The Independent Intelligence Review is finally out, and it’s a worthy sequel

The unclassified version of the 2024 Independent Intelligence Review (IIR) was released today. It’s a welcome and worthy sequel to its 2017 predecessor, with an ambitious set of recommendations for enhancements to Australia’s national intelligence community (NIC).
The IIR’s authors, Heather Smith and Richard Maude, have definitely met the goals of the review process: to gauge the effectiveness with which the NIC serves the national interest and meets the needs of government, and to examine how well positioned the community is for the future.
Smith and Maude find that the NIC is ‘today a more capable and integrated intelligence enterprise’, and it’s ‘highly capable and performing well’. But they also identify opportunities for ‘greater—or different—collective responses … so that the NIC can more effectively serve the national interest and meet the needs of government in the future’.
Unsurprisingly, given its authorship, the 2024 IIR captures well the state of Australia’s emergent and emerging strategic and security challenges, and the key priority issues facing the NIC. The report’s strategic framing reflects the reality of the international environment.
The report includes 67 recommendations, with the implication that there might also be classified recommendations or parts of recommendations. That is a lot—in 2017 there were just 23. Many of the 2024 recommendations are primarily about drawing attention to issues or sometimes getting down into the weeds. Compare that with 2017 and its singular vision for the creation of the NIC and the concept of ‘national intelligence’.
However, that’s the wrong take. Rather, the Smith-Maude recommendations reflect the breadth of the issues facing Australian intelligence and the complexity of its operating environment.
Smith and Maude’s principal findings are as follows:
—There is a gap between what’s being asked of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI, a creation of the 2017 review) in terms of leading the NIC as a collective enterprise and ONI’s ability to ‘bring the rest of the intelligence community along’. There’s a need for greater NIC integration and the review recommends ways to help ONI achieve this.
—There’s also a ‘need for deeper integration of intelligence with other arms of government’ to ensure intelligence is used as a ‘tool of statecraft to maximise Australia’s competitive edge’. This goes beyond just achieving decision advantage over adversaries and competitors. It includes using intelligence for strategic warning, and for influencing outcomes through intelligence diplomacy and the purposeful public release of intelligence information.
—Finally, innovation is key to preparing for future conflict and crisis, deploying new technologies, building and nurturing partnerships, and in recruiting, retaining and training a highly skilled and committed NIC workforce.
That emphasis on the policy-intelligence interface is important, and may come to be seen as one of the most consequential dimensions of the 2024 IIR. It was a resounding theme of ASPI’s submission to the review, including the idea of transforming the national intelligence community into ‘national intelligence power’.
Importantly, the unclassified version of the 2024 review gives the Australian public a sophisticated and updated understanding of the NIC, which serves them and acts in their name but about which information is necessarily limited. It also explains the very real challenges and opportunities the NIC faces and the laws and oversight mechanisms that govern Australian intelligence.
At 127 pages, comparable to the 2017 review’s 132, the 2024 version is both substantive and substantial. That substance confirms the value of Australia’s world-leading process of intelligence review. It works by scheduled check-up rather than crisis-driven post-mortem, and includes a detailed public version of the review’s findings. ASPI has consistently argued in support of this approach.
Kudos should also be given to the Albanese government for its related announcement of $44.6 million over four years from 2025–26 for ONI to begin implementation of key priorities identified in the 2024 IIR.
There is one disappointment. The prime minister’s media statement releasing the report says that ‘consistent with the approach to past independent intelligence reviews under successive governments, details about the proposed approach to specific recommendations will remain classified’.
As I highlighted in my submission to the review, and in previous analysis of the 2017 IIR, that historic practice of not publicly accounting for implementation of recommendations (at least in some form) has led to sub-optimal implementation and accountability in past. My concern about this approach is only reinforced by the number and complexity of recommendations.
Nonetheless, it was pleasing that the review listened to and made productive use of the contributions and submissions made, including from outside of government. For example, recommendation 66—providing security-cleared personal staff to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security Chair and Deputy Chair, to help relieve the workload on the committee’s members and secretariat, and also enhance parliamentary oversight capability—was suggested in ASPI’s submission to the review.
The depth and sophistication of the Smith-Maude review means there will be further analysis and insights to come as their findings and recommendations are pored over.