Despite numerous scandals and calls for it to be banned, TikTok, the Chinese-owned app, continues to enjoy immense popularity in Australia.

ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns and controls TikTok, is currently under investigation by the US Justice Department for spying on citizens, including journalists. In September last year, European Union regulators fined TikTok €345 million ($560m) for violating data protection laws. That was after the UK data watchdog levelled a £12.7m ($24m) fine at the company for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform.

But if you thought any of these rolling controversies would put a dent in the app’s meteoric growth, think again. Some 8.5 million Australians are active on the platform every month. That’s almost 40% of the adult population.

The most recent controversy, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald, revolves around the app employing a tracking tool, ‘TikTok Pixel’, that logs individuals’ web history and personal information, even when they did not provide consent. That too has prompted an investigation, this time by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

TikTok Pixel is a piece of code that can be added to a website to track its visitors’ activity. This is not new. TikTok is just the latest tech company to provide this service in a market historically ruled by Meta and Google. Many websites engage at least one of these companies to leverage the data collected on their visitors for analysis and online advertising purposes.

Once a website owner signs up to one of these services, they define what of their visitors’ events they are interested in tracking—like adding a product to a shopping cart or adding payment information—and then embed the ad platform’s tracking code on their webpages. The ad platform then uses the information gathered to help the websites measure how well their ads work and better target ads at potential customers. If you’ve ever been hounded from site to site by advertising banners for that new vacuum cleaner model you briefly looked into the other day, you’ve experienced these trackers in action.

Sometimes this tracking can be convenient, say if you get served an ad for that vacuum cleaner at a heavily discounted price. But sometimes it can be creepy, especially if those pixels are placed on webpages about sensitive issues like mental health or domestic violence, for example. That’s why there is often a pop-up box that users can tick to give their consent for their information to be hoovered up. What the Herald discovered was that TikTok simply wasn’t bothering to wait for any consent to be given.

The controversy has generated a series of headlines and a number of companies from Beyond Blue to Bunnings have now stopped using TikTok Pixel. But it would be naive to expect TikTok’s ad business in Australia to collapse or for there to be any significant exodus of users from the platform.

Let’s face it when it comes to protecting our privacy online, most of us have thrown in the towel. Conditioned after decades of surveillance capitalism, the prevailing mindset of those who use the app seems to be: ‘We give our data to everyone else, so what difference does it make if we hand it over to TikTok too?’

It’s an understandable point of view. Most of us mindlessly agree to obscure terms of service daily. According to a 2008 Carnegie Mellon study, it would take the average American 25 days to read through all the privacy policies on every website they visit in a year. In another study, 98% of people were oblivious enough to click ‘I agree’ to privacy policies that disclosed sharing data with spy agencies and their employers, as well as payment for the service by way of signing away their first-born child. Thousands of others unwittingly signed away their ‘immortal soul’ to a gaming company one April Fool’s Day.

According to the Herald, TikTok wasn’t waiting for consent to be given before gathering data on web users. But given that most of us don’t read any of the related terms of service or privacy policies, or if we did, understand the dense legalese they deploy to outline how our data is exploited, no meaningful consent is ever likely to be given anyway. In this instance TikTok has, apparently, just not bothered with the façade of it all.

To be clear, if TikTok has done as the Herald describes, it is quite possibly illegal. But it’s also the type of ethical arbitrage that we’ve come to expect from big tech ‘disruptors’. From ByteDance’s point of view, if consumers are already so inured to the invasive practices of surveillance capitalism, what’s the harm in pushing a few more ethically dubious growth hacking tricks on them, as long as it maximises user acquisition? In the cut-throat competition for online attention, it’s almost always worth it to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

Of course, there is a clear difference between Meta and Google’s data gathering operations and TikTok’s. The data TikTok gathers is accessible by their engineers in the People’s Republic of China, and can therefore easily be accessed by the PRC’s intelligence services. We might not mind being targeted by a vacuum cleaner brand, but we should be concerned when a one-party state can access a steady stream of our personal information.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Even if, overnight, TikTok were forced to sell to a non-Chinese entity, we wouldn’t be truly solving the problem. The private data of Australian citizens would continue to be exfiltrated to China. We’ve seen this show before. In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) forced a Chinese company, Beijing Kunlun Tech, to sell the gay-dating app Grindr, apparently on national security grounds. But as ASPI fellow Tom Uren has noted, that didn’t stop a small publication in the US from cross referencing Grindr user data it had acquired with the ‘pattern of life’ details of a Catholic priest to out him as gay a couple of years later. If a tiny Catholic publication can do that, you’d better believe China’s Ministry of State Security can too.

The fact is the way we deal with privacy is fundamentally broken. The business models that support the way we’ve become accustomed to use the internet have set a standard that makes it nearly impossible for consumers or governments to prevent data exfiltration to China and anywhere else, for that matter. When the regulators are too timid and the laws are not fit for purpose, it’s no wonder that consumers have become so apathetic.

Dealing with the national security risks posed by TikTok should be seen as an opportunity to create credible standards for all social media companies, no matter what their country of origin is. New laws should be designed to better safeguard individuals by restricting the collection, utilisation, and exportation of data, even when user ‘consent’ is granted. When it comes to national security, it shouldn’t fall on individuals to read the fine print.

Geopolitics is driving the dangerous strategic realities that Australia faces.

Beijing’s expansionist agenda is seen through its military aggression and commitment to undermining and changing international rules; Russia continues its revisionist war against Ukraine and a disruptive foreign policy; and we were reminded on 7 October that terrorism remains a top security threat with global implications.

However, the way Australia responds is within our control. Strong foreign and security policies, matched by serious defence investment, can ensure that potential adversaries looking to upend the status quo are deterred from dragging us into conflict.

There are two clear, related priorities. The first is to ensure that our foreign and defence policies are consistent and not at odds—the latter being a misstep that seems increasingly likely. The second priority is to invest properly in our defence force.

The defence and intelligence communities have made the hard-headed strategic assessment—articulated in the defence strategic review—that Beijing’s assertiveness is the greatest threat to our security and needs to be checked.

Our diplomacy, meanwhile, has been seeking ‘stabilisation’, in which we improve the atmospherics of the Australia–China relationship, reduce the focus on areas of disagreement and look for cooperation.

It’s a laudable goal, but is it sustainable or even consistent with our strategic assessments?

There are signs that stabilisation is coming at a cost to our strategy of seeking peace through strength and deterring Chinese aggression by having a highly capable defence force that we will deploy to support regional stability.

We have been too quiet about Chinese breaches of international rules, such as the bullying of Philippines vessels in the South China Sea. When the Chinese navy threatened the safety of Australian personnel, the government sent mixed signals as to how seriously it took the incident, with Defence Minister Richard Marles issuing a clear statement but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unable to say whether he had raised the issue with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

That inconsistency removed the opportunity for what should have been a moment of Australian unity in the face of direct confrontation and injury to defence personnel.

There’s a growing risk of a defence and foreign policy gulf in which we pull our punches diplomatically while trying to show military credibility through initiatives such as AUKUS and defence exercises. Indeed, it’s why there’s an inherent weakness in democracies viewing foreign policy as soft power and defence policy as hard power with distinct roles, while our authoritarian rivals see them as fused.

Our ability to deter aggression will be undermined if our defence policy suggests we face serious threats while our diplomatic communications suggest we don’t.

Good diplomacy isn’t about denying differences but confronting them with clear affirmation of the legitimacy of Australia’s national interests, and our right to protect them. Otherwise, we risk playing into Beijing’s strategy of claiming that any response to Chinese provocation amounts to Australian escalation.

Of course, providing assurances is an important companion to deterrence. The West is justifiably assuring Beijing that we don’t seek regime change in China, Taiwanese full independence, or containment of Chinese growth where it is rule-abiding and peaceful.

Such messages help reduce mistrust, but assurances alone provide no deterrence, only incentivising more bad behaviour, which is why they must be accompanied with unequivocal signals that we will respond when Beijing breaches rules.

Failure to do so is the mistake that Europe made with Moscow, relying too heavily on assurance that NATO posed no threat to Russia, even while Vladimir Putin escalated aggression after 2008 and as Europe wallowed in complacency with meagre defence spending.

If we don’t project the strength to match the reality of the threats, we risk making the dangerous misjudgement that Winston Churchill implored England to reverse in 1932 when he said: ‘I cannot recall any time when the gap between the kind of words which statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now. The habit of saying smooth things and uttering pious platitudes and sentiments to gain applause, without relation to the underlying facts, is more pronounced now than it has ever been in my experience.’

The recent AUKUS defence ministers’ meeting showed progress in developing capability but also importantly expressed clear collective intent. The ministers’ statement that ‘AUKUS contributes to integrated deterrence by pursuing layered and asymmetric capabilities’ sent a clear signal to Beijing.

These signals can’t be limited to defence ministers—our long-term sovereignty requires deterrence to be a national priority, baked into our economic and industrial policies, bringing industry and the public along the journey and not merely surprised when crisis hits.

At the bottom line, the Albanese government needs to invest in defence in a way that matches the rhetoric that statements such as the DSR have expressed. Resourcing defence to match a damped-down foreign policy aim of stabilisation may result in short-term savings but will only lead to more spending down the track.

As ASPI’s budget analysis in May stated, the additional funding the government has promised beyond the forward estimates period needs to be brought forward. Budgets are tight, but we are not going to deter aggression unless we are prepared to put real money into defence capabilities.

It would be wonderful if all states got along and if all conflict and unfair competition could be resolved by diplomatic niceties. History shows this is wishful thinking.

Diplomacy is vital but it is ineffective if viewed as the good cop to defence’s bad cop—a message to adversaries that we don’t have the willingness and competence to use our hard power.

Meanwhile, our own industry perceives a lack of seriousness and our public senses a lack of need and justification for investment. Indeed, it is defence investment that helps ensure diplomacy can focus on managing, not ignoring, tension.

It is the will to confront difficult realities and think through worst-case scenarios that provides the greatest chance of developing effective strategies to deter them, and to be best prepared if they do eventuate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit last week to the People’s Republic of China was a reminder that beyond the metrics of trade and the mechanics of statecraft, the Australia–China relationship carries deep meaning in Australia’s national life.

When Canberra established formal diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1972 amid the transformative politics of the period, Australia’s relationship with China became a metaphor for one version of a national story told as waking to a modern, independent, forward-looking Australia that could finally see its future in the region. It also defined relations with Britain and the US as the legacy of Australia’s colonial past.

As a metaphor for a modern Australia, the China relationship has animated national life for decades. It aligned well with the post–Cold War era of globalisation when trade and investment were driving Australian policymaking generally, reaching a highpoint in the boosterism of the 2010s. With the signing of the China–Australia Free Trade Agreement in 2014, Australia’s trade minister declared that China would secure the nation’s future for ‘50 to 100 years’. The metaphor also worked when China itself was relatively more liberal in the 2000s. It was easier for governments, businesses and public institutions in Australia to set aside the realities of China’s party-state system and make the case for a China future by focusing on the social, cultural and economic dynamism of China’s development.

Both the Chinese and Australian sides leaned heavily into that meaning to give salience to Albanese’s visit. It was framed around the 50th anniversary of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s visit in 1973 and even included a photo op at the Temple of Heaven to hark back to the iconic image of Whitlam leaning against the Whispering Wall.

But as the debate surrounding the visit has shown, the China metaphor has become a source of tension in the policy and politics of Australia’s responses to China as the Xi Jinping era has deepened.

It frames the securitisation of relations through issues such as foreign interference and the AUKUS agreement as retrograde rather than a response to Beijing’s hardening politics. It has radicalised public institutions as their reluctance to recognise the reassertion of the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarianism is required to be ever more zealous. And its economic case has been hollowed out by Beijing’s trade sanctions and China’s own economic problems.

A national future that Australia might have imagined for itself with China has become divisive and disruptive as that future has taken the form of Xi’s vision.

In recognition of these issues, the Albanese government has adopted a formula to manage China relations, which is: ‘We will cooperate where we can, disagree where we must and engage in the national interest.’ This structures the relationship into a balance of different conceptual domains. It is stabilising because its recitation means neither one nor the other of ‘cooperation’ or ‘disagreement’ can come to define the relationship by itself, and it lands on the concept of the national interest, the value of which comes from what it is not, which is corporate interests in a commodity trade-dominated economy, so reasserting the importance of sovereignty and statehood.

But the formulation leaves unanswered the questions of what exactly Australia should be cooperating on and disagreeing about. It offers a useful policy typology but it is not a metaphor for Australia’s future with China that can propel policy, politics and national life. Without those answers, it risks becoming a way of avoiding disagreements and leaving Australia stuck in a pattern of reactive relationship management that makes it harder to chart a course for the nation.

In other words, by identifying the fundamental areas of disagreement, Australia can have a clearer sense of its national future in the Xi era.

Needless to say, the most fundamental area of disagreement is China’s and Australia’s relationships with Taiwan. As Beijing declares often, the status of Taiwan is an existential issue at the core of the ideology and purpose of the party-state system. It is the object of relentless military, political and diplomatic tactics to take China closer to what it calls ‘reunification’.

Canberra well understands the devastating effects a war against Taiwan would have on Australia’s economy and security. Australian governments have made numerous statements in recent years on the importance of peace across the Taiwan Strait and no unilateral change in the status quo.

But Taiwan has also always been the supplemental part of Australia’s China metaphor. Just as establishing relations with Beijing in 1972 became an emphatic statement about Australia’s future in the region, so too was the punitive severing of relations with Taipei. Since then, Australia–Taiwan ties have moved gradually forward in the absence of diplomatic recognition to become an important trade relationship with rich and meaningful cultural and community links. But that has occurred against the tide of an Australia–China relationship that was implicitly premised on the position that the Taiwanese people were on the wrong side of history.

The national-interest case for maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait is self-evident. But to acknowledge that Australia could disagree with Beijing on its vision for Taiwan’s future as a province of the People’s Republic of China and see meaning for the Australia–Taiwan relationship itself recognises that treating China as a metaphor rather than a real place hasn’t offered a stable context to policy or an enduring way to tell Australia’s modern story.

Canberra could support Taiwan’s membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership or a free-trade agreement in Australia’s own trade interests. It could strengthen defence cooperation to be properly prepared for a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. But a first step would be for the government to acknowledge that it is Beijing that threatens Taiwan militarily and diplomatically and shift its phraseology to: ‘Australia opposes any changes by Beijing to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.’ This is a statement of the kind of region in which Australia wants to into the future and an animating metaphor for the politics and policies needed to sustain it.

Biotechnology is one of the world’s biggest industries with a global market share estimated at over US$1.37 trillion (A$2.1tn) in 2022. The massive investment driven by the Covid-19 pandemic has helped boost the market to an estimated annual growth rate of around 14%, putting the expected value of the industry at US$2.44tn (A$3.8tn) by 2028.

ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker update shows the intense competition between the United States and China in the sector which, along with artificial intelligence, is anticipated to deliver some of the most life-changing technologies over the coming decades.

The update adds four new technologies to the biotechnologies category: novel antibiotics and antivirals, genome and genetic sequencing and analysis, genetic engineering and nuclear medicine and radiotherapy. They join three existing fields in the tracker: vaccines and medical countermeasures, synthetic biology and biological manufacturing.

Our table collates the aggregated percentage of top 10% of highly cited papers in the different biotechnologies for different country groupings.

Of the four new fields, the US leads high-impact research in genetic engineering and nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, while China is ahead in genome and genetic sequencing and analysis, and novel antibiotics and antivirals. Among the previously reported biotech fields, China leads in biological manufacturing and synthetic biology and the US leads in vaccines and medical countermeasures.

In contrast to advanced sensors, the focus of our previous Strategist piece based on the tracker update, high-impact research in biotechnology is strong enough across likeminded nations that the leads established by China would be surmountable through joint efforts by the US and partners such as through the AUKUS agreement or with collaboration with Japan, South Korea and European nations in some combination.

The notable and worrying exception is synthetic biology, in which China produces 52.4% of high impact research and has nine of the top ten ranked institutions, giving the field a high monopoly risk rating. China’s strong performance in synthetic biology is almost twice the percentage of the AUKUS alliance combined with South Korea and Japan. This would be hard to beat even with a multilateral alliance including Europe. Irrespective of technology monopoly risks, the biotechnologies involving gene manipulation need international cooperation on the ethical issues and consensus on appropriate norms to minimise potential biohazard risks.

Synthetic biology is perhaps the most nascent of the biotechnologies and, as an emerging technology on par with quantum, is an area of interest for China with funded research at several institutions including CAS. The field involves redesigning living organisms into ones with new functions with applications in medicine, manufacturing and agriculture. The main distinction between synthetic biology and genome editing is that compared to genome editing, synthetic biology can involve the insertion of longer sections of DNA with the possibility of creating an entirely different organism like a recoded E. Coli.

Lab grown meat is another example of synthetic biology, as is engineering of stem cells into mini robots. Thus, synthetic biology, especially when engendering artificial lifeforms, must be regulated like genome editing and AI with multilateral expert input on where regulations would benefit from a US-Sino dialogue.

Biotechnology encompasses technologies that integrate biology and engineering into new products and processes leading to improved outcomes in health, manufacturing and society. The financial incentives to gain advantage in the sector are enormous given most countries spend more than 6% of the annual gross domestic product on healthcare, which accounts for more than 50% of the biotech industry.

Reflecting the importance governments are attributing to the industry, the United States, Australia, India and Japan are renewing their national biotechnology strategies.

China has listed biotechnology as one of its seven strategic emerging industries in 2010. In its 13^th Five-Year plan (2016-2020), China’s Ministry of Science and Technology released a comprehensive biotechnology development plan.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought vaccines and medical countermeasures to the forefront. The US has an exceptionally strong lead in this technology with eight of the top institutions being US-based (with the University of California system as the top research institution).

The Critical Tech Tracker reveals the strong performance of the Middle Eastern countries of Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia in novel antibiotics and antivirals. The development of novel antibiotics and antivirals is important both in treating and suppressing infection and diseases. Antibiotics are used not only to treat infections but also to suppress secondary infection during surgeries, thus saving millions of lives. However, the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in the modern world have given rise to drug resistant infections that cannot be treated. Antibiotic resistance is a global threat not only to human health but also to food security, due to its widespread use in animal husbandry and fish farming. The World Health Organisation has called for action to formulate, strengthen and implement policies and procedures to tackle this crisis at all levels.

The University of California is the top institution in three of seven biotechnologies, with a strong lead in both genetic engineering and genome and genetic sequencing. The most significant breakthrough in the two interconnected technologies is the CRISPR gene editing technique pioneered at the University of California Berkeley by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier (2020 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry). The CRISPR-Cas9 technique is set to revolutionise biomedicine, notably the treatment of genetic diseases, by deleting a section of DNA or turning off the gene causing the disease.

Genetic editing and engineering are biotechnologies fraught with ethical concerns, especially when applied to the human genome. There are high-level risks associated with gene editing. For example, the CRISPR-Cas9 technique is not error-proof as the process can insert or delete DNA letters at the points of insertion, potentially leading to a mixture of different versions of the edited cell. The possibility of developing a severely sick baby or a Frankenstein-like monster is no longer far-fetched.

A 2019 report on CRISPR in China has shown that the US is ahead of China by a fingernail on the number of CRISPR patent applications and China catching up on publication numbers and citations.

The tech tracker analysis shows immense competition between China and the US. For example, the US is ahead of China in genetic engineering and China is ahead in genome and genetic sequencing. China’s research in these biotechnologies has focused on agriculture, specifically transgenic crops and animal organs for human transplant. Unsurprisingly, the tech tracker data in these two biotechnologies shows the prominence of agricultural universities as well as biomedical institutes, hospitals and cancer treatment institutions. The established link between cancer and genes has made CRISPR an invaluable tool for cancer research and treatment.

Biological manufacturing, commonly known as biomanufacturing, is defined as processes that incorporate living cells in the commercial production of biomaterials and biomolecules (for use in medicine). China and the US are in first and second place respectively, while India is in third place and has two top-ranked institutions with the Indian Institute of Technology edging ahead of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the Indian NIT securing the third place. India has had a national biotechnology development strategy since 2000 with continuous renewal strategies since, and it aims to become a Global Biomanufacturing Hub by 2025. 

The technologies led by the US are not an immediate threat to Australia with its multilateral alliances in the Quad and AUKUS. The aggregated percentage for a Quad and South Korea alliance outranks China for novel antibiotics and antivirals and biomanufacturing. In the China led biotechnologies (other than synthetic biology), a Quad and South Korea alliance can reverse China’s dominance, with the AUKUS, Japan and South Korea alliance performing the best in genome and genetic sequencing. Our analysis also shows that in the aggregation of the seven biotechnologies, China (27.0%) has a slight lead over the US (25.2%) followed by the United Kingdom (4.2%), Germany (4.1%) and India (4.1%).

Australia’s most senior military officer has warned that the nation faces complex and interwoven threats including high-end military capabilities, economic coercion, climate change and AI-driven dangers to democracy in a post-truth world.

In his address to the 2023 ASPI conference, Australian Defence Force Chief General Angus Campbell said the theme of disruption and deterrence was very timely. He said some nations, including Australia, had taken substantial steps to protect themselves against political warfare’s worst excesses, yet these pernicious and insidious threats persisted.

The defence strategic review, and the government’s response, titled National defence, were centred on deterrence and, in particular, a strategy of deterrence through denial. ‘National defence is a response to our deteriorating strategic environment.’

The environment, Campbell said, was made much more confusing for analysts and practitioners by at least five global, complex, non-linear, interdependent disruptions—strategic, economic, diplomatic, climatic and informatic—that lay at the heart of our understanding of the nature and utility of power.

‘It is imperative that we understand them, individually and in systemic combination, if we are to have the appropriate capability, credibility and modes of communication that are the classical foundation of stable deterrence,‘ Campbell said.

He drew as an example on the three-body problem, the complexity encountered by Isaac Newton when he tried to use his newly discovered mathematics to predict the motion of celestial bodies and realised that he couldn’t precisely predict the course of more than two at once.

‘In every direction I look we are confronted by serious, novel and consequential three-, four-, five-body problems, both within and across disruptions,’ Campbell said.

‘Within the realm of one disruption—the strategic—keeping the peace on the 38th parallel was once a bipolar, linear problem, very dangerous to be sure but limited. Over time it has grown from a peninsula problem to a North Asia problem to an intercontinental problem, directly involving four independent nuclear-armed states, our four largest trading partners, and the future of the entire region,’ he said.

‘And across disruptions, you only have to consider the economic, diplomatic, climatic and potentially strategic implications and interdependencies of the global clean-energy transition agenda. In a world characterised by disruption, each solution to a problem is at best an approximation, and each effort to resolve a problem likely affects all the other problems.’

The post–World War II international order was under great strain, he said, with some states preferring a rebalance in favour of what they might describe as the innate ‘privileges of power’.

‘We are in a time of rapid technological advances and a changing calculus between detecting and concealing, striking and shielding, human and machine, overt and covert, civil and military,’ Campbell said.

In military capability terms, advanced missile systems were the exemplar breakout technology of the day, he said, with ballistic, manoeuvring ballistic, cruise, hypersonic manoeuvring, hypersonic boost guide and fractional orbital bombardment all being fielded or explored in the Indo-Pacific. ‘As a nation whose largest trading partner is, as Deputy Prime Minister [Richard] Marles has said, also its “biggest security anxiety”, Australia finds itself in uncharted geostrategic territory.’

Economically, he said, strategic infrastructure investment races, coercive trade practices, debt-trap diplomacy, the prioritisation of supply-chain assurance and resilience, and trade diversification agendas were all aspects of an underlying breakdown in the globalisation consensus of the post–Cold War era. The lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated these challenges.

‘The worst potential legacy of this disruption, the impoverishment of decoupling, is a real concern, hopefully to be avoided,’ Campbell said. But so too was rampant intellectual property theft and the undeclared application of dual-use technology.

‘Diplomatically, the effort to sustain, reinforce and evolve an international system under great strain, indeed in some cases attack, is a constant and demanding task without map or compass, albeit a clear-eyed sense of what we may lose if not successful. And as we have recently been reminded by China, maps matter,’ he said.

‘Climatically, our planet is clearly moving away from the system within which modern human endeavour has flourished. A hotter environment, with larger, more intense climate events, more often, will be the norm.

‘As National defence recognises, climate change is now a national security issue. It has immediate disaster mitigation and response challenges, along with food and water security implications and longer-term human migration impacts. This disruption is happening faster and less predictably than we all hoped.

‘Without the global momentum needed, we may all be humbled by a planet made angry by our collective neglect.’

Informationally, we are on the cusp of an extraordinary new era characterised by both knowledge and uncertainty, said Campbell. Information was being harnessed and weaponised to shape will, and through it the ability to deter.

‘The disruption resulting from the development, introduction, exploitation and use of big data, machine learning, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence is of particular interest and concern given its enormous potential for both good and ill; to inform, enhance, confuse, obscure, fabricate or delete the inputs to our perception of reality.

‘Like a silicon sword of Damocles hanging above our heads, a significant number of leading AI experts and tech entrepreneurs, including Yuval Noah Harari and Elon Musk, believe AI systems with human-competitive intelligence will shortly have the potential to pose profound risks to our system of government and the health of our body politic writ large.’

Campbell said that by feeding and amplifying untruths and fake news on social media using bots, troll farms and fake online personas, the Russians attacked American and British democracy, heightening distrust, sowing discord and undermining faith in key institutions.

Taken to their extremes, these types of operations could fracture and fragment entire societies so that they no longer possessed the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions. ‘Their aim was to change not only what people think, but how they think and act.’

Increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled deep fakes further complicated our ability to perceive reality and know truth, Campbell said. Their ability to simulate the appearance, sound and movements of individuals posed obvious risks to the health of society and national security, especially when their targets were leading public officials. Such a deep fake of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was released in March 2022 in which Ukrainian troops were urged to lay down their arms in the face of Russia’s invasion.

Generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, were of great potential benefit for modern society but also posed serious challenges, Campbell said. As these technologies matured, it could soon become impossible for the average person to distinguish fact from fiction.

China’s People’s Liberation Army had a well-developed doctrinal approach seeking to ‘win without fighting’ through its three-warfares strategy, encompassing psychological operations, media operations and legal operations. Informatic disruption was exponentially, instantaneously and globally enhancing the prevalence and effectiveness of a three-warfares approach, by any reasonably sophisticated practitioner.

That may bypass the need for a physical attack and strike directly at the psychological, changing perceptions of reality, with profound implications for deterrence.

These disruptions were now deeply enmeshed within, and served as a backdrop to, great-power competition. They challenged the theory and language, verbal and physical, of deterrence.

‘The purpose of deterrence is peace,’ Campbell said. ‘Conflict in our region would be catastrophic for all. That makes it essential to build an appropriate language of deterrence, which confidently, clearly and consistently communicates capability and credibility within, and despite, these disruptions.’

National defence directed that the Australian Defence Force urgently transition to a focused and integrated force capable of undertaking high-end warfighting across the spectrum of competition and conflict, and across all domains, Campbell said.

‘However, enhanced defence capability alone is insufficient. As a relatively modestly sized military, credible deterrence can only be delivered in partnership with those with whom we share common cause.’

Successful deterrence in this age of mass disruption would be a team effort requiring a deliberate, integrated and collective response. This demanded effective, nuanced and active diplomacy, Campbell said.

But it was important not to see diplomacy as the soft form of a securitised perspective of the world. ‘Rather, within its full breadth, diplomacy is an innate complement to harder power like military capability and economic strength.

‘And engaging partners on their terms, and on the issues that matter most to them, such as the Boe Declaration’s Pacific climate security agenda, is a critical facet of our diplomatic approach,’ Campbell said.

‘Diplomacy can prevent conflicts by conveying credibility. It can mitigate conflicts. It can provide partners in conflict. It can express and win wider global sympathy and support. It can mitigate the scale or escalation of a conflict. And hopefully it can bring conflict to an end.’