Those of us who were in the defence sector in the late 2000s will remember the challenges that both the Department of Defence and the defence industry experienced in attracting and retaining workers in what was a busy project environment. If we think about it, we can probably identify projects that had the seeds of underperformance sowed in the inability of Defence and industry to get the highly skilled workforce they needed.

The strategic reform program of 2009 resulted in a sharp contraction in workforce numbers, which now has implications for our ability to scale up.

We’re embarking on the largest modernisation and recapitalisation of the Australian Defence Force since World War II, and the defence industry workforce will need to grow by 10–20% over the next five years to deliver on Defence’s integrated investment program.

The defence sector doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and adjacent industries such as construction, infrastructure and technology are strong competitors for the core skills the sector requires. Engineering, technology and project-management skills are already in short supply in most parts of Australia, and the workforce development air bubble of 2010–2015 means that there are concerns with the maturity and experience levels of mid-level practitioners and managers.

There’s no silver-bullet solution to the challenges we face, but there are two clear themes we must focus on to guide our thinking. First, we must make the most efficient use possible of the existing workforce, and second, we must increase the supply of workers. Failure to do both of these things will lead to undesirable project outcomes and destructive competition between employers.

The Australian worker is relatively immobile and is unlikely to move permanently between states for employment. That means we must take the work to the workers when possible. A distributed workforce model will face some operational and technology challenges, but non-traditional locations will open untapped workforce resources.

Employers, both government and industry, must look for the optimal mix of permanent employees and contingent labour. Achieving the right balance will ensure efficient allocation of labour while enabling organisations to focus on their core activities.

Defence employers must explore opportunities to partner, rather than duplicate each other’s workforces. Sharing workforces or intellectual property among primary defence contractors has been seen as impracticable in the past; however, they could explore subcontracting work packages to capable small and medium enterprises rather than trying to raise a new workforce themselves.

Employers must also have realistic expectations about what sort of workers they’ll get and set their sails accordingly. There are worrying signs of operational managers in the public and private sectors being slow to adapt in this respect, which will only compound the shortfall in the future.

The government’s defence industry skilling and STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) initiative is aiming to address the long-term supply of STEM-based skills. But the workforce shortage is being felt now, and we must be smart about how we develop and retain a capable workforce right now.

It’s clear to anyone who has tried to hire a software engineer with a security clearance lately that the cupboard is practically bare, and that we need to plan to hire people straight out of the education sector or from adjacent industries. This is also increasingly the case for the majority of the engineering, technology and management skill sets that the sector needs.

The challenge goes beyond just attracting people—the defence sector needs to attract people with a close alignment to its technical, procedural and cultural aspects. Failure to do so will lead us to attract the wrong type of worker—one who will not stay or, worse, one who will stay but fail to productively integrate. These risks aside, there’s a great opportunity for the sector to benefit from the broad range of experience and skills that workers from adjacent industries can bring.

New immigration visas are making it easier to bring in expertise from overseas, but it frustrates everyone when an experienced engineer from a Five Eyes nation ends up working in the rail sector because they’re ineligible for a security clearance and therefore can’t get work in defence. The ADF has a way to deal with this, and the government should consider whether a different approach is warranted given the defence industry’s status as a ‘fundamental input to capability’.

Avoiding the overclassification of work or facilities will help. Smart systems and organisational design can mean that time and infrastructure aren’t tied up unnecessarily, while providing faster access to workers without high-level security clearances.

Lastly, we must consider the cost of workforce expansion. Defence industry will spend around $20 million on talent-acquisition activities in 2020–21 alone. Defence industry salaries have been increasing since 2015, and we must budget for a level of increase that’s higher than inflation to be competitive with other industries. Flexible working arrangements and stimulating work are highly valued by the workforce and smart employers are leveraging their offerings to attract and retain staff.

The cost of upskilling workers from the education sector or adjacent industries must also be factored in. Risks here can be mitigated through careful recruitment and selection. Funding for such initiatives will pale in comparison to the costs of worker undersupply in the coming decade.

Australia has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a strong sovereign defence industry capability, while also growing a deeper capability in our education, technology and manufacturing industries that will provide the basis for prosperity and security in the future. To realise this opportunity, we must be smarter than we have ever needed to be in the past about how we plan for, organise and build our workforce.

Australian democracy, Peter Hartcher observed in his post in The Strategist on ‘The real China choice’, ‘is a precious asset’. He’s right. Indeed, our constitution guarantees that the House of Representatives and the Senate must be ‘directly chosen’ by the people, and in multiple cases over recent decades the High Court has reinforced the importance of that direct choice.

Despite his framing, however, Hartcher is not altogether comfortable with the Australian people choosing their own representatives. Instead, his post argued, we should require ‘all MPs and Senators … to submit to a formal ASIO security clearance’, and anyone unwilling to submit themselves to a clearance ‘shouldn’t be allowed to sit in parliament to make laws’.

Let’s be clear: Hartcher would give ASIO a veto over parliamentary preselection. If anything is an existential threat to Australian democracy, it is the Orwellian prospect of preselection being subcontracted out to the spies.

It is important to reflect on the ramifications of such a proposal. Anyone who has been through an assessment for a high-level security clearance knows that it typically involves a searching analysis of the subject’s personal life—including their financial status, sexuality, medical history, relationships, internet habits, home life, and general attitude to the world. If the conclusion of that process is unfavourable to the subject, they will usually be provided with, at best, a summary of the reasons why they were denied a clearance. They may never know what was said about them, or by whom, and they may have limited ability to challenge the decision.

In Hartcher’s Australia, candidates for political office would be subject to this scrutiny. ASIO agents would be prying into the private lives of every candidate for every federal election. They would presumably deny some candidates the ability to run, and do so without giving detailed reasons or disclosing the full evidence on which the denial was based. The candidates, their supporters and their opponents may never know why the spooks weren’t willing to allow them to run for office. Their political future would be demolished.

And consider this: if we adopted the approach advocated in Hartcher’s post, how many public-spirited Australians would refrain from running for office altogether because of a reluctance to sit down with ASIO to discuss their divorces, their youthful indiscretions, or their embarrassing medical conditions?

But we shouldn’t be concerned solely with the would-be candidates who fail Hartcher’s preselection or those who refrain from running. Even the politicians who passed the Hartcher test would forever know that there might be a manila folder, sitting somewhere in ASIO headquarters, containing deeply sensitive and potentially embarrassing information on their personal lives. It bears emphasising that these politicians would be the same ones responsible for overseeing ASIO, and ASIO’s funding and responsibilities.

We expect our politicians to ask tough questions of the security services, and to hold them to account on our behalf. This is one of the ways in which they’re in a different position to the many departmental public servants who subject themselves to security clearances every year. One doesn’t need to be an avid reader of John Le Carré to imagine the potential consequences of an empowered ASIO holding files on every single politician and every single minister of the crown.

And, even if we forget the politicians, all of this should concern all of us, as citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia. Our right to vote is ‘precious’. Depriving us of the ability to choose who we want to represent us is something we should resent, especially when the deprivation would typically be on the basis of undisclosed or undisclosable information. Once we give the security services a veto over candidates for office, the slope becomes very slippery indeed.

Peter Hartcher has observed elsewhere that ‘Australia is best served when democracy is thriving everywhere’.  Doubtless there is a great deal that can and should be done to add integrity to our political system, to fight anyone who seeks unfair influence, and to stamp out corruption of any sort wherever it hides.

But in making ‘the real China choice’, we should make sure that our efforts to ‘choose Australia’ don’t wind up undermining the very democracy Hartcher wants to protect.

In this episode, Strategist editor Jack Norton covers this year’s Beersheba Dialogue, the annual conference between ASPI and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, named after the World War I battle.

He speaks to former Labor MP and shadow assistant minister for defence and cybersecurity Gai Brodtmann about the state of the Australia–Israel relationship and to arms-control expert Emily Landau about the Iran nuclear deal and the possible threat posed by Tehran.

Jack also interviews veteran journalist Yossi Melman about Israel’s relationship with China, with a focus on Chinese investment in the country.

It is evident from Australia’s increasingly severe droughts and record-breaking heatwaves that time is running out to take action on climate change.

Yet, despite persistent calls from eminent scientists to reduce global dependence on fossil fuels, a call to action has gone unanswered by our political leaders.

And we aren’t facing just an environmental threat in Australia—there are significant implications for our national security and defence capabilities that we haven’t fully reckoned with either.

This point was made abundantly clear in a speech prepared for defence force chief Angus Campbell in June, excerpts of which have been recently published by the media. It noted that Australia is in ‘the most natural disaster-prone region in the world … [and] climate change is predicted to make disasters more extreme and more common. If the predictions are correct, it will have serious ramifications for global security and serious ramifications for the ADF.’

Climate change works as a threat multiplier—it exacerbates the drivers of conflict by deepening fragilities within societies, straining weak institutions, reshaping power balances and undermining post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding.

This year’s IISS armed conflict survey noted that ‘climate-related drivers for armed violence and conflict will increase as climate change progresses’.

The survey points out that the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that escalated into civil war was preceded by the country’s deepest and most prolonged drought on record. One study found that the drought was two to three times more likely to happen due to climate change, and that it helped fuel migration to large cities, which in turn exacerbated the social issues that caused the unrest.

In May 2018, I was among numerous experts who gave evidence to a Senate committee examining the potential impacts of climate change on Australia’s national security. One of the biggest threats I identified was the possibility of mass migration driven by climate change.

There will be nearly 6 billion people in the Asia–Pacific by 2050. And if the region has become increasingly destabilised due to climate change, many people will likely be affected by rising sea levels, water and food shortages, armed conflicts and natural disasters, and desperate to find more secure homes.

This is already happening now. Since 2008, it’s estimated that an average of 22.5 million to 24 million people have been displaced globally each year due to catastrophic weather events and climate-related disasters. And a new World Bank report estimates that 143 million people in three developing regions alone—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America—could become climate migrants by 2050.

Australia, with its very low population density, will likely be an attractive place for climate migrants to attempt to resettle in. The World Bank has called on Australia to allow open migration from climate-affected Pacific islands, but successive governments haven’t exactly been open to refugees and asylum seekers in recent years. If we don’t have a plan in place, our estimated 2050 population of 37.6 million could be overwhelmed by the scale of the national security problem.

Other experts agree. American climate security expert Sherri Goodman has described climate change as a ‘direct threat to the national security of Australia’, saying the region is ‘most likely to see increasing waves of migration from small island states or storm-affected, highly populated areas in Asia that can’t accommodate people when a very strong storm hits’.

Australia would also struggle to respond to worsening natural disasters in our region either caused by or exacerbated by climate change.

As part of the Senate inquiry, the Department of Defence noted an ‘upwards trend’ in both disaster-related events in the Asia–Pacific region and disaster-related defence operations in the past 20 years. As alluded to in the speech prepared for Campbell, we could easily find ourselves overwhelmed by disaster relief missions due to the severity and scale of future weather events, or due to a series of events that occur concurrently in dispersed locations.

This would stretch our available first-responder forces—defence, police, ambulance, firefighters and other emergency services—even in the absence of any other higher priority peacekeeping missions around the world.

The Senate report listed 11 recommendations for action by national security agencies and the government. Among these were calls for:

• the government to develop a climate security white paper to guide a coordinated government response to climate change risks
• the Department of Defence to consider releasing an unclassified version of the work it has undertaken already to identify climate risks to the country
• the government to consider a dedicated climate security leadership position in Home Affairs to coordinate climate resilience issues
• the Department of Defence to create a dedicated senior leadership position to oversee the delivery of domestic and international humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as climate pressures increase over time.

Some of these findings were contested. In their comments, the Coalition senators made a point of saying how well the government has been doing on climate change in the defence and foreign affairs portfolios. Sufficient strategies are in place, they said, ‘to ensure Australia’s response to the implications of climate change on national security is well understood and consistent across the whole of government’. They also considered that a separate recommendation on defence emissions reduction targets fell outside the spirit of the inquiry. They did not support it.

The findings in the report are a cause for concern. The recommendations lack timetables for action and a sense of urgency.

The Senate committee also admitted its own shortcomings. For instance, it couldn’t adequately examine the potential impacts of climate change on Australia’s economy, infrastructure and community health and wellbeing due to a lack of substantial evidence on these issues.

Furthermore, and most worryingly, it seems the government just doesn’t care enough. It has yet to table a response to the report more than a year later.

A welcome development would be if the government announced a climate change security white paper that clearly spells out where ministers stand on the issue and the specific measures we need to take to prepare for the threats ahead. It would also dispel the concerns of many Australians about our future-readiness.

But the Coalition’s response to the Senate report is breathtakingly complacent and smacks of reckless negligence, given that Australia is on the front line when it comes to climate change and our national security faces undeniably serious risks.

Climate change is already presenting significant challenges to governance, our institutions and the fabric of our societies. It’s time we recognise the potential threats to security in our region as well.

US President Donald Trump’s muddled messaging on Chinese tech giant Huawei has had us all confused this year. The tweets, mixed signals and excessive focus on trading away policy positions for a ‘deal’ don’t always paint a picture of an administration with a long-term strategy for national security and technology.

The Australian government, while it certainly can’t always be held up as a strategic public communicator, does have clear messaging on its side when it comes to 5G. In August 2018, the Australian government banned ‘high-risk vendors’—including Huawei—from involvement in the country’s 5G networks. The government’s decision on Huawei was a too-rare example of policy contestability. It was fostered by a strong and in-depth public debate and involved input from multiple departments and agencies that spanned economic, technical, geopolitical and—importantly for Australia given its geographic location—strategic considerations.

Huawei is now unable to participate in Australia’s 5G build. Before that, in 2012, the company was banned from participating in Australia’s national broadband network. But beyond those pieces of critical national infrastructure, the company has free rein and continues to do plenty of business in Australia.

So, what motivated the Australian government’s decision on Huawei? The 5G network is critical national infrastructure, not public Wi-Fi for a local swimming pool. Critical parts of the economy will sit on top of—and rely on—5G. This is about far more than telecommunications; it’s about whole-of-economy security assurance.

While the media narrative has often been that the US applies pressure to its allies to ‘ban Huawei’, that wasn’t Australia’s experience. In fact, Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was ousted in mid-2018, has gone to great lengths this year to carefully and publicly explain why the decision was made. He is also on the record explaining that it was he who encouraged Trump to make 5G a greater priority.

Once the decision was done and dusted, it was clear that Australia’s choice came down to a combination of three overlapping issues: risks, transparency and trust.

There are many risks when it comes to working with a company like Huawei, and the Australian government’s appetite for risk on 5G wasn’t large enough to absorb them all.

When making various decisions related to 5G—and other critical technologies—the potential for ‘back doors’ is only one risk being weighed. Governments also need to make assessments about the integrity and availability of the data on the network, in addition to the confidentiality of information. They also need to worry about public relations and perception. For example, how closely do governments want to work and associate with a company that is complicit in enabling human rights abuses in Xinjiang through its work with the region’s public security apparatus?

A range of risks of working with Huawei are already on the record, from allegations of systematic intellectual property theft and dubious ethics to allegations of sensitive data theft that occurred under the company’s watch. Increasingly, governments also need to ensure they analyse, and fully understand, the laws that govern a company’s home environment. This is particularly critical when such laws mean a foreign government can exert extrajudicial direction, something that would obviously never be publicly acknowledged.

The UK government’s approach—testing Huawei’s equipment via the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre—provided a beacon of hope for governments wanting a middle-of-the-road solution. But, unfortunately, it’s turned out not to be the palatable policy option many governments were hoping to replicate. First, the evaluation centre’s mandate is purely technical, which means it can’t mitigate all the non-technical risks that come with working with a company like Huawei in 5G. Second, the centre’s annual reports have become progressively more negative in their outlook, and earlier this year Ian Levy, the technical director of the UK National Cyber Security Centre, gave a damning assessment of Huawei’s equipment: ‘The chance of a vulnerability with a Huawei piece of kit is much higher than other vendors.’ Third, the approach has the perverse effect of giving the most problematic major vendor an advantage over its competitors by providing it with tailored advice to improve its products.

Getting a straight answer out of Huawei—on a range of important issues—is difficult. This lack of public transparency puts the onus back on governments to conduct their own investigations to inform 5G policymaking. That’s a burden they don’t have to carry with other 5G vendors like Ericsson and Nokia.

For example, Huawei has struggled to explain who exactly owns the company and how its governance structure works. This is no small matter. Huawei has also struggled to prove its independence from the state. On the issue of internal Chinese Communist Party branches, a Huawei overseas executive said that while the company has one such branch, it ‘has no say in our operations. It meets in non-working hours and looks after staff social issues and activities. It has nothing to do with the management of the company and is run by a retired employee of the company.’ But through Chinese-language sources, we know this number and explanation are not correct.

In 2007, Huawei had reportedly established more than 300 CCP branches and counted 12,000 CCP members among its employees. The CCP’s expectations of these party committees—and associated branches—are clear. Article 32 of the CCP’s constitution outlines their responsibilities, which include encouraging everyone in the company to ‘consciously resist unacceptable practices and resolutely fight against all violations of party discipline or state law’.

The company has also struggled to explain what happened in the African Union headquarters  between 2012 and 2017, when there was reportedly a data breach that whisked sensitive information to servers in Shanghai every night. Huawei was the key ICT provider in the African Union headquarters and was responsible for protecting data from security threats. Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei hasn’t denied the hack took place, instead telling the media: ‘For the breach of equipment used by the African Union, it had nothing to do with Huawei.’

That may well be true, but wouldn’t a private company conduct an independent review to figure out how, over a period of five years, it all went so wrong? Meanwhile, Huawei’s work in Xinjiang is increasingly in the spotlight, and for good reason. In July 2019, the company argued that it is providing equipment in Xinjiang ‘via a third-party’. That is not true. In fact, many of Huawei’s business dealings in Xinjiang are done directly with local authorities, police and security agencies.

The announcement of one Huawei public security project in Xinjiang in 2018 even quoted Huawei director Tao Jingwen as saying, ‘Together with the Public Security Bureau, Huawei will unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society.’

Because 5G is critical national infrastructure, most governments must make sure they can trust the companies they partner with. The suite of risks, combined with a lack of transparency, has resulted in a crippling trust deficit. It would have been negligent of the Australian government to allow high-risk vendors, like Huawei, into Australia’s 5G network. In many ways, it wasn’t just the right decision. Given the evidence available, it was the only possible decision.

A version of this piece was published in The Diplomat magazine’s August 2019 issue as a section in the cover article, ‘Asia’s great Huawei debate’; it has been republished with permission.