Tag Archive for: Australia

Beyond words: Australia must act to protect civilians in Gaza and Lebanon

As regional tensions escalate threats to civilians across the Middle East, our leaders need to take concrete steps to prevent further civilian harm.

Those steps should include an immediate embargo on arms and arms components destined for Israel, an affirmation of the existence of the Palestinian state, and expanding targeted sanctions to include Israeli leaders who are responsible and who call for continued unrestricted warfare in Gaza.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese affirmed last month, alongside his counterparts from Canada and New Zealand, that ‘the situation in Gaza is catastrophic. The human suffering is unacceptable. It cannot continue.’ Many Australians agree, watching in horror over the past 10 months as attacks in Gaza continue to intensify: so-called ‘safe zones’ are declared and then revoked amid a persistent looming threat of famine, and a record number of aid workers have been killed, including Australian Zomi Frankcom.

Across Australia, people continue to take to streets, harbours and university campuses to demand an end to civilian suffering. As regional tensions escalate, prompting urgent calls for Australians to leave Lebanon, people are asking, ‘How is this still happening? Are we really doing enough to make it stop?’

As protection practitioners, we know that statements condemning civilian harm are necessary, as illustrated in the outpouring of condemnation following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel last year. Calling out civilian harm and reminding all parties to the war, including Israel, of their legal obligation to spare civilians during hostilities are critical elements of the political pressure that must continue to be exerted. Yet words are not enough. Australia’s efforts to use its leverage to mitigate the escalating violence that is now extending to Lebanon must include timely and concrete actions.

Our allies know that, and we need to follow suit. In the wake of the landmark ICJ advisory opinion that found Israel’s occupation and annexation of the Palestinian territories to be unlawful, many countries have already taken concrete steps to prevent further violations of international law. Beyond upholding our international legal obligations, concrete action is essential to exert the necessary pressure for a lasting ceasefire and to de-escalate tensions that are threatening civilians across the region.

Those steps follow earlier actions taken by a host of countries, including South Africa, which led a coalition of states to bring a case against Israel to the ICJ, and such EU states as Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia, all of which have recognised Palestine as a state. The new British Labour government is reported to be reviewing arms export licences to Israel, following Canada and the Netherlands, which have stopped shipments of weapons.

Australia can and should take stronger action to protect civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and the wider region, putting practical action behind Albanese’s affirmation that ‘The protection of civilians is paramount and a requirement under international humanitarian law. Palestinian civilians cannot be made to pay the price of defeating Hamas. It must end.’ This has only become more urgent following the assassination last month of Ismael Haniyeh, the lead Hamas ceasefire negotiator, and the increasing fear of retaliatory actions that could spark a regional war, dramatically increasing threats to civilians across the region.

As a middle power, Australia has a critical role to play in upholding the rules-based order and the necessary protections for civilians provided in international humanitarian and human-rights law. We need to be clear in amplifying our democratic and human-rights-based values, which include respect for academic freedom and the right to peaceful protest. And, to be taken seriously, we need to act to protect those legal standards and values when situations like Gaza threaten their erosion. Granting continued impunity in the Israel–Gaza crisis increases threats for civilians everywhere.

There are clear steps that Australia must take. That means an immediate embargo on shipments of arms and arms components, including dual-use exports that can be used for civilian and military purposes. Recent Senate estimates revealed continuing exports from Australia to Israel related to military activities. Even since the assault on Gaza escalated in 2023, the Department of Defence has renewed or signed almost $100 million in contracts with Israeli-owned companies such as Elbit Systems.

In the Netherlands, a court recently ordered the Dutch government to block similar kinds of exports to Israel, highlighting the risks of breaching international law if they were to continue. Aligned with its policy that continues to affirm a two-state solution, the Australian government needs to align with EU allies and others in recognising that two states exist, affirming the existence of Palestine alongside Israel. Australia can build on sanctions announced by Foreign Minister Penny Wong last month by extending restrictions to Israeli leaders who continue to support unrestricted warfare in Gaza, as we have in other conflicts involving breaches of international law—for example, against Russia over its invasion of and ongoing attacks on Ukraine.

Through timely, concrete action, Australia can demonstrate its commitment to protecting civilians in Gaza and the wider region and its respect for the international legal obligations arising from the ICJ ruling. Such actions align with our important role as a middle power, reinforcing our legitimacy through a consistent approach with like-minded countries to defending the rules-based order and protection for all civilian populations.

The UN cybercrime convention: a victory for state sovereignty

On 8 August, UN member states agreed to what was once deemed implausible: a universal cybercrime convention. A Russia-led effort to challenge existing Euro-centric standards for law enforcement cooperation turned into an agreement that preserves human rights protections instead and focuses on actual cybercrimes.

But the new convention, which still awaits adoption by the UN General Assembly, may come at a price, as binding treaties and state sovereignty appear to surface as the guiding principles of global cyber governance.

In December 2019, when the idea for ‘a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of [information and communication technology] for criminal purposes’ was presented to the General Assembly, the international community was sharply divided. Russia, China and most Southeast Asian countries were among those that cast the 79 votes in favour, while 60 delegations (including Australia, most European states, Japan, Britain and United States) voted against.

Australia and likeminded partners have always argued there was already a legal mechanism in place: the Budapest Convention. Agreed under the purview of the Council of Europe in 2001, it facilitates cooperation between law enforcement agencies on cybercrime issues for joint investigations, sharing and recognition of digital evidence, jurisdictions and extraditions. The Budapest Convention also contains an agreed set of core cybercrimes and cyber-enabled crimes. It includes safeguards for human rights and other fundamental freedoms and a review mechanism and facilitates access to technical assistance.

This was now all going to be duplicated or, worse, hollowed out in the process of creating a UN convention. Indeed, throughout its negotiation process, attempts were made to broaden the remit of cybercrime. For example, China proposed criminalising the ‘dissemination of false information … that could result in serious social disorder’, while India advocated for criminalising offences related to ‘cyber terrorism’.

The problem with the Budapest Convention is that it’s in name and spirit a European convention. While non-members such as Australia, Brazil, Fiji, Nigeria, Philippines and Tonga are among the 76 states that are party to the treaty, it was too easy to dismiss as non-inclusive and non-representative. Russia, itself a former member of the Council of Europe, never signed it. Moscow cited a lack of respect for state sovereignty, because it would allow for cross-border law enforcement operations without the consent of that state. Other states, such as South Africa, followed this narrative.

But while the new UN cybercrime treaty isn’t perfect, it’s far from a slam-dunk victory for Russia and China. In fact, Russia, Iran, and Egypt continued to hold strong objections until the very last moment. Perhaps this is the strongest indicator of success in holding back attempts of further state repression in the digital realm.

In an early draft, Russia proposed various controversial points, such as an expanded list of crimes that would be criminalised and an erosion of democratic and human rights safeguards. While considered during negotiations, these offences did not make it into the final text.

Iran, with backing from Russia, called for seven rounds of voting to remove paragraphs that contained human rights safeguards. For instance, Iran sought the removal of an article allowing states to deny mutual legal assistance if they have reason to believe the investigation is discriminatory on the basis of a person’s sex, race, language, religion, nationality, ethnic origin or political opinion. The vote resulted in a resounding defeat: 102 against and only 23 in favour.

The strongest critique to the UN convention comes from civil society organisations and the tech industry. They believe that the convention is too broad in scope and could be misused for surveillance and repression by authoritarian states seeking prosecution of alleged criminals residing in foreign jurisdictions. Industry fears it could be compelled to hand over data against terms and conditions and the laws of their home jurisdictions. Others point out that the convention could allow states to prosecute whistleblowers and cybersecurity researchers.

Despite these shared concerns by industry and civil society, liberal-democratic governments conceded for the sake of global consensus.

The cybercrime convention will be presented to the UN General Assembly this year and, upon endorsement, will be opened to member countries for signature and eventual ratification. To come into force, it requires at least 40 signatories by 31 December 2026.

It remains to be seen whether that will be achieved in the time available. The US has made no such commitment, although it ‘welcomed the Committee’s adoption of the convention.’ Australia’s ambassador for cyber wrote that the convention first needs to be adopted (by a majority) in the UN General Assembly ‘before Australia will consider becoming a party to the Convention.’ Iran, in its final statement, said to ‘maintain reservations and objections on certain provisions and terms.’ Moscow only acknowledged the outcome, with Russia ‘as the inspirer and leader of the negotiations.’ Beijing has not issued a statement yet.

For decades, cyberspace was thought to be most effectively governed through collaborative multistakeholder interactions, in which governments, civil society, industry and the technical community would take responsibility for their share of the domain. The experience of the UN cybercrime convention, however, shows government-led proceedings take precedence and that cyber sovereignty is the rallying concept around which states find consensus.

In the long run, this may pave the way for other government-to-government treaties on issues such as critical infrastructure protection, state-on-state cyber operations during peacetime and ethical principles of AI. While this would provide authoritarian states with opportunity to strengthen control over the internet and related technologies, for liberal democracies sovereignty becomes the strongest line of defence against cyber-enabled transnational repression and undue foreign interference.

Emerging generations should design future disaster response forces

Last week, the Select Committee on Australia’s Disaster Resilience released its long-awaited report, Boots on the ground: raising resilience. It’s an excellent summary of input from across the disaster-response community in Australia and makes many sensible recommendations for advancing disaster resilience. 

It does not, however, solve the core problem that it identifies: how to displace the ADF’s role in anything but last-resort domestic disaster response. Until that problem is solved, the requirement for ADF support during emergencies will continue to increase—leaving it distracted from its core defence mission amid rising geopolitical uncertainty. 

What Australia needs is a future disaster-response capacity commensurate with rapidly accelerating climate impacts—driven by an intergenerational strategy for climate-amplified disaster response. 

To do so, governments must give emerging generations a seat at the table in designing a future disaster-response force that they will lead. This strategy must be complementary to the forthcoming National Adaptation Plan and ongoing energy transition efforts. Rather than mandating sacrifice through inaction and poor preparation, governments should invest in and give young people hope for a safe climate-resilient future that they can build.

On the select committee’s core finding: this is far from the first time that the ADF’s role in domestic disaster response has been flagged as a challenge. The issue was acknowledged in the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and the 2024 National Defence Strategy, both of which pointed out the operational trade-offs involved in the concurrency of the ADF’s increasing engagement in domestic disaster response and its core national defence missions. ASPI commented on this with the DSR’s release last year, but little has changed in public decision-making since then, despite rising disaster intensity and frequency driven by climate change. 

This defence and disaster-response concurrency challenge is also not unique to Australia. The Center for Climate and Security in the US has been tracking the rising number of military responses to climate hazards around the globe. NATO’s latest annual Climate change and security impact assessment report demonstrated how its strategic competitors, Russia and China, face the same climate-amplified disaster-response and adaptation challenges as allied militaries. In large part, the effectiveness of future militaries will depend on their ability to decouple themselves from disaster response. 

Rising disaster-response needs also drive Australia’s support to partners in the Indo-Pacific and further abroad. Australia’s proposal to establish the Pacific Response Group (PRG) reflects this: a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief focused initiative between the militaries of Australia, Fiji, France, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Tonga. The PRG may play an increasingly important role in the years to come, including by helping to meet Australia’s disaster-response commitments to Tuvalu under the Falepili Union, if Tuvalu were to request a multinational response. 

International responses also eat into domestic non-ADF disaster-response capacity. There’s a longstanding tradition of countries sharing disaster-response capacity. For example, Australian firefighters have recently deployed to help combat Canada’s western wildfires. Such cooperation contributes not only to Australia’s partners’ disaster resilience, but also secures needed capacity in Australia during times of need. While international dynamics were not factored explicitly into the select committee’s report, they are critical to planning and preparing for future disaster-response capacity. 

Of course, the ADF can reduce its involvement in domestic disasters only if our civilian capacity for disaster management is strengthened significantly. As Raymond Whitehead noted in his testimony to the committee, a civilian force will need to be able to 

… provide heavy logistic and tactical support to local frontline services, including such things as: communications and IT support, medical support through deployable hospitals, heavy logistics support. It would also have access to equipment such as helicopters of different sizes, specialist observation and situational awareness aircraft, a fleet of transport planes, and tactical and strategic water bombers ….

It will also need far greater numbers of emergency-response personnel than are available today. While there’s an excellent body of Australian disaster-response experts—including ADF veterans contributing to Disaster Relief Australia—the ADF is facing a recruitment crisis. Beyond needing to limit requests to the ADF for disaster response, Australia will also have dwindling numbers of ADF-trained disaster-response experts available to train and supplement a future civilian force. This necessitates significantly increasing the scope and breadth of trained disaster responders in the near term. 

The obvious solution is to ask emerging generations, who will bear the brunt of climate-amplified disasters, to fill out those ranks—but how governments do that is crucial. 

Young generations know they face a burden of higher global temperatures and climate impacts: up to 75 percent of Australians aged 16 to 25 years are concerned about climate change, according to a YouGov report last year. That’s understandable: global temperatures may breach the Paris Agreement’s lower ‘safe’ threshold of 1.5°C by the 2030s and reach catastrophic levels of warming by the end of this century without further action by governments. Youths’ commitment to tackle this head on has been clear through their climate activism and protests, demonstrating their desire to effect change rather than be paralysed by climate anxiety. 

The federal government should leverage that concern and energy, but its efforts will be rightly met with cynicism if they’re not matched by far more ambitious emissions-reduction and climate-adaptation action. What basis should youth have for a sense of voluntary disaster-response duty when past governments and generations have failed to take on the costs of emissions reductions? Failing that voluntary sense of duty, given the strength of protests against insufficient climate action, how will they react to being drafted into a pathway of complicated (and arguably ineffective) mandatory national service? 

The path forward should begin with a genuine process to engage Australia’s young and emerging generations about how they want to build their future. Success will also depend on how much the participants develop a genuine sense of ownership and agency. 

Governments at all levels in Australia should seize this as an opportunity: our climate trajectory is dire, but not hopeless, as long as many required changes are made. Emissions must be reduced rapidly as part of an equitable energy transition that grows future economic opportunity. Climate-adaptation funding and resilience building must be scaled significantly to minimise the extent of future risk. The considerable disaster-response expertise and resilience among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities should also be sought and supported, as the committee notes, including by funding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community response units. 

At the federal level, bold commitment is needed to devise what should become an intergenerational strategy for climate-amplified disaster response. Heavily informed by younger generations, this would be complementary to Australia’s forthcoming National Adaptation Plan, while laying out a roadmap to train, equip and organise young and future generations to meet rising disaster risks at the local and national levels. 

To be clear: enhancing Australia’s disaster-response capacity alone will be insufficient. While the ADF’s involvement in disaster response must be limited, the much greater task here is getting buy-in from emerging generations for future disaster-response capacity. If that can be done right, future generations can be given a meaningful way to build a safer and more resilient future for themselves, while freeing the ADF to focus on its core missions. 

They’re controversial, but Australia should keep continuing detention orders

‘I cannot foresee a time when you will cease to be dangerous …. I cannot envisage you being freed without the most cogent evidence of a change of mindset.’ So remarked Justice Mark Wall in London’s Woolwich Crown Court last month when handing down a life sentence, with a minimum of 28 years, to Anjem Choudary for directing a terror organisation.

Choudary was the face of militant Islam in Britain, leading numerous groups under the Al-Muhajiroun banner and pledging his allegiance to Islamic State. The ruling makes it likely that Choudary, age 57, will die behind bars in a specialised high-security separation centre in the UK.

Wall’s reasoning was essentially the same as the rationale for Australia’s continuing detention orders (CDOs), which courts can issue on application from the federal Attorney-General to keep high-risk offenders out of society. Australia would make a mistake if it abolished them. They are a valuable and well-justified counterterrorism tool, supplementing other measures.

The life sentence handed down by Wall, with the clarity that there will be no release if Choudary continues to be assessed as dangerous, is in stark contrast to the recommendation of then Australian Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM) Grant Donaldson in March 2023 that Australia’s CDOs should be abolished, as they ‘are not proportionate to the threat of terrorism and are not necessary’. Of course, threats and what is a proportionate response are not static and, since Donaldson’s review, we have seen the Hamas terror attack on Israel, the resulting regional conflict and last week’s raising of Australia’s terror level to ‘probable’ by ASIO.

Donaldson criticised CDOs for being based on perceived future risks rather than criminal guilt, arguing that those laws contributed to a harsher society without proven safety benefits. The report recommended abolishing CDOs and amending the law’s objectives to emphasise rehabilitation and reintegration. Problematically, the former INSLM’s suggestion that future risks not be guarded against seems to wholly misunderstand that counterterrorism is ideally about prevention, not only response.

Importantly, Wall’s ruling pragmatically reflects that some criminals—including terrorists and paedophiles—will always be a threat to society. It therefore contextualises Australia’s balanced approach to countering terrorism, which includes continuing detention as a last resort under Division 105a of the Criminal Code Act. The confirmation by the director-general of security that the risk of a terror attack in Australia is greater than 50 percent in the next 12 months reinforces the need to have all legislative and policy tools available.

Australia’s counterterrorism framework is about more than just being tough. It has appropriate protections. Had Choudary been sentenced in Australia, the outcome would have been significantly different. Under the Criminal Code, the mandated penalty for terrorist offences is life imprisonment. In Australia, life imprisonment generally incorporates a non-parole period, although there are slight differences between states and territories. In cases involving mandatory life sentences without parole, the legal framework permits avenues for appeals and reviews and the potential for parole following the non-parole period. Additionally, offenders can serve part of their sentence outside of prison.

If terrorist offenders are assessed as posing a significant ongoing risk to the community post-sentence, the Australian legal system can employ CDOs. These orders enable a court to extend someone’s imprisonment beyond the original sentence if he or she has been convicted of certain grave terrorist-related offences and is deemed to present an unacceptable risk of committing further serious crimes.

Under prescribed circumstances and at the request of the Australian Federal Police, the attorney-general can apply to the courts for a CDO. If granted, the order keeps the offender in prison for a specified period up to three years. Importantly, the offender’s case is reviewed at least once every 12 months.

CDO applications and annual reviews involve expert assessments, court reviews and consideration of the offender’s participation in rehabilitation programs to determine whether continued detention or release under specific conditions is necessary to manage the risk of reoffending.

The decision to apply for a CDO and the court’s decision are underpinned by a systematic assessment and evaluation of an individual’s risk factors and indicators associated with violent extremism. The tools used in that assessment aid in developing targeted interventions and strategies for prevention and rehabilitation.

While there is no perfect system, VERA-2R is Australia’s most used assessment protocol to evaluate and manage the risk of violent extremism. It uses a structured method to assess 34 indicators related to violent extremism, guiding professional judgements without providing numerical predictions. According to a report testing the reliability and validity of VERA-2R on individuals who have radicalised in Australia, it had good inter-rater reliability but low predictive validity. In simple terms, multiple assessors could reach the same conclusions about one subject using VERA-2R, but those conclusions would not reliably predict the subject’s future behaviour.

Rehabilitation and human rights are critically important components of national counterterrorism strategies. While custodial sentences reduce terror risk (likelihood) from specific offenders, deradicalisation, when successful, offers more lasting mitigation. The aim of deradicalisation is to counteract and transform extremist ideologies and behaviours by rehabilitating individuals, thereby reducing their susceptibility to terrorist influences and promoting their reintegration into society. Holistic deradicalisation programs tailored to individual needs are more effective because they address the unique personal, psychological and social factors that contribute to an individual’s extremism, fostering a more profound and lasting transformation. By personalising interventions and support, these programs enhance engagement, build trust and facilitate meaningful changes in attitudes and behaviour.

The justice system can and should make every effort to rehabilitate radicalised terrorist offenders. However, recidivism unfortunately still happens, and the consequences can be severe. In 2018, convicted terrorist Usman Khan, deemed a rehabilitation success and released temporarily from a British prison, killed two people at a London rehabilitation conference in 2019. Previously incarcerated terrorists also committed attacks in London in November 2019 and February 2020.

Rehabilitation programs are essential but imperfect, which requires governments to grapple with the possibility that not every offender will be rehabilitated—particularly within the term of his or her original sentence. CDOs offer necessary complementarity to deradicalisation professionals and law enforcement within a transparent framework of judicial oversight and control, which means they remain a last resort, having been used only twice. Other measures, such as extended supervision orders (ESOs), are again complementary but cannot replace CDOs as they are limited to non-detained individuals roaming in society.

As security threats evolve, so must governments constantly review their laws and security settings, but wholesale deletions of laws based on the threat level on any given day is not in the national interest, which is why CDOs remain an essential power in addition to surveillance, monitoring and rehabilitation.

Advancing the Australia–Indonesia peacekeeping partnership

Australia should seek a more comprehensive peacekeeping partnership with Indonesia, a country that has become highly experienced in the field.

Through frequent joint training exercises, the Australian Defence Force can learn from the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) and play a key role in containing growing unrest in the region. Eventually, the ADF and TNI should together conduct peacekeeping operations, not just training.

Joint efforts in peacekeeping would also strengthen the relationship between the two-armed forces.

In the 2020–2024 Plan of Action for the Australia–Indonesia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP), the two countries committed to strengthening cooperation in peacekeeping operations under the auspices of the United Nations. But they did not specify how this would work in practice.

Expiry of the plan of action this year presents an opportunity for Canberra to advocate for a more substantive Australia–Indonesia peacekeeping relationship under a renewed CSP.

The renewed CSP should establish regular joint peacekeeping exercises between forces of the two countries. Peacekeeping training centres in each country should frequently host defence personnel and cadets from the other. This should be possible, since both the ADF Peace Operation Training Centre (ADF POTC) and the TNI’s Peacekeeping Centre (PMPP Sentul) already host defence cadets from other countries. Canberra and Jakarta made a start when they agreed to establish a permanent Indonesian instructor position at the ADF POTC.

In such places as the Philippines, Georgia and Nepal, the TNI has gained much more experience in peacekeeping than the ADF, whose peacekeeping efforts have dwindled. At present, the TNI’s Garuda Contingent (Konga) has more than 2000 peacekeepers in eight conflict zones, including Lebanon and Mali.

There is already recognition of the value to Australia of cooperating with Indonesia in this area. Last year at PMPP Sentul the Australian Army’s Major Matthew Breckenridge said, ‘Australia doesn’t have large contingents on UN peacekeeping missions, so working with the Indonesians, who send thousands of people yearly, provides the ADF valuable knowledge.’ Breckenridge teaches and provides mentoring to up to 1200 Konga members at a time in the PMPP training centre.

A strengthened peacekeeping capability in cooperation with Indonesia would serve Australia well if unrest broke out in, for example, a Pacific island country, and demanded military intervention—which China might be all too keen to provide if others didn’t.

The Australia–Indonesia partnership should extend eventually to co-deployment of peacekeeping operations, in which one of the two countries, usually Indonesia, would take the lead on the ground while the other played a supporting role. For this, they would need to set up an Australia-Indonesia Peacekeeping Taskforce, which would assess the benefits of cooperation in conflict zones on a case-by-case basis. Priority should be given to current or future conflict zones in the Indo-Pacific. Mutual support would likely be welcomed by both the ADF and the TNI, as peacekeeping operations are often undertaken in extremely challenging and complex environments.

The two countries did announce their intention for co-deployment on a UN peacekeeping mission in 2019, with the aim of strengthening military training cooperation. However, they provided no further information on how such a deployment would be managed and coordinated nor even where they would be keeping the peace. Nevertheless, in 2021 Australia gave Indonesia 15 Bushmaster armoured vehicles for peacekeeping.

Indonesia and Australia have experience working alongside each other in conflict zones, as regular contributors to the UN Department of Peace Operations, but the deployments have not been integrated with each other. Australian and Indonesian UN peacekeeping deployments have overlapped in places like Cambodia (1991 to 1993) and Namibia (1989 to 1990). Peacekeepers from both countries are currently operating in South Sudan.

Australia is the 12th-largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping. ADF personnel have taken part in over 50 peacekeeping operations around the world. In fact, Australians were among the first peacekeepers to be deployed under UN auspices when they monitored the ceasefire between Dutch and Indonesian forces in 1947.

Together, Australia and Indonesia already conduct around 20 exercises a year. The two neighbours also work closely together to prevent people smuggling and human trafficking. However, there is still great potential for bilateral security ties to grow and deepen. Close cooperation in peacekeeping would help.

In Indonesia, Australia has a giant neighbour that now knows a great deal more about this aspect of military capability. It should not lose the opportunity to learn from it.

The Quad is here to stay

The Quad is in good health, despite suggestions that it is being overtaken by other Indo-Pacific security initiatives. We saw its strength at the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Tokyo in late July.

In the past few years, the Quad has been joined by the Squad, comprising the United States, Australia, Japan and the Philippines, and by AUKUS and the proposition of an Asian NATO. All, to varying degrees, offer ways of reinforcing security in the Indo-Pacific in addition to the Quad, which groups Australia, India, Japan and the United States.

Yet India’s External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, said at the Tokyo meeting, the ‘Quad is here to stay, here to do, and here to grow.’

The joint statement from the Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Tokyo showcases the diverse agenda of the Quad, highlighting its commitment to maintaining a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific. This agenda spans various sectors, including outer space, cyber security, artificial intelligence, health security, infrastructure building, sea lane protection, climate-impact measures and supply chain resilience. It demonstrates the Quad’s substantial and multifaceted cooperative efforts.

Greater focus on the issues of immediate neighborhood concern to member countries, such as Myanmar, state-sponsored terrorism in South Asia, North Korea, Pacific island countries, Houthi attacks in the Indian Ocean region, and even the Middle East and Ukraine, demonstrate the collective understanding and efforts to safeguard the region from instability and upheavals.

It is also worth noting that, during the meeting, Australia announced the launch of the Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre, a critical initiative to boost reliable connectivity and the growth of the digital economy.

These efforts aim to fill gaps and strengthen capacities across multiple sectors to safeguard the current rules-based order and protect it from disruptive actions by revisionist powers. The Quad members are united by shared threats and a collective intent to reap economic and trade benefits and to promote Indo-Pacific stability and security, countering Beijing’s narrative and influence over regional players.

Among those who play down the value of the Quad, Ashley Tellis says: ‘In militarised crises and conflict with China, the mini-laterals like AUKUS and the Squad and, most importantly, the US–Japan alliance, will prove to be far more important than the Quad.’

But the Quad’s focus on a rules-based order and extended maritime domain awareness positions it as a softer but more systematic power alternative to Washington’s strategy for containing China’s growing assertiveness in the region. This approach aims to build regional trust and confidence, distinguishing the Quad from AUKUS or the Squad, which focus on direct hard-power deterrence.

Unlike the Squad, the Quad emphasises trust-building and economic friendshoring. This strategy consolidates existing security measures and extends new safeguards to non-member nations, including ASEAN countries.

The Quad’s emphasis on extended maritime domain awareness sets it apart from other security-centric mini-laterals, which are limited by geographical and operational constraints. The Indian Ocean remains the central geo-security domain for the Quad, with the Indian Navy playing a crucial role in enhancing joint capacities and supporting extended maritime operations with contributions from the US Japan, and Australia.

As Jaishankar noted, the Quad’s strength lies in its foundation of democratic politics, pluralistic societies and market economies, stabilising factors in a volatile world. The diversity of Quad members’ capabilities and offerings across diverse domains ensures a resonant and aligned partnership, providing a credible and resilient alternative to China’s propositions or those of any individual Quad member.

Reviewing the intelligence and media relationship

In 2024, Australian security relies on maintaining a resilient democracy and an underlying strong civil society as much as it does on secrecy to protect sensitive information from foreign or domestic threat actors. For two decades, our public discourse has focused on balancing national security and our freedoms, but that doesn’t need to be a perfect marriage. Our focus should just be on making it work.

The first review conducted by the new Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM) Jake Blight, Secrecy offences—Review of Part 5.6 of the Criminal Code Act 1995, provides important recommendations for improving our secrecy legislation and laying the foundations for a better relationship between the national intelligence community (NIC) and the media.

The relationship is not always amicable, as shown by the 2019 AFP raids on Annika Smethurst and the ABC, and last year’s reporting on former secretary of home affairs Mike Pezzullo’s proposal to reinstitute a system for issuing D-notices—official requests not to publish.

This is not a new problem. As argued by Melanie Brand in a paper for Australian Historical Studies, Australia’s D-notice system fell into disuse by 1982 as trust and mutual respect between the NIC and journalists eroded. New policies are needed to re-establish trust and reinforce our national security in a threat environment defined by foreign espionage, disinformation and limited public awareness. As Director-General of Security Mike Burgess put it in his 2024 annual threat assessment, ‘Australians need to know that the threat is real. The threat is now. And the threat is deeper and broader than you might think.’

Although national security announcements often grab headlines, Blight’s detailed 300-plus page review of Australia’s secrecy legislation (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not. Nevertheless, it vows a commitment to both national security and democratic freedoms and makes important recommendations to better protect journalistic freedoms.

Many of the INSLM’s recommendations should allay media concerns when reporting on matters of national security. Blight principally assesses whether Australia’s secrecy laws are proportionate, clear, and align with the rule of law. The report makes 15 recommendations, including: removing the classification system as an element of the offence (rec. 1); narrowing the scope of offences to sensitive information (recs. 3, 4); focusing expressly on the communication of sensitive information (recs. 7, 8); and better clarifying an existing legal defence that a reasonable belief in the public interest can be relied upon to avoid conviction when disclosing information, without introducing a general public-interest test (rec. 13).

More simply, Blight provides four general principles for secrecy offences by non-officials (such as journalists, NGOs and members of the public): offences should relate to the communication of information, focus on actual harms, apply only to serious harms and be narrower than offences for officials.

While the INSLM’s review is thorough and commendable, the government should not accept all its recommendations. The proposed change from ‘deemed harms’ to ‘actual harms’ is impracticable. ‘Actual harms’ might not be apparent for a long time (if ever), particularly where foreign intelligence services actively conceal the impact of leaks, or Australian agencies may highly classify ‘actual harms’ to maintain ongoing operational security. The current legislation focuses on risks to operations, capabilities, lives and national security, and creating a severe risk must still be an offence.

Blight also briefly touches upon the introduction of an Australian Defence Security Media Advisory (DSMA) notice system (otherwise known as a ‘D-notice’). As last year’s reporting indicated, and as Blight surmised, ‘there is not a level of trust that would enable a DSMA Notice System to work well in Australia.’

Instead, we need a unique Australian alternative: a consultive body to build a closer working relationship between the media and the national-security community. Policymakers should not be estranged from the fourth estate, particularly when our security environment calls for improved public awareness, discourse and democratic resilience. Experienced national security journalists already demonstrate the utility of collaboration, but an accessible engagement mechanism would further expand journalists’ access to the NIC, boost transparency and improve public perception.

The consultative body would provide journalists with the opportunity to voluntarily discuss received classified information directly with national security and intelligence officials. It should consist of representatives from each NIC agency, overseen by a representative from the Office of National Intelligence.

As opposed to a D-notice system, this body cannot become just a potential source of injunctions. Journalists and relevant NIC representatives could liaise on impending reporting across a range of national security matters, and the NIC representatives could advise of potential risks or provide backgrounding.

It would be incumbent on the NIC representatives to be persuasive, should they believe that reporting needs adjusting. Should this mechanism start to lead towards a series of injunctions journalists would simply—and quite understandably—stop engaging with it.

The NIC is increasingly engaging with journalism, led by Burgess’s annual threat assessment and media appearances. Failure to create a workable mechanism and build a closer relationship between the NIC and the media may come with real national security risks. As noted by former ASIS director-general Paul Symon, national security policy without social licence exposes Australia to disinformation attacks designed to divide and dislocate us.

In such an environment, necessary security policies could be spun into a controversial wedge by foreign actors, or misinterpreted by domestic actors, and ultimately diminish our national security.

A task for AUKUS: multiply the value of SSNs

The 1972 movie The Candidate is a good metaphor for the current state of AUKUS, the tri-nation consortium for supplying Australia with eight nuclear submarines (SSNs) and other technology. In the movie, Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, a political novice who wins a miraculous upset victory over a long-serving Californian senator. As the movie ends, Redford desperately asks his campaign manager, ‘What do we do now?’ There is no answer.

After a brilliant campaign by Australia to create and launch AUKUS against seemingly impossible odds, the question of ‘What do we do now?’ is rather important.

Several years ago, few would have believed that the US would allow even a trusted ally and member of the intelligence-sharing Five Eyes group access to its most sensitive SSN technologies.

Australia’s effort should become a textbook case of how strategic vision can produce implementation. Pillar 1 of AUKUS is aimed at building eight SSNs for Australia and has a time horizon measured in decades. Pillar 2 is a program for technology sharing and co-development that will have more immediate impact. The obstacles to both are many.

It takes nine years to build an SSN for the US Navy, and, currently, the US is not building enough of them for its own use. While Australia takes three to five US-built Virginia-class submarines, Britain will design a follow-on SSN class for Australia and itself; it will also help build them. That will be a long and expensive process with no guarantees of success.

In an earlier article, I proposed making Pillar 2 the higher immediate priority and considering expanding it to include other partners, such as Japan and South Korea, even given the constraints and impediments of US International Traffic in Arms Regulations. But AUKUS has far greater strategic potential that can be exploited if the participants are determined to do so and are prepared to embark on game-changing innovation.

Consider a plan to do that. Pillar 2 should be a force multiplier and enabler that will greatly expand the capability and application of even one AUKUS SSN in both kinetic and non-kinetic scenarios. We notice, for example, that an F-35 Lightning is much more than a fighter: with powerful sensors, computing capacity and communications links, it can be an information node that enhances the effect of other forces without itself firing a shot. Might not each AUKUS SSN be similarly exploited with add-on capabilities that multiply its value? And how might that be achieved?

First, Pillar 2 cannot be just a shopping list of technologies. Specificity is essential. The traditional approach is for senior military commanders to define military requirements needed to execute plans for war and peace and for other contingencies. The shortcoming has been that requirements have often become how Einstein described the universe: finite but unbounded, with emphasis on ‘unbounded’.

What might be a more practical approach would be to convene a series of seminars that use a variety of potential Asian scenarios to determine which technologies will be relevant, useful and even game-changing force multipliers—for example, a Chinese attempt to provoke the Philippines into a crisis or conflict; to control access to and from various Indonesian straits; or to blockade or occupy Taiwan. The scenarios might represent crises involving North Korea, Japan or South Korea, too.

The usual suspects attending these seminars would be political, military or economic officials: military officers; subject-matter experts from national labs; and representatives from large defence companies. Unusual suspects, however, can come from start-ups in Silicon Valley and other high-tech centres in Britain and Australia. The first seminars would identify technologies for further analysis. Subsequent ones would do finer-grain analysis on specific technologies for implementation.

The metric for picking winners and losers must extend across what the military calls the tactical, operational and strategic levels to focus on implications and consequences for China, Russia and the Sino-Russian condominium. One question to be answered is how Pillar 1’s eight SSNs can be enhanced or multiplied to provide greater capability to influence events beyond individual military applications.

In the broadest strategic vision, could a future AUKUS become a transformational construct in advancing the national-security interests of the partners while preventing actions by China or Russia or other parties that would be counter to those interests? While it could be argued that this vision is unrealistic or unattainable, the same criticism could have been used as Australia began its planning for AUKUS.

The organisation of the seminars will require a great deal of coordination to avoid Einstein’s twin pitfalls of ‘finite’ and ‘unbounded’. They will need to be held in various locations and often enough to ensure a comprehensive examination. That will require a major change in the leadership and management of AUKUS.

Currently, working groups of three-star officers and civilian equivalents have been put in place to oversee AUKUS. Clearly, three different governments and cultures are complicated and not easy to manage and coordinate. Further, and with due respect to three-stars, the fact is that four-stars or officials of equivalent seniority are needed if programs such as AUKUS are to succeed. One approach is to create a four-star or undersecretary position to serve in the White House and prime ministers’ offices to oversee AUKUS.

Clearly, the first priority for AUKUS is to start production of the SSNs. However, it would be a great pity not to think about what AUKUS could achieve in the broadest sense and determine how that vision might be achieved. Given the obvious fiscal and personnel constraints, imagination and innovation are critical and are not great consumers of resources. Imagine a ‘no limits’ AUKUS as an antidote to the Sino-Russian condominium. That would be something.

Pacific family deserves Australia’s backing on New Caledonia

A member of the Pacific family is in crisis, and how Australia responds next will shape its partnerships for years to come.

Following unrest among pro-independence Kanaks in New Caledonia, Australia needs to back the diplomatic intervention of other members of the Blue Pacific. And it should tell France, for France’s own good, to hold a replacement for a discredited referendum that overwhelmingly rejected independence in 2021.

Australia faces a choice between, on one hand, demonstrating its attentiveness and commitment to its Pacific family and, on the other, staying silent for the sake of preserving relations with France and hoping to offend no one.

Violence broke out in New Caledonia on 13 May as the French parliament was about to vote on a constitutional amendment that would have reshaped the electoral roll in the French overseas territory. Pro-independence Kanaks saw it as an attempt to water down their voting power. New Caledonian society remains tense, and violence threatens to erupt again.

Other Pacific island countries have put New Caledonia firmly on the agenda for an upcoming summit of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). Australia should step up and support the PIF in its calls for a visiting mission and a resolution to the crisis. It should also privately lobby Paris not to block such a visit.

A Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting that Japan held in mid-July became a perfect opportunity for Pacific leaders to discuss issues in person. The most pressing one was the evolving crisis in New Caledonia.

While their leaders were in Tokyo on 17 July, the members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group issued a statement declaring the referendum ‘illegitimate and null and void’, opposed the militarisation of New Caledonia and called for a series of international missions. The group is formed by Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the New Caledonian independence movement FLNKS.

Cook Islands prime minister and current PIF chair Mark Brown on the same day that the results of the referendum were ‘not really valid’ as a result of the boycott by the Kanak population due to COVID-19 and cultural mourning periods. Only 3.5 percent of voters supported independence, but turnout was very low. Then on 22 July the PIF said it would send representatives from Fiji, Tonga and Cook Islands to New Caledonia; they would report back to a PIF Summit to be held from 26 to 30 August.

With New Caledonia firmly on the Pacific agenda and momentum building into the PIF summit, those without a clear position are being pushed to declare one. Brown said: ‘New Caledonia is a PIF member, and we have a responsibility to take care of our family in a time of need.’

Australia’s response to the PIF’s calls to help a family member in need will shape perceptions of its true commitment to the region. Currently, Australia is increasingly isolated in its silence, as New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has joined Pacific partners in questioning the legitimacy of the independence referendum.

Despite France’s poor handling of the 2021 referendum, two held in 2018 and 2020, in which majorities rejected independence fairly narrowly, were viewed as free and fair. This should be reason for hope that France can act responsibly and negotiate a peaceful political settlement.

Yet France has not responded to requests for a mission by the PIF, preoccupied by the Paris Olympic games being held right now and by political wrangling that has followed an inconclusive snap election. If France fails to allow the PIF mission to New Caledonia before the PIF summit takes place, it wouldn’t be shocking to see a temporary change in status as a dialogue partner.

Australia should support the PIF in its calls for a resolution of the crisis and work to bring France around. If Australia doesn’t actively support the PIF, it too may find friends a little more hostile at the upcoming forum. Eight civilians and two gendarmes died in the in the first few weeks of the riots. Action must be taken to de-escalate the situation, promote understanding and dialogue and find a path forward.

There are concerns that an independent New Caledonia will face economic and political instability and that Australia will be burdened with the significant cost of being the primary supporter of a new, poor country. Another consideration is the potential influence and presence of China in any newly independent state in the region; that will remain a factor in long-term strategic planning.

France’s presence does contribute to upholding the region’s security, in many ways and France is a particularly important Western partner to Australia. But these issues are secondary to the immediate calls to address the current crisis, and Australia cannot let itself be driven by a fear of the region losing French support.

If Australia wants to back France, it should do so by encouraging France to negotiate. Ideally, France would agree to hold another referendum to account for the complaints about the previous one and use an electoral roll that, as far as possible, matches that of the third referendum. That, at least, would be a starting point.

Another referendum, even another ‘no’ result, would at least address the primary concern around the third referendum’s legitimacy. This would remove some immediate tension and require all parties to reassess their positions and focus on a fair political settlement. Another referendum would also make Australia’s choice easier: Canberra would endorse either the peaceful implementation of a ‘yes’ vote or the necessary political (re)negotiations that would follow another democratically endorsed ‘no’.

A definitive solution in New Caledonia is highly unlikely in the short term. If Australia is serious about its place in the Pacific family, it should be preparing for eventualities where France doesn’t contribute to the region in the ways which it currently does through development aid and security.

Even if the crisis in New Caledonia is resolved or de-escalates again to a slow burn, France’s position in the region is irreversibly stained. Local leaders will likely be more willing to push back against France’s influence and presence. Australia needs to put priority on its own relationship with the region and back the PIF. This means it is time for Australia to take a firmer stance on the New Caledonian issue and be ready to tackle the region’s security issues with less help from France.

Losing the insight of Australia’s myriad non-government security experts

In Australia, anti-intellectualism has become something of a national pastime. We are champions of the common folk and heartily reject political and academic elitism. Cutting down the tall poppies is standard, and lauded, practice.

But while we have been proudly adopting this attitude as part of the Australian identity, we have also allowed it to undermine the quality of our national security and defence policies. A sufficiently rigorous intellectual basis is difficult to discern in recent decisions that hinder our ability to protect ourselves, even as we know our adversaries prepare for war.

The Defence Strategic Review (DSR) confirmed that Australia no longer has a 10-year warning time for planning and preparedness, yet our most important defence capability responses to the deteriorating strategic situation are somewhere in the future.

Australian decision-makers have succumbed to the tyranny of short strategy by responding only to immediate political pressures while making parsimonious attempts to access the most rigorously tested ideas and understand the interrelationships between means and ends. We choose ordinary decisions over extraordinary ideas. The recent move away from accessing expert external providers and out-of-the-box thinkers and towards trusted in-house expertise confirms this anti-intellectual movement. The development should make us feel more than a little uncomfortable, as it is not just anti-intellectual; it is also anti-democratic.

Centralisation and control of information are in the toolkit of autocratic regimes. During the Cultural Revolution, fear of external ideas led to the widespread persecution of intellectuals within Chinese society, and today the Chinese Communist Party controls information to such an extent that it is used as weapon against the Chinese people.  Concerted efforts to centralise or control knowledge, which seems the trend in Australia now, is at odds with the principles and the mechanics of our democracy. We should remain mindful of this point, whatever the risks that discordant ideas and voices may seem to democratic cohesion.

Certainly, provision of external expertise has recently been blighted in Australia with instances of bad behaviour and dubious offerings. Some have sought profit above service, and at times even at the expense of ethics and legality. And the products churned out by some general consultancies offer little in terms of challenging ideas or even evidence-based analysis, often inhibited by their own strong anti-intellectualism. Moreover, the insularity of many of the public universities risks creating a self-referential intellectual class that is ‘no longer capable of distinguishing the bartering of interests from the jettisoning of principles’. However, the federal government’s efforts to curtail the conduct of the few wrongdoers has resulted in unreasonable constraints on knowledge infrastructures, writ large.

The Varghese Review into federal funding for strategic policy work is an opportunity to reinforce the important role that external experts play in bringing contestability and intellectual capability to the national defence and security discourse. But if the review results in further constraints on the field of defence and security thinking, and further centralises policy-relevant knowledge creation, we cut off any attempt at gaining an intellectual edge on our adversaries. Fostering a broad and diverse fellowship of strategic policy thinkers that can hold government to account for securing the nation is becoming more important. Indeed, it is a vital element in our participatory democracy. We must democratise the fight to protect our democratic system. This is especially if universities continue in their intellectual decline.

What is ignored in this conversation, however, is the need for improved engagement with those who, as a matter of course, work at the intersection of scholarly and everyday knowledge but are not housed in formal strategic policy organisations. Peppered throughout university departments, research houses, small advisory firms, consultancies and elsewhere are highly skilled experts who exercise independent thought and have a clear sense of civic duty as they commit their means to improving policymaking through research and new ideas. They are intellectuals in the most applied sense and committed citizens of our democracy, but they are increasingly prevented by government policy and practices from providing their services to the national cause.

We would do well to heed Friedrich Hayek’s observation that knowledge is dispersed. That to ‘act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm’. Knowledge, we should remember, ‘never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’. In that sense bureaucratic organisations, whether public or private, are not ideally suited to effective knowledge-creation.

The benefits of dispersed knowledge are obvious in initiatives like Wikipedia, the logic of which is to create free, open and self-correcting content through the collaborative efforts of a community of users. But dispersed knowledge is also a form of practical collective intelligence. Examples of this include the Coastwatchers program, which relied upon a small band of civilians in remote locations as an early warning network in the Pacific during World War II. More recently, we’ve seen creative use of open-source intelligence in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, collective knowledge is especially effective if it can be brought together at these critical moments.

This returns us to the DSR and the National Defence Strategy (NDS), the government’s response to the DSR. The whole-of-nation approach in the NDS requires harnessing all arms of Australia’s national power to achieve an integrated approach to defence and security. Does this include using the diverse intellectual capability that exists beyond government? Moreover, in the DSR, net assessments were championed as a means to improve decision-making in national defence. But are those trying to develop this capability within government coming up against the same sorts of challenges that bureaucratic thinking creates? Net assessment requires out-of-the-box ideas and access to expert research and knowledge far beyond defence and national security circles. The best options often come not from standard defence or security dimensions but from unexpected economic, technological or human skills and capacities—and more often from their innovative combinations.

Knowledge does not thrive when it is centralised or confined. If everyone contributes, a better product is more often made. So, if we are to move beyond the tyranny of short strategy, we must redress our anti-intellectualism and become enthusiasts of diverse knowledge and the marketplace of ideas. Efforts to concentrate knowledge in-house and limit pathways for external knowledge providers will, at best, result in myopia. At worst, they may become a worrying echo of autocratic regimes, where free-thinking and independent ideas are deemed threats to the state. In its dispersed nature, knowledge encourages liberty and is the source of societal and material flourishing. This is the democratic edge. We should be fostering knowledge as a national weapon. Indeed, it may become a potent form of intellectual warfare. History repeatedly shows that ideals and ideas win wars.