Tag Archive for: AFP

Australian politics needs clearer national security boundaries

We need to establish clearer political boundaries around national security to avoid politicising ongoing security issues and to better manage secondary effects.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) revealed on 10 March that the Dural caravan laden with explosives and an antisemitic note naming Jewish community targets, discovered 19 January, was a hoax orchestrated by criminal actors.

Political debates around national security have focused on the caravan since its discovery. The AFP’s revelation voided much of the rampant speculation, perfectly demonstrating the need to establish better political boundaries.

The AFP confirmed the caravan was essentially a ‘criminal con job’—an ‘elaborate scheme contrived by organised criminals, domestically and from offshore.’

The AFP believe that those responsible were trying to ‘change their criminal status’, likely attempting to leverage information about the plot in exchange for reduced sentences. In short, criminals sought to exploit security fears for personal gain. While police are clear that, for various reasons, there was never a real terrorist or mass casualty threat—there was no detonator, for example—it is important to acknowledge that the plot was convincing and created real safety concerns for Jewish Australian communities.

Despite a lack of formal designation, the caravan was initially presented as a terrorist plot, including by NSW Premier Chris Minns and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. It followed months of hate crimes and December’s designated terrorist attack against the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.

However, this quick political designation and ensuing discussions likely heightened community fears and enhanced criminal actors’ ability to exploit them.  The caravan was discussed repeatedly in federal and state parliaments and the media despite the ongoing police investigation, often alongside criticism of governmental responses to rising antisemitism.

Silence in the face of national security threats is a problem, and government messaging around the Dural caravan and other incidents has been lacking. But loud inaccuracies can be as bad or worse—particularly if they create secondary psychological effects that criminals are trying to exploit, such as public fear.

Clearer government statements would have better informed the public and managed fears. Delays in messaging also leave further room for misinformation. But the political handling of the Dural case is also defined by a heavily partisan approach and politicking at the expense of accuracy. Clearer messaging in the first instance is needed, but so are mechanisms to reduce the misinformation window of opportunity.

Partisan discussion of the Dural caravan was clear in Parliament. In February, Liberal member of parliament Julian Leeser, while discussing a motion to condemn antisemitism, said that the plot was evidence that Australia faces a ‘domestic terrorism crisis’ and criticised the government for failing to adequately support the Jewish community.

That same day, opposition foreign affairs spokesperson David Coleman raised the caravan while specifically criticising Albanese:

 … extraordinarily, a caravan packed with explosives, apparently targeting Jewish addresses, and a prime minister who was in the dark—oblivious. This is an extraordinary failure by a weak prime minister, and it is marking our national character.

Days later, Jason Wood, another Liberal MP, listed a series of antisemitic attacks, calling Dural ‘the big one’ before echoing Coleman’s sentiment:

the prime minister should have been very strong on this right from the very start, instead of trying to walk on two sides of the road at the same time.

While firmer leadership was needed, we now know there were complex factors to consider. Investigators suspected early in the process that the plot was a hoax. The operation was not straightforward, and there actually were a few sides of the road to walk—often the case with such investigations.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton raised the caravan matter with the media on multiple occasions, repeatedly criticising Albanese’s handling of the case. Speaking to the ABC, Dutton criticised Albanese for not being immediately briefed on the caravan incident, which he labelled ‘potentially the biggest terrorist attack in our country’s history’, and said the prime minister’s actions constituted ‘an absolute abrogation of his responsibility’. He also speculated that NSW Police may have had concerns the prime minister’s office would leak the information and that this may have been the reason Albanese wasn’t briefed.

In contrast, when pressed for particulars, the prime minister often noted that the Dural caravan was subject to ongoing investigation.

This discourse had flow-on effects. The caravan was repeatedly cited in debate relating to the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crime) Bill. Critics of the government were pushing for mandatory minimum sentences—an objective they eventually achieved.

Due to the incident’s recency, greater consideration should have been given to the investigation process. Misrepresentation of the incident was not intentional, but it was speculative and premature, affecting the integrity of debate and legislation.

Media should hold politicians to account. Law enforcement can better support this by more quickly and more directly making information available to reporters, even if limited only to reminders that investigations are ongoing, details are classified or claims are unsubstantiated. Importantly, this aligns with national security objectives by managing secondary effects and preventing social division.

Stopping anti-Semitic terrorism in Australia

In the next six months there is a greater than 50 per cent chance of a terrorist attack being planned and possibly carried out in Australia. The Director-General of Security told us so on August 5, 2024, when the terrorist threat level was raised to “probable”. The Jewish Australian community has every right to be gravely concerned that Jewish people and places, such as synagogues, might be the targets of such an attack. That this is even a possibility should shock all Australians.

We can be very confident that ASIO, the AFP, state and territory police and other agencies will do everything in their power to stop such an attack. However, history shows that while many terrorist attacks are stopped, some attempts succeed. Afterwards, commissions of inquiry typically find that governmental structures and processes were deficient, responsibilities were not clearly assigned, and information flows had broken down. Those were the lessons, for instance, of the institutional failures that occurred in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.

We must not minimise the gravity of this situation by thinking that this threat has little to do with the lives of Australians generally. Were a mass casualty terrorist attack to occur, perhaps on the scale of the bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in July 1994, which killed 85 people, Australia would never be the same again afterwards. Our idea of Australia as being a peaceful and cohesive society would be transformed overnight, for the worst.

The federal government is charged with the defence of the nation, the protection of its sovereignty, and the maintenance of the “peace, order, and good government” of the commonwealth, the latter phrase being contained in the Constitution. If the government fails in any of these first duties of state, no amount of success in other fields will protect it from condemnation, today and in history’s enduring judgment.

While police and security intelligence officers, and other officials, have to grapple at the operational coalface with the complex challenge of counter-terrorism work, it is the government that has the higher and prior responsibility to prevent matters developing to the point where the nation is being riven by polarisation and social fractures, and where there is a risk that hateful beliefs might be acted upon through terroristic violence.

As in war, countering terrorism requires active and involved ministerial leadership, and the wielding of the power of ministerial office to ensure that institutional failures are remedied before tragedy strikes, and not in the aftermath.

In counter-terrorism work, it is vitally important that the architecture of roles and responsibilities is clear, especially in a federation, that governmental structures reflect this clarity, that functions are distributed accordingly, and that there is integration and unity of effort across agencies and jurisdictions. Institutional failures are more likely to occur when the assignment of roles and responsibilities lacks clarity. Reporting lines become tangled. Information flows are impaired. Coherence of effort breaks down.

At the most foundational level, it is not even clear who is the lead federal minister of the government. Under the current Administrative Arrangements Order, the document that sets out the responsibilities of ministerial departments of state, the responsibility for “law enforcement policy and operations” is vested with the Attorney-General, while the responsibility for “national security policy and operations” is vested with the Minister for Home Affairs. So, who is the minister for counter-terrorism?

This blurring of responsibilities, and the associated transfer since May 2022 of the AFP, other law enforcement agencies, and then ASIO from the Home Affairs ministry to the Attorney-General’s, were retrograde steps. They unravelled the clarity and unification of effort that had been put in place by the Turnbull government in December 2017, when the Department of Home Affairs was established in its modern form. Were there to be a major terrorist attack, this blurring of responsibilities, and the consequential weakening of the nation’s counter-terrorism machinery, would be key exhibits in any resultant commission of inquiry.

In the same way that the Minister for Defence would be expected to take the day-to-day lead in matters of war – and we would not have separate ministers for the navy, the army, and the air force pulling in different directions – the Minister for Home Affairs should lead in all matters of domestic security and federal law enforcement. The minister should have “authority over the whole scene”, as Winston Churchill used to say.

Sound arrangements were in place during the period December 2017 to May 2022, when the minister, the department, and ASIO, the AFP, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and AUSTRAC were able to work together as a cohesive team, with the minister having “authority over the whole scene”.

This is not a theoretical claim. It was our lived experience. The relevant machinery of government was integrated. Information flows were seamless. Effort was unified. Australia was safer.

In the absence of a senior minister having such authority, and the information, so that they are able to set strategic directions and to give lawful directions as might be necessary, too much of the burden of accountability in counter-terrorism is being borne by officers who, while being highly diligent and resolutely determined in their work, are not charged with being accountable to the parliament, and the people.

Only an empowered minister who has full command of all of the facts of an evolving situation can probe, question, nudge and – at times – overrule, subject to having the legal authority to do so.

This is the basis for the successful governance of Operation Sovereign Borders. It is how we would fight a war. Why is counter-terrorism being treated differently? It should not be.

Here is what needs to be done, without delay. These measures might strike the reader as being concerned with technical matters of governmental machinery. They are. Getting the machinery and processes of counter-terrorism right keeps us safe, and it is precisely these matters that any future commission of inquiry into a major terrorist attack would have to examine in painstaking detail.

First, the AAO should be amended this afternoon, assigning explicit ministerial responsibility for counter-terrorism to the Minister for Home Affairs. Accompanying instructions should be issued, also this afternoon, to the Director-General of Security and the AFP Commissioner directing them to report to the minister with immediate effect. In due course, the Department of Home Affairs should be reconstituted fully.

Second, the Prime Minister, consulting with first ministers, should declare the existence of a National Terrorist Situation, under the provisions of the National Counter-Terrorism Plan. That plan is the agreed national arrangement for dealing with terrorism, and it should be fully activated, without the government waiting for an attack to succeed. Some might quibble that a “terrorist incident” has not yet occurred. Let them. They can answer before the judgment of history.

The declaration of an NTS would open the way for the commonwealth to assume full strategic leadership of the overall anti-Semitism effort.

The states and territories have vital supporting roles to play in this regard, as they would in any national crisis. However, the severity of the situation has reached a point where the commonwealth now has to lead. Imagine no one bothering to tell Churchill in 1940 that German-speaking parachutists had landed in Sussex, because detective chief superintendent Foyle had the matter in hand!

Had the recent caravan bomb plot succeeded, it would have been an attack on Australia, not an attack on an individual state.

Accordingly, and third, the government should immediately establish a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional taskforce within the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Co-ordination in the Department of Home Affairs. This should include state and territory officials. The taskforce should be led by the commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator within Home Affairs. The office of Co-ordinator was established in the wake of the Martin Place siege of December 2014, and the subsequent review that was undertaken of Australia’s counter-terrorism machinery.

The taskforce should be built around these three missions: “prevent and protect” (led by Home ­Affairs); “intelligence” (led by ASIO, working with the AFP, ACIC, AUSTRAC, and other intelligence agencies); and “disruption” (led by the AFP, working with ASIO and state and territory police). This model would mirror the successful Operation Sovereign Borders model that has been in place since late 2013, with a key additional element being the integration of state and territory police, who would retain primacy for the investigation of offending that was related to state and territory laws, under the umbrella of the disruption mission.

The “battle rhythm” of the taskforce should be driven by the provision by the co-ordinator of a daily situation report to the minister, which would provide him with the latest information regarding the threat picture and the operational situation. Nothing more focuses the mind of officers than the need to work to the steady beat of ministerial oversight. This is what happens in war, and in other domestic security crises such as dealing with illegal boat arrivals. It should drive action here too. The report should be suitably classified and constructed such that those few with a comprehensive need to know everything would be able to be fully informed, while those with a lesser need to know would be informed of only those matters that fell within their responsibility. On advice, but in the end exercising his own judgment, the minister should decide what should be said publicly, and when – always balancing the obligation to inform and reassure the public with the imperative to protect operations.

Fourth, national cabinet should agree to the establishment of a national crisis committee of relevant state and territory ministers, to be led by the Minister for Home Affairs. This committee should meet weekly, or more frequently as might be necessary. It would provide a regular opportunity for the co-ordinator and others to brief ministers, and to act as required on any collective decisions that they might take. National cabinet should be primed to meet urgently, as circumstances require it.

Fifth, the co-ordinator should develop a strategy for a national community engagement campaign, in consultation with commonwealth departments and agencies, the first secretaries of the states and territories, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, and others with particular expertise in the field. Special Anti-Semitism Envoy Jillian Segal should be appointed to be the principal strategic adviser to the co-ordinator and the taskforce in this and all other regards, while retaining her direct reporting line to the Prime Minister and the Home Affairs Minister. She should be given special intelligence and other briefings so she can better perform her functions.

Drawing on the best practice in countering violent extremism, and combatinganti-Semitism, including by way of better Holocaust education, the aim of the campaign would be to counter the very particular and pernicious narratives and ideologies that underpin and sustain anti-Jewish hatred.

Success in this regard will not be achieved by generalised anti-racism and anti-discrimination efforts, and well-meaning pleas for the maintenance of social cohesion, as important as these are. Anti-Semitism has to be countered specifically at the level of narrative and ideology, having regard to the particulars of this ancient hatred. Such a campaign should expose and challenge anti-Jewish tropes, memes, conspiracy narratives, signifiers, and so on. It would have to be mounted across a wide array of social media platforms, and it would ideally involve prominent Australians, including faith leaders, calling out this hatred, and standing with Jewish Australians.

Sixth, the taskforce should work with technology companies and other data providers to generate a better online “dragnet” of anti-­Semitic content, built on more powerful, lawful AI-assisted searches for such material, to address the data problems that were recently identified by Mike Kelly in these pages.

A better “dragnet” would generate more leads for intelligence and investigative work, support takedown efforts by the eSafety Commissioner, and assist in the shaping and targeting of the community engagement campaign.

Seventh, the co-ordinator, working in conjunction with the commonwealth Department of Education and the vice-chancellors of universities, should prepare a plan for the minister’s consideration on making our universities safe for Jewish staff and students. Some universities have become hotbeds of hatred. This should not be tolerated. Perpetrators should be dealt with decisively. Sit-ins and encampments should be shut down. This is not an issue of free speech. It is intimidation that has no place in civil discourse.

Eighth, the minister should convene an urgent meeting of the Five Country Ministerial grouping, which brings together the security ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the US. This forum has worked very effectively to crack tough domestic security and public safety issues, doing so on the basis of the very highly classified intelligence that is shared among the Five Eyes partners. The Five Country Ministerial group should focus especially on the foreign state and other actors who are almost certainly operating in the shadows to seed and amplify anti-Jewish hatred. Special attention should be paid to Iran, which has a record of sponsoring attacks against Jewish people and places around the world. The FBI and MI5 warned of the threat of Iranian-backed terrorism in the immediate wake of the October 7 attack on Israel.

Ninth, the minister should reassure himself that effective plans are in place to deal with mass casualty bombing attacks, active shooter contingencies, siege/hostage recovery situations, and car-ramming attacks. With the Minister for Defence, he should satisfy himself that the call-out arrangements under Part IIIAAA of the Defence Act are in order, and that the ADF’s Tactical Assault Groups can be quickly deployed.

He should also instruct the co-ordinator to ensure that the guidance for the protection of crowded places, schools and places of worship is current, and has been promulgated effectively to the Jewish community, and to the owners and controllers of relevant physical places. Similarly, access to dangerous chemicals and explosives should be reviewed and tightened as required, and preparations made for the lawful deployment of counter-drone capabilities at certain locations, to defend against drone-mounted attacks.

Finally, the minister should direct Home Affairs to expedite the cancellation on character grounds of the visas of any non-citizens who espouse extremist anti-Semitic viewpoints. A new ministerial direction to decision-makers should be promulgated to ensure that consistently decisive decisions are being taken in this regard.

These measures have a single theme. We know, from the findings of commissions of inquiry, terrorist attacks are more likely to occur where there has been a failure of central co-ordination and direction, a fragmentation of effort, and a breakdown in information flows.

What is suggested here could be set in motion this afternoon. Doing so would not reflect any criticism of officials, and certainly not of the operational teams who are doing their job. However, they do not bear the onerous burden of being responsible for “the whole scene”. That charge falls to the government, which also needs to do its job.

ASIO threat assessment provides window into radicalisation

This week saw two significant developments in Australian counterterrorism. Victoria Police arrested two young men and a boy in Melbourne, and charged the two men with planning a terrorist act and one with being a member of Islamic State. Then, Mike Burgess, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, released his second annual threat assessment.

The arrests demonstrate why ASIO has assessed the terrorist threat level in Australia at probable and reinforce public confidence that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are well placed to disrupt potential plots.

The bottom line of ASIO’s threat assessment is that things aren’t getting any better. During the Covid-19 pandemic, people worldwide have spent more time at home, online and unhappy with their prospects of long-term economic and social prosperity. This puts those at risk of radicalisation at even greater risk. Extremist groups of all types are capitalising on the situation by increasing their online radicalisation efforts.

For the policing and intelligence agencies charged with preventing attacks and developing policies to counter violent extremism, the big challenge is to understand the characteristics of those who are vulnerable to online radicalisation.

At the launch of this year’s threat assessment, Burgess made a significant change to ASIO’s counterterrorism terminology. From now on, its preference is to categorise violent extremism as ‘religiously motivated’ or ‘ideologically motivated’, rather than as ‘Islamic’ or ‘far-right’, for example. While some have argued that this language change is simply a concession to political correctness, we believe that it affords a more accurate understanding of the radicalisation process. It does not preclude further identification of groups and trends within those categories in political, public and academic discourse.

The new terminology allows for a more precise focus on identifying vulnerable groups and individuals progressing along the radicalisation spectrum online by avoiding unnecessary and divisive debates on the definitions of ‘far-right’ and ‘Islamist’.

So, who are Australia’s budding terrorists, and how can this knowledge be used to prevent radicalisation and disrupt terror plots?

They’re overwhelmingly male, and their average age is 25, though there’s been a significant rise in the number of 15- and 16-year-old boys becoming radicalised. Often these men are socioeconomically disadvantaged and have a sense of alienation and isolation from their local community and of dislocation from the country’s and the world’s broader momentum. Those who are religiously motivated reside mostly in urban areas; those motivated by ideology come from both urban and rural areas.

Understanding why at-risk people feel disenfranchised and see violent extremism as an attractive solution is key to understanding the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of terrorism, and to better enabling intelligence and policing efforts to stop the ‘when’.

Covid-19 has had a strong negative impact on this cohort of at-risk young Australians. A bright future of opportunities has become less tangible. The pandemic has beguiled their sense of agency in determining their own, their community’s and their nation’s future. Collectively, these conditions are fomenting online extremist practice based on some aspect of religion, politics, society or the economy in a community, the country or the wider world. But it isn’t just dissatisfaction; it’s that they see few or no legitimate avenues to voice their opinion or bring about change. Undoubtedly, Covid-19 isolation and boredom have driven many to engage with others on these issues online who might have otherwise pursued non-violent ways to express their frustrations.

The logic behind ASIO’s assessment suggests that we should have seen an increase in the number of women radicalised in Australia, given that those hardest hit by Covid-19-related immediate and long-term job losses are women. Poverty and youth amplify the effects. ASIO’s latest assessment makes no mention of gender.

Understanding the gendered nature of today’s religious and ideologically motivated groups is fundamental to understanding how those who are at risk are attracted and radicalised. And given that women make up half of most communities, it could present options for how valuing the role of women in their lives and communities can play a part in circuit breaking radicalisation. Let’s not ignore the gendered sentiments of Islamic extremism and far-right extremism globally. It’s hard to do so given the repeated targeted murders of women by members of many of these groups over many years, and as recently as this week.

Intelligence and law enforcement’s efforts in keeping Australians safe are one part of addressing this threat. However, we cannot and should not expect policing agencies to address both the effect and the causes of violent extremism any more than they can respond to the causes of domestic and sexual violence.

In today’s Covid-19 world, extremism is an increasingly complex security, social and economic issue, requiring a policy response that addresses multiple and interrelated grievances and inequalities. Perhaps the key here is that those at risk of radicalisation need a tangible sense of a future in which they have a voice, a sense of agency, and the power to change their communities positively.

Having a voice that matters and can effect change can be a circuit-breaker on the path to radicalisation. To this end, at-risk people need to feel part of a community they value, and that values them. This result has nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence and everything to do with creating stable economic opportunities. Then at-risk youth can believe in and work towards a future worth having.

Given the Covid-19-instigated crisis in youth unemployment, which is likely to last a decade, the Commonwealth and state governments need to urgently increase welfare support and employment pathways for Australia’s youth.

Dismantling the conditions that make radicalisation an attractive pathway for at-risk young people in Australia and giving them a future as valued members of their communities requires a coordinated, cross-portfolio policy response. While this won’t stop all threats, it might just be enough to prevent some from taking the first steps towards radicalisation.

How ready is Australia for peacekeeping operations?

Australia has a proud history of engagement with the UN, including participating in and leading UN peace operations, from Cyprus in 1964 to East Timor in 1999. But peace operations have fallen off the Australian priority list over the past 20 years, and our experience gained in the early 2000s is beginning to look dated.

Many of those who had peace operations experience in the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Federal Police have now moved on in their careers. The nature of peace operations has also changed. UN peacekeeping missions today are much closer to war-fighting or counterterrorism operations than they were when Australia last led them.

In October last year, the prime minister announced an Australian co-deployment of peacekeepers to the Golan Heights. With this in mind, it seems reasonable to consider Australia’s readiness for future peace operations. If we intend to dust off our UN peace operations role, how well prepared are we? Based on discussions I had in mid-2019 with subject-matter experts from the AFP, the ADF, the government and the non-government sector, the answer is mixed.

Given Australia’s current focus on the Pacific, it’s most likely that that’s where an Australian contingent would be deployed if the need arose. Police networks are much more prevalent in the region than militaries, which means the AFP is more likely to be called on than the ADF to respond to a crisis.

Australia gained deep levels of experience in regional stabilisation missions such as RAMSI throughout the 2000s and was even considered a world leader in peace operations policing. In 2014, as a member of the UN Security Council, Australia secured the first-ever resolution focused on UN policing. Since then, however, our commitment to and specific capability for police peacekeeping appear to have quietly faded. The capability shortfall ranges from a lack of basic understanding of how the UN system works (for example, the effect of a Security Council mandate on the rules of engagement, and how the chain of command works in a UN mission) to a lack of specific UN-mandated predeployment training, which used to be, but is no longer, integrated into the ADF training continuum.

AFP readiness was dealt a significant blow when, in 2015, the agency’s International Deployment Group (IDG) underwent a substantial internal restructure. This group was a highly trained and specialised unit focused on the particular challenges of police peacekeeping that are distinct from the day-to-day work of the AFP (such as dealing with actors with access to weapons not readily available in Australia, multiagency cooperation and international mandates). Of course, internal restructuring is a consistent feature of government. At the time, the perception was that the role would no longer be required in an environment of limited AFP resources.

However, what was lost was the readiness to deploy quickly, as instruction in those essential and specialised skills was removed from AFP training. The AFP does maintain extensive community policing and mentoring networks across the region and it’s already well represented in the front lines of relevant institutions. But the reality is that any decision to pull people from those roles to contribute to a peace operation would be at the cost of existing tasks, and diverting resources from established functions to a new line of effort would require time and funding and interrupt other essential work.

To put it another way, the AFP doesn’t have built-in ‘fat’ as an organisation, and diverting officers to peacekeeping missions would take them away from anti-drug operations, airport security, institution-building, counterterrorism and other vital work in our region. If a crisis requiring peace operations policing arises, the mission will need to be ‘recruited to’, and AFP officers will need to undertake specific training before they can be deployed. The restructuring of the IDG is a significant blow to the operational readiness of the AFP for peace operations.

There also seems to be some confusion between the ADF and AFP about whole-of-government capabilities and readiness. For example, the status of the AFP’s IDG isn’t well known within the ADF. Unless the reality of the AFP’s readiness is accurately understood and taken into account by the ADF now, the viability of planning for a real-life crisis is at risk.

It was clear from my discussions with AFP and ADF members that there’s a unanimous political will to act if something happens in the region on the scale of events in Solomon Islands or Timor-Leste. What’s missing is the readiness to respond to such a crisis quickly. For example, peace-operation-specific skills aren’t integrated into large-scale military exercises such as Talisman Sabre, as they reportedly once were. The departmental resources required for AFP and civilian agency participation in military exercises are considerable and divert officers away from their day jobs.

So, while the scenarios practised in exercises, such as humanitarian disasters, stabilisation or peace operations, would undoubtedly have a strong police or civilian lead in real life, rehearsing with those key players is increasingly difficult because only militaries are resourced with planning as a central task. If the transition from war-fighting to peace operations—or from green to blue—isn’t practised sufficiently with Australia’s regional and strategic partners, we may be underprepared should a crisis arise.

What’s lacking in our current peace operations readiness is clear: there’s no whole-of-government policy. People working in this area see Australia as a frontrunner in regional training and leadership for peace operations, but it seems that view is based on our peace operations experience of 15 to 20 years ago and the ADF’s standing in the region as a professional, highly trained defence force.

The AFP and ADF need to work with government agencies in a more consistent and concerted fashion. Other components of planning­—such as policy and political enablers­—need to be brought into the conversation to ensure that operations, policy and planning across the whole of government are more consistent. A coordinated approach, including integrated and updated training and exercising, would ensure that Australia’s readiness is understood across the board and that accurate planning is based on today’s capabilities, not those of two decades ago.

The value of Australia’s engagement in international law enforcement

When it comes to transnational serious and organised crime in the Asia–Pacific, it’s hard not to be pessimistic. At the moment, Southeast Asia is on the brink of a methamphetamine (ice) epidemic, with cheap and high-purity drugs being produced at an industrial level. Harm-minimisation safety nets are few and far between in the region, so the impact of any epidemic is likely to be dire.

Australia’s international policing efforts are concerned with far more than altruism. Over recent years, Australia’s domestic organised crime problem has become increasingly transnational. And the costs of that crime have never been higher. Earlier this year, the Australian Institute of Criminology estimated that organised crime costs the country between $23.8 billion and $46 billion a year.

The continued globalisation of Australia’s serious and organised crime problem is resulting in a shift in policing responsibilities from the states and territories to the Commonwealth. In the wake of these changes, Commonwealth law enforcement agencies, like the Australian Federal Police, are facing a widening gap between the amount of crime that’s occurring and their capacity to respond to it. This makes the disruption of criminal groups offshore more important than ever.

These developments mean that Australia’s international law enforcement efforts, be they police-to-police cooperation or capacity development, are critical. The theory underpinning this policy perspective is that raising police capability across the Asia–Pacific and improving international cooperation will contribute to the disruption of transnational organised crime groups.

Unfortunately, Australia’s international policing efforts are under significant financial pressure. Fiscal responsibility is necessary for any government, especially one that is attempting to return a budget to surplus, but there are also tough policy decisions on issues like Australia’s commitment to the international criminal police organisation, Interpol, that need to be made.

While there are other international policing organisations, including Europol and Aseanapol, Interpol is the world’s largest and arguably its only truly global policing organisation. Although Interpol can trace its origins to 1914, for all intents and purposes its worldwide, or perhaps universal, status emerged in 1956. That year Interpol adopted a modernised constitution and became truly autonomous by starting to collect dues from member countries.

Interpol supports cooperation between criminal law enforcement agencies from different countries. It performs an administrative liaison function on behalf of the law enforcement agencies of its member countries, providing communications and database assistance.

While Interpol’s formal role is to ‘enable police around the world to work together to make the world a safer place’, it is its promotion of information and intelligence that is critical to combatting transnational serious and organised crime. Interpol’s collaborative form of cooperation seeks to address disincentives and barriers to criminal intelligence-sharing, such as language, culture and bureaucratic differences.

Australia has always been a global leader in police-to-police cooperation and an active regional partner in police capacity development in the Asia–Pacific. So it’s only natural that Australia has also long been a big supporter of Interpol. In the ASEAN region, law enforcement agencies have invested heavily in Interpol, as it provides secure communications that would otherwise not be available.

The Australian Federal Police has had two senior staff with Interpol for several years: one with its Global Complex for Innovation in Singapore and the other as the executive director of police services in Lyon.

Australia’s financial commitment to Interpol is made directly from the AFP budget. Consecutive efficiency dividends, and lapsing policy initiatives, have had a big effect on the AFP’s budget, which in turn has directly affected the organisation’s international policing efforts. As shown in the graph below, Australia’s contributions to Interpol were in steady decline until 2014 and are yet to return to 2010 levels.

Should we really be concerned about the overall drop in funding given that, as illustrated in the next graph, Australia remains in the top 10 contributors to Interpol?

A longitudinal analysis of these contributions shows that Australia’s Interpol funding in terms of purchasing power is in steady decline in comparison with countries like China and the US.

The decision for government shouldn’t necessarily be a binary one about whether or not to invest further in Interpol. Australia’s contribution to international policing shouldn’t be measured only in terms of Interpol; our other efforts across the globe, especially in capacity development in the Asia–Pacific, are extensive.

It’s fair to say that continued erosion of Australia’s contributions to Interpol will see a decline in our influence within the organisation. However, further investment in Interpol shouldn’t necessarily come at the cost of capacity-development efforts closer to home, which are critical in tackling Australia’s transnational serious and organised crime challenges.

While this is largely a law enforcement issue, it should also be viewed through a geopolitical lens. Australia has likely benefited more from bilateral police-to-police arrangements than from multilateral mechanisms, but that doesn’t mean we should neglect international engagement through these forums.

The bottom line here is that the Interpol funding dilemma illustrates that it’s as good a time as any to reconsider some Commonwealth law enforcement policies. It also illustrates that while the statutory independence of law enforcement agencies needs to be maintained, policy decisions on issues like this need to be considered in light of Australia’s broader national security strategy.

Police, public servants and law enforcement: a contested domain?

The government’s once-in-40-years reform of domestic security arrangements with the new Department of Home Affairs provides a rare opportunity for policymakers to question assumptions about policing and law enforcement.

Let’s start with the differences between the two and the powers that society gives to police, who aren’t public servants, and those increasingly designated as law enforcement officers, who are.

If you’re smuggling heroin, it’s irrelevant whether you’re arrested by a law enforcement officer or a police officer. If you’re developing national strategies to disrupt crime, the difference is crucial in terms of powers and policy. The dogged commitment of police to independence and discretion in the performance of their duties is as critical to domestic security as submarines. Giving invasive police powers to public servants brings a risk that Homeland Security, especially in terms of criminal investigations, will be less accountable and more vulnerable to politicisation.

While the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Border Force (ABF) might explain the difference between policing and law enforcement in terms of legislative powers or organisational responsibility, there’s something far more fundamental involved. Policing promotes compliance with the law through approaches that include community engagement and education. Law enforcement—jailing people for breaking the law—is one aspect of policing.

It’s time to re-examine our assumptions given the AFP’s broadening responsibilities, the increasing number of public servants across agencies identified as law enforcement officers, and the bureaucratic push for wider access to police powers for them, such as the use of listening and tracking devices. Given Home Affairs’ new domain, ranging from foreign interference to ice epidemics and terrorism, Australia needs to carefully manage a balance between law enforcement and problem-solving police work.

While many Australians understand the role of police in fighting crime and promoting public safety, they may find it hard to define the different roles of police and law enforcement officers.

For much of the time since its inception in the 1800s, policing focused on crime prevention and peacekeeping rather than on law enforcement. After the Fitzgerald Inquiry and Woods Royal Commission in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, policing shifted towards law enforcement. That pushed police to prioritise criminal investigations, a necessary response to the complexity of the 21st century environment.

Police executives are rightly held accountable for what they achieve and how it’s done. They’ve rapidly implemented crime prevention strategies and that’s not been easy. Policing at its heart has remained a problem-solving activity, undertaken in collaboration with the community.

Most Western democracies have conflated ‘policing’ and ‘law enforcement’ without much consideration of their differences and often use the terms interchangeably.

In 2016, John argued that border security had gone through a period of securitisation which involved more than introducing bigger or better security measures. It also meant concentrating on border movement that presented a risk to sovereignty, rule of law and national security.

Many agencies, including the AFP, have been securitised by government decisions that focused strategies on the strict enforcement of law. This has blurred the line between policing and law enforcement, as is evident in the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s Strategy 2020 and the ‘border continuum’ it describes.

In terms of border security, the AFP performs strategic policing functions with its unique investigative powers and capabilities, including telephone intercepts and electronic tracking, in support of complex investigations.

The ABF protects the border and manages the movement of goods and people across it. Within Home Affairs, ABF members are most definitely law enforcement officers, but aren’t police. Like police officers, ABF officers enforce border law. Under very specific conditions, ABF officers may also use force to protect themselves, but this doesn’t make them police either.

The ABF is responsible for far more than law enforcement and performs other facilitation and regulation activities. Some ABF work focuses on solving problems, but its personnel are still not police. The ABF isn’t trying to be a ninth police force.

It would be naïve to argue for AFP primacy in law enforcement, or for an end to the use of law enforcement terms, on the basis that the ‘police’ brand is universally revered or trusted. Rather, the law enforcement lexicon—with its media-generated images of armed officers and sophisticated and invasive data mining technology—is being adopted by various commonwealth agencies, which may lead, unintentionally, to a public perception that government is creating some kind of ‘police state’. The AFP’s operational shift from strategic policing to law enforcement does little to allay such fears.

In the AFP’s Policing for a Safer Australia strategy—its functions are described as ‘police services’ to counter, disrupt, investigate, prevent and protect. It generally avoids the term ‘law enforcement’. That’s smart given that, if there’s no difference between law enforcement and police officers, then does Australia need a federal police service?

While laws outline the powers of specific agencies and officers, and policy defines the training required, more needs to be done to define the natural differences between law enforcement and police. Documents like the AFP strategy are a good starting point to clearly define the roles of each and to explore the policy implications of these differences.

Home Affairs needs to re-examine the domestic security and Commonwealth law enforcement lexicon and clearly articulate the different roles of police and law enforcement officers to ensure that we don’t further dilute Australia’s unique policing model.

Last month, AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin told a parliamentary committee his organisation faced a ‘supply and demand challenge’, and it often had to make tough decisions about what to investigate. The policy response shouldn’t be to grant law enforcement officers additional police powers to fill the gap.

Australians ought to question whether a public servant should have the same powers as a police officer, if for no other reason than that police occupy a higher position of trust in our society.

Australia–PNG police cooperation needs a long-term approach

Wok wantaim2In an ASPI Special Report launched today, we explore options for future police engagement between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

In July 2013, during negotiations to reopen the Manus Island detention centre, PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill asked Canberra to provide a significant Australian Federal Police contingent to work in publicly-visible roles alongside the Royal PNG Constabulary (RPNGC). In late 2013, fifty Australian Federal Police officers joined the 23 uniformed and civilian members already in PNG.

But just nine months into the new AFP deployment, PNG’s Police Minister, Robert Atiyafa, flagged a review, with a view to making major changes and potentially even winding it down. The visible policing aspect of the partnership appeared unable to meet community expectations made unrealistic by the AFP’s lack of legal protections and powers to make arrests, conduct investigations, or direct junior RPNGC counterparts. Given the current political turbulence surrounding allegations about O’Neill’s own links to a possibly corrupt law firm, he seems unlikely to risk political capital by mounting an uncertain and unpopular bid to change the PNG Constitution just to provide the AFP with greater immunities and powers. Read more

Necessary, but not sufficient: Australia’s new Fraud and Anti-Corruption Centre

Money is All Powerful

While most of the attention on national security has focused on this Tuesday’s announcement of limited new counter-terrorism measures, last week’s news that a Fraud and Anti-Corruption Centre is to be established within the Australian Federal Police has been overlooked. The Centre will evaluate serious fraud, foreign bribery and corruption complaints and refer them on to state-based investigation teams. They will also assist in training Commonwealth agencies in fraud prevention.

The Centre will have federal police working with officials from the Australian Taxation Office, Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, Department of Human Services, Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Department of Defence, and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Importantly, the Centre will also leverage the intelligence capabilities of the Australian Crime Commission. The Centre will have out-posted officers in many state capital cities. Read more

Police and peacekeeping: not just an afterthought

An Australian Federal Police Officer deployed to UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP). Cyprus is Australia's longest peacekeeping mission, having commenced in 1964.

Last week the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2151—its first stand-alone resolution on security sector reform (SSR). It’s not the first time that the issue of SSR has been considered by the Council. Indeed, references to it in Security Council resolutions have increased noticeably in recent years. Still, the adoption of resolution 2151 is significant as it reaffirms the centrality of SSR to the organisation’s work, particularly peacekeeping operations and political missions.

As you’d expect, Australia—as a Security Council member—actively participated in the negotiations on resolution 2151. Our history of regional engagement means that we have considerable experience supporting SSR efforts in Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands—experience highlighted in Australia’s statement to the Security Council. In that statement, Ambassador Quinlan spoke about the centrality of policing to SSR efforts and urged the Council to focus on that as part of its mandating process. He noted that the Council had just authorised a large police component to be deployed to the UN Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA). Read more