Economic coercion in Indo-Pacific island states: Building resilience

/in ,

Indo-Pacific island states face diverse challenges as they grapple with their own unique vulnerabilities to the geopolitical consequences of growing strategic competition in the region. This report explores the vulnerability of island states to economic coercion and the risks they face in navigating the growing economic power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

In this report, the authors examine four perceived examples of economic coercion within the region that challenge the Quad’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific. China’s increasing interest in the island states of the Indo-Pacific has led to concern that the imbalance in those relationships is so large that both domestic and broader regional stability are at risk.

This report offers a number of policy recommendations to protect Indo-Pacific island states from economic coercion, including:

  • Island states must be better invested in the rules-based international economic order;
  • Establishing codes of conduct to limit economic duress, limit undue economic influence and strengthen the rules-based international system;
  • Strengthening government institutions so they can resist economic coercion;
  • International partners should work with Indo-Pacific island states to help strengthen the ability of local businesses to take collective action against economic coercion.

The Pacific Fusion Centre: the challenge of sharing information and intelligence in the Pacific

/in ,

The Pacific Fusion Centre: the challenge of sharing information and intelligence in the Pacific examines the Australian-sponsored Pacific Fusion Centre (PFC) which is due to open permanent offices in Vanuatu later this year.

The PFC was set up in 2019 as an outcome of the 2018 Boe Declaration with the mandate of providing strategic intelligence to Pacific Island states to assist in high-level policy formulation on human security, environmental security, transnational crime and cybersecurity. The report argues that the impact of these assessments may be limited, including due to the open-source nature of the information.

There are also widespread misperceptions about the PFC’s role. Unlike regional information fusion centres elsewhere in the region, the PFC will not produce actionable intelligence on specific security threats. For example, identifying vessels that are engaged in illegal fishing or smuggling people, arms or drugs.

The Pacific still sorely needs a regional centre to fuse and share actionable intelligence in the maritime domain. Australia needs to consider how it can best move to fill this important intelligence gap.

The Report concludes that the PFC may be a useful soft-power initiative, but the Pacific still sorely needs a regional information fusion centre to produce and share actionable intelligence in the maritime domain.

New beginnings: Rethinking business and trade in an era of strategic clarity and rolling disruption

/in , ,

This special report considers the relationship between our business and trade positioning in the context of the impacts of Covid, natural disasters and the actions of coercive trading partners.

Global economic integration has enabled the spread of ideas, products, people and investment at never before seen speed. International free trade has been a goal of policy-makers and academics for generations, allowing and fostering innovation and growth. We saw the mechanism shudder in 2008 when the movement of money faltered; the disruption brought about by COVID-19 has seen a much more multi-dimensional failure of the systems by which we share and move. The unstoppable conveyor belt of our global supply chain has ground to a halt. This time, what will we learn?

ASPI’s latest research identifies factors that have led to the erosion of Australia’s policy and planning capacity, while detailing the strengths of our national responses to recent crises. The authors recommend an overhaul of our current business and trade policy settings, with a view to building an ‘agenda that invests in what we’re good at and what we need, values what we have and builds the future we want.’

The authors examine the vulnerabilities in Australia’s national security, resilience and sovereignty in relation to supply chains and the intersection of the corporate sector and government. To protect Australia’s business interests and national sovereignty, the report highlights recent paradigm shifts in geopolitics, whereby economic and trade priorities are increasingly relevant to the national security discussion.

ANZUS at 70: the past, present and future of the alliance

/in ,

The ANZUS Treaty was signed on 1 September 1951 in San Francisco. It was the product of energetic Australian lobbying to secure a formal US commitment to Australian and New Zealand security. At the time, the shape of Asian security after World War II was still developing. Canberra worried that a ‘soft’ peace treaty with Japan might one day allow a return of a militarised regime to threaten the region.

ANZUS at 70 explores the past, present and future of the alliance relationship, drawing on a wide range of authors with deep professional interest in the alliance. Our aim is to provide lively and comprehensible analysis of key historical points in the life of the treaty and indeed of the broader Australia–US bilateral relationship, which traces its defence origins back to before World War I.

ANZUS today encompasses much more than defence and intelligence cooperation. Newer areas of collaboration include work on cybersecurity, space, supply chains, industrial production, rare earths, emerging science and technology areas such as quantum computing, climate change and wider engagement with countries and institutions beyond ANZUS’s initial scope or intention.

The treaty remains a core component of wider and deeper relations between Australia and the US. This study aims to show the range of those ties, to understand the many and varied challenges we face today and to understand how ANZUS might be shaped to meet future events.

Watch the launch webinar here.

Losing our agnosticism. How to make Australia’s foreign influence laws work

/in ,

Country agnosticism, under which Australia’s laws treat all foreign influence efforts in the same way, regardless of their source country, is the key failing of Australia’s statutory response to foreign governments’ influence activities.

It has imposed sweeping, unnecessary regulatory costs. It has caused waste of taxpayer-funded enforcement resources. It has diverted those resources from the issues that really matter. And it has brought unnecessary legal complexity. Yet for all that, nobody believes that the laws are truly country agnostic. Not the Australian media, which routinely describe them as ‘aimed at’ China. Nor, presumably, the media’s audience. Nor, certainly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which regards itself as the target, explicitly citing the laws as a key grievance.

Perhaps the greatest cost of country agnosticism is that the current statutory framework isn’t as effective as it needs to be. Why? In adopting a country-agnostic stance, we blinded ourselves to the very factor that matters most in evaluating and responding to foreign influence—its source country.

It’s time to remove the blindfold. We should recognise this basic truth: foreign influence transparency requirements must be more stringent in relation to some source countries than others.

‘Lead me to the harbour!’: Plotting Darwin Harbour’s future course

/in , ,

In this report, authors Dr John Coyne and Dr Teagan Westendorf seek to move Australia’s public policy discourse on the future of Darwin Port beyond a binary choice. In doing so, they consider the Harbour’s history, the nature of its strategic importance to Australia and our allies, and opportunities for its future development.

The report explores four potential options for the future development of the Port and Harbour. Rather than providing a specific policy treatment on the current leasing arrangements, this work focuses on promoting policy discourse on a unifying vision for the future of Darwin Harbour.

A key insight from this analysis is that this moment is an opportunity for the federal government to work with the Northern Territory Government to harness the existing plans for the Port’s future, including those proposed by Defence, the US and the NT Government, and embed those plans within the broader strategic vision for Australia moving forward. While each of these worthy plans undoubtedly has merit, the question is whether, by carefully harnessing them together, they could produce a greater economic and national security whole.

Digital government services. Building for peak demand.

/in ,

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the myGov website was overwhelmed by a demand surge from citizens seeking to rapidly access digital services. In 2016, the online Census (eCensus) suffered a series of relatively small distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. While they didn’t overwhelm the platform, the attacks ultimately resulted in the eCensus being taken offline.

What do these two examples have in common, and what lessons should we learn to ensure more robust digital government services?

To answer those questions, this paper will examine five points:

  • The nature of the DDoS attacks
  • The CIA (confidentiality, integrity and availability) triad model for digital security
  • How to predict demand
  • How to respond to unpredictable demand
  • The structure of reliable data systems

An Australian DARPA to turbocharge universities’ national security research: securely managed Defence-funded research partnerships in Five-Eyes universities

/in ,

More than at any time since World War II, science and technology (S&T) breakthroughs are dramatically redesigning the global security outlook. Australia’s university sector now has a vital role to play in strengthening Australia’s defence.

In this paper, we propose establishing a formal partnership between the Defence Department, defence industry and Australian universities. There’s a significant opportunity to boost international defence S&T research cooperation with our Five-Eyes partners: the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand. We outline how this can be done.

Central to this partnership proposal is the need to restructure current arrangements for Defence funding of Australian universities via the creation of an Australian Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)— based on the highly successful American model, which the UK plans to emulate in 2022. In Australia, implementing these initiatives will contribute significantly to a vital restructuring of the university sector’s research funding model. An Australian DARPA, with robustly managed security, will enhance research ‘cut-through’ in the defence sector and the wider economy.

We think it’s also vital that this work, underpinned by a DARPA-like culture of urgency and innovation and with potential to affect several portfolios beyond Defence, needs to be championed at the government level. In the modern Australian system of government, that means the Prime Minister needs to be directly involved. Urgent means urgent. At least for the first few years of its life, an Australian DARPA should, in our view, report through Defence to the Prime Minister and the National Security Committee of Cabinet.

Mitigating the risk of a China–India conflict

/in , ,

More than a year has passed since Chinese troops began to occupy previously Indian-controlled territory on their disputed border in Ladakh. The crisis has cooled and settled into a stalemate. This report warns that it could escalate again, and flare into a conflict with region-wide implications.

The report assesses the risk of conflict by analysing its likelihood and consequences. A possible war would be costly for both India and China. But a possible war could also risk stirring Indian distrust of its new partners, especially in the Quad – Australia, Japan, and the United States. The report outlines some conditions under which a war would disrupt or dampen those developing partnerships.

The report concludes by offering a framework for policymakers to shape India’s expectations and the strategic environment before and during a possible war.

France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy and its overseas territories in the Indian and Pacific oceans: Characteristics, capabilities, constraints and avenues for deepening the Franco-Australian strategic partnership

/in ,

The report analyses France’s military capabilities and cooperation activities in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, underlining its strengths and limitations. In terms of its economic presence and official development assistance commitments, it is clear that the French strategy suffers significant limitations. However, these may be offset by a growing commitment from the EU and through strategic partnerships allowing France to pool efforts at all levels to meet regional and global challenges.