Since the terrible events of October seven, twenty twenty three, we have witnessed a number of appalling anti Semitic attacks against Australia's Jewish community. I have made it clear that these sorts of incidents have no place in Australia and that I wanted Asia and the AFP to investigate as a priority.
When Prime Minister to Anthony Albanezi fronted the media this week alongside ASIO chief Mike Burgess, it was with extraordinary news. Albanizer revealed that ASIO now has evidence that the Iranian government was behind at least two anti Semitic attacks on Australian soil, the fire bombing of a Jewish kitchen in Bandai and an arson attack on the Adas Synagogue in Melbourne. He said Iran directed the attacks and then tried to cover up its role.
It is totally unacceptable and the Australian government is taking strong and decisive action in response. A short time ago, we informed the Iranian ambassador to Australia that he would be expelled.
It was interesting timing as Australia's Defense Minister took an impromptu visit to the United States, taking secret meetings with unpublished agendas. I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM today Press Gallery journalist Karen Middleton on the high States diplomacy behind closed doors and the shifting lines of trust between the US, Israel and Australia. It's Saturday, August thirty, Karen. Last weekend, Defense Minister and Deputy PM Richard Marles made
a seemingly unplanned lightning trip to Washington. What struck you about the timing of that trip, Well.
Daniel, For starters, it was a parliamentary sitting week, and normally when there's a high level visit overseas involving a senior minister like Richard Miles, you would have all eat a sitting week wherever possible because he has parliamentary duties. It's not a great look to be missing parliament. So that suggests to you that it was a meeting of some urgency. And then you know there was a lot of confusion around exactly why he was going and who
was meeting with. But primarily the first sign that it was a bit weird was the fact that it clashed with a sitting fortnite.
And as Miles flew out, he usued a statement saying that the purpose of the trip was a meeting with his counterpart, Pete Hegsith, but his key meeting was with the Secretary of State Marque Rubio. So what can we take from that.
Well, that's the second thing that was a little bit odd. He did indicate as he flew out on Sunday that he was seeing Pete Hegsas. Then it was suggested that that meeting hadn't been locked in and he was arriving in Washington without it having been locked in. Then we discovered that he was seeing Marco Rubio, who's the Secretary of State. Now he's also the acting National Security Advisor,
so he does have a broad remit. And Richard Marle is in the security domain as Defense Minister, so it's not ridiculous that he would meet the Secretary of State. But generally speaking, it would be a foreign minister who would be meeting with the Secretary of State, and that meeting has been very much downplayed by Richard Miles and by the government generally. All the focus has been on the whether he did or didn't meet with Pete Hegsas.
But the meeting with Rubio, there was one photograph that was published in the Australian newspaper, but didn't appear on Richard Miles or social media feeds of him and Kevin Rudby, Ambassador and Australian officials sitting down with Marco Arriubio and American officials, and we don't know what was discussed. And normally there's a readout from the American end, at least on a formal sit down meeting with a visiting foreign
leader or minister, and we didn't get that. So there's nothing from the American side and nothing from the Australian side on why they sat down, on what they talked about. So there's a.
Degree of ambiguity about it all. What did the Pentagon say when they responded to the questions about these meetings.
Well, this did not make it any clearer, can I say? Initially Richard Marles issued these photographs of himself with Vice President JD. Evance and with Defense Secretary Pete Hegsath, So there was naturally a question about, well, what happened at the heggs this meeting, and the Pentagon issued a statement saying it wasn't a meeting.
The Pentagon has told nine News there was not a meeting between Defense Minister Richard Miles and his US counterpart Pete Hegzeth. A US defense official, says it was a happenstance encounter.
Mister Martin just sent us.
Offline to the dictionaries to try and work out what that exactly means, because it's not a Jenner phrase we've heard before. But it would suggest very strongly that it was not a meeting of substance. It was a chat basically. But then it got weirder because of course, once Richard Miles was back in Australia, there was a lot of media attention on this and what this phrase means.
You would see politicians have a pretty good understanding of their diaries. However, there is confusion tonight as neither the Australian nor the United States governments seemed to know if our defense ministers had a meeting or not.
And then the Pentagon issued another statement, which we suspect was at the urging of Richard Miles and the government saying no, no, it was actually a meeting.
And within hours a fresh statement from the Pentagon landed Secretary Hegseth welcomed the opportunity to meet in person with Deputy Prime Minister Miles. Their meeting at the White House on Tuesday was coordinated in advance.
By Thursday, Miles was back in Parliament and he got a question from Shadow Minister Angus Taylor specifically about the Hexath meeting.
Was this a meeting with Secretary Exith or just a photo opportunity and was there an outcome beyond the photo?
Richard Miles had a crack at Angus Taylor in reply, but he still didn't tell us why he went.
Misters Speaker, I think we all understand that the question from Captain Conspiracy over here was whether or no, actually the.
But the Pentagon has not issued any kind of readout on this meeting, and normally they would, so to not have a summary does suggest this was somewhere short of a full blown meeting.
Coming up, Marco Rubio's meeting with Israel's foreign minister and how it may have shaped what happened here, Karen, Marco Rubio had another significant meeting this week with Israel's Foreign Minister, Gideon sa So what do we know about what was discussed and whether there was any link between that meeting and Rubio's meeting with Miles.
They did issue a readout on that meeting. It was a couple of days after the one with Richard Miles, and in a lot of ways, the content of what they discussed, according to the readout, was not very surprising. They said that they had discussed the US's quote unwavering commitment to Israel's security unquote, and that's spoken specifically about Gaza Lebanon in Syria. So that's hardly surprising, especially under the current circumstances. And then there was this sentence quote additionally,
the Secretary discussed the importance of countering Iran's malign influence unquote. Now, again, there's nothing surprising about discussing Iran. Israel attacked Iran recently, we know all about that. It's the wording that says as Secretary discussed Iran. Whether there's anything significant in it being the Secretary who brought that up rather than the
Israeli Foreign Minister, I don't know. We could be reading way too much into it, but of course we're interested in any reference to Iran in the current context, in proximity to what the Australian government announced just as Richard Miles was sitting down with his counterparts in Washington.
Yeah, so let's go to that current context. I mean, like you said, Ribio and Sara discussed Iran, but it came at the same week that our government took the extraordinary step of expelling the Iranian ambassador from the country, and we're told this was because the Iranian government was behind anti Semitic attacks on Australian soil. Can you tell me what's known about Iran's record on orchestrating attacks in other countries.
Yeah, we certainly know that Iran has been accused of orchestrating attacks in Europe and elsewhere. That what they are said to have done is hired local criminals to undertake violent attacks. We've also heard a lot of evidence of harassment of Iranian expatriates living in other countries. But these the violent attacks and the alleged use of criminal gangs and criminal networks is what appears to be similar to the allegation we're seeing in Australia.
The federal government has announced that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will be listed as a terrorist organization. This is something that critics of the regime have been calling for for a long time. So how long has the government been warned about Iranian activity in Australia.
The government has known and had concerns for some time and that goes back to them Morrison government as well as the under the alb and Esy government, but has resisted taking formal steps like expelling the ambassador to see Now or listing the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps as a
terrorist organization. There was a Senate inquiry in Australia in twenty twenty three examining the implications of the deaths of a young Iranian woman, Marsa Amini in Tehran, who had been arrested for not wearing a hijab and died in mysterious circumstances. It was great concern. There were protests worldwide
at the treatment of women. There were allegations of harassment of Iranian Australians here and there was great pressure then on the government from members of the Coalition here in Australia and for members of the wider Iranian community to list the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. At the time, and interestingly, the Director General of ASIO, Mike Burgess, mentioned Iran specifically in his National Security Assessment in February, which he does annually.
We shouldn't be complacent or consider ourselves insulated from any of these threats. We are not immune to hostile nation states such as I run undertaking acts of security concern on our shores or near region.
Given that history, Karen, how significant was what the government did this week.
It's a big thing. What they have done is they have declared the Iranian ambassador persona non grata and kicked him out of the country. They gave him forty eight hours to leave and he has now gone. I have done my job and I'm going upon determination of my mission going home. Three other Iranian diplomats have been given seven days to get out of the country.
Now.
The reason the governments are very reluctant to do this is that it sever's relations with another country. There is no channel of communication. If you have Australians of dual nationality or Australians living and working in that other country, it leaves them vulnerable because there are no bilateral relations and the reciprocal thing usually happens and has in this
case that Australian diplomats have been extracted from Iran. The government had to get them out of the country before it made this announcement public because of concerns for their safety. We've seen violent actions against the Australian embassy in Iran in the past and an assassination plot against the Australian ambassador in Iran some six years ago, but it's never got to this stage of evidence of actual violent acts
in Australia. So that's a big thing to expel the ambassador and then to make this decision to list the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization is also a big deal.
The government will legislate so that we can list around Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps the RIGC as a terrorist organization. The actions of my government send a very clear message to what.
That does is it's effectively saying that an arm of a foreign government, that a foreign state is a terrorist state. This Revolutionary Guard as the Yataller's security force. So in making that statement in the government's going to have to amend the Criminal Code here to allow for that. And it does open up potential other implications. For example, in other non democratic countries where there might be aggressive security forces, are they going to come under pressure now to do
the same thing. There The upside in terms of the law of listing an organization like that is that it widens the scope of the kinds of criminal offenses that people involved in these kinds of violence in Australia might be exposed to. For example, they wouldn't just be charged with attacking premises, they'd be potentially charged with terrorism offenses.
So there are lots of reasons to do it, but they have a lot of consequences, and there's also now concerned of retaliation against Australians in Iran.
And finally, Karen, do you think it's fair to assume the government made these calls after consulting with the US and indirectly with Israel itself.
Well, there's no doubt that the United States would have known about this. We know from things the government said in the last few days that there was at least one foreign intelligence service involved in this. They say that Azio did the bulk of the work, but there was
clearly involvement of our foreign intelligence service. Whether that was the United States or Israel or both, we don't know, but you can be assured the United States would have known well before the announcement was made on Tuesday that this was going to happen. I'm sure Israel would have been kept informed as well, given the anti Semitic nature of these attacks and the implications for Jewish Australians and
for Jews abroad. So Tuesday was not the first time that many of those other countries had heard about it, and indeed Monday was not the first time that the Australian executive government, the Prime Ministry and his colleagues would have heard about it either. They would have been kept abreast of the investigation and it was the formal advice that they received from ASIO on Monday that prompted them to take these steps, But people would have been kept in the loop for sure.
Karen, thank you so much for your time. Thanks Daniel, thanks for listening to this extra Saturday edition of seven AM. On Monday, I speak with the Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt. I asked him about his plans to fix Australia's broken environmental laws, and I ask why in one of his first acts as minister, he approved the expansion of Woodside's massive Northwest Shelf gas project, despite Australians voting for action on climate change.
I understand that when that decision was made there were many people who looked at it and questioned how we could be approving a project like that when you're thinking about greenhouse emissions and climate change.
See you on Monday. Have a great weekend.
D