The Covid-19 crisis is revealing many truths about our society, not least that lies and misinformation can be just as infectious as any disease.

Since Australians went into lockdown in March, we have seen conspiracy theories about the virus proliferate, a spike in Covid-19-themed cyber scams and online frauds, Chinese diplomats tweet misinformation about the virus’s origins, and the US president suggest injecting bleach as a potential treatment.

In our digitally connected world, separating fact from fiction and genuine opinion from geopolitical jostling is increasingly difficult. The deaths of individuals who have followed treatment misinformation, and the damage to public health objectives from confusion and misdirection, show that information (or lack of it) can also cost lives.

So it’s the right time for Australians to start thinking about one of the newest tools that criminals, conspiracy theorists and nation-states will use to deceive and mislead: deep fakes. Deep fakes are digital forgeries that use deep learning (a type of artificial intelligence) to generate or manipulate video, audio, images and text.

Three years ago, the term barely registered on a Google search. Now, thanks to rapid advances in AI, deep fakes are increasingly realistic, fast and cheap to create, and are a rising cause for alarm for governments and businesses globally.

Last year, criminals used AI to impersonate a company executive’s voice, duping the CEO of a UK energy firm into transferring €220,000 to them. Intelligence operatives were discovered to be using a fake LinkedIn profile for a ‘Katie Jones’, complete with an AI-generated profile picture, to access security professionals’ networks. A military coup was attempted in Gabon, after the president posted a video to counter speculation that he was in poor health and his opponents wrongly dismissed it as a deep fake.

These are early examples of how deep fakes will exacerbate challenges societies already face in the digital age, further destabilising our instincts about who and what we can trust, and distorting news and information flows online.

In the months and years ahead, deep-fake technology will only become better and more accessible. As our ASPI report has found, the proliferation of deep fakes will require society and organisations to adapt in three important ways.

First, we will need to get used to the idea that seeing (and hearing) no longer means simply believing. As deep-fake technology proliferates, more criminals will use AI-generated forgeries to try to trick, or blackmail, targets into paying them money, and revealing their secrets.

Second, text-based deep fakes will make disinformation possible at unprecedented scale and speed, and accessible to new actors. Human operatives like the workers at Russia’s infamous ‘troll farms’ currently drive the disinformation value chain. But text-based deep fakes will take humans further out of the loop.

For example, in November, Chinese government–funded researchers published a paper outlining how an AI system could be trained to scan a news article, distil its key points and then post ‘attention-maximising’ online comments. AI optimised for trolling will be able to flood online spaces to drown out authentic voices or give false momentum to extreme views.

Finally, in a world where computer-generated audio-visual and written content is increasingly realistic, we will need to ask ourselves: how will we know whether anything is true? Arguably the biggest risk in the deep-fake age is not manipulated content itself, but the risk that our uncertainty about what is real, and what is doctored, attenuates our ability to trust each other and our institutions.

To avoid this dystopic future, governments and industry can act early across three lines of effort.

First, investing in detection technologies will be key. Unfortunately, detection researchers are unlikely to always win the ‘arms race’ against increasingly sophisticated deep fakes. However, not all detection methods need to rely on technology: new procedures may be needed such as requiring corroborating evidence before businesses or officials act on digital content.

Second, and even more important that detection, is developing reliable and trusted mechanisms for signalling when information is in fact authentic. Australia will likely need new standards like digital watermarks and digital chain-of-custody procedures to assure content is legitimate. Businesses can take the lead on these efforts, but governments will have a role, especially in harmonisation.

Finally, governments have a narrowing window to make meaningful investments in trusted gatekeepers of information, such as independent media, transparency bodies and fact-checking outfits. Digital literacy initiatives will also be critical.

The best responses to deep fakes will be those that address the harms they can cause, rather than attempt to fight the technology itself. In a democracy like Australia which is connected to a global information environment, we will never be able to identify and neutralise all lies and misinformation, and nor should we try.

And if we play our cards right, we won’t need to. Deep fakes are a new, albeit potent, tool for playing old games. The strength of liberal democracies is that we can build resilient institutions, stable legal frameworks, trusted channels of communication and an educated citizenry to minimise the harms that deep fakes can cause. And investment in these things will also boost the health of our democracy overall—something that is always a worthwhile goal.

In the years leading up to the global Covid-19 crisis, Australia, like many countries, failed to heed health specialists’ warnings on the likelihood and consequences of a global pandemic. Critical pandemic readiness was an insurance policy deemed too expensive by most nations. That decision left our nation’s pandemic policies exposed to short-sighted efficiency budget cuts.

By 9 March 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was warning us, ‘Whatever you thought 2020 was going to be about, think again.’ On 23 March, Morrison, with implied bipartisan support, told Australians young and old that because of Covid-19 we’re likely to face the ‘toughest year of our lives’.

Fortunately, Australia has been able to implement policies that have slowed and, at the time of writing, flattened the rate of infection. Deaths, social isolation, rising unemployment, global economic recession and intergenerational national debt will ensure that Covid-19 leaves an indelible mark on our individual and collective memories.

But now is no time to rest. Australia needs to be ready to deal with the crisis after the crisis.

The pandemic has shown that far too much of our national resilience, from broadband bandwidth to the capacity to produce basic medical supplies, has been left to market forces and good luck rather than planning.

Our assumptions about the shape of Australian society and the broader global order are now being challenged, and we need to take stock of likely future directions.

There is hope. There are indications that the government is beginning to focus on the need for tectonic strategic change after the immediate health crisis stabilises.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne has called for an international effort to explore the causes, and Beijing’s management, of the pandemic. Morrison has reached out to his counterparts in the US, Germany and France, seeking to empower the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of the novel coronavirus. These are important indications that the government understands that relations with the People’s Republic of China can’t revert to quiescent overdependence.

At the heart of this crisis is a story about the clash of political systems—messy democracies versus brutal authoritarianism. Covid-19 will reshape the global order. The urgent task for Australia and like-minded democracies is to make sure that a stronger form of liberal internationalism prevails.

The Australian government has also announced that it will invest in ‘government-owned oil reserves for domestic fuel security’. Although much remains to be done, this is a welcome development, and it’s clear that there’s a fresh appetite for addressing points of vulnerability across the economy where Australia has been too dependent on the just-in-time delivery of essential goods.

With the right investment, Australia could emerge from the crisis with a stronger capacity to protect its sovereign interests and a deeper resilience when it comes to riding out the challenges of an increasingly risky regional security environment.

Morrison’s national cabinet, bringing together the prime minister and state and territory premiers and first ministers as a real decision-making body, has been a genuinely profound step in making the Australian federation work more effectively. Likewise, many areas of the Australian public service have risen to the challenge of creating new policy quickly and effectively. Crises can bring out the best in many people and in many organisations.

There’s an urgent need to sustain that energy and creativity and to broaden its application into new policy areas. Australia has never had a more desperate need for its public officials to think big and to be prepared to walk away from old policy settings that may simply not be relevant after the pandemic.

Although Australia and much of the world remains locked down, we need to emerge from the crisis more connected with our neighbours and with like-minded democracies.

It’s possible that the worst effects of Covid-19 have yet to be seen in Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Pacific. Australians should turn our minds to what we can do to help our more fragile neighbours. Here, a humanitarian imperative and a strategic necessity come together. Australia needs a stable and secure region in which we can be stable and secure. We should do everything we can to build closer relations in our neighbourhood while deepening and reinvigorating ties with longstanding allies and friends. The world that emerges after Covid-19 will need strong, like-minded liberal democracies working closely together as a foundation of global stability.

This pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our nation to critically review and reset many of our policy assumptions. Perhaps 2020 will mark the beginning of a new period of nation-building for Australia that rivals our heady post-war years, but such success will come only from big thinking and bold policymaking.

Today, ASPI releases its new book, After Covid 19: Australia and the world rebuild. This publication offers a policy-focused analysis of the world we’ll face once the pandemic has passed. It analyses 26 key topics, countries and themes, ranging from Australia’s domestic situation through to the global balance of power, climate and technology issues.

In preparing each chapter, we asked our authors to consider four questions:

• What impact did Covid-19 have on their research topic?
• What will recovery mean?
• Will there be differences in future?
• What policy prescriptions would you recommend for the Australian government?

And we asked them to think big and bold.

After Covid-19 offers pithy, policy-focused analysis of the world we’ll face once the pandemic has passed.

There’s so much to do and so many challenges to address. ASPI intends this to be the first in a series of After Covid-19 volumes, bringing bright minds and new ideas to major policy problems and covering Australia and the wider world.

In this time of Covid-19, Australia marks Anzac Day without dawn services and marches. Instead, a private ceremony will be broadcast from the Australian War Memorial. It’s another change in a unique Australian commemoration that’s been evolving for more than a century.

Anzac Day is a fixed moment of season and a day of remembrance with shifting meanings.

The leaves change, the chill begins, the football launches, and then it’s 25 April, the day for The March.

In many households it’s capitalised like that—The March.

The March stands for a lot of things. The medals come out and the old comrades assemble for the annual parade to mark their memories.

For me, as a child in the 1950s and a teen in the 1960s, The March meant Melbourne’s St Kilda Road, leading to the Shrine.

We clapped loud for my father and his revered and raucous 9th Division mates, striding in step like the young soldiers they’d been. We knew that this was the magnificent 9th. They swaggered again.

The applause was different, gentler, for the slow-moving, ghosting ranks of my grandfather’s World War I division of original Anzacs.

As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, I vaguely grasped the tensions and the divides, even the politics that swirled beneath Anzac Day.

Many of those conflicts of meaning and memory have faded.

The original Anzacs are all gone. And most of the sons of Anzac who marched off to World War II march no more.

My father’s generation grew up knowing the Anzac legend in intimate ways. The original Anzacs stood before them as fathers and uncles—or stared down at them as pictures and medals on the mantle, amid the souvenirs of France.

In the 1920s and 1930s, many were taught the legend as a defining expression of Australia as a new nation. Others got the opposing story about a massive waste—sometimes from the lips of those original Anzacs.

The understanding of Anzac Day is ever contested. Yet the divides across Australia society are no longer as vivid or as powerful.

Today’s Anzac Day more easily aligns personal remembrance, Australian identity and political purpose. And perhaps the politics doesn’t throb as forcefully.

Not least in this simplification is that previous struggles about Australian identity are forgotten.

See this by considering what was once a hallowed term, as important in its way as Anzac: the Australian Imperial Force. My mum’s father was in the 1st AIF, my father in the 2nd AIF.

For my father, the sense of continuity was as much about the AIF as the Anzac legend.

The AIF was an identity as significant as the slouch hat. When our military were named the Australian Defence Force in the 1970s, Defence Secretary Arthur Tange and his political masters well understood which bit of the tradition they were honouring and which bit had already died.

At its inception, the contest over the meaning and ownership of Anzac Day was the tension between Australian and Imperial.

For some, empire and Australia were inextricably united. Others believed Australia had sacrificed her youth to unworthy imperial ends.

Mix into this the great political and sectarian divide that cut through Australia during the conscription referendums of World War I, and ached for decades.

For 25 years, Catholics were discouraged from taking part in Anzac Day as a ‘non-denominational’ ceremony honouring the dead. As the journalist Jack Waterford notes, the chief Catholic military chaplain, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, considered Anzac Day ‘forbidden to Catholics’ and regarded the RSL hierarchy as ‘morally equivalent to high-grade Freemason, which, of course, they often were’.

On its foundation in 1916, the RSL’s full title was the ‘Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia’. Imperial meant British and Mannix wouldn’t nod to that, or to the officer class at the top of the RSL.

The RSL’s grip on Anzac Day meant a deeply conservative organisation wielded a great Australian talisman through the 20th century.

As a Protestant, my dad was on the other side of the sectarian divide. While he laughed at the RSL when it was in jingo mode, he served on RSL committees for many years and was a proud life member. He thought the league did more good than harm. When old mates were in trouble, the RSL was a network that could be quickly mobilised.

The Imperial versus Australian struggle is absent from today’s understanding of Anzac.

The shift from a British to an Australian identity can be traced through the life of Charles Bean, who inscribed the Anzac legend into the official history of World War I and helped create the War Memorial in Canberra.

In Ross Coulthart’s fine biography, Bean starts out as the most jingoistic of Britons, thrilled by imperial might and notions of British racial superiority and purity: ‘Despite this, what is intriguing about Charles Bean is how his personal life story tracks the origins of Australian nationalism. Over the coming decades, his own growing sense of Australian self-identity would transform so much of what he and all Australians had once so passionately believed.’

The journey from Imperial to Australian is part of the story of how the meaning of Anzac Day has been remade, becoming less overtly political or even geopolitical.

The annual moment of memory has evolved. And what we remember has changed. The imperial element has faded from the commemoration of the AIF in the two world wars.

In the way the Anzacs are remembered today, you’d hardly know they served British commanders on a British mission. Now they are honoured as Australians embodying an Australian ethos.

The slouch hat mystique means today’s ADF inherits much from the Anzacs. But the public understanding sees the Anzacs as having enlisted in the ADF, not the AIF.

Anzac Day has buried the British dimension. The idea of the Australian Briton has been interred along with the empire.

To see the shift, come join me for a 1950’s memory at the Carrum State School in Victoria. Every Monday morning, we assembled for a rendition of God Save the Queen and recited the national salute as Victorian state schoolkids had since 1901:

I love God and my country. I honour the flag, I will serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law.

We used to zoom through that final ‘cheerfully obey’ line like a bunch of staccato chooks.

The conception of Australian Britons echoed through my Monday assembly. Serving the Queen seemed a natural enough commitment to be grouped with God and flag—all obeyed with a smile.

Even as those sentiments were being affirmed to the kids, the imperial settings had been blasted out of Australian geopolitics, rapidly evaporating as a force. The nation with its own continent could find all the identity it needed in the wide brown land.

We are a pragmatic people, quick to abandon what no longer works. As Britain’s power waned, so did the once powerful characteristics of the Australian Briton.

Anzac Day’s exclusively Australian identity expanded to take the whole space of memory.

Date the final sunset of the Oz Briton as the moment Sir Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966. He left not long after provoking mirth by proposing that when Australia abandoned pounds and shillings, the new note should be called the ‘royal’.

Allegiance had shifted—we adopted the dollar, not the royal, to honour the replacement great-and-powerful ally.

Popular culture reflected the elevation of Australian qualities and disowning of the imperial mission.

In movies like Breaker Morant and Gallipoli, the British officer class was bludgeoned. Just recently, The Water Diviner portrayed a Turkish commander at Gallipoli as a far more sympathetic character than the arrogant Pom officer who tries to thwart the hero’s search for his dead Anzac sons.

As a Vietnam-era movie, Gallipoli was also making a point about going to war on behalf of the great ally, new or old. An enduring continuity is the debate about the cost of serving the alliance.

The public usage these days has many elements that would jar with the quasi-religious remembrance of earlier generations: Anzac Day football would have been as sacrilegious as the once taboo idea of playing footy on a Sunday.

We still play two-up after The March, but much else of that society has gone. No memory now of the dry decades when Victoria’s pubs closed at 6 pm, a discipline imposed during World War I that persisted for 50 years as an emblem of Oz wowserism.

In earlier eras, The March, as much as the 6 o’clock swill, was private men’s business. Australia saluted Anzac Day and then stood back as the returned comrades gathered to drink and commemorate and, for a moment, share the nightmares as well as the memories.

Anzac Day mattered to my father in complex ways. With the 9th Division, he’d taken a bit of shrapnel in the head during El Alamein and been back on the line within a week. He served in the 9th Division landings at Lae, Finschafen and Tarakan.

By Tarakan, he remembered, the veterans thought the war would never end. Not many of the original division would be still going if they had to fight all the way to Tokyo.

My mother dreaded Anzac Day. It meant the nightmares were likely to recur. Often it was the Japanese and the jungle.

The Vietnam veterans cracked the code of silence bequeathed by men from the AIF. Or, perhaps, Australian society was ready to listen to the Vietnam vets in ways that they could not bear to hear from the AIF.

The change is reflected in the different tone of Anzac Day, no longer secret bloke business.

Because of the Vietnam vets, my father got the chance for an incredibly valuable benefit from Veterans’ Affairs. He talked to a psychiatric counsellor about his nightmares and gained new insight into the demons he’d so successfully fought in a career as a great teacher and husband and father. The memories he’d tried to confine to Anzac Day were re-examined and re-explained.

After that, Dad agreed to take out his medals occasionally and to talk to groups of school children at the memorial.

It was the action of a born schoolteacher who served the Victorian Education Department with devotion equal to that he gave the 9th Division.

Those talks to kids at the War Memorial about the experience of war and remembrance were a sign that the memories didn’t strike so harshly—and so he was able to take my son to a dawn service. Towards the end, my father managed to change his personal meaning of Anzac Day, just as Australia has reshaped its understanding of what we mark on 25 April.

Australians returning from overseas are being met with the uncommon sight of Australian Defence Force personnel at our airports. Even though Prime Minister Morrison has said that the ADF is there in support of the police and has no enforcement role, there are nevertheless potential political and security risks associated with the ADF’s involvement in the Covid-19 response.

The ADF was mobilised following a decision by the national cabinet that citizens and residents arriving from overseas would undergo mandatory quarantine at designated facilities. Calling up the ADF to support the states and civilian authorities isn’t a new concept. Just last week, Operation Bushfire Assist concluded, bringing to an end the largest mobilisation of the ADF for domestic disaster relief. As part of that operation, the ADF assisted with logistics and emergency relief and supported recovery efforts in fire-affected communities across the country.

We have seen the same levels of ingenuity and community partnership in the ADF’s response to Covid-19. Parts of that response draw on the military’s engineering, logistics, communications, planning, reconnaissance and medical expertise, lending support to state and territory governments, the private sector and charitable organisations. That type of support is unlikely to cause much controversy. However, the visible deployment of the ADF on the streets, at the doors of people’s homes, at airports and at border crossings, providing support to civilian law enforcement agencies, represents a further step in engagement that presents some likely risks.

Some of these risks were explored during parliament’s recent consideration of amendments made to the Defence Act 1903 following the Lindt café siege in Sydney in 2014. The Defence Amendment (Call Out of the Australian Defence Force) Act 2018 effectively lowered the standards required for the ADF to be called out in an event of ‘domestic violence’. The changes were intended to address potential gaps in initiating and supporting counterterrorist activities by the states.

Although the ADF’s role in the response to Covid-19 isn’t under those powers, the concerns raised by the situation are similar to those raised about the legislation, namely in relation to enforcement activities. Already, across the globe, we are seeing some political leaders use this crisis to try to consolidate power. While Australia’s democratic institutions are relatively robust, public trust can be fickle in a crisis. The functioning of our democratic institutions has already been restricted, with parliament unlikely to resume regular sittings before August. While it appears that the government is consulting closely with the opposition, such a significant shift in the operation of a democratic institution warrants further public debate.

In much the same way, the decision to deploy the ADF in response to the Covid-19 crisis requires clear communication about its expected roles and responsibilities. Efforts to communicate like that by the head of the Covid-19 taskforce, Lieutenant General John Frewen, are a welcome move. Such messages reflect the organisation’s awareness that it must tread carefully when operating in these contexts. However, public information campaigns need to go to the next step and move beyond emotive images of defence ‘answering the call’ and communicate clearly that this is an exceptional and extraordinary role for the ADF.

Pictures convey a thousand words. While photos of ADF personnel carrying bags and engaging with the public may be received positively, military personnel patrolling and door-knocking alongside police may cause confusion and resentment. It only takes one bad encounter or use of force against a member of the public to be captured on a mobile phone and go viral for trust to be severely undermined overnight.

There’s also the question of perception among our regional neighbours. In several countries in the Indo-Pacific, the military has had a role in overthrowing democratically elected governments. This pandemic offers plenty of justification for governments to assume extraordinary powers that they may not relinquish, particularly if they can point to examples of things that Australia has implemented.

Political leaders have been quick to characterise efforts to respond to Covid-19 as a ‘war’ with ‘frontline’ workers. But while that rallying cry might assist in securing resources and public compliance, it’s unlikely to strengthen our democratic institutions. Such analogies may also lull us into thinking that human life, including within the military, is more expendable. It’s a challenge unfolding in the US military, reflected in the words of the former captain of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, now relieved of his command after his request for assistance with a Covid-19 outbreak on the ship went public. ‘We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die’, he said.

And this highlights another potential risk. The pandemic is exposing vulnerabilities in our national security institutions, particularly the military, which relies on the operational readiness of its personnel. So far, the impact of the virus on the ADF has been somewhat limited, with 30 cases as of 6 April. But that number is likely to increase if members continue serving in roles in which they’re exposed to members of the community who are at high risk of infection.

Decisions to draw on the ADF will need to be continually balanced with potential future tasking of our defence forces. Our strategic security environment is likely to become only more uncertain in the weeks ahead, as some countries seek to exploit the vulnerabilities presented by the pandemic. Furthermore, failure to follow through on our Pacific step-up commitments in this time of real need will not be forgotten by our neighbours.

Our political and military leaders need to make clear that these powers are extraordinary and time-limited to this crisis. While those messages have been there, they haven’t been clear enough for a community that is panicked, anxious and scared.

Yes, we are living in unprecedented times, and unprecedented measures are warranted, but we need to ensure that we don’t undermine our democratic institutions, including the valued trust placed in the ADF by the community, in the process. In that event, the cure may indeed be worse than the disease.

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.