ASIO's worst nightmare Greens elected to government

IT must be ASIO's worst nightmare -- the meddlesome Greens finally are set to have a meaningful say in governing Australia.

Not just from a token MP or sympathiser in the House of Representatives but from next July 1 when the Greens take the balance of voting power in the Senate.

The spy industry in Australia was going from strength to strength until election weekend. Trying to stay in step with the huge expansion of the spying business in the United States.

Once upon a time you had to build a High Court or National Gallery to score a plum building site on Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra.

But the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation has shouldered its way into the national capital's waterfront real estate.

Its new $600 million plus (how would you know the real bill to taxpayers?) lakeside headquarters kept taking shape as Labor and Liberal went hammer and tongs to run Australia.

Mugs! ASIO is regarded by many old Canberra hands as the real ruler of national government. Start nosing around or writing press reports about ASIO and these clowns will start snooping.

Legend has it the spooks from ASIO or the other national spy agencies, including the Prime Minister's own secret service, used to keep a dossier on Greens boss Bob Brown.

Be a bugger for ASIO and the other spies if Senator Brown starts demanding answers on their operations before the Greens start passing legislation.

Senator Brown told one national newspaper last month that the cost of the new ASIO headquarters was indefensible.

ASIO's KGB-style bunker will not rise up to confront taxpayers; rather it will stretch long and low so eventually Australia's overpaid and underworked spies will be able to doze and play ping-pong behind walls and greenery. The building's deceptive appearance will disguise the fact that it is the largest construction project in Canberra since our new Parliament House in the 1980s.

You wonder what politicians were thinking when the project was approved. Probably it was too difficult to ignore those events in the US.

Uncle Sam's September 11 (2001) panic appears as powerful as ever. A total of 24 new security organisations were created in the US within weeks of that event. The total of new security organisations has topped 260 with presumably more to come.

The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency workforce jumped from 7500 to in 2002 to 16,500 this year. Budgets keep doubling, secret reports keep multiplying.

Little wonder the US economy had a dollar deficit of trillions which defied household comprehension last year. After all, there are more than 850,000 Americans with top secret security clearances. The Post estimated that the government security business in the US is supported by up to 2000 private firms operating from almost 10,000 different locations within America itself. Then there is US security work overseas: estimates on Australia's spy expenditure are about $4 billion a year, four times what it was at the turn of the century. It is not just the thousands in ASIO, there are the James Bonds from the undercover ASIS agency who swan around overseas. Add on the Office of National Assessments, Defence Department's DIGO agency, Defence intelligence and the magnifying glass mob from Signals secretariat.

The ASIO project in Canberra will look an awful lot like the Australian puppy wagging its tail for Uncle Sam's approval when it is finished. Imagine the ongoing cost of ASIO's cyber spying programs when phone-tapping and satellite surveillance become obsolete? Sure, fanatics with terrorism tendencies are rounded up semi-regularly, but it is the young bucks from dirty-tricks departments within the Australian Federal Police doing the harder yards.

The so-called war on terrorism became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Canberra veterans reckon ASIO only really excelled at penetrating branches of the Communist Party in the 1950-60s, until it all fell apart when there were more spies than commos per branch.

One thing is for sure. ASIO and all the other expensive spy networks in Australia are useless in preventing deaths of fine young Australians in Afghanistan.