Detect, disrupt and deny: Optimising Australia’s counterterrorism financing system

Detecting, disrupting and denying terrorist financing is vital to efforts to degrade terrorist organisations. This paper examines the nature of terrorist financing and the system used to counter this. Using examples, the paper analyses how terrorist organisations raise, move and use funds. While the focus is currently on Islamist terrorist groups, particularly the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), historical examples demonstrate how terrorism and terrorism financing are neither new phenomena nor dominated only by groups in the Middle East.

The paper examines the international and Australian systems for targeting terrorism financing.

Australia’s overall counter-terrorism financing (CTF) system is robust but could be enhanced and strengthened. The 84 recommendations in the government’s recent Review of Australia’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism legislation is a good start to improving the CTF system but doesn’t go far enough in some cases.

This paper sets out recommendations on how the Australian Government could enhance Australia’s CTF system.

For the right reasons, in the right ways (Part 1): A four-nation survey of information sharing about organised crime

This special report examines how government, business and the community in four nations share information about organised crime. Its key finding is that the Australian Government, businesses and community as a whole must be open to new kinds of information sharing partnerships.

The field work involved over 80 interviews, including visits to or discussions about a range of information sharing mechanisms in Israel, the UK, the Netherlands and the US.

This is an abridged version of a report submitted to the Churchill Memorial Trust in June 2016.

America’s ‘Maginot Line’: A study of static border security in an age of agile and innovative threats

Borders and border security are once again becoming increasingly important to the nation state. Many take a default position that our coastline is our border and that border security involves merely police, security guards and immigration or customs officials. But Australia’s geography no longer provides the physical barrier from the outside world that it once did.

This strategy provides a case study analysis of post-9/11 changes to US border security policies. It examines each of America’s different borders: the friendly northern borders, maritime borders, and the militarised southern border. It provides recommendations for Australia’s border security.

Australian border security and unmanned maritime vehicles

Protecting the sovereignty of our maritime borders has never been more difficult than it is today. Australia must identify strategies for pre-positioning our finite maritime response capabilities in order to be able to respond promptly, effectively and efficiently to risks across our EEZ.

This special report examines the potential for UMVs to expand Australia’s maritime domain awareness and make the ADF’s and Australia Border Force’s risk management strategies more efficient. It provides recommendations for improving the efficiency of Australia’s maritime border security efforts.

Opportunities abound abroad: Optimising our criminal intelligence system overseas

Criminal intelligence (CrimInt) is so useful in serious criminal investigations that it’s difficult to envisage a situation where it shouldn’t be sought and used if it’s available.

This special report argues that Australia’s current arrangements for gathering and disseminating CrimInt overseas are suboptimal.

While additional resources are needed to address this condition, there’s also a need to streamline priority setting and associated collection requirements, provide ways to evaluate and better coordinate the collection of information and intelligence product, and expand opportunities to improve training in CrimInt.

The paper provides recommendations to improve the quality and utility of our overseas CrimInt effort for law enforcement, policy and regulatory agencies.

Agenda for Change 2016: Strategic choices for the next government

The defence of Australia’s interests is a core business of federal governments. Regardless of who wins the election on July 2, the incoming government will have to grapple with a wide range of security issues. This report provides a range of perspectives on selected defence and national security issues, as well as a number of policy recommendations.

Contributors include Kim Beazley, Peter Jennings, Graeme Dobell, Shiro Armstrong, Andrew Davies, Tobias Feakin, Malcolm Davis, Rod Lyon, Mark Thomson, Jacinta Carroll, Paul Barnes, John Coyne, David Connery, Anthony Bergin, Lisa Sharland, Christopher Cowan, James Mugg, Simon Norton, Cesar Alvarez, Jessica Woodall, Zoe Hawkins, Liam Nevill, Dione Hodgson, David Lang, Amelia Long and Lachlan Wilson.

ASPI produced a similar brief before the 2013 election. There are some enduring challenges, such as cybersecurity, terrorism and an uncertain global economic outlook. Natural disasters are a constant feature of life on the Pacific and Indian Ocean rim.

But there are also challenges that didn’t seem so acute only three years ago such as recent events in the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, and ISIS as a military threat and an exporter of global terrorism.

The incumbent for the next term of government will have to deal with these issues.

Launch Video

Bolstering national disaster resilience: What can be done?

This report outlines the goals of ASPI’s Risk and Resilience Program. It introduces several broad areas to be covered and measures to strengthen mitigation, response and recovery options spanning the community, state and federal spheres. The program will contribute to our long-term thinking on how best to prepare for and recover from disasters.

Methamphetamine: Focusing Australia’s National Ice Strategy on the problem, not the symptoms

In this report, law enforcement isn’t focused on arrests, prosecutions, custodial offences or seizures, as none of those will have a guaranteed impact on the problem. The focus is on means to reduce the availability of drugs, the disruption of user behaviour and the integration of education and health initiatives.

The report argues that the National Ice Strategy should consider three key points:

  1. Integration. Drug strategies have a better chance of being successful when each of its initiatives are integrated into a strategically focussed harm reduction strategy.
  2. Innovation. Education, health and enforcement stakeholder should be free from the limitations of wholly quantitative performance measures.
  3. Disruption. Initiatives to tackle the ice problem should be focussed towards the disruption of problems rather than the treatment of symptoms of the problem.

Security through aid: Countering violent extremism and terrorism with Australia’s aid program

The paper argues that countering violent extremism (CVE) and terrorism are international security and development issues. Australia’s foreign aid should be used to strengthen resilience to violent extremist ideologies. Improving governance in weak states can help to deny terrorists the easy recruiting grounds of lawless communities.

The ASPI report argues that there are  several ways to better leverage our foreign aid program to counter terrorism and violent extremism.

  1. Where a clear need has been identified, implement direct CVE aid programs
  2. Apply a CVE and counter-terrorism ‘filter’ to our aid programs
  3. Develop targeted reporting on CVE aid programs
  4. Use InnovationXchange to explore avenues for implementing CVE into the aid strategy
  5. Share information on CVE and aid
  6. Lead the debate to modernise official development assistance (ODA) reporting

Creative tension: Parliament and national security

This paper argues that enhancing parliament’s role in national security will reinforce Executive accountability, improve the quality of public debate over national security and serve to strengthen the foundations of Australia’s parliamentary democracy.

There are several measures that would materially improve parliament’s role in the conduct of national security: 

  • enhance respect for parliament as the forum for consideration of national security issues by utilising the parliament’s existing procedures to more fully consider issues of foreign affairs, defence, intelligence and border security
  • develop parliamentarians’ education in national security by providing a new members’ orientation program focussed on national security
  • examine parliament’s exercise of war powers 
  • encourage parliamentary diplomacy 
  • a material improvement in parliament’s role demands more attention to increasing the human and financial resources available to key national security committees
  • undertake an examination of national security committee mandates, particularly in intelligence oversight