Tag Archive for: National Security

Agenda for change 2025: Preparedness and resilience in an uncertain world

For more than a decade, which has included the 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022 federal elections, ASPI has helped to generate ideas and foster debate about Australian strategic policymaking through Agenda for change, a wide-ranging collection of analyses and recommendations to assist the next Australian Government in its deliberations and planning.  

Agenda for change 2025: Preparedness and resilience in an uncertain world continues in its tradition by providing focused and anticipatory policy advice for the 48th Parliament of Australia. The agenda strives to highlight, and present solutions to, the most pressing questions that our next government must consider in order to advance and protect Australia’s national interests in a more disordered and challenging world. 

This edition reflects five interrelated aspects of Australia’s position in 2025, focused on the need to:

  • defend Australia
  • navigate our place in a new world (dis)order
  • reform our security architecture and policies
  • secure our critical infrastructure
  • protect and use our natural resources. 

In 2025, that means equipping the next government for the reality of the contest in which our country is engaged. Since the previous edition of Agenda for change in 2022 we’ve seen:

  • Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine and public confirmation of the China–Russia ‘no limits’ partnership
  • change in Australia’s policy towards China, with a focus on ‘stabilisation’, accompanied by reduced economic coercion against Australia but a ratcheting up of military intimidation, including an unprecedented PLA Navy circumnavigation of Australia
  • heightened aggression by China against the Philippines in the South China Sea and against Taiwan
  • a lowering of the national terrorism threat level to ‘possible’ in 2022, before it was raised back to ‘probable’ not quite two years later 
  • the 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, the resulting war in Gaza and an increase in politically motivated violence in Australia
  • the rise of artificial intelligence, including the landmark release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and then DeepSeek in 2025
  • the return of Donald Trump to the White House, bringing tension among allies and question marks over the future of the US-led international order.

Each chapter in Agenda for change includes a limited number of prioritised policy recommendations, which are intended to be discrete, do-able and impactful. Although, when dealing with some of the more existential challenges facing Australia, the recommendations are necessarily and similarly expansive.

In addressing that extraordinary range of developments, ASPI has drawn on a wide range of expertise for the 2025 edition of Agenda for change. The views expressed are the personal views of the authors and don’t represent a formal position of ASPI on any issue, other than a shared focus on Australia’s national interests. 

National food security preparedness Green Paper

Australia’s agriculture sector and food system produce enough food to feed more than 70 million people worldwide. The system is one of the world’s least subsidised food systems. It has prospered under a global rules-based system influenced by Western liberal values, but it now faces chronic challenges due to rising geopolitical tensions, geo-economic transitions, climate change, deteriorating water security and rapid technological advances. The world is changing so rapidly that the assumptions, policy approaches and economic frameworks that have traditionally supported Australia’s food security are no longer fit for purpose. Potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific is driving enhanced preparedness activity in Australia’s defence force, but that isn’t being replicated across the agriculture sector and food system in a coordinated manner. Food hasn’t featured as a priority in the public versions of the Defence Strategic Review or the National Defence Strategy. This has created a gap in Australia’s preparedness activities: if Australia’s national security and defence organisations are preparing for potential conflict, then Australia’s agriculture sector and food system stakeholders should also be preparing for this period of strategic uncertainty.

Food security is a pillar of whole-of-nation preparedness for an uncertain future. While current targeted preparedness efforts and resilience mechanisms are valuable, they aren’t sufficient. Stakeholders are calling for stronger, proactive national coordination from the government to empower and support private-sector action. Meeting that demand is essential to strengthening overall resilience. So, too, is understanding that Australia’s food security relies on a holistic and interconnected ecosystem rather than a fragmented supply chain. Australia is a heavily trade-exposed nation that exports 70% of production, so any disruption to maritime and other transport corridors or to the infrastructure needed to move food risks undermining both national food security and Australia’s standing as a reliable global supplier.

This work has been written and constructed as a Green Paper, not an academic publication. Informed by six months of consultations with government, the private sector and civil society, the paper combines applied policy analysis and real-world insights to promote deliberate conversation about protecting Australia’s food security with the same priority as protecting Australia’s national security. The Green Paper is divided into four parts. It also includes three case studies in the Appendix, which use a threat and risk assessment to analyse three critical inputs to the food security ecosystem—phosphate, glyphosate and digital connectivity—to help stakeholders evaluate the vulnerabilities in Australia’s food security ecosystem.

The intention of this Green Paper is to deepen understanding of food security as a key public policy issue, stimulate public discussion, inform policymaking and provide both government and key stakeholders with policy options for consideration. This Green Paper’s 14 recommended policy options have been designed to equip governments and the private sector with structured national-security-inspired assessment tools and a framework to continuously identify, prioritise and mitigate vulnerabilities. That includes options to centralise the coordination and decentralise delivery of preparedness activities, establish accountability and embed food security as a national security priority and a key element of Australia’s engagement across the Indo-Pacific.

The ‘official’ histories of Australian and British intelligence: Lessons learned and next steps

Unclassified, official histories of ‘secret’ intelligence organisations, for public readership, seem a contradiction in terms. These ‘official’ works are commissioned by the agencies in question and directly informed by those agencies’ own records, thus distinguishing them from other, outsider historical accounts. But while such official intelligence histories are relatively new, sometimes controversial, and often challenging for historians and agencies alike, the experiences of the Australian and British intelligence communities suggest they’re a promising development for scholarship, maintaining public trust and informed public discourse, and more effective functioning of national security agencies. Furthermore, these histories remain an ongoing project for Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

A national strategic warning intelligence capability for Australia

Australia’s strategic warning time has collapsed—in response to profound geopolitical shifts. As the ADF is adapting to the hard implications of this change, so must the national intelligence community (NIC).

Australian Government decision-makers need time and insight to identify and prioritise threats (and opportunities) and devise effective responses. Strategic warning intelligence enables and empowers them to do so. But it must be done in a way that keeps up with the rapid pace of geopolitical and technological change, and a widening array of non-traditional strategic threats, and in a fashion best suited to Australia’s circumstances.

To meet this need the NIC should develop a discrete, institutional strategic warning intelligence function—an Australian Centre for Strategic Warning (ACSW). This would recognise the distinct skills, analytical focus and interface with decision-making entailed—and the vital national interests at stake. In implementing an ACSW, much can be learned from our own and other intelligence communities’ ongoing efforts to adapt to threats other than invasion—notably terrorism and pandemics. This will be especially pertinent in its application to grey-zone threats such as economic coercion.

Done right, an ACSW would be an important addition to the suite of Australia’s statecraft tools.

North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: Views from The Strategist, Volume 9

The Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre’s latest report, North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: views from The Strategist, Volume 9, contains articles published in ASPI’s The Strategist over the last six months.

Expanding on previous volumes, this edition introduces thematic chapters focused on a range of subjects relevant to northern Australia. These include;

1. Defence in the North,

2. Developing Northern Australia,

3. Northern Australia and the Indo-Pacific

4. Critical Minerals, Energy, and Commodities,

5. Space, Food Security and Climate Trends

As in previous editions, Volume 9 contains a range of expert opinions across these varied topics.

Volume 9 also features a foreword by the Hon. Eva Lawler, Chief Minister of the Northern Territory. Chief Minister Lawler calls readers attention to the relevance of northern Australia in light of the National Defence Strategy and updated Integrated Investment Program as well as Australia’s economic ambitions, stating “the strategies in this volume can inform our efforts to unlock northern Australia’s full potential and build a stronger, more resilient nation.”

The 36 articles discuss practical policy solutions for decision makers facilitating development, prosperity and security of northern Australia. These policy solutions tackle both the challenges and opportunities present in the north, and reflect the potential of the north to increasingly contribute to Australia’s national security and economic prosperity.

National resilience: lessons for Australian policy from international experience

The strategic circumstances that Australia contemplates over the coming decades present multiple, cascading and concurrent crises. Ensuring a safe and secure Australia, able to withstand the inevitable shocks that we’ll face into the future, will require a more comprehensive approach to strategy than we’ve adopted over the past seven decades. We can’t rely on the sureties of the past. The institutions, policies and architectures that have supported the nation to manage such crises in our history are no longer fit for purpose.

The report highlights lessons drawn from international responses to crisis, to assist policymakers build better responses to the interdependent and hyperconnected challenges that nations face. The report brings together the disciplines of disaster management, defence strategy and national security to examine what an integrated national approach to resilience looks like, and how national resilience thinking can help Australia build more effective and more efficient responses to crisis and change.

The report concludes that now is the time to commence action to deliver a national resilience framework for Australia. Collective, collaborative action, enabled by governments, built on the capability and capacity of Australian industry and the community, and aimed at the goal of a resilient Australia, can ensure that we’re well placed to face the future with confidence.

North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: Views from The Strategist, Volume 8

The Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre’s latest report, North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: views from The Strategist, Volume 8, contains articles published in ASPI’s The Strategist over the last six months.

Building on previous volumes, this edition discusses the opportunities and intersections between improved national defence and capability development in northern Australia, regional economic growth, and enhanced engagement with the Indo-Pacific region.

Similar to previous editions, Volume 8 contains a wide range of articles sourced from a diverse pool of expert contributors, writing on topics such as: northern Australia’s critical role for national defence, how Defence can improve operational capability and re-design its strategy in the north, critical minerals and rare earths, national disaster preparedness, and economic opportunity in northern Australia.

Volume 8 also features a foreword by the Hon. Natasha Fyles, Chief Minister of the Northern Territory. Chief Minister Fyles writes, “this edition sheds light on our region’s position at the intersection of significant national and international interests.”

The 27 articles discuss practical policy solutions for decision makers to facilitate the development, prosperity and security of Australia’s north. The authors share a belief that Australia’s north presents yet to be tapped opportunity and potential, and that its unique characteristics – its vast space, low population density, specific geography, and harsh investment environment – can be leveraged to its advantage.

Incels in Australia: The ideology, the threat, and a way forward

This report explores the phenomenon of ‘incels’—involuntary celibates—and the misogynistic ideology that underpins a subset of this global community of men that has become a thriving Internet subculture. It examines how online spaces, from popular social media sites to dedicated incel forums, are providing a platform for not just the expansion of misogynistic views but gender-based violent extremism.

It raises key questions regarding Australian efforts to counter misogynistic ideologies within our nation. If there’s a continuum that has sexist, but lawful, views on gender at one end and gendered hate speech at the other, at what point does misogynistic ideology tip into acts of gendered violence? What’s needed to prevent misogynistic ideologies from becoming violent? And how do we, as a society, avoid the epidemic levels of violence against women in Australia?

This report doesn’t intend to provide answers to all of those questions. It does, however, seek to make an important contribution to public discourse about the increasing trend in misogynistic ideology through examination of a particularly violent community of misogynists, and proposes a range of policy options for consideration to tackle the threat that misogynistic ideology poses to Australia.

This report makes six recommendations designed to reduce and, where possible, prevent the risk of future occurrence of incel and similar violence in Australia. The recommendations include greater awareness raising and policy recognition that incel violence can be an ideological form of issue-motivated extremism which would provide certainty that incels could formally fall within the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)—in addition to law-enforcement agencies—and would encourage tailored education programs focused on engaging young males at risk from indoctrination in this extreme subculture (along with their parents).

An inflection point for Australian intelligence: Revisiting the 2004 Flood Report

The 2003 Iraq war, and more particularly intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi WMD, led to a broad-ranging inquiry into Australian intelligence conducted by Philip Flood AO. Flood’s July 2004 report has proven an inflection point between the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) of the immediate post–Cold War period and today’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Flood laid out an ambitious vision for Australian intelligence and forcefully advocated for sovereign intelligence capability. The scope of his review extended beyond more than ‘recent intelligence lessons’ – that is, Iraq’s WMD, the 2002 Bali bombings and the unrest that led to 2003’s Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands – to the effectiveness of oversight and accountability within the AIC (including priority setting), ‘division of labour’ between AIC agencies and their communications with each other, maintenance of contestability in intelligence assessments, and adequacy of resourcing (especially for the Office of National Assessments – ONA).

It was in addressing these matters that Flood laid the foundation for the future NIC, upon which would be constructed the reforms instituted by the L’Estrange-Merchant review of 2017.

Importantly, Flood’s recommendations significantly enhanced ONA’s capabilities—not just analytical resources but also the resources (and tasking) needed to address the more effective coordination and evaluation of foreign intelligence across the AIC. This was a critical step towards the more structured and institutionalised (if sometimes bureaucratic) NIC of 2023 and an enhanced community leadership role for, ultimately, ONI.

In addition, the Flood Report identified issues that remain pertinent and challenging today – including the vexed issue of the public presentation of intelligence for policy purposes, the central importance of the intelligence community’s people (including training, career management, recruitment and language proficiency), intelligence distribution (including avoiding overloading time-poor customers), the need to maximise collaborative opportunities between agencies, and how best to leverage intelligence relationships (including broadening relations beyond traditional allied partners).

North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: Views from The Strategist, Volume 7

The Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre’s latest report, North of 26 degrees south and the security of Australia: views from The Strategist, Volume 7, is a series of articles published in The Strategist over the last six months. It builds on previous volumes by identifying critical intersections of national security, nation-building, resilience and Australia’s north.

This issue, like previous volumes, includes a wide range of articles sourced from a diverse pool of expert contributors writing on topics as varied as critical minerals, rare earth, equatorial space launch, agriculture, advanced manufacturing, fuel and water security, and defence force posturing. Importantly, it addresses the Defence Strategic from a northern Australian perspective. It also features a foreword by the Honourable Madeleine King MP, Minister for Northern Australia.

Minister King writes, “Northern Australia is central to the prosperity, security and future of our nation and will be the engine room of Australia’s decarbonisation effort and drive towards net zero.”

The 24 articles propose concrete, real-world actions for policy-makers to facilitate the development, prosperity and security of Australia’s north. The authors share a sense that those things that make the north unique – its vast space, low population density, specific geography, and harsh investment environment – are characteristics that can be leveraged, not disadvantages.

Tag Archive for: National Security

Editors’ pick: Australia’s security architecture must evolve, not regress

Alongside Monday’s cabinet reshuffle, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese returned responsibility for the Australian Federal Police and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to the Home Affairs portfolio. ASPI executive director Justin Bassi outlined reasons for such a change in a 27 March Strategist article that called for the reform. We repeat it below.

The Independent Intelligence Review, publicly released last Friday, was inoffensive and largely supported the intelligence community status quo. But it was also largely quiet on the challenges facing the broader national security community in an increasingly dangerous world, in which traditional intelligence is just one tool of statecraft and national power.

After the January discovery of a caravan laden with explosives in Dural, Sydney, confusion emerged around what federal and state governments knew and when. The review was completed before the caravan was discovered, and the plot was likely beyond the review’s scope. However, government responses to the event should prompt a discussion about Australia’s national security architecture.

Australia faces an unprecedented convergence of threats. We are confronted simultaneously by the rise of aggressive authoritarian powers, global conflict, persistent and evolving terrorism, foreign interference and the normalisation of cyber warfare.

Luck will not protect us; we need structure and certainty. Australia saw these threats early and began to modernise its security architecture in 2017, including the establishment of the Home Affairs portfolio.

But the government has gradually reversed some elements of the consolidation, returning various security responsibilities to the Attorney-General’s portfolio, including for the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. This reversion to an outdated model risks leaving the system ill-equipped to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

Debate on Home Affairs seems fixated on the leadership style of its former head, Michael Pezzullo. Leadership is crucial, but obsession with individual style over substance distracts from both strategic thinking and the fundamental issue of resurrecting a system that had structural inadequacies and was demonstrably unfit for purpose. We are not simply revisiting a past model; we are resurrecting a failed one.

The Attorney-General’s portfolio, in its traditional guise, was designed for a simpler, less dangerous era. Domestic threats were minimal and tended to come one by one—for example, after the end of the Cold War, security focus shifted from espionage to the emerging threat of Islamist terrorism. The Attorney-General’s oversight was appropriate, as it focused primarily on the legal framework while security agencies executed operations.

However, the proliferation and intersection of modern threats have overwhelmed this antiquated model.

When confronted with asylum-seeker boat arrivals, global terrorism, China and hybrid threats including cyber, the previous system—notwithstanding highly talented people—struggled as the Attorney-General’s portfolio held both the legal and security responsibilities.

The system’s limitations were evident well before the 2017 restructure. In 2011, prime minister Julia Gillard moved cybersecurity from the Attorney-General’s purview into her own department. Similarly, the 2012 review of illegal boat arrival policy was managed within the prime minister’s department, reflecting that the framework was not up to the task. And as a result of a review after the 2014 Martin Place terrorist attack, the Abbott government created a Counterterrorism Coordinator within the prime minister’s portfolio.

The rise of the Islamic State terrorist group in 2014 exposed policy deficits. While terror laws rightly fell under the Attorney-General’s remit, the broader policy response demanded a more strategic perspective and decisive approach. Changes were needed, partly because laws were so out of date.

But it was China’s rise that finally revealed the urgent need for a dedicated focus on national security policy. The 2016 review into foreign interference was a direct consequence of Australia’s evolving threat landscape.

Few of our closest partners’ chief law officers also function as security ministers. Typically, a dedicated security minister focuses on threat assessment and policy development, while the Attorney-General ensures that all actions are lawful.

Australia’s Home Affairs model strengthened the legal checks and balances by separating security policy and operational functions from the legal oversight function. It ensured that a single minister could not simultaneously identify a threat, determine the appropriate response and authorise the necessary actions without independent scrutiny. The previous system essentially allowed a single minister to mark their own homework.

Dividing security responsibilities between the Attorney-General and Home Affairs portfolios limits the effectiveness of both departments.

If this gradual dilution portends a future abolition of Home Affairs altogether, that would be a mistake. As the Dural caravan controversy unfolded, no one seemed able to agree on what was an appropriate amount of information-sharing between police and security agencies, and state and federal governments. This underscores the need for clarity that Home Affairs is responsible for setting, coordinating and implementing national security policy.

Home Affairs was created because the threat environment was evolving and, within our national security architecture, foreign and defence policy were covered but the third aspect of national security—domestic security—was lacking. So, what security evolution has justified its regression? The Attorney-General’s department has not shown itself to be more capable than Home Affairs in terrorism, cybersecurity or foreign interference.

Home Affairs—to the government’s credit—led the world by banning DeepSeek from government devices. Could we count on such decisive action if lawyers were doing all the work and then reviewing it themselves? Would you allow your lawyer to run your business, rather than provide essential legal counsel?

Technology amplifies threats and is advancing much faster than new laws can be written. Terrorists use encrypted apps to plot attacks and social media to attract recruits. China spreads propaganda through social media and has already begun using cyber intrusions to prepare to conduct sabotage operations in future conflict.

Australia must not only reinstate the separation between the security minister and the attorney-general; it must evolve further to confront 21st-century threats. This should include establishing a National Security Council or Secretariat, like those of many of our partner nations, including Quad countries. This body should be led by a national security adviser who provides strategic coherence and policy coordination.

To navigate the increasingly complex and dangerous global security landscape, we need to evolve, not regress.

In national security, Australia needs a ‘banana republic’ shock

On 14 May 1986, Paul Keating gave one of the most consequential political interviews in Australian history. He was interviewed by John Laws of 2UE, in the pre-internet era when talkback radio was dominant, and Laws reigned supreme.

Keating did not speak in talking points. He was determined to convey to Laws, and to his listeners, the gravity of Australia’s predicament as a commodity-dependent trading nation that was at risk of economic failure.

In speaking of Australia’s worsening terms of trade, Keating cut through the technical complexity of the economic issues. Australia was living beyond its means. It was not earning enough from the world to support the lifestyle it was enjoying.

He told Laws: ‘We must let Australians know truthfully, honestly, earnestly, just what sort of international hole Australia is in.’ If Australia did not make the necessary economic adjustments, ‘then Australia is basically done for. We will just end up being a third-rate economy.’

Keating was not afraid to critique what he saw as national complacency: If ‘in the final analysis Australia is so undisciplined, so disinterested in its salvation and economic wellbeing that it does not deal with these fundamental problems’, then Australia would have to accept lower living standards. He did not speak glibly about being ‘optimistic’ about the future or about Australians ‘coming together’. He urged action. If action was not taken, the consequence would be unavoidable: Then ‘you are gone. You are a banana republic.’

In that moment, Keating transformed Australian politics. The political and policy shock opened the way for an avalanche of much-needed economic reforms, which today form the foundation of Australia’s modern economy. Keating pierced the great Australian complacency, which Donald Horne had critiqued in 1964 in The Lucky Country. Horne had written about Australia’s complacency ironically. We still often misconstrue this irony, smugly confident that we are indeed ‘lucky’. Horne’s critique was that this luck was largely unearned by many who enjoyed its spoils and that luck eventually runs out.

Keating was not a cultural commentator who could be satisfied with ironic reflection. His burden was to act, and he was determined to demolish the old order—which was unimaginative, risk-averse and self-satisfied—and to build a new one, which was not predicated on complacently living off the spoils of a narrowly based economy.

Today, Australia is once again facing another moment of potential impending doom. It is once again at risk of falling into an international hole, although this time it will be a geopolitical one. Just as the Australia of the 1980s was living off earlier economic fortunes—the foundations of which were collapsing—today Australia is living off earlier strategic fortunes, the foundations of which are similarly collapsing.

Since its British settlement, Australia has enjoyed the shelter of distance, which was for many years an economic ‘tyranny’, in Geoffrey Blainey’s famous phrase, but a blessing in terms of security. We have also enjoyed the strategic protection that has been afforded us by being allied with the dominant maritime powers of the era—first Britain, and then the US. Land powers that attempted to establish hegemony over the grand geopolitical prize of Eurasia—Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia—were defeated by the maritime and industrial power of Britain and the US. Sheltered Australia, protected in these great geopolitical contests, did not have to struggle for its survival and autonomy, other than for a few months in 1942.

Today, distance provides no shelter from geopolitical risk, or the growing arsenals of long-range weapons that can easily reach us. Moreover, the terms and conditions of our strategic protection are being reshaped by a US that is reducing its geopolitical liabilities by pushing costs and obligations on to what it considers to be freeloading allies and partners. It is doing so because it is confident it can better secure itself, and perhaps a select few others, by way of rebasing its strategic relationships, and spreading the costs and burdens of its alliances.

At the same time, China is rapidly developing the capabilities it will require to aggressively pursue its strategic objectives (territorial and otherwise), and to compel acquiescence through coercion, whether that be by direct and blunt means or by indirect and implied threats. Moreover, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together as a Eurasian axis in unprecedented ways.

In a more brutal and lonelier world, a hard reckoning is coming for countries such as Australia that have long relied on international rules and partner reliability to underpin their prosperity and security. Just as our changing terms of trade had to be confronted in the 80s, today we will have to confront the challenge of no longer being able to secure ourselves through distance and relatively low-cost strategic protection.

So, what will be in the prime minister’s in-tray on Monday morning, after today’s election? We will have to build more rapidly our capacity to defend ourselves with our own combat forces in all contingencies short of the threat of national annihilation. We will have to renegotiate our strategic bargain with the US, such that its costs, contributions and obligations are explicitly agreed, including in relation to how Australia will help to protect the US, in return for both existential protection and crucial strategic support. We will have to build different kinds of relationships in Asia, with countries such as Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia and The Philippines, which will need to be more explicitly geared to mutual security and protection. We will have to reshape our economy so it can better absorb the shocks of supply-chain disruption and geopolitical confrontation and, if necessary, be switched seamlessly to war production. We will have to build societal resilience in anticipation of possible conflict.

These issues have hardly featured in the election campaign. They should have. Unfortun­ately, there are no structured processes or practices that might have crystallised the issues and forced the debate—no pre-election defence and security outlook, no applicable data releases, as occurs with economic data, no independent voices such as there is with the Reserve Bank in economic affairs, and no appetite in the media for demanding a dedicated leaders debate on these questions.

Given this silence, and to paraphrase Keating, will we be so undisciplined and so uninterested in our own salvation that we refuse to confront the challenge of possibly becoming the geopolitical equivalent of a ‘banana republic’? It will take a shock to shake us from our complacent belief that we are still living in a strategically lucky country. Will that shock be delivered by a leader speaking as plainly as Keating spoke in 1986, or will it take the sight of Chinese aircraft carriers and Russian bombers routinely operating at the frontiers of what was once our sheltered land?

Australia (still) needs a dedicated and public-facing national security adviser

In the week of Australia’s 3 May election, ASPI released Agenda for Change 2025: preparedness and resilience in an uncertain world, a report developed for the next government and to promote public debate and understanding on issues of strategic importance to Australia. This is an edited version of an article from that report.

In the early months leading up to the 2025 federal election, Australia’s public debate was dominated by domestic issues with the ‘cost of living’ crisis looming largest of all, as well as the actions of US President Donald Trump, in particular his global tariffs. But, in late February, a task group of Chinese ships from the People’s Liberation Army Navy conducted unannounced live-fire drills near Australia, disturbing both domestic politics and the notion that military intimidation was only for nations far from our shore.

It’s believed it was the first time a PLA Navy task group had circumnavigated Australia, and it took an unsuspecting public very much by surprise. Beyond standard remarks and occasional speeches from foreign and defence ministers, parliamentarians don’t often talk to the public about geopolitical developments regarding China, and that’s especially true when it comes to Chinese military activities.

At times during this episode, politicians and senior officials appeared to be caught off guard, sometimes providing the public with slightly different timelines and explanations for the PLA Navy drills. It was clear early on that the situation had the potential to unravel quickly as a scramble kicked off to fill the information gap left by the government.

And unravel it did. When Senate estimates was held five days later in Canberra—and was used to extract a wealth of information about the drills, including who knew what, and when—the story blew up across all major media platforms. Sydney Morning Herald and Age journalist Matthew Knott wrote:

The government initially downplayed the seriousness of what took place, providing Australians with a whitewashed and, in some crucial respects, misleading version of what occurred. In fact, we would probably still be in the dark about what happened were it not for the lucky coincidence that Senate estimates hearings were scheduled in Canberra this week.

This episode—which continued to gain media coverage into April as a Chinese Government research ship travelled around Australia—confused and distracted Australians. It meant there was less public coverage of the election topics that both political parties had planned to discuss. The nature of the discussion and the criticism of the Australian response can’t have been what the government would have wanted. The situation again highlighted that there’s a gap within national-security policymaking, especially in relation to high-level strategic communications and coordination.

Instead of the outcome we all watched, as it played out publicly over many weeks, what if a senior and public-facing National Security Adviser (NSA) had been supporting the Prime Minister, the parliament and the bureaucracy? Most countries—including our most important partners—have an NSA, and it’s almost certain Australia would have ended up with quite a different result if we’d had one.

An Australian NSA would have advised the Prime Minister, coordinated strategic communications and been able to inform and update the Australian public as needed. The Prime Minister may have decided to ask the NSA to provide Australians with factual, clear and concise information about the PLA Navy task group as it neared the Australian coast, but before it engaged in live-fire exercises. Doing so would have taken away the element of shock, reducing confusion and frustration, and taking the heat out of the media coverage. There would have been less public backlash and more support for the Prime Minister and other ministers with an NSA on the front foot.

A public-facing NSA doesn’t preclude ministers from engaging publicly on any national-security matters—in fact, far from it. The public expects to hear from its politicians on an almost daily basis. But, in an era when Canberra’s heads of departments and agencies rarely talk publicly, ministers have found themselves spread too thinly, expected to be able to connect with voters, stay across enormous detail in their portfolios and also increasingly perform a ‘spokesperson’ function. That last role isn’t the best use of their limited time and, frankly, can expose where there’s a lack of expertise or coordination with other ministers and their departments, especially in times of fast-breaking global developments.

How is this going to continue in an era when we’ll continue to see tensions and instability rise?

It’s clear the Australian public needs to feel more informed and secure. The PLA Navy task group, as well as the early decisions of President Trump including in relation to Ukraine, the Middle East and China, have only re-emphasised the need for a dedicated, senior and public-facing Australian NSA to help Australia navigate through what could be a very difficult decade.

The world has continued to change since I first outlined why an Australian NSA is needed and others have made valuable and complementary contributions over recent years.

The arguments for why Australia needs an NSA remain the same today and, in fact, have only strengthened of late given the need for Australia to navigate and influence an unpredictable Trump administration. And in the next decade, the intersection of technology with geopolitics and national security—especially the challenges and risks of AI as it continues to advance rapidly—will have unexpected consequences for our society, economy and security. Technology will become a major area of focus for all future Australian NSAs, as it has become for the NSAs of our close partners over recent years.

At the moment, in NSA meetings around the globe, Australia can only imagine what is being said, what information is being shared, and what is being proposed and decided. There will of course be times when, after these engagements, we will be provided with read-outs. But when you’re not setting the agenda and you aren’t in the room, it’s near impossible to influence the outcome. Now, more than ever, the government needs to seize every opportunity available to shape and influence global conversations and outcomes.

The months following the 3 May federal election offer the next Prime Minister and the 48th Parliament a window of opportunity to announce the appointment of a dedicated, senior and public-facing National Security Adviser—someone who can immediately connect with NSA counterparts thereby tapping into one of the world’s most important and influential networks, talk to and inform the Australian public when required and support the Prime Minister in effectively and strategically advancing Australia’s national interests, both at home and abroad.

What’s secret? When is it secret? Well, that’s complicated

The argument over US officials’ misuse of secure but non-governmental messaging platform Signal falls into two camps. Either it is a gross error that undermines national security, or it is a bit of a blunder but no harm was done.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has twice used Signal for sensitive national security conversions, including once in which he and officials discussed planned military operations against Houthis in Yemen. When we consider the security implications of this, we see that classification systems are complicated, subjective and nuanced. Many people, even those who have worked within government for years, don’t understand them.

A classification is simply a label that the originator of the information attaches to it based on his or her perception of the damage that would happen if it became public. Information can be declassified by group consensus and through a proper process, but it is generally up to the originator to make a reasonable judgment at the time.

Only certain government systems are permitted to hold the most sensitive information, and these are highly protected and monitored. They are usually air gapped, meaning they are separated from other networks and not connected the internet. Still today, the most sensitive information is shared only on specific coloured paper that is destroyed after being read in a special room. In 2013, the Russians even bought up a stock of typewriters to make sure they were truly offline. The much discussed secure compartmented information facility (SCIF) is there to protect from physical attacks such as eavesdropping or covert cameras.

A classification is different to a handling caveat, which indicates to whom the information can be shared, and a nationality caveat (preceded in Britain with ‘Eyes Only’), indicating which country produced and which countries can read the information. These elements (plus some codewords others for more sensitive information) make up what we generally call a classification. It is technically possible to have unclassified information with other caveats. However, because classified information is for most practical purposes allowed only on particular systems, people tend to rely on classifications alone.

Technically, the person who first writes down the information is meant to classify it based on a set of guidelines. These definitions are very clear. In the British system, something is classified based on the effect if it is compromised. Top secret information, for instance, ‘could lead to loss of human life’ or damage military operations, international relations or prosperity. To avoid compromises, people tend to over-classify or add handling caveats that limit the people to whom the information may be distributed.

On one hand, it is possible to argue that the information in that Signal chat about the planned operation was not classified as the ‘accidental or deliberate compromise’ of the information did not result in anything ‘more than moderate, short-term damage to the operational effectiveness’. There is probably a longer conversation to be hard around causing ‘moderate damage to the work or reputation of the organisation’. Regardless, it is up to the person who writes the information down to classify it; so technically whatever Hegseth says goes.

To add to the complication, classifications mean nothing outside of government systems. Although some apps claim to have ‘government or military encryption’ they are not accredited to hold classified information; so, by definition, they don’t have classified information on them.

The more you think about the definition of a secret, the more things start to break down. Governments spend millions on sophisticated (and highly classified) cyber tools but then send them to people’s computers and phones to hack those devices. These tools bring back highly sensitive information from these devices over the internet; and only when they get back into a government system does the information become ‘classified’.

When does this information become ‘secret’? The answer is: when it sits on a government IT system.

Furthermore, people who meet agents around the world have highly classified conversations in coffee shops or in hotel rooms; hiding in obscurity. It only becomes ‘classified’ when it is written up on an IT system.

When diving into these matters, it often helps to turn the question around. Instead of asking ‘what is the effect if this leaks?’ ask ‘what are you trying to protect?’ It could be a capability, operation, intention or limitation, a set of factors commonly abbreviated as COIL. It is also worth asking: who are you trying to protect this from, and how long for? Striking the Houthi bases isn’t going to be a secret for long once the planes have taken off.

Asking these deeper questions should have a significant effect on your security posture, considerations and planned approach. These questions start getting to the heart of the issue and mitigating the systemic risks, which is a lot more important. In most cases, the classification of some information is the bluntest of instruments to protect what could be a person, a sensitive operation, a policy plan or your own reputation.

Applying blame for a breach in security essentially comes down to subjective judgements on the person and the error they made. In the case of SignalGate it was a pretty bad one, no matter the classification of the information.

Australia’s security architecture must evolve, not regress

The Independent Intelligence Review, publicly released last Friday, was inoffensive and largely supported the intelligence community status quo. But it was also largely quiet on the challenges facing the broader national security community in an increasingly dangerous world, in which traditional intelligence is just one tool of statecraft and national power.

After the January discovery of a caravan laden with explosives in Dural, Sydney, confusion emerged around what federal and state governments knew and when. The review was completed before the caravan was discovered, and the plot was likely beyond the review’s scope. However, government responses to the event should prompt a discussion about Australia’s national security architecture.

Australia faces an unprecedented convergence of threats. We are confronted simultaneously by the rise of aggressive authoritarian powers, global conflict, persistent and evolving terrorism, foreign interference and the normalisation of cyber warfare.

Luck will not protect us; we need structure and certainty. Australia saw these threats early and began to modernise its security architecture in 2017, including the establishment of the Home Affairs portfolio.

But the government has gradually reversed some elements of the consolidation, returning various security responsibilities to the Attorney-General’s portfolio, including for the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. This reversion to an outdated model risks leaving the system ill-equipped to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

Debate on Home Affairs seems fixated on the leadership style of its former head, Michael Pezzullo. Leadership is crucial, but obsession with individual style over substance, distracts from both strategic thinking and the fundamental issue of resurrecting a system that had structural inadequacies and was demonstrably unfit for purpose. We are not simply revisiting a past model; we are resurrecting a failed one.

The Attorney-General’s portfolio, in its traditional guise, was designed for a simpler, less dangerous era. Domestic threats were minimal and tended to come one by one—for example, after the end of the Cold War, security focus shifted from espionage to the emerging threat of Islamist terrorism. The Attorney-General’s oversight was appropriate, as it focused primarily on the legal framework while security agencies executed operations.

However, the proliferation and intersection of modern threats have overwhelmed this antiquated model.

When confronted with asylum-seeker boat arrivals, global terrorism, China and hybrid threats including cyber, the previous system—notwithstanding highly talented people—struggled as the Attorney-General’s portfolio held both the legal and security responsibilities. Having public servants working on legal considerations and intelligence officers doing operations is no longer adequate.

The system’s limitations were evident well before the 2017 restructure. In 2011, prime minister Julia Gillard moved cybersecurity from the Attorney-General’s purview into her own department. Similarly, the 2012 review of illegal boat arrival policy was managed within the prime minister’s department, reflecting that the framework was not up to the task. And as a result of a review after the 2014 Martin Place terrorist attack, the Abbott government created a Counterterrorism Coordinator within the prime minister’s portfolio.

The rise of the Islamic State terrorist group in 2014 exposed policy deficits. While terror laws rightly fell under the Attorney-General’s remit, the broader policy response demanded a more strategic perspective and decisive approach. Changes were needed, partly because laws were so out of date.

But it was China’s rise that finally revealed the urgent need for a dedicated focus on national security policy. The 2016 review into foreign interference was a direct consequence of Australia’s evolving threat landscape.

Few of our closest partners’ chief law officers also function as security ministers. Typically, a dedicated security minister focuses on threat assessment and policy development, while the Attorney-General ensures that all actions are lawful.

Australia’s Home Affairs model strengthened the legal checks and balances by separating security policy and operational functions from the legal oversight function. It ensured that a single minister could not simultaneously identify a threat, determine the appropriate response and authorise the necessary actions without independent scrutiny. The previous system essentially allowed a single minister to mark their own homework.

Dividing security responsibilities between the Attorney-General and Home Affairs portfolios limits the effectiveness of both departments.

If this gradual dilution portends a future abolition of Home Affairs altogether, that would be a mistake. As the Dural caravan controversy unfolded, no one seemed able to agree on what was an appropriate amount of information-sharing between police and security agencies, and state and federal governments. This underscores the need for clarity that Home Affairs is responsible for setting, coordinating and implementing national security policy.

Home Affairs was created because the threat environment was evolving and, within our national security architecture, foreign and defence policy were covered but the third aspect of national security—domestic security—was lacking. So, what security evolution has justified its regression? The Attorney-General’s department has not shown itself to be more capable than Home Affairs in terrorism, cybersecurity or foreign interference.

Home Affairs—to the government’s credit—led the world by banning DeepSeek from government devices. Could we count on such decisive action if lawyers were doing all the work and then reviewing it themselves? Would you allow your lawyer to run your business, rather than provide essential legal counsel?

Technology amplifies threats and is advancing much faster than new laws can be written. Terrorists use encrypted apps to plot attacks and social media to attract recruits. China spreads propaganda through social media and has already begun using cyber intrusions to prepare to conduct sabotage operations in future conflict.

Australia must not only reinstate the separation between the security minister and the attorney-general; it must evolve further to confront 21st-century threats. This should include establishing a National Security Council or Secretariat, like those of many of our partner nations, including Quad countries. This body should be led by a national security adviser who provides strategic coherence and policy coordination.

To navigate the increasingly complex and dangerous global security landscape, we need to evolve, not regress.

Two concepts of patriotism

Most Australians would say that they are patriotic, proud to be Australian, and proud of their nation’s history, even for all of its shortcomings. True, self-denunciation of the nation and its history is in vogue among the cultural elite that is so well described by Musa al-Gharbi in We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (2024). However, their long-term agenda of ending the nation’s ‘structural oppression’ and rewriting its colonial-settler history, in the name of ‘social justice’, will never take hold in the community at large. 

If the suggested remedy for the historical harms of colonisation—the retelling of the nation’s history, and the pursuit of reparations for those harms—were to be pursued seriously, such action would be rejected by most Australians as being too radical, and an unnecessary distraction from meaningfully addressing the real disadvantage that is experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. 

Rather than engaging in such national self-denunciation, most Australians practise what might be termed ‘soft patriotism’, an intuitive love of country that is ingrained from early childhood, for those born here, or rapidly acquired by those who choose to make Australia their home, first as permanent migrants, and then as new citizens. 

Patriotism involves more than going to the beach on a summer’s day on 26 January to celebrate Australia’s national day. It is a love of country. It is an understanding that Australia is not an arbitrary geographical space that happens to be inhabited by randomly selected individuals who lack a connection to one another. It is a cherishing of the nation’s shared heritage, which is the legacy of settlers, pastoralists, farmers, miners, administrators, industrialists, workers, and so many more. 

Our institutions of democratic government were shaped by colonial-era founders, who championed the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in the second half of the 19th century.  Our economy was also built on foundations laid in colonial Australia, when endowments such as wool and gold, and access to capital and product markets, led to Australia being one of the richest countries in the world on a per capita basis at Federation in 1901. These and other foundations of the nation will need to be better taught to future generations in an era when historical understanding is in decline. 

The patriot also intuitively recognises that being a member of a national political community is the best available means of exercising freedom, democracy, and sovereignty. Maurizio Viroli wrote in For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism that patriotism involves a love of the institutions and the way of life that sustains the common liberty of a national people. In a world of sovereign nation-states, we owe no higher loyalty to a global or supranational form of government, to another nation-state, or to any international organisation. 

When the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 became law on 26 January 1949, it established for the first time the legal status of ‘Australian citizen’. At the first citizenship ceremony, held in Canberra on 3 February 1949, the Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, asked the new citizens to respect the Australian flag, and to swear allegiance to ‘our concepts of government’. He explained that Australian democracy was a means for achieving national progress without the ‘chaotic spectacle of revolutionary disturbances ending in dictatorial minority rule’. He said that faith could be placed in the ‘common-sense and national goodwill of the Australian people’, and that political differences could be resolved peaceably through the nation’s democratic processes. That sentiment is today captured in the Australian citizenship pledge, when new citizens are asked to pledge their loyalty to Australia and its people, to share our belief in democracy, to respect our common rights and liberties, and to uphold and obey Australian laws.  

Most Australians embrace this form of patriotism. To call it ‘soft’ is not to diminish it.  Rather, it is to suggest that such patriotism is reflexive and relatively cost-free. It is a love of a readily understood ‘idea of Australia’, which does not require much explanation or ideological rationalisation. 

There is an altogether different, and more challenging, form of patriotism. ‘Hard patriotism’ has a necessarily martial quality, as it is invariably associated with the defence of the nation. It is today being displayed by Ukrainians, and by Israelis. Hard patriotism challenges us to ask of ourselves: what is to be defended, to the last if necessary, and are we prepared to pay that price? 

Hard patriotism cannot be solely expected of our armed forces, although it is intrinsic to the profession of arms, which traditionally have placed a more visible emphasis on duty, honour, service and country. In the event of having to defend the nation, hard patriotism would be required of all. Sacrifice and commitment would be expected from all, subject only to age or incapacity. Hard patriots would need to be found not just in the armed forces, but across a mobilised and resolute population. 

Winston Churchill’s ‘darkest hour’ speeches of 1940 are a supreme example of hard patriotism, expressed in magnificently eloquent words. His theme was ‘never surrender’, because he knew that surrender would mean the loss of liberty and sovereignty, and the end of the British way of life. The British people rose to the occasion, as did the Empire, which for a time stood alone against Nazi Germany.  Compare this with France. French historian Marc Bloch described in The Strange Defeat—written in 1940 and published posthumously in 1946—how the French were still a patriotic people in 1940. However, after a period of national malaise in the 1930s, which had led to a loss of self-confidence, they were not prepared—strategically or morally—for the Nazi onslaught. Soft, demoralised France fell in 1940, while hard, patriotic Britain fought on. Later, Charles de Gaulle emerged as the hard Free French patriot who restored French honour. 

Hard patriotism is the willingness to fight to the end if necessary for three treasured national possessions: freedom, or the liberty to live as we choose, subject only to our own laws; democracy, or our institutions of government that allow us to choose our leaders and lawmakers, and to check abuses of power; and sovereignty, or our capacity to control our territory and resources, and to pursue economic and social development as we see fit, free from external coercion and intimidation. 

Australia has no threatening neighbours, or historical enemies. If we did, hard patriotism would be intuitive and reflexive. Instead, for more than two centuries, we have mentally lived in an imagined ‘sheltered land’, far from strife. No matter that the security of our ‘sheltered land’ has been a function of Australia being prepared to fight distant wars (and a close one in 1942-44) against Eurasian powers, thereby assisting first the British Empire, and then the United States, to prevail over aspiring Eurasian hegemons. 

Today, we still live in a ‘sheltered land’, at least in our national imagination. In the absence of enemies at the gate, it is hard to appreciate that our way of life might one day be threatened—if not necessarily by invasion, then by other forms of strategic coercion or military attack. Australian strategic and defence policy is not couched in the language of hard patriotism. Even though we appear to be pursuing an implied grand strategy of working with the US and others to prevent Chinese hegemony, it is a strategy that dares not speak its name in those terms—principally so as to not disturb the foreign policy of ‘speaking softly’ and stabilising ties with China, but also to avoid the challenge that would be inherent in building hard patriotism. 

Therein lies the problem. Hard patriotism cannot be conjured into being suddenly on the eve of a military crisis, or at the outbreak of a war. Moreso than a significant financial crisis, a serious public health emergency, or a catastrophic natural event, a major war would throw its terrible shadow across society in ways that would require a more far-reaching  mobilisation of the nation, and greater sacrifices. 

A determined and resolute government could today make the case for hard patriotism, so that we were better prepared for the unlikely but credible prospect of major war. This would require a different discussion between the government and the people. Such a discussion would begin with a more honest explanation of the precarious nature of our strategic circumstances. The ‘sheltered land’ of our national imagination is no more. The Eurasian axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is seriously challenging the US and its allies in the struggle for mastery in Eurasia, and therefore globally. Distance no longer affords us the protection that it once did, as potential adversaries field longer-range weapons, and potent offensive cyber capabilities. 

In a more honest discussion, we have to consider the possibility of the emergence of a world where an isolated US, following either military defeat or strategic withdrawal, was either unwilling or unable to extend its protective shield over Australia and other allies. In that world, US forces and facilities would not be present in Australia, and its nuclear forces would not protect us. China would rule the waves of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and its military bases would be in our sea-air approaches, including probably in East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands. 

A hegemonic China would be free to impose its will on Australia, including in relation to trade, investment, resources, energy, and more besides. There would be little that we could do about resisting Chinese pressure, other than to develop significantly larger armed forces and military capabilities in an effort to independently deter a military attack. This would probably have to include an independent nuclear deterrent. 

Australia would come under pressure to free up its markets for Chinese investment and acquisition, to drop restrictions on technology access—for instance, regarding 7G and successor technologies—and agree to more China-favourable terms for access to our resources and energy. We would also come under pressure to extradite persons of interest to China, and to ensure that Australian media and public discourse exhibited the ‘correct understanding’ of China and its interests. Local quisling political and business leaders would emerge, who would urge their fellow Australians to ‘adjust’ to the new reality of Chinese supremacy. 

To avoid the possibility of such a future, Australia should be doing more to support the US-led deterrence of China, including being prepared to go to war if required to thwart Chinese hegemony. This would require the building of a hard Australian patriotism, the kind that is seen in frontline states that have a threatening neighbour. 

In any such war, China would employ advanced methods and techniques to undermine the national will to fight, sow discord among the people, fracture the community, amplify quisling voices, and generally attempt to demoralise the population. Cognitive warfare would be employed, waged over TikTok and the like, using technology-enabled propaganda and disinformation. An early objective would be to have sections of the community question the legitimacy of any such war, or at least Australia’s participation in it. Attempts might even be made to undermine Australia’s very legitimacy, perhaps by emphasising its origin as a European settler-colonial society, an ‘outsider’ in greater Asia, with a shameful, racist past. 

China’s President Xi Jinping has made Chinese nationalism a co-equal component, with Marxism, in his overarching ideological framework, as explained by Kevin Rudd in On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World. Chinese strategy mobilises national history and national identity, in competition and in conflict.  Nationalism is employed to sustain a dual narrative of China’s re-emerging to its rightful place of international prestige and leadership, and its cultural superiority, relative to the declining West. China would go into any conflict confident and self-assured, not agonising over a supposedly shameful past. National self-confidence would be crucial to success. Like France in 1940, any soft and demoralised nations would lack the will to fight such a war, calculating that yielding to the ascendent power was the more tolerable course.      

Political leaders in democracies are invariably focused on the domestic priorities of their citizens. They are measured on their ability to deliver prosperity, and not their ability to wage war, unlike earlier times when waging war was central to the prestige of the state. Issues of statecraft typically hold no interest for parochial citizens. In such an environment, building hard patriotism in the absence of a visible threat is almost impossible. However, leaving it to the coming of darker days would be too late. 

True, Australians are likely to unite in a crisis, as was seen in the COVID pandemic and during natural disasters such as the Black Summer of 2019-20. They tend to be trusting of the institutions of government during such crises, even if there is grumbling at inconvenience. However, in those circumstances, governments tend to have more direct levers and a greater power of initiative, such as introducing urgent fiscal stimulus measures, or enforcing strict public health measures. A war fought in defence of the nation would be a more challenging affair. It would require broader and deeper mobilisation, and more directive control being exercised by the federal government, as compared, for instance, with what occurred during the COVID pandemic. 

How might a balance be struck between trying to rally a sceptical people too soon, when many are unlikely to see the need, as against trying to build the hard patriotism that would be required in wartime, when it might be too late? One way might be to ask all citizens, perhaps aged 18-65, to affirm annually a ‘pledge of service’, where we would all be asked to register the kind of national service that we would be willing to render in the event of a military emergency involving the defence of the nation. This would not be limited to being willing to take up arms. It would include other categories of service such as medical, construction, logistics, and so on. Establishing such a register, perhaps as a prelude to establishing an Australian national service scheme—solely for the territorial defence of the nation—would form the basis for a very different discussion between the government and the people about the realities of our strategic circumstances. 

Pursuing this and other initiatives, such as preparing a War Book, and treating national security like the national budget—through an annual,  prime-time, national security statement to the nation—would better prepare the people for what are said to be the worst strategic circumstances since the Second World War. A harder patriotism would build steadily, as the people began to appreciate the stakes, and the potential sacrifices that might have to be made in order to protect all that we cherish about Australia. Unfortunately, Australia is no longer a ‘sheltered land’, and the times call for a new Australian patriotism. 

Australia needs to prioritise local launch providers to grow its sovereign space capabilities

Visiting senior US Space Force officials were on the money when they said Australia is a ‘pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’ for future space operations. Australian space launch providers like Gilmore Space Technologies, Equatorial Launch Australia and Southern Launch have known for some time that Australia has advantages that enable launch vehicles to be sent into any trajectory at any inclination. The country’s geographic position and relatively clear skies make it a prime location for assured access to space. Global companies such as Virgin Orbit have taken notice and are beginning to establish their footprints in Australia to take advantage of these competitive strengths.

If heeded, calls for deeper cooperation between governments and the commercial space sector are likely to attract further foreign investment and put Australia’s space sector on a growth path for many years to come. The challenge, however, remains how to enable such investment while ensuring that Australian launch providers can effectively compete for contracts.

Fortunately, precedents from other jurisdictions provide some answers to this challenge. The European Union mandates that first preference be given to launchers developed by the European Space Agency, followed by Russia’s Soyuz launcher and then any others (though Russia’s war in Ukraine means the Soyuz launcher is no longer a viable option). The US applies similar protective measures by requiring US government satellites to be launched only on US launch vehicles.

There are good reasons for introducing such measures. First, they protect the growth of sovereign space industries and the social and economic benefits they provide. Second, they give policymakers the necessary levers to pull during times of crisis—something the US government knows all too well from past events in other industries. The Jones Act of 1920, for instance, was implemented because of concerns over national defence after the belligerent countries withdrew their merchant fleets to assist in the war effort during World War I, which had a direct impact on the US economy and its later efforts to enter the war. The act was introduced in a bid to subsidise the American merchant navy, which the US military could use in a future war if required.

There’s also the US Civil Reserve Air Fleet program, which was used last year to engage US airlines in evacuating Americans from Afghanistan. The program was established in 1951 following a shortage of US military air-transport capacity during the Berlin airlift. The civil carriers participating in the program ‘are given preference in carrying commercial peacetime cargo and passenger traffic’ for defence-related mission.

Recognising the benefits of such measures, a parliamentary committee inquiry recommended in November 2021 that future government contracts give priority to Australian-owned and -operated space assets. There are already Australian laws in place that grant the government certain rights if there’s a determination that national security is at risk. The recommendation from the committee, however, is just as much about national security as it is about economic prosperity. The policy mechanism is intended to create certainty and work for Australian start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises while ensuring that Australia develops sovereign capabilities for access to space to protect its interests.

Some may argue that such measures are protectionist and anti-competitive. But, as the Civil Reserve Air Fleet program demonstrates, when applied appropriately, they can give the government the necessary levers in times of need and still allow an industry to remain viable. For Australia’s space sector, this can be achieved by prioritising a sovereign launch capability and investing significantly to support it. This is far from an uncompetitive blanket protectionist policy. If targeted foreign investment is done well, including by introducing other launch companies, it can help stimulate demand and the broader economy around launch, which will help Australian launchers along the way. But such measures will require sophistication and will need to allow policy mechanisms to be recalibrated as necessary.

Australia hasn’t needed to implement such policies for at least the past three decades. The lack of a large industrial manufacturing base means that Australia has relied instead on the globalised marketplace to fulfil its needs. Another tool that has been widely used in defence acquisitions is the US foreign military sales program. However, while using these mechanisms might resolve an immediate concern, in the long run, they inherently prioritise the growth of another nation’s space capabilities at the expense of Australia’s sovereign space industry. As I argued in a previous article, relying mainly on market-based solutions without considering potential national security risks is fraught with danger which, if realised, will require long lead times and costly solutions down the track.

As Australia’s space industry continues to grow and mature, the government needs to consider prioritising Australian companies for both civilian and defence purposes to help develop a vibrant and competitive sovereign space industry in Australia. This is not a zero-sum game in which the benefits that accrue to Australia’s sovereign launchers come at the expense of global space organisations. But without a level playing field Australian companies will remain at a disadvantage against the more established corporations for the foreseeable future. More importantly, it will mean that Australia will continue to rely on global companies to meet its sovereign needs. If the Ukraine war and the US’s historical experiences are anything to go by, we should not put all our eggs in one global basket and should instead try to mitigate any potential risks by supporting Australia’s space industry to complement existing global players for a prosperous future.

Policy, Guns and Money: Space and national security

This week’s episode is all about space. ASPI recently hosted a masterclass and dialogue focused on space and national security, and we are delighted to be joined by some special guests for conversations on this critical policy area.

ASPI’s Malcolm Davis talks with space-policy experts Namrata Goswami and Kevin Pollpeter about China’s capabilities and ambitions in space. They discuss the country’s space industry and the potential for China to accelerate its lunar program.

Bec Shrimpton, director of ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue, speaks to Virgin Orbit’s Janice Starzyk and Bret Perry about the company’s history and  ambitions. They discuss opportunities for government and industry collaboration in space, including in the areas of national security and defence, and how Virgin Orbit is supporting spacefaring nations.

Shrimpton is also joined by futurist Jeffrey Becker for a conversation on space futures and why futures thinking is an important tool for policymakers. They discuss the role of technology in warfare and the military implications of different technological developments, and the importance of the space domain in military strategy.

Security clearance overhaul needed to build Australia’s high-tech workforce

The Australian government recently published its updated guidelines to counter foreign interference  in the university sector, declaring that ‘All universities are subject to foreign interference risks’. And last month, at ASPI’s inaugural Sydney Dialogue, Prime Minister Scott Morrison released the government’s Blueprint for critical technologies, which identified a number of technology categories deemed essential to Australia’s long-term prosperity and security, including biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics and quantum computing.

Taken together, these documents tell us that Australia’s technology-driven future will be heavily reliant on a specialist research workforce that our national security leaders believe is being aggressively targeted by foreign powers.

Rapid and transformative technological innovation generated by non-government institutions is now at the core of Australia’s domestic economic vision and is also central to how Western nations intend to remain the dominant grouping in world affairs, as the tech-centric AUKUS and Quad partnerships show.

However, Australia’s ability to realise its technological potential and contribute to Western tech dominance relies on having a research and corporate sector resilient to foreign interference—with intellectual property theft and coercion by the Chinese Communist Party the most pressing threats. To achieve this resilience, more needs to be done to help non-government organisations become self-reliant in their security with trusted workforces that are resistant to interference.

In line with this, the government should consider taking two measures to improve the capacity of universities, businesses and other non-government organisations to build trusted workforces and work environments in which exposure to foreign interference is made transparent and can be mitigated.

The first measure is to establish a national security vetting framework for the non-government sector under which nationally significant research institutions and businesses pay to have staff appropriately vetted. The aim would be not just to protect sensitive work with government, as is currently the case, but to provide assurance to the institution or business that its intellectual property and corporate integrity are being protected.

At the moment, businesses looking to work on sensitive government projects often have to obtain standardised security clearances for their staff. But the need for security vetting now arguably extends well beyond government contracts. Even if they’re not working on government projects, more and more businesses and their investors want to be assured that they have hardened themselves to the risk of foreign interference and corporate espionage. Yet the options available to Australian organisations to conduct background checks on their staff in an effective, ethical way are limited and inconsistent.

Establishing such a clearance capability alongside the public service’s existing security vetting system would be an enormous task for already strained government vetting agencies. Currently, processing high-level security clearances can take months or years and can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

That brings us to the second measure, which will support the establishment of this new security vetting capability for the non-government sector.

The government should establish a scheme to allow relevant students to apply for security clearances at the beginning of their degrees and to transfer the costs onto the low-interest HECS-style loans most Australians use to cover their university or vocational education fees.

This will mean essential technology specialists won’t have to wait for lengthy clearance processes before they can start their jobs.

As the Blueprint for critical technologies indicates, there’s an obvious range of tertiary and vocational programs that will be vital to achieving the national uplift required for Australia to meet its economic potential and security needs.

Australia’s burgeoning digital businesses demand new technology workforces to seize the opportunities of AI and new quantum information processing. So too will the AUKUS pact and Australia’s technology partnerships with the Quad countries demand an influx of new high-tech specialists into Australia’s growing national security community.

Allowing vocational, undergraduate and postgraduate students in these key areas to commence security vetting while studying will mean they can be cleared and job ready at the conclusion of their degrees. Importantly, such a scheme should involve agencies reimbursing students for their clearance upon commencing employment, since it’s a cost these agencies already cover.

A new HECS-funded vetting capability would also allow private businesses and universities themselves to provide security clearance scholarships and create their own pipeline of vetted research and professional staff.

Importantly, the influx of cash from HECS-funded vetting applications could be used to fund desperately needed innovation in Australia’s approach to security vetting; the adoption of new open-source intelligence methodologies is an obvious area for improvement. An even healthier innovation fund could be generated if universities and relevant businesses can opt to pay more for faster clearances.

Establishing a new security vetting capability for the non-government sector is also urgently required to address a perverse shadow employment market that has arisen out of the current model. Currently, Australians with top secret clearances can command rapid promotions or high salaries for jobs that they’re not strictly the most qualified candidate for but which they get because of the prohibitively long time it takes to clear a new employee from scratch. An additional avenue for building security-cleared workforces within universities and businesses will help alleviate this problem and mobilise Australia’s world-class researchers to the most pressing economic and security challenges we will face.

Developing a national intelligence threat assessment for Australia

In a previous article, I talked about Australia’s changed threat environment and recommended that the government produce a national threat assessment with both classified and publicly accessible versions. In this follow-up, I’ll focus on what the process for developing such an assessment would look like.

The benchmark for a national threat assessment is set by the US’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Notably, the leadership and enterprise management role of Australia’s Office of National Intelligence (ONI) was modelled on the US office.

The release of the US intelligence community’s annual threat assessment is always keenly anticipated. Like the ones before it, the 2021 report is an ‘all threats’ assessment and includes foreign threats such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, as well as transnational threats such as terrorism, cyberattacks, pandemics, climate change and organised crime. (It shouldn’t surprise anyone that China is clearly identified as the US’s most significant threat.)

It is a whole-of–US intelligence community threat assessment that is written as an all-source classified document, then declassified for public release. It’s also accompanied by the public testimony of the director of national intelligence at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While the 2021 unclassified document is only 27 pages, the US government also ensures that it’s readily digestible for time-poor or alternate learners by making a graphics-based version available.

An Australian equivalent process would be for the director-general of national intelligence to lead an annual whole-of–national intelligence community (NIC) process by developing an all-source classified national threat assessment for delivery to the prime minister and the cabinet’s National Security Committee for them to then develop national security strategy and risk assessments.

This document would then be ‘sanitised’ and made unclassified so it could be tabled in parliament by the prime minister and be presented by the director-general of national intelligence as public testimony on the threats Australia faces to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.

It would also be posted on ONI’s website for public access (there are currently no intelligence assessments on the agency’s public website). It’s important that this process be, and be seen to be, apolitical and be accompanied by a public information campaign.

A publicly releasable national threat assessment would ensure the public understands all the threats to Australia’s national security, not just the threat from China, and therefore why the government devotes the resources it does to the departments of Defence and Home Affairs and the NIC.

Currently, if you want to know about threats to Australia, other than the domestic threats of terrorism, espionage and cybercrime, you must go to a US document and translate them to an Australian viewpoint, or rely on think tanks, academia or the media to do it for you with all the attendant risks.

How to make an all-source classified national threat assessment unclassified for public release? Well, not all intelligence collected by the NIC, and the Australian Defence Force’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability on its behalf, is classified to begin with. Indeed, much of it is already drawn from publicly available information sources which is then fused with information collected through secret means.

Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, is already a key collection and analysis discipline—just like signals, human and geospatial intelligence—and has much to offer the national threat assessment process.

Within government, ONI already operates the Open Source Centre, which ‘collects, interprets and disseminates information relating to matters of political, strategic or economic significance to Australia’. Outside government, there are several commercial providers that already work closely with government by providing OSINT products and services.

On the more technical side of things, space-based imagery collection is also no longer the sole remit of government. Commercial vendors now operate satellites capable of capturing high-quality unclassified imagery by night and day in all weather. Radio-frequency transmissions—effectively open-source signals intelligence—are also collected by several commercial satellite operators.

Think tanks and online investigators already very effectively use these commercial sources to support their work, so why not the NIC in the development of the public version of the national threat assessment?

So, because OSINT is already used in agencies’ intelligence processes and products, a good proportion of the classified national threat assessment will already actually be unclassified. The next part of the process will be sanitising secret sources and methods down to unclassified.

Basically, when sanitising secret intelligence, NIC analysts will be able to use publicly available information and OSINT from a variety of sources and methods as a guide as to what is and is not classified and then make conscious decisions about what to include in the public version and what to keep secret. In addition, not all of the detailed ‘evidence’ needs to be made public; sometimes only the broad assessment will be made public because the evidence can’t be.

A move towards developing an annual, apolitical, publicly available national threat assessment, rather than ad hoc speeches and ‘announceables’ made by officials and politicians, would both inform and focus the public. This process would normalise the strategic threat conversation and hopefully reduce the media hype that tends to accompany such announcements. The assessment would be developed by intelligence professionals and delivered to the public through the parliament and its committee processes.

While a national threat assessment should go hand in hand with an ‘all hazards’ national security strategy, which Australia last produced in 2013, this is a separate but important debate. It needs to be stated, however, that a national threat assessment is not reliant on a national security strategy, though a national security strategy would be reliant on a national threat assessment.

An annual all-threats assessment process that produces both classified and unclassified threat assessments for Australians by Australians will enable the Australian public to be properly informed of the significant 1930s- and 1940s-like changes in Australia’s strategic environment—and prepare accordingly.

Tag Archive for: National Security

Rudd and Shearer aren’t enough. Washington needs to see more Australian heavy hitters

We need more than two Australians who are well-known in Washington.

We do have two who are remarkably well-known, but they alone aren’t enough in a political scene that’s increasingly influenced by personal connections and therefore reputations.

The two are ambassador Kevin Rudd and the director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer. In dozens of meetings with officials, politicians, industry and think tanks in Washington on a recent trip, I repeatedly heard people mention Rudd and Shearer – but rarely other Australians.

What happens when one or both of those people are no longer in office? This country should systematically promote other people with strong reputations and work on developing more heavy hitters for the future.

Australia’s overriding national security issue is the risk that China dominates our region, establishes its authoritarian political system as the norm and uses coercion to extract what it wants from other countries at the expense of their liberty and prosperity.

While Australia must do what it can to look after its own security, we are much better placed with a strong US commitment to our region and to the alliance. It is therefore essential that our voice is heard in Washington.

Traditionally, a person’s access to US officials was determined mainly by his or her position, though reputation and contacts have always been important. But, even before the re-election of Donald Trump, reputation and contacts were pulling ahead of office as influential factors.

I saw in Washington in March and April that they were now dominant. My discussions took place in the usual departments and sensitive compartmented information facilities (known as SCIFs) but also in cafes, restaurants and bars. If you are a government official and work only 9 to 5 on Monday to Friday, on Monday morning you will be behind and scrambling to catch up.

Business these days is done everywhere all the time, and when it’s done away from the office, it’s more likely to be arranged at a personal level.

We are lucky to have Rudd and Shearer, who are well known by Republicans, Democrats and senior bureaucrats. They have both done excellent jobs in building their international networks over many decades, especially in Washington, the hub for international, security and defence debates. It shouldn’t be missed that both have spent time in think tanks and have diverse work experience across government and non-government.

Rudd is seen as a globally recognised, Mandarin-speaking expert on China. He also has great prestige as a past prime minister, which is a stronger factor in the United States, with its presidential system of government and respect for former leaders, than is generally appreciated in Australia.

Shearer is further elevated by being seen in Washington as the Australian official who is most nearly a national security adviser, a position that grabs attention in Washington.

It’s not his job that gives him this status, but his reputation for understanding global security issues. It isn’t hard to understand that we need to offer more than two people whom influential Americans are keen to meet, especially with Shearer based in Canberra.

Behind Rudd and Shearer, the bench is not deep. There are former and current intelligence chiefs, for example, who are listened to globally and have built strong relationships in the US intelligence community, including ASIO boss Mike Burgess.

Why do we have so few others of the status of Rudd and Shearer? The best explanation is the increasingly domestic focus of Canberra. Serving ministers and responding to a 24-hour media cycle is busy, urgent work. Talking points, possible parliamentary questions, Senate estimates, meeting records and minutes, reams of briefs absorb enormous resources.

I don’t exaggerate too much in saying that we’re incentivising the development of bureaucratic clones.

Yet we do have people in the public service with potential to become heavy hitters internationally. For the medium term, say, the 2030s and beyond, we should identify and begin cultivating them now, putting them in positions in which they can build reputations.

Foreign and security policy requires big picture strategic thinking, an understanding of defence, diplomacy, economics, politics and culture. People with this stature globally have worked through the major crises and twists of recent history.

They’ve built the confidence to be risk managers, not risk-averse. They’ve been mentored by the previous generation of giants. They’ve stood at the shoulders of influential leaders, ready to provide whispered sober advice at moments when an ability to see the forest rather than just the trees was most crucial.

They painstakingly earn their reputations, which then precede them through the doors into the most powerful rooms on earth.

We must identify those Australians who are already on their way to developing strong reputations – perhaps people in government but particularly in academia, business and think tanks.

ASPI is only one of several suitable hosts for the task, but we are also the only one with an office in Washington. Unfortunately, support for our DC office was cut in a government review of national security think tanks.

It’s poor timing to have fewer Australian voices and less convening power in Washington, which is why we aim to keep the office open.

One move that is guaranteed to deliver short-term results is for the next government to create a position of national security adviser. American officials notice that we don’t have one. So do friends in Europe and Asia.

All of our Quad partners, for example, have the role and they meet regularly, with no Australian at the table. In general, a job title may have lost its lustre in gaining traction in Washington, but the job title of national security adviser hasn’t.

Moreover, its lustre will stay with its office holder after he or she has moved on to other things.

So it’s a national priority: create people who, in an increasingly personalised Washington, are attractions not because of their jobs, but because of the wisdom for which they’re recognised. That’s what, and who, we need more of.

‘Evil’ silence from Canberra on threat to national security

They say silence breeds contempt but the reticence of the Australian government about national security threats is more akin to the quote attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer when resisting Nazi Germany: that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil”.

The government is not responsible for individual violent incidents across our cities, but it is responsible for informing, reassuring and protecting the public. Yet the current malaise of leadership is feeding anxiety and infecting the social cohesion that has stood Australia apart from much of the world despite decades of global terrorism and conflict.

Australia remained united in the face of terrorist plots from al-Qa’ida, attacks by ISIS, wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the malicious rise of China, and Russia’s war in Europe. But we are cracking; rising anti-Semitism and national fear shows domestic division is even more insidious than international incidents.

The government’s systemic abdication of responsibility, cloaked in silence and evasive justifications, is not a one-off relating to the caravan plot against Australia’s Jewish community but a troubling trend, exemplified by the tactic of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and ministers only commenting if asked by media and, even then, answering with non-statements.

Australians are not naive. We understand the need for operational secrecy in matters of national security and that classified intelligence should not be divulged lightly. But “operational details” cannot be a catch-all excuse to deflect legitimate scrutiny or hide truth.

Uncertainty breeds fear so governments must be on the front foot. Almost within the hour of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor, US president Franklin Roosevelt was instructing his press secretary to immediately inform the media. While not comparable events, the principle is key: keep the public informed and confident that its government is in control even in the most challenging times – even more important in the digital age.

Albanese’s refusal to address questions about the explosives-laden caravan, due to “ongoing investigations”, added to confusion, anxiety and speculation. A stonewalled public is not a secure one. Similarly, his reluctance to clarify whether he discussed China’s sonar pulse attack on Australian navy personnel in a meeting with Xi Jinping just days after the incident in November 2023, citing the confidentiality of diplomatic talks, simply resulted in doubt and more questions.

While discretion in diplomacy is essential, selective silence is inconsistent given the broad topics of leaders’ meetings, if not the exact words, are usually published, and suggested he just didn’t want to admit he had inexcusably failed to raise the matter.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s handling of the case of Yang Hengjun, the Australian arbitrarily detained in China, is equally disconcerting – failing to even acknowledge on January 19 Yang’s sixth year of detention, and previously insisting on being “constrained for privacy reasons”, despite Yang’s own desire for public advocacy. Hiding behind the veil of privacy appears less about protecting Yang’s interests and more about protecting the government’s.

This week marks one year since Beijing sentenced Yang to death so a comprehensive condemnation and demand for release is required. Similarly, Wong omitted to mention China in her readout of January’s discussions with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in contrast to Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya’s honesty that China was a central part of his meeting with Rubio.

Meanwhile, when asked about the US and European countries reviewing the security risk of Chinese-made smart cars, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said no such review would happen here as the priority was consumer choice. On that basis, we’d welcome Russian gas or perhaps Iranian nuclear know-how, not to mention that prioritising price now will mean consumers in the future will have few choices but Chinese-made smart cars.

The pattern of evading, ignoring or downplaying security threats is itself a security threat. It erodes public trust – and cynicism can quickly turn to conspiracy. It creates an information vacuum to be filled by conspiracy theories and speculation, leading not just to an uninformed but a misinformed public. And it has the potential to weaken Australia’s strategic position by reducing the confidence of our allies and increasing that of our rivals.

We’ve seen it before. The flood of illegal boats from 2008 and refusal to acknowledge pull factors created not only a backlash against illegal immigration but reduced confidence in legal immigration and emboldened criminal organisations. It was only by being upfront about the illegal immigration problem that confidence was restored in Australia’s strength as a migration nation.

Importantly, division is distinct from difference. Different opinions, including on world leaders or policies, are to be promoted as the basis of freedom of speech. But support for terrorist groups and acts of intimidation and violence are not free speech.

Our longstanding national resilience means the cracks can’t be papered over but can be resealed quickly by a government willing to lead, including with some good old-fashioned naked truth.

Image: © Thennicke 2016, Wikimedia Commons

Make no mistake, command and control will crush ASPI’s independence

For China watchers, there’s a grim irony contained in the 14 principles that former senior official Peter Varghese recommends in his long-awaited review into national security think tanks, released last week.

Fourteen was also the number of grievances the Chinese embassy notoriously unveiled in 2020 and that Beijing expected to be addressed if diplomatic relations were to improve – the 10th of which was defunding the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Beijing hasn’t quite got its way through the recommendations of Varghese, who is now chancellor of the University of Queensland. But the embassy’s champagne stocks may be a little depleted once its officials have measured his list against their own.

Beyond the impact on ASPI itself, there is a deeper danger in the principles, accepted by the Albanese government: the push to exercise more control over think tanks and to dampen the contestability that researchers provide.

ASPI was set up in 2001 precisely to contest the advice that the Howard government was receiving from the Department of Defence. We have since grown into a broader national security think tank that looks at modern threats ranging from cyber and disinformation to authoritarian abuses of power in places such as China’s Xinjiang.

We are recognised globally for our groundbreaking work on China – none of which is convenient to the government’s narrative of diplomatic stability with Beijing. The idea that the security issues ASPI has pursued independently – and often well ahead of national and global trends – may in future be given the thumbs up or down by ministers and bureaucrats is deeply unsettling. Yet the Varghese report recommends this command-and-control approach.

After delivering the 50-page report, Varghese then wrote an op-ed in these pages at the weekend responding to the responses to his report. This is ironic given his report’s criticism of “op-ed overreach”. The problem with Varghese’s insistence that we all just need a Bex and a good lie-down is that a veritable chasm exists between his rhetoric expressing support for think tank independence and the actions he’s actually recommending.

First, think tanks would have to bid against one another for operational funding. That sounds superficially appealing, but if two institutes are competing for a grant and one has been nicer to the sitting government, who is better placed? Not all think tanks will resist self-censorship when they know fearless critiques may jeopardise future funding.

Second, ministers and their departments would set priorities for research, meaning anything that didn’t match the government’s agenda or was sensitive could be discouraged.

If an organisation wanted to look at China’s political and hybrid warfare, or the rapid and opaque modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, this might not go ahead if it didn’t suit the government. The government’s response here went further than Varghese by adding ministers, not just department heads, as gatekeepers.

Third, the government will require government officials to sit on think tank councils, making them at least an observer during think tanks’ internal deliberations and perhaps even a voice to influence meetings. Again, the government’s response went further than Varghese’s recommendations.

This is inconsistent with the many other organisations that receive federal funding.

And while Varghese points out some entities already have government officials on their boards, he leaves unanswered his own question of whether they have had independence compromised. The answer is yes, a government official sitting on a non-government board likely has impact, including to censor criticism.

Fourth, specific federally funded research projects would be “co-designed” by bureaucrats, potentially putting guardrails on the researchers’ instincts.

The government gives grant money to the arts but nobody expects a bureaucrat to stand over the artists telling them how to stage a performance of Hamlet or do an interpretative dance.

Finally, there is the shutting of support for ASPI’s Washington office. Here, Varghese appears simply not to understand the role of think tanks’ overseas offices – saying it’s a problem “having ASPI freelance”. Freelance is a synonym of independence and, to be clear, we are independent and not there to push the views of the government of the day.

We are there to foster debate on issues that are important to Australia and its people, such as Indo-Pacific security and global rules. This has long-term value.

ASPI is known and respected across the political aisle in Washington for its nonpartisan and hard-hitting work, with many in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, including incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio, citing our research numerous times.

So it makes zero sense that the Australian government would narrow rather than expand Australia’s options for engaging with Washington when the US is moving into a new Trump administration that will bring challenges for the Australian bureaucracy.

Varghese himself acknowledges that the kind of contestability ASPI was established to provide is essential and refers to our research as “groundbreaking”. Regrettably he also refers to our China research – on human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Beijing’s interference in Australia and other countries – as controversial. Let’s face it, it was controversial only in the sense that Beijing didn’t like it.

Some of this review’s recommendations are reasonable and welcome, but the problems at its heart represent an abandonment of principles that successive governments for more than 20 years have recognised and respected.

Still, ASPI believes in our mission to pour sunlight on security threats to Australia and to help improve understanding – whether among policymakers or the public – of the steps needed to keep ourselves safe. We will continue to build on our proud legacy – because this work has never been more vital.

Why we need a national security adviser

On 16 December the Canberra Times published a short version of Danielle Cave’s article that argues Australia needs a national security adviser. The long version of the article was then published on the ASPI Strategist on 18 December and is available here:

The review of Australia’s intelligence community that’s now underway—as long as it is delivered with ambition so it remains relevant years from now—is one tool that will help prepare the government to confront the speed of global change. In the current environment, maintaining a strategic and technological edge over our adversaries, remaining a sought-after and valuable partner that can keep pace with bigger and better-resourced intelligence communities, and attracting and retaining top workforce talent (for which industry is also fiercely competing) will continue to become harder.

Both the domestic and international stakes are higher for this intelligence review than the terms of reference let on, so the review’s output should be watched closely. But it likely won’t look at a gap in Australia’s security architecture that has been filled in almost all counterpart nations—a dedicated and autonomous national security adviser (NSA). An Australian NSA would report to the prime minister and speak publicly with a trusted voice both internationally and domestically on Australia’s most pressing interests and priorities.

Without such a position, Australia is missing out on a seat at the table at key global meetings, which provide the best opportunities to exercise the kind of influence we want, need and deserve. What’s more, the lack of an NSA means the government lacks an authoritative representative who can help set the tone and focus of our strategic communications across all international security issues.

Most countries—including our most important partners—have an NSA. These roles are as senior as it gets, often equivalent to a department head or sometimes even a minister. NSAs have the ears of their leaders, often travel with them and are always available for briefings and policy advice. Critically, most NSAs also maintain their own remits of policy work and their own busy travel schedules separate from their presidents or prime ministers.

On 20 December former Director-General of ASIS Paul Symon responded with an article on the ASPI Strategist titled ‘Yes, Australia does need a national security adviser.’ Head of the ANU National Security College also joined the debate in the Australian Financial Review on 27 December.

Image: United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his visit to Kyiv, Ukraine on 20 November 2023. Flickr

Continuing detention orders are a constitutionally valid measure yet we are choosing not to use it in the case of the MCG bomb plotter

Reports that convicted terrorist Abdul Nacer Benbrika might soon be released from jail should be of concern to all Australians.

Alarmingly, the release may happen without the court system even being asked to consider a continuing detention order.

Just three years ago, the then-Home Affairs Minister asked the Victorian Supreme Court for a continuing detention order, a vital last-resort measure that enables the Commonwealth to ask a court to keep a convicted terrorist behind bars after they’ve finished their sentence, on the basis that they continue to pose “an unacceptable risk” of committing further terrorist crimes.

The court agreed, deciding Benbrika posed an unacceptable risk. So what has changed in three years?

Is it possible that Benbrika has reformed such that any risk he poses is now acceptable? That seems highly unlikely, but if a new assessment has found the risk has fallen, the government would at the very least need to explain that shift to ensure public confidence.

So what else has changed? First, the governance arrangements, with the decision to seek a CDO shifting from the Home Affairs portfolio to the Attorney-General.

Second, the strategic and security environment. A few years ago, we were at the height of the Islamic State threat and there was enormous awareness of the risks of terrorism. The terror threat level in Australia was high, with terrorists planning attacks in and against Australia.

By 2022, the terror threat level was reduced from probable to possible. IS was degraded with its control over land in Syria and Iraq removed and capabilities severely reduced. The risk since last year, however, has been an increasing perception that the terror threat was not just temporarily reduced but had faded completely — even though ASIO head Mike Burgess was at pains to say this was not the case.

And we have made this mistake before.

In January 2013 the then Government’s National Security Statement effectively said the era of terrorism was behind us. Yet within the year, IS had risen.

The terror threat level was raised and we reached the alarming realisation that the security law framework was not adequate for this new era.

The control order regime — allowing authorities to put special monitoring arrangements on people of concern — was updated multiple times and new laws were introduced, including the continuing detention regime.

Of course, CDOs are a measure of last resort. The basic principle of justice is that criminals who complete their sentences are released, having received their punishment and, hopefully, a chance at rehabilitation.

But the evidence shows that some offenders remain simply too much of an ongoing security threat. Benbrika was one of these.

He had a proven ability as a leader who could inspire others and coordinate a terrorism plot, including a plan to detonate a bomb at the MCG during the 2005 AFL Grand Final. His failure to reform in prison, and his ongoing proselytisation of violent jihadism, meant he continued to pose a danger.

In the last couple of years, we have moved into an era in which other threats have risen and surpassed terrorism. Foreign interference and espionage were declared in 2021 to be Australia’s top security threats.

But Burgess has always been clear this doesn’t mean terrorism has disappeared. Yet we are now at risk of repeating our mistakes. Because IS and al-Qaeda are no longer on the front pages, we are in danger of complacency about violent extremism.

We saw this play out in March 2023 when the then Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, Grant Donaldson, SC — arguably stepping beyond his remit — said that CDOs were not necessary to counter the threat of terrorism and recommended they be abolished.

In doing so, the watchdog was choosing a point in time and misunderstanding the nature of the terrorism threat, which ebbs and flows.

The government is yet to make any response to the INSLM’s recommendation.

In fact, in recent weeks the Parliament has introduced a new preventative detention regime based on the terror laws to deal with the fallout of the High Court ruling that meant more than 150 non-citizens were released from immigration detention, some despite having criminal convictions.

This shows the folly of the original recommendation and shows it is unlikely the government will abolish CDOs altogether — all the more reason why someone as serious as Benbrika should not be released without a court even being given a chance to consider continuing detention.

In another significant development, the Hamas-Israel war has inflamed hatreds for which a firebrand like Benbrika could prove a combustible new accelerant.

Overall, we are proving to be a resilient nation, to the credit of our multicultural society. But there are extremists looking to incite hatred and violence.

Remember, just three years ago, a court found Benbrika to pose an unacceptable risk to society.

And yet the Commonwealth is not even asking the court to hold him further. What risk is there in asking the court the question it affirmed in 2020?

Surely less than the risk of releasing Australia’s most notorious terrorist into the community.

CDOs are a constitutionally valid measure that we’ve just seen used as the model for the immigration detainees. And yet we are choosing not to use it now.

If we don’t use it for someone like Benbrika, when would we use it?

Image: Abdul Naser Benbrika planned to detonate a bomb at the MCG during the 2005 AFL Grand Final. Herald Sun 2023