Australia urged to create national security strategy as foreign interference and cyber risks escalate

The 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) underscores the complex and dangerous world in which Australians now live. Big changes in regional and global policy are still working themselves out with unpredictable results.

The government now has a two-year cycle for releasing the NDS, rather than through irregular Defence White Papers.

But our national security goes beyond Defence: it’s not just about bombs and bullets. Threats or hazards may come from unexpected sources. We’ve seen evidence of recent state efforts with respect to sabotage of submarine cables and unwelcome foreign interference in domestic political processes by China and Iran. ASIO has foiled 14 terror plots since Bondi. But we aren’t just facing rising terror risks.

Foreign governments, ASIO chief Mike Burgess says, are pursuing interference in Australia at extreme levels. This is now a first order national security threat.

Before wars are fought on battlefields, they are almost always fought in information spaces first. It’s called political warfare, an area largely vacated by Australia and fellow democracies.

Effective national security relies on a multitude of departments, agencies and increasingly, business, in a network of collaboration. There’s now a greater blurring between domestic and international security spheres, whether it be from data theft, border security or the growth of serious and organised crime and cyber threats.

As threats become increasingly interlinked, joining forces across government has become a necessity. That’s why the Home Affairs Department and the Office of National Intelligence were created; to take a more holistic approach to national security.

Australia currently lacks an officially approved national security strategy. Kevin Rudd as prime minister released the first national security statement to the Australian parliament in 2008 – but this wasn’t a strategy. It was basically a list of potential horrors, not a careful risk assessment that would help priority setting.

That was the year smartphones first made an appearance in this country. Rudd even went as far as including response mechanisms to catastrophic natural disasters in Australia. Threats weren’t listed in any order of priority.

Julia Gillard in 2013 launched Australia’s first national security strategy. Her strategy underplayed the risks in our environment naively by prematurely pronouncing that we had a “positive” and “benign” security outlook and were at the end of the “9/11 decade”.

That was an epoch marked by the constant threat of terrorist attack. To be fair to Gillard, her strategy did broaden the concept of national security to include issues like climate change, demographics and fragile states. But Gillard’s mistaken judgment that Australia faced a benign security outlook led to a lowering of priority to drive coherent national security policy.

Thirteen years later, we need an Australian national security strategy to prioritise security policy at the national level and to articulate a vision of the new security environment in which Australia operates. Managing national security without a strategy is a recipe for an ill-co-ordinated response to emerging threats. Many of our political leaders prefer to keep security policy informal. But it’s not just all about issues management.

Rather, we should be developing conceptual and functional coherence across levels of strategic orientation, security doctrine, strategy and defence planning. We should identify our security priorities over the next five years.

The lack of an explicit national security strategy hinders our ability to adapt to Australia’s ever-changing security environment. Such a security strategy should address the assumptions of our national security, and the challenges and opportunities facing us both externally and in the domestic arena, where there are increasing threats to our national resilience.

A strategy would set out our security objectives that should align with our basic national values. It would categorise threats and challenges by severity and map out alternative means to address them. A new national security strategy would need to be designed to ensure continuous reassessment in the face of an ever-changing national security landscape.

In a nutshell, the national security strategy would clearly lay out our national security interests and goals for the coming years in a coherent manner. It shouldn’t just be a “cut and paste” from existing security documents. But it should draw on key high-level guidance, such as the 2026 NDS, to set out the remit of our national security interests and identify the risk factors within the national and international security environment to Australia. It can’t just be a “going through the motions” exercise.

Such a strategy would enhance community confidence in the government’s approach to national security. A first step would be to appoint a national security adviser, together with a committee of seasoned security practitioners, to help streamline the collaborative process of preparation and implementation of the strategy.

When Tony Abbott became PM, the position of national security adviser disappeared: this was a bureaucratic, not a political choice. Departments and agencies did what they always do – fight each other over money and turf.

The only institution that drew the elements of national security together was the National Security Committee of cabinet. But the capabilities and interest of ministers at that table was, and remains, variable.

Now is the time for Australia to prepare its second official national security strategy and be prepared to issue them on a regular basis like the NDS. 

To fix this situation, a national security adviser position should be recreated. It needs to be a senior secretary-level position to have any cut-through in Canberra.

Publishing a national security strategy would follow a global trend of national governments preparing national security strategies. The US, Britain, Japan, France, New Zealand and Canada have all released such strategies.

But it’s not just about keeping pace with friends. The interconnectedness of security issues requires the government to take a joined-up approach in managing its response. That would be helped by an overall national security strategy and it would provide our government with an anticipatory view of national security.

At present, there’s a plethora of government strategies on “national security”, from high level foreign and defence papers to documents on AUKUS, cyber security, artificial intelligence, energy security, counter-terrorism and critical infrastructure resilience.

ASIO produces Australia’s Annual National Threat Assessment. But what’s lacking is a framework to integrate the spectrum of contemporary security challenges.

A national security strategy could assist in the political assessment of the vulnerabilities on which to prioritise and direct resources. It would help develop a government-wide framework to promote greater co-ordination among relevant departments and agencies.

Although the federal government bears responsibility for national security, such a strategy should also consider the vital role of state governments, especially in areas such as defence industry, heath preparedness, counter-terrorism and protecting critical infrastructure. Local government bodies also make their own contributions towards national security, especially when it comes to protecting crowded places. Local councils are on the frontline here.

A national security strategy won’t eradicate all the threats we face but it can bring the various parts of the national security system to the table. It could assist the government to communicate its approach to safeguarding national security clearly and effectively.

Creating a national security strategy should be all about acting early and working together when it comes to our national security.

As noted, in practice, our political leaders prefer making policy up on the spot. It gives them more freedom of action and less constraint than when clear policy is written down. The problem is that we don’t get thoughtful outcomes from such policy freewheeling.

Now is the time for Australia to prepare its second official national security strategy and be prepared to issue them on a regular basis like the NDS.