When growth within living organisms is exponential it’s often described as cancerous.
ASIO budget growth 2001-2009
On that basis, the growth of Australia’s internal ‘intelligence agency’ has become a fully-feldged cancer over the last decade.
More than a year ago, Bernard Keane reported in the independent Australian news website Crikey that the annual budget of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation grew from “$60m at the state of the decade to nearly $300m in the final Howard Government budget”.
The graph, reproduced here from Keane’s original article on Crikey, shows the picture clearly.
Expecting to see some decrease since then – or at least a stabilisation of this sky-rocketing budget – I did a quick desktop search today. The most recent relevant document I could find is a Parliamentary Paper entitled Budget 2010–11: Security Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and related intelligence issues by Nigel Brew. Here are two brief extracts:
After several years of receiving regular annual increases to its budget and experiencing rapid, significant growth in staff numbers under a planned expansion program stemming from the 2005 (Taylor) Review of ASIO Resourcing, ASIO’s overall budget has again increased (from $427 million in 2009–10 to a total of some $717 million this year) as the program enters its final phase…
ASIO is also expecting an increase of 89 to its Average Staffing Level (ASL) this coming financial year, bringing the agency’s ASL to a total of 1800. This is in line with ASIO’s ongoing five-year growth program and keeps it on track to meet its objective of 1800 staff by 2010–11, consistent with the recommendations of the Taylor Review. ASIO staff numbers have been steadily increasing every year now for some time.
By stealth – and with broad bipartisan support and precious little scrutiny from the mass media – Australia’s secret state has enjoyed a budget increase of some 1,000% in a decade.
Bernard Keane’s comment back in 2009 is even more relevant today:
“All this for an agency with no public scrutiny or performance indicators to assess whether it is doing its job or responsibly spending taxpayers’ money.”
