in our own court of law before we find out how weak or strong they are?

Jake Blight

No, and that's part of the role of my office. I mean, national security laws actually rarely get prosecuted. And things like the ASIO Act or the Intelligence Services Act almost never end up before a court. That's different to tax or Centrelink laws that are tested all the time. Part of the specialist role of my office is to come in and do the legal work test laws that are probably never going to be tested by our courts. But they can still have a chilling effect. They still influence how our free press operates. And I heard from journalists and media organisations, including independent journalists, who say they just don't take on defence and national security work. They haven't got the legal teams to do that. They leave it to the big organisations, and that's a problem in itself. And those big organisations are themselves risk averse. It's very expensive to make errors here. And journalism, inconvenient as it can be for the government, isn't espionage. People might pretend to be journalists, that could be espionage, but the legitimate press might be inconvenient. It might breach secrecy laws, but it's not espionage. And we need to pare back our espionage laws. We have an espionage offence that is a life imprisonment offence. That is the most serious crime you can commit in Australia, a life imprisonment offence. We need to reserve that for the most serious conduct, things that people do deliberately to harm Australia, to give sensitive information to foreign governments. Right now our offences are much, much broader than that. Now there are other crimes. It's a crime to assist a foreign intelligence service, to aid the intelligence activities of a foreign government. We've got so many different crimes. We don't need to lump everything into one crime. We have this kind of hierarchy of offences. The more serious it is, the longer the jail penalty. So true espionage, you really should go to a jail for a long time for that. Actually what more happens in Australia is breaches of secrecy laws, serious but not as serious, assisting foreign intelligence agencies or assisting the intelligence activities of a foreign government. So we have this whole suite of laws. We don't have to squash everything into espionage anymore.

Sharryn Parker

I mean historically there are stories out in the public domain, certainly through the Cold War, of some of these laws and some of the laws that we had back then being tested in this way. I think in the modern construct of Australian society, we almost view it as an entertainment in some ways. How do we bring back Australians to this idea that these are very serious and help them understand some of those cascading effects that I mentioned earlier.

Jake Blight

These are very serious offences and one of the fundamental things that we value in this country, we value in our democracy, is the rule of law. You know, we make laws that bind everybody. You're innocent till proven guilty, you have a fair trial. If we can't defend that, then we aren't the nation that we think we are. So those are fundamental values that we must protect, that our police, security, intelligence agencies are designed to help us protect. We have to make sure that our laws also protect those and don't undermine those really core values. Because that affects all of us. It affects the values of our country. So it might seem that, no, don't worry, they only go after the bad guys. Well, that's a subjective judgment. Law needs to be quite precise. What is the law? When do you cross the line? And so when we talk about legal concepts, that's why we get so obsessed with being clear and precise. It is a different kind of game.

Sharryn Parker

Right. Well look, you know, I guess this takes us to this broader definition of what national security is and the fact that espionage and a definition of espionage actually fits in under the idea of a broader definition for national security. Would you like to have a stab at you know, something that nobody else has actually written on paper? What it what it might actually look like to you?

Jake Blight

Well I think the first thing is why define national security? Okay, so when I talk about it, I'm talking about it as an element in a very serious criminal offence. Now, when we talk about the National Security College at the ANU, we're using the word in a different way. We're talking about a whole area of research of things that impact our national well-being, our economy, our way of life. Much broader category. Now both are appropriate, but we use this word in very different ways. I know the ANU did a survey recently, and the kind of things people are worried about aren't necessarily the things that we criminalise under our national security laws. That's okay. And in fact, I think it might be better if we didn't use the word national security in these laws. In fact, most other countries don't. New Zealand uses protected New Zealand interests and other countries tend to use different laws. Just because as soon as you say the word national security, all sorts of different things pop up in different people's minds. But for these laws, we do need a definition. We have a definition, but it's really circular and messy. Yep. So I've proposed a new definition for these laws. Now that doesn't mean it's the right definition for research or for other topics. But if you're going to send someone to jail, you need a clear boundary. So when we're talking about deliberately harming national security by giving information to a foreign government, I'm talking about things that are about the defence of the country, protection of our borders, our national economic well being, the maintenance of our security-related international relationships, so our defence, intelligence, law enforcement, regional stability, and basic things like the protection of the peace order and good government of the Commonwealth. So that's our constitutional framework, not overthrowing the government by force. So those are the things I mean when I'm talking about the crime of doing something to damage national security. It's a quite specific concept.

Sharryn Parker

Can we narrow in on the idea of a border? You know, in in defence they talk of the five domains, you know, land domain, air and then maritime domain, but there's also now a cyber domain and a space domain. So when we talk about a border, it's something quite physical. in the twenty first century context, it becomes far more grey and blurry. So how would we prosecute against that kind of definition?

Jake Blight

There's a few things there. So that would probably come on a defence of the country if it was a militarised attack in any of those domains. You don't need to rely on the border for defence.

Sharryn Parker

And if it's not militarised?

Jake Blight

Then we've got a whole range of offences. Don't forget, I mean, when I'm talking about that two and a half thousand pages of laws, there's a lot of offences in there.

Sharryn Parker

That's right.

Jake Blight

We have really specific cyber offences. We have really specific sabotage offences. And cyber is the biggest growing area of espionage and sabotage. And those are the things we have specific offences for. It's a crime, for example, not only to sabotage our infrastructure, but it's a crime to lay down an implant that someone else that you don't even know might one day use to sabotage infrastructure. So we have a whole suite of offences. We don't need in the law to sort of say, well, we'll have vague domains, and if you do anything in a vague domain, that'll be bad. In the law, we need to be quite precise. These things are a crime. Those things are quite broad and in the cyber domain we have a lot of specific offences in the criminal code and in other laws.

Sharryn Parker

Do you think in in the definition that you've delivered now that this will actually capture the evolving environment for the next twenty, twenty five years?

Jake Blight

I think it will for the offences it's used in. So it's not used in every offence. So for example, foreign interference, there was someone arrested just last week, the Russian Ukrainian sorry, the Russian Australian allegedly spying for Russia on Ukraine. Yes. He was charged with foreign interference, not espionage, because one of the foreign interference offences is assisting the intelligence activities of a foreign government. That doesn't depend on the definition of national security. It's totally neutral. It doesn't matter whether it harmed Australia or not. We don't want spies in our country, no matter who they're spying on. So that is quite a neutral definition. The law should be as neutral as possible to account for those types of risks.

Sharryn Parker

And do you think that the report itself and the advice that you have you've actually given in you know across all of these reports actually helps us protect our political discourse, you know, protest, communication, etcetera? This is obviously as we've already mentioned a really fundamental part of being Australia, being the democracy that we are. have we gone far enough to protect that freedom of speech?

Jake Blight

I think, as I said, we need in our transnational repression laws to go a little bit further and make sure that we protect interference with the right of any person in Australia to voice their political views. Even if they can't vote here, they can influence those who do vote and they should be free to do that. I think we can go further there. We need to wind back in some areas to make sure we're not inadvertently catching our free press. And you know, we might not like what the press says, but we shouldn't be calling that harm to national security, that is robust political debate. So need to go a little bit backwards there, a bit forwards in some other areas. But as you say, it's very fundamental to the protection of our democracy to understand what our values are. And the freedom to protest, the freedom to engage in political discourse without fear, right up to the point where you commit violence, that's across the line. But the peaceful protest and discourse is fundamental to our way of life. We have to protect that. And it's built into my very legislation. It's very clear in my act that protecting the rights of individuals and Australia's compliance with our international human rights and other obligations is one of the things I must consider. And the Parliament put that in my act to make sure that those are always considered when we look at national security laws.

Sharryn Parker

There's a balance there between the rights of the individual and then the responsibility I think of the individual and then a matchup with our government to make sure that we are delivered the right information to make the right decision. How does that play into to the entire act?

Jake Blight

These rights are not inconsistent. And that they do differ a bit depending on who you are. If you're a government official who has taken a job in a security agency or the Department of Defence and voluntarily undergone a security clearance and have access to the nation's secrets, then you have quite different obligations to other people. And you are bound by very serious secrecy offences that people on the street are not. That's proper. So it depends a bit on who the individual is. If you're a journalist, your obligations are not the same as those who've spent their career in defence and get paid to do that. So I don't think these are inconsistent things. We need to both be able to ensure the integrity of our agencies and their systems and allow free political comment and journalism, because both of those are important to our security. It's not an either-or.

Sharryn Parker

Yeah, fantastic. And complex, I would add. every time you finish answering a question I just see in my mind's eye, you know, thousands of pages of the legislation which, you know, nobody except perhaps you and a number of legal professionals want to actually go through. how do you how do you put forward this conversation with everyday Australians?

Jake Blight

Those people listening to this podcast now know and understand more about espionage and foreign interference than they did. And that public engagement's really important, especially for the foreign interference laws in our diaspora communities. Because those foreign interference laws criminalise things that were not a crime before. And the first prosecution, Mr. Duong, he was prosecuted during COVID for making a donation to a hospital. And on the face of it, that seems like a very good thing to do. Behind the scenes, he was being influenced or instructed or at the behest of a foreign government, and he was trying to do it to get a photo opportunity with a minister in case in the future maybe they could influence that minister. Now that didn't used to be a crime. When we brought these laws in, that became a crime, and he went to jail. But it's very important that home affairs and others do community education campaigns so people understand how broad some of these laws are and how little tolerance Australia has for foreign interference in this country.

Sharryn Parker

Great. Thank you very much. Look, I guess before we wrap up here, I'm very keen to talk about the terrorism review process. I would like to just mark at this point that you know, and acknowledge that there was a Bondi Beach terrorist attack in December 2025. There were many lives lost and many injured, and there was a significant impact on Australia and all of its communities, that the shock was palpable. I guess without actually asking you, having said that, you know, to comment on ongoing matters of substance of any report that is that is forthcoming, how do you go into a review like this, noting that it is occurring in the aftermath and the emotional response is still being felt by Australians? How do you answer that?

Jake Blight

Bondi's a horrific attack and obviously that's before the courts and limited on what I can say about it, but it acknowledged the terrible grief and suffering and the damage and harm that will do for years and years and years to not just the individuals and their families, but to the nation. But this review started well before Bondi. It was announced you know two years before, and then I began work on it. The issues paper was launched in August the year before. It's a long review. It's not triggered by any particular event. It's triggered by the fact that it's nearly a quarter of a century since 9/11. I have people in my office who weren't born when 9/11 happened. 9/11 shaped my career, my life, but it's a long time ago. And these laws that we enacted in two thousand and two were in a different world. So the passage of time and the nature of the threat. What terrorism looks like today is very different to what it looked like in 9/11. We absolutely still have the threat of ISIL, Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and that ilk absolutely, absolutely with us still. But it's also changed thirty to fifty percent. Depends on the year of ASIO and AFP's case, load is other ideologies. When we had 9/11, they were adults, they were well funded, they were organized, they were international. These days, your average terrorist's a child. So far of the people sentenced in 2026, I got this statistic just as I was leaving the office. 63% of the people sentenced for terrorism this year, terrorism-related offences, were children.

Sharryn Parker

Can you just define for the audience the definition of a child?

Jake Blight

Under 18 is a child. So in some offences it's up to sixty percent of those charged are children. At the moment it's o about thirty percent over all of those before the courts are children. And said those sentenced this year, it's probably a skewed number because most of those are charged with possession of violent extremism material, which is a fairly new offence. But in 2002, when we designed these laws, we didn't have children in mind. We had Al Qaeda in mind. Now, these laws apply, and I'm not saying that they shouldn't apply, I'm just saying the threat has changed. So we've had 25 years, terrorism looks different. Those Al-Qaeda Islamic State people are still there, but there's others now. And now we also have hundreds of other laws attached to this definition. When it was first introduced, there were sort of a handful of special powers and a handful of special laws, including those around financing and membership. We did, we commissioned an academic to do some research to kick this review off and I think he identified four hundred different laws that depend on the definition of terrorist act. It's a very complex area of law now. So it's that change in time, the body of law, the change in threat, that triggered this review. I'm not looking at the Bondi attack itself. You know, that's a matter before the courts, but you know, the publicly available facts, it looks like an archetypal terrorism attack. That's not the kind of thing that's in question in this review. I'm more looking at the edges of terrorism. Where are the edges of terrorism, not where the center is? Where are the edges? What does it look like? How does it work today with these other ideologies? What does ideology mean? You know, one of the defining features of terrorism that differentiates it from murder and other crimes is that it needs to be done to advance a political, religious, or ideological cause. Now, none of our case law, none of our cases have unpicked those, what any of those categories mean. But we've got a quite different conviction rate for what you might call the classic Islamic State Al-Qaeda type terrorist, about 83% of that category go to jail. Of the other ideologies, about 50% conviction rate. Now it's a smaller number of cases, but why are they falling over? So my office has been trawling through every one of those cases, through the transcripts, through the jury directions, to try and understand what's going on here. And each case is individual, but one of the themes is people and juries are struggling with what does ideology mean. So these aren't questions that were at the fore in two thousand and two. In two thousand and two we were responding to a horrific three thousand or something people died in nine eleven. It changed the world and it changed our criminal law and we brought terrorism laws in. To recognise that if an attack like that happened in Australia, no single police force could deal with it. No single police force could identify it. We needed a federal system of law that brought in ASIO, Signals Directorate, ASIS, the military. These are not things any state could deal with. So terrorism law was brought in to deal with this extraordinary situation. Now, it doesn't mean every terrible or terrifying crime is terrorism. Take, for example, the Port Arthur shootings in Australia, a terrible and terrifying crime. He was arrested in Tasmania by Tasmanian police, charged with murder, convicted by a Tasmanian court, will spend the rest of his life in a Tasmanian jail. That legal system worked fine. We didn't think that would work for a 9-11 type situation. So we didn't need to change our law for every terrible crime. Murder remains a state offence. It remains a terrible crime. We don't need every terrifying crime to be terrorism. In fact, we have now a whole suite of hate crimes and other things in between. But we do have this special category of things that are particularly dangerous because of their scale, or because they're about advancing a cause behind which others will rally and perpetrate more violence. They're not just lone acts. So terrorism law, we need to put it in the context of a whole legal system. And that's what this review is doing, looking at the heart of that law. What is the definition? It's worked pretty well in the past, but is it working for terrorism now? And is it going to work for the kind of terrorism that we forecast for the next twenty years?

Sharryn Parker

I guess the thing that pops out to me is that all of that makes sense, but the extraordinary part of this conversation has been how much is occurring around people who are under the age of 18. Now that is a very specific group in the Australian context. It means children. We're now building laws around the offence. Are we also considering the idea that children don't have full brain development. They are being used as tools in this manner across the cyber domain and elsewhere. Are we actually putting into play protective securities around those people that require that extra layer of both ethical and moral support rather than just tagging them as people who are conducting crime?

Jake Blight

I mean we didn't go out looking for evidence on children in this review, but we got a lot of it. We got a lot of experts raising these concerns about children's developmental ability to understand that what they're doing is preparing for a crime rather than just talking loud. We got a lot of evidence about children who have particular vulnerabilities, whether it might be intellectual delay or being on an autism spectrum or various challenges in their lives. We got a lot of evidence. In fact, there's statements of Five Eyes Police and Security Intelligence joint statement talking about needing a whole of nation response to children. It's not just a criminal matter. Th this is really come to the fore in this review, but it's not the focus of the review. The focus of the review is the legal definition. But I definitely think there is more work to be done on questions about children and terrorism. Is it the right vector? Is it making us safer to deal with children in this way? Are there better ways to intervene early so that crime and criminal systems are a last resort? I don't think police enjoy charging children with terrorism, but they're dealing with the pointy end. What's happened before that? These are really complex whole of society questions. That's not something I can resolve with the definition. The definition can and should apply to everybody over the age of criminal responsibility. But it is certainly something that's come up in this review and something I'm going to go into in some detail and likely recommend that it needs further work.

Sharryn Parker

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is something that will alarm a great majority of Australians and to understand that and then think about how we can actually solve those problems. Look, I guess before we wrap up, can we just talk about you personally for a minute? you won't be the monitor forever, Jake. What is on the cards for you next?

Jake Blight

What next? No, my term finishes in end of November this year. It's a three-year term. I've absolutely loved being monitor. It's a fantastic job. I've enjoyed every moment of it. I have a fantastic team of lawyers and s and corporate support staff in my office. And I'm really proud of the work that we've done as a team. What's next for me? I'm not sure. I think I'll be unemployed for a while. I'll possibly look to finish my PhD, which I've been working on forever and maybe do some other things, but I will leave this job with a sense of achievement in what we've done and pride in the work of my team and awe at the role of civil society and their willingness to engage and the value they can bring. And I've always remained a great deal of respect and for our police and integrity and security agencies as well. So it's been a fantastic role. I'm not done yet. We're going to finish this terrorism review and I'll be happy to come back and talk about that once the reports are tabled.

Sharryn Parker

Absolutely, we'll book you in. I guess you know, you've got to do a handover at some stage. What's the key message you're going to leave with the next monitor?

Jake Blight

Well, apart from how fantastic our staff are, they've got an enormous job. This role, as I said, our jurisdiction's been expanded. I think you could easily count five thousand pages of legislation to pick. There are some things on the horizon and it's a terrific job. There's a lot of work to do, and I would encourage them to continue the work of a lot of engagement with agencies and with civil society group to come up with pragmatic and practical improvements to our law.

Sharryn Parker

Pragmatic and practical. Let's see how we go. Thank you very much, Jake Blight.

Jake Blight

Thank you.