Transcript

What is democratic resilience and why is it a national security issue?

Why is it important to preserve public trust and participation in the electoral process and what are some of the challenges to this?

Apart from voting, what are some other ways that Australians can engage in the democratic process?

What challenges do big tech companies, mis- and disinformation, and AI present in this digital age?

In this episode Tom Rogers joins Tim Wilford to discuss the importance of democratic resilience in Australia, the role of civic engagement, and the challenges posed by misinformation in the digital age.

(This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)

Tom Rogers

Truth has terrible marketing and what we're seeing is that lies swirl online. I think the research consistently shows that lies move about six times faster than the truth. And we need to make sure that the way that we're dealing with information keeps up with that and continues to support that great electoral and democratic architecture I spoke about as the optimistic bit. So I do think we're well positioned but we need to keep focusing on it. We can take nothing for granted and it needs a whole of nation focus.

National Security Podcast

You're listening to the National Security Podcast, the show that brings you expert analysis, insights and opinion on the national security challenges facing Australia and the Indo-Pacific produced by the ANU National Security College.

Tim Wilford

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm Tim Wilford, Director of the College's Community Consultations Initiative. We're recording this conversation on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Nambri people. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

Today, I'm delighted to be joined in the studio by someone special. A former Australian Electoral Commissioner who served from 2014 to 2024. He's now a member of the advisory board for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and the Electoral Psychological Observatory at the London School of Economics. But importantly, he's also a distinguished advisor here at the ANU National Security College, where he's currently sitting on the Advisory Committee for NSC's Community Consultations. That man is Tom Rogers. Welcome to the studio Tom.

Tom Rogers

Many thanks, Tim.

Tim Wilford

Now, democratic resilience is well and truly embedded in the lexicon of policymakers in Australia and the world over. Can you describe what it means?

Tom Rogers

It really has come from sort of nowhere over the last decade that people now talk about democratic resilience. I think it's important to put on the record it's more than just elections. Elections are a critical part. Good elections and safe elections are an important part of it. But it's about how we participate as a community in our democratic process, ensuring that its safe, protecting the participation of our citizens, ensuring that citizens have access to accurate information about our democracy and about our elections. and ensuring that we can make decisions based on accurate information moving forward. And there's probably a hundred other things that might be put in there, but for me, they're the critical things.

Tim Wilford

And can you explain why those things you've just described are a critical national security issue?

Tom Rogers

Well, all government and parliamentary legitimacy rests on free and fair elections. It's as simple as that, and the centrepiece, by the way, of that, Tim, is trust. People have to trust the electoral process. Now, to trust the electoral process, they need to understand it, and that electoral process needs to be driven by accurate information about the process. It's just so important that we have clear information and an understanding of that process among citizens.

Tim Wilford

And did that debate evolve much while you were in the hot seat at the AEC for the decade?

Tom Rogers

It fundamentally changed. You know when I arrived as the Deputy Commissioner, I think in about 2012, frankly, most election management bodies around the world were just about delivering elections, just we run a good election, that'll be fine. Because of the information environment, that fundamentally changed during that period. And now most election management bodies are involved in helping to protect the democracy in addition to running those elections. It's become so important for us.

Tim Wilford

And so, something that you regularly talk about is running an election, especially a federal election, is essentially the largest single peacetime logistical event in the life of a country. And so what are the electoral implications if Australia is now somewhere in the grey zone between peacetime and wartime?

Tom Rogers

Look it is complex, I know people probably don't think that. I've even had friends say to me, what a sweet job you have Tommy, A couple of weeks work every three years. And I know that the current commissioner and his staff will be getting you know, the same thing because there's a thing, Tim, called the Electoral Commission's dilemma, which is the commission makes the whole thing look so easy that people actually think it is. Whereas the reality is it's an incredibly complex thing, as you've mentioned. It's kind of like building a Fortune 500 company in four weeks and then dismantling it afterwards.

 So it is already complex before any other changes occur. And now that we're dealing with miss and disinformation about the electoral process, not just in Australia, but overseas, and that has an impact on us, it becomes more complex. And the commission has to focus on those things as well, on the information environment, not just operational delivery.

Tim Wilford

One of the ways we often hear defence leaders explain their job is as preparing Australia for worst case scenarios. So can you describe some of the contours of a worst case scenario for Australia in your line of work? And I'm thinking here these could be acute issues or chronic.

Tom Rogers

Well, I think, first of let me put on the record that Australia is incredibly well served by our electoral process, by the democratic architecture that underpins who we are. Really important things like compulsory voting, preferential voting, they have really protected Australia and led to really high levels of turnout, amongst the highest in the world. That's important in terms of protecting who we are. So those worst-case scenarios for me would be that citizens are so overwhelmed by disinformation or misinformation about the electoral process that they stop trusting the system. That would fundamentally impact on who we are as a people. Now I just, I don't want to make this boring Tim, but (its) really important for me to talk about this. I’m talking about disinformation about the electoral process. I'm not talking about what political parties say or what candidates say. That's the contest of ideas and they need to prosecute that. The worst case would be that Australians stopped trusting their electoral process. It would destroy democratic legitimacy, the legitimacy of parliament and government and would really make it a difficult place to live.

Tim Wilford

I mean, and on that note of trust, you know, the AEC is regarded as one of the most trusted parts of the Australian Public Service. What was your secret sauce while you were commander in chief? How did you strive to maintain that trust in the organisation?

Tom Rogers

Yeah, look we, you know, we had a few ups and downs over my time Tim. We started out not quite so good. We'd been on the back of a crisis with election delivery at the 2013 election. I knew what we really needed to do is to rebuild trust with the community, and there's two bits to that. One is we had to run good elections. So there was a huge internal process of professionalising election delivery and developing better doctrine and processes and systems and test events. We did all of that. But the most important thing was actually communicating with the public, telling them what we were doing, being transparent, letting them see inside the electoral process and owning it, never shying away from mistakes and making sure that people understood the process deeply and understood what we were doing on their behalf. That's the secret sauce and I think that's what led people to really trust the commission. We weren't, we were helped, when Australians looked at some of the elections that were being run overseas. They looked at that and thought, we don't want that, we're very happy with what we've got here, so there's a couple of things at play with that.

Tim Wilford

And so if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, it's sort of about demonstrating the trustworthiness of the organisation. Is that right?

Tom Rogers

100%. We developed a thing called our reputation management system, which is designed to obviously manage the reputation of the AEC. And the point you've just made was really interesting. The first version of that, we had all these things in it. I won't go through the detail. But I looked at it after a few months and thought, there's something missing from this reputation management system, and I had a deeper look. The thing we'd left out was, being operationally excellent. I'd kind of assumed it but the thing is you can't have a reputation to manage unless you're actually delivering a good event and you've got good mechanics underneath it. So you need to do two things, be competent, but also be able to explain what you're doing very clearly. It's not good enough just to be competent. And nor is it good enough just to be good at talking. You've got to be able to do both.

Tim Wilford

And are many of those things or all of those things that you're describing in your view replicable for other important national institutions? Or is there something special, unique about the AEC that made your case out of the ordinary, if you like?

Tom Rogers

I think there are many things that are replicable. I think particularly the reputation management system that we put in place and the courage to actually front up to the community and explain what you're doing and also take the bad bits of that as well. And we did that, I think, very well when I was commissioner. And I know the current commissioner is also very strong on that.

It would be wrong of me, though, not to talk about the advantage that the AEC had in this regard, which is an independent entity, and ministers and prime ministers can't tell it what to do. And so that adds to that sort of level of courage that you have that you know that you have to do those things. And you also know you don't have to get clearance to do those things. It's a really important structural piece for Australia's democracy that they've set up the AEC as an independent entity. I think it's one of the real strengths of the entire process.

Tim Wilford

Australia's got a rich history in democratic innovation. Very well documented in Judith Brett's book, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage.

Tom Rogers

It’s a great book

Tim Wilford

You read it?

Tom Rogers

 Yeah

Tim Wilfrod

I liked it as well. Do you think we should be more ambitious when it comes to democratic innovation in the present day? And so ⁓ I'm thinking here of experimentation in the digital environment, or things such as deliberative democracy and citizens' juries? Or is it better the devil you know? And should we be quite cautious about treading a different path or tinkering with the system, if you like.

Tom Rogers

There's a risk here Tim, that I'm going to sound like an old bloke that's trying to defend something that he's just done. But when I left the commission, I think the level of enrolment was well over 98%. I know the commission's continuing with that. Participation rates were high. Our legislation provides to access for voting for people in extraordinary circumstances it is unique, the amount of access to the electoral system. And having people involved in that, you know, 105,000 workers, they become like a democratic army as well. So that they're able to, in their own lives, tell the truth about the electoral process and deal with disinformation. So I think we need to be very careful about going down the digital path. The AEC over the years has innovated hugely behind the scenes. The back of house stuff is already cutting edge, and there are projects going on right now in the AEC to change some of the systems and to update them further. So I think that bit, personally, I think we should grab that system we've got and not change it.

Second thing you raised that was interesting about citizens' juries, there's a number of countries overseas that have experimented with that. I think probably most famously Ireland, and they use that citizen jury process, I think to help them with the same-sex marriage process, and possibly even the abortion debate. I think I might have that wrong so... There's a strong support for it in those countries where it's been used. In Australia, I've spoken to a few people behind the scenes and there's not strong support because people say we already have a citizens jury and it's called parliament, that's the big argument. I can see both sides, I guess what I would say is the information environment is amending and changing and adapting so quickly. We are going to have to be open to other ways of engaging citizens. I don't want to come out and say citizens juries is the way, but I think there are a range of tools that we need to look at in the future. We can't just put democracy in a box and say, it'll always be this. The environment's changing so much. And some of those things I think are very interesting.

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Tim Wilford

And I think you mentioned previously that voting is the centrepiece, if you like, of Australian democracy, but part of it is also about civic participation. Are there other ways that you think Australians could be engaged more in the democratic process that aren't necessarily those citizens, juries or? deliberative democracy practices for example?

Tom Rogers

Yeah, look, I think we were just talking before we came in, Tim, about political party membership. Globally, political party membership is plummeting, which I think is a real shame because when citizens are involved in parties, they're involved in that democracy. I think part of this is about civics education as well. The more civics education we provide citizens, the more we explain our system, the importance of it. We show what happens when the system fails. I think the more people want to get involved, which for me is a good thing. The more people that are involved, the better that is.

Tim Wilford

And we're talking here about students or, you know, everybody population wide.

Tom Rogers

Everybody.  The AEC does a great job, they run the National Electoral Education Centre, about 100,000 kids a year pump through that. They're doing a range of other things. I know the current commission is very keen on civics. I know up in parliament, they've been doing some great work with the Parliamentary Education Office amongst others. But we need to scale this up, I think, as well and get everyone involved, not just kids, but right across the board, from young to old, to give people knowledge about our electoral system and the democratic architecture of Australia.

Tim Wilford

Now, Tom, there's been a lot of discussion around some of the things that are causing this decline in trust globally. Technology and artificial intelligence and social media as well often comes up as one of the culprits. What's your perspective on these things?

Tom Rogers

I mean, you mentioned at front the Judith Brett book, which was a fantastic outlining of Australia's electoral history. And I think, you know, post the secret ballot in Australia, things were mostly calm-ish up until about 2013. And we're in this new electoral era at the moment, a new epoch of democracy and elections, driven by I think, social media and people's access to social media. So from my perspective, we're seeing technology really impacting on how elections delivered. But to be clear, miss and disinformation didn't start with social media or in 2013. Miss and disinformation have been with us since the very beginning of elections. There's a great story about, I think, Mark Antony was subject to miss and disinformation about his relationship with Cleopatra, which damaged his chances of becoming consul or whatever the election was that he was standing for.

But what we're seeing is technology turbocharging that in a way we haven't seen before. And I think AI is the latest part of technology. So I've been dwelling on this a lot. And I think I've used as an explainer three V words that talk about the potential for AI. So artificial intelligence, amongst other technological tools, is producing information at a volume we've never seen before. So there's always been disinformation. This is now potentially producing it at a volume we've never seen, at a velocity we've never seen before. So it's just so damn quick. And the last one is the most worrying V word, it's veracity.

 So it means that this information is becoming very hard to pick up what's real and what's not real. So we've got, if you think of a metaphor, it's the poor old voter in a little rowboat being buffeted by these waves with velocity and veracity and volume, and it's this sea of disinformation. So we're asking the voter to navigate this without much assistance. And I think what we need to do is to think about the impact of what technology is, how we can provide that assistance. And I think the assistance is through civics education, digital literacy, media literacy, all of these sorts of things that will really assist people make sense of the world that they're in.

Tim Wilford

And we're recording this in October of 2025, a few months out from the social media restrictions coming into place later in this year.  On the other side of the coin from media literacy and giving our citizens the capabilities they need to decipher and I guess wade through this very complex information environment. Do you think Australia needs to be more ambitious when it comes to how we deal with the tech titans.

You, I'm sure in your previous role had a lot of engagement with social media companies. So are probably quite well placed with regards to how they see their social license and what they think or don't think is their responsibility. Is there more work required in this space? Or do we have to take another path?

Tom Rogers

So I should put on the table here that these are my personal views. just very important, I'm not speaking on behalf of the AEC, I'm no longer the commissioner, nor am I speaking on behalf of the government. So, and these are just personal opinions. I think that the way the social media companies have interacted with election management bodies globally has gone through various waves. And at various times, they've been more likely to take down false information.

There's a whole range of issues associated with takedown in any case. Sometimes it actually creates the reverse effect from the one that you think. But it seems to be over the last couple of years, they've moved away from any of that. And it's very hard to deal with. It is very complex to get the social media platforms to change their rules in that regard. So from my perspective, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do that, but we should also do other things that are more likely to succeed. And we come back to that bit about about digital and civics literacy, which is so important. So it's not telling people what to think, but giving them the skills they need to navigate that information online, to make up their own minds. And that is better than just worrying about whether or not we're going to be able to fix the algorithm problem, because that may never happen. So I think what we really need to do is to focus on some of those issues. There's other stuff that people talk about as well. I might just wax lyrical about that for a moment, but...

Tim Wilford

please.

Tom Rogers

You know, you hear all sorts of solutions put up, things like censorship, labels on AI content, and people are genuine in their belief that that might make a difference. And they might be right. But from my perspective, there is so much AI-generated content that if you start labelling it, it's just going to become like wallpaper. And there's this implied truth effect. What do they call it? The liar's dividend? If you start labelling stuff, people think that stuff that isn't labelled must be true and the stuff that is labelled isn't true. It's a complex environment. And I think censorship itself creates its own issues. The thing to note, Tim, I think is that we haven't yet seen the catastrophic impacts of AI that people predicted. A couple of years ago when people first started using chat GPT and generating images, there was a prediction that elections immediately would be affected by this. It'd be a global issue.

You mentioned I'm on the board of International Idea and I do get to speak to global electoral commissions. People have seen bits of it, but not yet to the extent that we thought. So it's an interesting area, not yet at the end of its development and something we need to watch very closely.

Tim Wilford

And I should mention here, and you would know this firsthand as part of our community consultations initiative, we are asking people, you know, how their concerns rate with regards to different issues and, you know, disinformation is certainly one of those. So keep your eyes peeled for the release of that report early next year.

Tom Rogers

Well maybe I might be slightly provocative here Tim for a moment.

Tim Wilford

This is the place for provocateurs.

Tom Rogers

Righto, okay well. And none of this is designed as a criticism because there's some really good people developing great products out there on this stuff on miss and disinformation and AI generated miss and disinformation. Even in Australia academics and researchers, I know that Loey have done some good work on this with Lydia Cahill and some people associated with her.

And I just worry about labelling. I'll tell you why. Legislatures sometimes grab for labelling because it looks like they're doing something. Like it's the illusion of progress. We've done something, we've passed legislation and labelling is going to fix it. We really need to attack the deeper issue, which is giving citizens the skills they need to exist in this world rather than stuff like labelling.

Tim Wilford

Are there any ideas that you'd like to put on the table with regards to operationalizing those sorts of civic literacy, media literacy, digital literacy? Are there any things that you personally think have got legs for, like the governments could pick up and run with right now?

Tom Rogers

Well, yes, Tim, as it so happens. Look, two things, and everyone knows this, none of this is revolutionary. People talk about it all the time. So I don't want anyone listening to this thinking, my God, this guy's taking other people's ideas. The first one is we really need to run a national campaign on digital and civic literacy. And they exist, like the AEC has already got their stop and consider campaign. It's been spoken about forever. There's still no national digital literacy campaign. And the stuff that is occurring even at state level where some states are starting to change school curricula and putting that in.

This needs to be nationally driven and nationally coordinated and it needs to be big. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is probably one level up from that. At the risk of annoying everyone with ex-bureaucrat recommending yet more bureaucracy, we need a place where this is given a home.

 I don't know what it is, Tim. Perhaps it's a National Resilience Council or something like that where it is given the responsibility of driving activity in this regard because it's too fractured at the moment. It's not scaled. It's nowhere near where it needs to be in terms of coordination for the size of the threat that we potentially face. We've been lucky so far. You know, nine out of 10 Australians trust the AEC to deliver the vote and the levels of trust in government are generally higher than overseas. We can't take that for granted. We need to do some stuff now to protect that.

Tim Wilford

Well, look, Tom, I should have mentioned earlier as well, you've just come from delivering the opening remarks for our inaugural preparedness and resilience course here at the National Security College. So thank you for that.

Tom Rogers

No problems.

Tim Wilford

It was absolutely fascinating and a final question for you off the back of that presentation. Looking ahead to the future, noting the challenges we have as a country, what are the things that make you feel optimistic about the path ahead?

Tom Rogers

I think something we should all be proud of is our electoral process. It truly is world class. It's spoken about internationally and that helps Australians have their say. And as a result of that, because of the high levels of turnout, people feel more satisfied with our democracy as a result. So I feel really, really positive about that. I do think though that if...I take the other side of that question, which you haven't asked, which is what are the sort of problems with that? Truth has terrible marketing. And what we're seeing is that lies swirl online. I think the research consistently shows that lies move about six times faster than the truth. And we need to make sure that the way that we're dealing with information keeps up with that and continues to support that great electoral and democratic architecture I spoke about as the optimistic bit. So I do think we're well positioned, but we need to keep focusing on it. We can take nothing for granted and it needs a whole of nation focus.

Tim Wilford

Tom Rogers, thank you for joining us.

Tom Rogers

Thanks very much Tim.

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