In November 2025, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess told the Lowy Institute his agency had linked pro-Russian influencers to an offshore media operation "almost certainly" directed by Russian intelligence, one that hides its Moscow ties. He also described Australia as “resistant and resilient”. Australian national security understands the Kremlin as a hostile adversary that attacks directly and covertly. This paper argues that the graver channel no longer arrives stamped from Moscow: Kremlin influence propagates through an entangled network in which Australian politicians and donors are themselves particles, advancing the wave from inside the jurisdiction Burgess credits with resisting it. A quantum lens brings both into view: the particles of these foreign influence operations and the wave they form.
Read as isolated incidents, the record looks like unconnected domestic politics: Pauline Hanson praising Putin and doubting Russia's responsibility for MH17 in 2017; an Indonesian social media network boosting One Nation; Hanson's pilgrimage to CPAC and Mar-a-Lago, flights funded by Gina Rinehart; Tucker Carlson's Clive Palmer–sponsored national tour, fresh off his Putin interview; a Trump strategist claiming he secretly advised the Liberal Party, while partnered with longtime political architect of Kremlin influence, Paul Manafort. Read as an entangled system, these are correlated particles of a single network, advancing a wave of Russian influence within Australia.
Hansard records the deepening entanglement. In March 2022, One Nation's response to the Senate motion condemning Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was Malcolm Roberts refusing to take a stance "either way," claiming Australians have "no dog in this fight" and that wars are made by "globalists"; a declared superposition, held while the motion passed without dissent. Four years of entanglement followed, and then the collapse came when the Sydney Morning Herald recently exposed Roberts praising Putin for his war in Ukraine and "standing up to the globalists"; comments Pravda Australia harvested and republished within hours of the SMH report. In June, UK far-right activist Tommy Robinson traveled to Moscow on a trip that Errol Musk says the Musk Foundation funded. While his host, who a year earlier had sat beside Russia's foreign minister at a forum run by sanctioned oligarch Konstantin Malofeev's Tsargrad network, spent this visit at the Kremlin's flagship economic forum, Robinson declared Russia "not the enemy" and posted a 26-location protest list seen 8.4 million times, amplified by Elon Musk to millions more, hours before masked rioters burned homes across Belfast. Weeks later, Hanson sat down with him in the UK for a publicity campaign.
Observing and measuring this entanglement, its particles and the wave of Kremlin influence aimed at sowing discord and division, is how Australia keeps “resistant and resilient”. A democracy that can measure the whole system and its movement, and not only its nodes, can protect what its spy chief credits as the nation’s strength.
