It gives me no pleasure to give you this world exclusive, never before revealed to the public. Years ago, when I was the minister in charge of Asio, they sent some papers up to me for my signature. Asio needed my approval for a certain activity in which it was about to engage. But when I read the papers, it was obvious to me that the organisation had made a ghastly mistake which would have caused immense trouble if the project had gone ahead on a falsity. Like all such exercises, this one had started with the apparatchiks at the coalface, worked its way up through presumably several layers of supervisors and had then come forth to me from the inner sanctum of the organisation for my approval. But the mistake they had made as the papers meandered their way to my desk was obvious. Everything was halted while an investigation was undertaken to see if I was right or wrong. I turned out to be right and, after some humble pie was eaten by those responsible, the mistake was corrected and the job went on its merry way. No harm was done, and the incident was forgotten, except by me. So why, you might ask, am I revealing this event after staying mum for so many years and why have I departed from the golden rule of never exposing Asio to public scrutiny?

The answer is that Asio itself has changed. And so, it seems, has the role of its Director-General, Mike Burgess. Asio has been transformed from a silent and neutral body divorced from politics into an organisation all too ready to take part in the political debate and allowed itself to be used to provide ammunition for the benefit of either side of politics. So, as it has entered into politics why shouldn’t I contribute to the political debate, just as Asio has done?

Asio has always rightly relied on the secrecy of its operations and its assessment of security trends to earn and keep the respect in which it has been held. Unfortunately, that detachment seems to have been abandoned as Asio is now an active participant in the debate over admitting refugees from Gaza into Australia.

Moreover, Burgess himself has become an active participant in the public debate. Former occupants of that office kept well clear of doing or saying anything that could be seen as taking sides or even as having an opinion on public issues, no matter on what side of the argument. Indeed, their success came from not being public commentators. But now, no event seems complete without the D-G popping up like a media star and giving us the benefit of his opinion. He even took part in a highly political press conference flanked by the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General, an exceedingly unwise thing to do as he thereby intruded himself into the public debate and inevitably on one side of it. He has also revealed the intelligence that several countries were spying on us and that some of them are our friends, starting another guessing game as to which of our friends is snooping on us. As he is clearly trying to become a popular figure with these titbits, I wonder where he will appear next. Dancing With the Stars? Or perhaps with a Gold Logie? And it is worse than that because Asio and its boss’s involvement in public disputes has been entirely voluntary.

And Asio has not limited itself to statements of fact, which might be acceptable. It is now well and truly into the opinion business which inevitably leads to disputes and conflicting opinions which must diminish public confidence in an organisation that is supposed to be neutral. And it is more likely to be wrong on matters of opinion, especially where there are two sides to every issue, as there are on Gaza.

The trend to Asio’s becoming a party and an activist is already starting to have some unfortunate consequences. One is that having intruded onto the political stage, politicians will not be able to resist the temptation to bolster their case by saying that Asio agrees with them. We saw this when Albanese was trying to defend his indefensible position on which refugees from Gaza we should allow in. He was brazen enough to say that Burgess agreed with him and then deceitfully misquoted him, starting a new argument which dragged Asio even further into public controversy. The second result is that the media will expect them both to become similarly involved when the next big issue comes along and on present trends they will not be able to resist the temptation to comment.

Thirdly, these interventions open up issues of whether Asio is right or wrong. Burgess has claimed that the present security checks on people from Gaza are adequate. This is nonsense; they are tourists who have made only online applications and are subject to no manual security checks at all. It is inconceivable that there has been time for 3,000 people to be subjected to anything remotely like adequate checks, especially as we do not have people on the ground in Gaza to administer them, as we did assessing refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.

Burgess also argued that Gazans who only support Hamas’s philosophy should be admitted to Australia so long as they have not been engaged in actual terrorism. That is an absurd distinction, as Hamas is a terrorist organisation and has been declared as such. We therefore cannot be certain that the refugees we accept are untainted by terrorist connections or not. Moreover, Asio has chosen on both of these issues a side with which a sizeable proportion of the public disagree.

We were better off before this trend took hold. Asio was respected and its actions were broadly accepted because it was the silent service and it kept out of politics. That respect is now being eroded; it should be stopped before more damage is done.