Transcript

Why do Australia’s borders require a fundamental rethink? How can Australian governments build on the vision of Australia’s borders as a national strategic asset?  

How can new forms of border governance, such as the use of AI and advanced data analytics, be introduced without undermining public trust?

What should the border look like for industry, travellers, the pubic, international partners and those interested in conducting trade with Australia?  

In this episode, Mike Outram joins Sally Bulkeley to discuss the need for Australia to reconceptualise its borders as strategic assets, the threats posed by transnational crime, and the economic benefits of modern border management.

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

Mike Outram

If you look at the complexity of logistics supply chains, the importance of them for our economy and our prosperity and the reliability of them in this world in which we now live, which is far more contested, geopolitical competition, rules-based order fragmenting, globalization fragmented, I think that requires a different mindset about the borders of system.

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.

Sally Bulkeley

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm Sally Bulkeley, Deputy Head of the Australian National University National Security College. And today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and I pay my respects to the elders past and present. Today, I am delighted to introduce a special guest, Mike Outram, Distinguished Advisor to the National Security College and previous Australian Border Force Commissioner. Today's podcast will explore Mike's recently published paper titled Beyond the Checkpoint Managing Australia's Border as a Strategic, Economic and National Security Asset. This is available on the National Security College website. In this paper, Mike examines that Australia must re-conceptualise its borders as a strategic asset and modernise its governance systems and partnerships to manage risk, enhance resilience and embrace the unrealised economic benefit that come from our enhanced border management. Mike, welcome to the National Security Podcast.

Mike Outram

Thank you, Sally, such a pleasure to be here and thank you to the college for your support over these last few months writing the paper.

Sally Bulkeley

You're welcome, Mike. And I think in the recent media attention of late, we've been really pleased to be able to launch this paper for you and see the importance of border security.

Mike Outram

Absolutely, and maybe I should have called it Beyond the Headlines rather than Beyond the Checkpoints.

Sally Bulkeley

I don't disagree. For our listeners out there, borders can be quite an ambiguous term. It would be great if you could paint a picture for everyone on what is meant by borders and how it's applied in your paper.

Mike Outram

It's a really good question and it goes to the heart of the paper and the title of the paper. For most people, understandably, a border is a smart gate where you put your passport in or it's the border force officers in the kiosk or it might be your customs declaration. And that's understandable, that's your lived experience with the border. Behind that is an incredible system. It's geographic, obviously, we've got 33,000 kilometres of coastline and of course the border though is a system that connects us to the world.

And that's really important. It allows us to travel, it allows us trade and of course movement of goods and finance and those sorts of things. But it's also a system that transmits risk into our economy and our community. So it's incredibly important for our prosperity and our security.

Sally Bulkeley

And of course, Australia is a maritime nation and similar to the UK. I think looking at your extensive career, more than four decades in the UK and in Australian law enforcement, including as commissioner to the Australian Border Force, what first made you realise that Australia's borders required a fundamental rethink?

Mike Outram

Yeah, so an interesting inflection point for me. Of course, when I became the commissioner, I was very focused on the organization, the culture and those sorts of things. And some of your listeners might remember the Australian Federal Police run an operation called Ironside. It was such a novel covert operation at the time and they worked I think with the US FBI and other international partners covertly. And they collected a lot of intelligence. I won't go into all the details, but they collected a lot of intelligence we hadn't seen before, which confirmed what we'd always worried. And that was that the Australian border had been quite significantly infiltrated in our ports and airports by criminals. So I took 100 officers offline for 12 months to probe that problem. And we identified about thousand people and hundred companies that were of deep concern.

Moreover, we identified, of course, about 43 ports around the world that were of concern. So we took the problem to the World Customs Organisation. Long story short, we did a joint operation not only with 43 other countries, but also with industry, some of the big shipping lines who gave us access to data, visibility, in other words, of their supply chains we hadn't seen before. In a six-week trial, we seized 100 kilos of cocaine that wouldn't have been previously seized. So that, to me, was a light bulb moment that we cannot just continue to target risk in a very narrow, solid way the way that we were, either within Australia or across government, with industry or internationally.

Sally Bulkeley

That's an incredibly extensive intelligence investigation that took place there. And no doubt there were a series of threats posed as part of the assumptions regarding how you would come to conclude a fundamental rethink of the borders.  Last week in the podcast with Rory and Heather Cook, the head of ACIC, she mentioned in her ACIC report, there is an $82.3 billion liability when it concerns serious and organised crime. So you have a partner there also that's advocating for the need to look at how we manage serious organised crime. What kind of threats most clearly demonstrated that traditional border controls were being bypassed?

Mike Outram

Yeah, there's a number. And what concerns me the most isn't necessarily the dramatic headlines, although of course we can go to tobacco straight away.  I think that illicit tobacco and e-cigarettes is a current case study in why things need to be re-examined. And the size of that particular market, the illicit market, is between 5.7 and 8.5 billion Australian dollars a year. And that's as estimated by the illicit tobacco commissioner. So let's assume that a fair amount of that is retained profits by organized crime. And the question on my mind is, but how are they laundering that money? And now we have the advent of cryptocurrency and digital finance. And there are a lot of questions here that we don't have answers to. For example, trade-based money laundering. And trade-based money laundering is really about the obfuscation of trades so you undervalue, overvalue, misdescribed, conceal origin of goods.

So if you can use cryptocurrency to purchase goods and import them legitimately into Australia or other countries, you've laundered the money and the trade looks normal. So there are a couple of examples and then increasingly – and people would have heard Mike Burgess in his national security briefings that he does every year talking about how state-sponsored activities now becoming blurred where some countries are using organized crime as their foreign intelligence services.

In Europe in particular, heads of intelligence agencies have been making very public commentary about this. And so here you're seeing criminals being used as proxies by countries to carry out criminal activities with espionage and sabotage and things like that. And supply chains are important here. So there's a couple of examples. And then finally, the advent of things like containerized weapons systems. And this is all available online. If you look at the Club K system that Russia has had since about 2010. You're talking about missile systems hidden within sea containers and then of course embedded within what looked like legitimate cargo lines, shipping lines, supply chains. So these threats make it very hard for traditional targeting that's looking for drugs, that's looking for firearms in particular containers at particular ports. It makes it very hard to do that based on, let's say, just x-ray screening. So screening is an important tool of border agencies, but you can't screen enough. And so you have to get much better at targeting. And that means you need data, you need intelligence, you need more information, and that creates complexity and that creates difficulty if you do in silos.

Sally Bulkeley

And there appears to be a broader complex backdrop here when it comes to transnational crime. And certainly last year we heard Commissioner Krissy Barrett, AFP Commissioner, expressing the different scales and complexity of both digital and physical transnational crime, particularly within our region. We heard Mike Burgess at the ASPI launch also uncover the complexities of transnational crime from foreign nationals into Australian homeland. And Heather Cook, during her inaugural ACIC address here at the National Security College, demonstrating how the convergence of the digital environment and the physical security side of our borders is highly vulnerable to these very sophisticated networks. Have these networks always been around or are they new? And how would we forecast how we manage these networks in the future when it concerns borders?

Mike Outram

I think they've always been around. If you look back in Australia, we've had a number of task forces, Trident and Polaris to name a couple in my time. Of course, I used to work at the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission when it was the ACC a few years ago. And those operations were very successful in disrupting groups. But what we've never done is solve the systems problem.

Sally Bulkeley

Yes.

Mike Outram

What we've never done is really understand what are the vulnerabilities that are being exploited and how. And today, when you overlay that world with technology, with social media, so criminals are able to communicate with each other globally through encrypted communication systems, they've embedded themselves in supply chains and in parts of the world own entire supply chains. They've taken over parts of countries. So that's new. And now where you've got this convergence with some state sponsored activities, that's new too. So technology is changing the game and I think it's changing in a number of ways including the way that criminal groups and networks evolve and work together.

Sally Bulkeley

So Mike, we've worked through the threat picture of borders at the moment and that tends to take the national security angle, but there's also a positive light to borders. There's an area where we can leverage the economic benefit of borders and you make a strong case within the paper that borders are now instruments of economic statecraft, but there's also wonderful opportunities here through a data-driven environment to really leverage and enhance the benefits of what the borders provide to us. When did Australia begin to feel the shift most acutely with economic statecraft, but when did you start to realise that there were economic benefits at play?

Mike Outram

It's quite a recent realization for me. When I made my press club speech, it was my parting speech at the press club when I was the Border Force Commissioner, I signalled some of my concerns in that speech back in October 2024. And at that time, that was before the re-election of President Trump.

It was based on what we were seeing through the pandemic where Australia, we were subject to economic coercion. You might remember barley, wine, lobster, or coal. We were subject to our connectivity with the world being weaponized to put political pressure on Australia to conform to other countries' wills. And now when you look at the world today, that's times by 10.

You know, geopolitical competition is the norm. People would have heard Carney’s comments at Davos a couple of weeks ago about how he sees supply chains being weaponized now. So the interconnectivity of the world that benefited us so much because of globalization and the rules-based order and trade and free trade and those things can now be a vulnerability for us. So visibility becomes really crucial in our supply chains.

That builds resilience and borders can give us that visibility. So it also helps us then work out where we can change if we need to in terms of our supply chains and trade and those sorts of things. But also I think in terms of resilience, the amount of data that's available now in the world that we're not making use of, IoT sensors in supply chains.

Industry is using this data all the time, you know, digital twins of ports and airports and so on and so forth. Our integrated cargo system, which is our single window for trade in Australia, 1.2 billion transactions a year, nearly a trillion dollars in two-way trade, 1.2 trillion in trade and services for Australia. So the border’s an important system, right, economically.

Sally Bulkeley

Yes.

Mike Outram

It's quarter of a century old. It's a mainframe. It does a great job. And industry love it because they know how to use it but it doesn't give government the ability to detect risk. You cannot plug those AI systems into it. You can't ingest more data into it. You can't configure it in a way that will be effective in this world to automate threat and risk detection, to understand where the efficiencies might lie more clearly for government, to ensure that policies are being implemented effectively. And you can get real-time feedback from those sorts of systems on the effectiveness of policy. And so I think that there's a whole lot of arguments as to why a digital border would be so beneficial for Australia. And I'm just talking about trade.

Sally Bulkeley

Yeah absolutely.

Mike Outram

Imagine at airports where you've got combined domestic and international operations. Imagine the productivity boost you’d get from the footprint of an airport if you could combine international and domestic passengers. And you can only solve that problem with technology.

Sally Bulkeley

So I hear words productivity, technology, digitisation, transparency, providing visibility of movement of goods, trade.  In your paper when we start to combine those, they start to provide a picture of the borders being a national strategic asset to Australia and no doubt international trade activity as well. What's your vision for the borders as a national strategic asset and how can Australian government start to build on that vision?

Mike Outram

Well, my vision is that the border is regarded as a national capability in its own right. At the moment, it's really seen as a subset of either dealing with organized crime or a subset of particular modes like aviation or sea travel. When you think about the border as a system, if you look at it in those sort of fragmented ways, you're not harnessing its true potential value. So that's the first thing. See the border as a system as a national capability in its own right. And if you think about it in those terms and the value of the border economically and in terms of security, if you add all that up, then to have such a system and to not have a plan for it or to not have a vision for it, if you don't know what good looks like, I think that's got to change. There's a lot of money to be invested in the border by obviously by industry. You've got system users, system operators and taxpayers primarily. There may be others investors.

The way that we handle it at the moment through normal sort of portfolio budget processes means that every sort of six months we're trying to get new policy proposals or we're trying to get into the budget process within portfolio budgets. That's not a way to handle a system as economically important and as in terms of security it's important too to our country. And if you look at the sovereign capability funds like Future Made in Australia. If you look at the way that we work with industry, co-design, I think could improve dramatically. think procurement by co-design could be achieved. I think industry could undertake a lot of the functions that the government currently do and could be potentially commercialized. I think there's a lot of ways that we could look at doing things differently in the future that doesn't slow industry and travellers down, that gives government a better handle on risk and real-time risk and gives us much greater resilience.

So that improves prosperity, it improves security. So I think in terms of my vision, it's for as seamless and as friction-free a border as possible, where people hardly notice the border. And our ability to manage risk is exponentially improved.

Sally Bulkeley

And so we're moving from an existing input system, so to speak, at the moment into a suggested outcomes driven performance-based system that would have a means to an end for where Australia would like to envision itself in not only managing risk across the borders, but also in leveraging economic benefit as part of that cause.

Mike Outram

I couldn't agree more, Sal, and so it was a bit of fun. I've been spending the last couple of weeks trying to write an algorithm for board and management.

Sally Bulkeley

I'm not surprised one bit Mike.

Mike Outram

What's the outcome? What's the outcome is A, assurance. That's the outcome. And then when you break what assurance down looks like, what is assurance? Well, obviously visibility is part of that. How do you have – do we have good visibility now? You can break visibility down further. And then for industry, it's got to be cost down. So whatever systems government designs, I think that's why co-design with industry is so important. It has to be cost down.

So I think we can start to understand what a border looks like in terms of outcomes. Of course, it delivers safety, security and productivity, but I assurance is the key defining variable or factor for what a border should deliver.

Sally Bulkeley

I think that leads nicely into the paper's recommendation of a national border visibility platform. So the enabler to be able to realize the outcome focus performance-based system, to be able to gather this strengthened assurance system underway. How would shared visibility across agencies work through the shocks that we currently experience?

Mike Outram

Yeah.

Sally Bulkeley

Over the last 18 months, two years, Australia has really witnessed quite a few economic shocks, particularly as economic state crafts starts to rise as a coercive activity. But also there are a whole host of other concurrent shocks taking place as well that affect borders. How would a platform be able to withstand itself in both business as usual and in a crisis moment?

Mike Outram

So the how is a really good question. I've tried not to too prescriptive in my paper about how we should do this. I do, though, provide an example of a technology called federated learning systems. It's an example. It's not a panacea. And if you think about the challenges, we operate in a high-volume data-rich environment, and no single agency can see the full picture. And the risk today we've talked about. Federated learning allows machine learning models to be trained across multiple decentralized data sets without pooling everything in one place and whilst preserving privacy, legal control and data sovereignty.

So the practical example I use in the paper is in the medical industry in hospitals where you have private information and sensitive information about patients including digital images, diagnostic information, outcomes-based information. What they can do is share data that allows the system to learn without breaching privacy. And it's improving patient outcomes.

So as a principle, I think, well, actually that could apply to a border. So in a visibility platform, I'll give you an example. In the pandemic, don't want to talk about the pandemic because people start to twitch including me. But in the pandemic, almost daily, I was being asked, know, Mike, how many passengers arrived from country X yesterday? How many passengers with this profile arrived the day before? How many of this has happened in the last seven days? I had an entire team and they all know who they are if they're listening here. They were having to get their almost their rulers and pencils out to constantly provide data that the government needed through Prime Minister and Cabinet. Constantly. A broader of visibility platform would give the central departments that visibility immediately.

They just have to ask the question of the system. That's what I'm talking about. It allows all system users, not just the border force, not just biosecurity, not just the AFP, you've got Austrac and others, and national emergency management when they need it, a national coordination mechanism when they need it, because we're in crisis. The system can be used for multiple different things. And in the pandemic, this visibility platform would have made our life a lot simpler, believe me. I'd have had those sort of 20 or 30 people doing other things than constantly manually pulling data out of systems to answer questions that the government needed answered.

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Sally Bulkeley

Mike, what you're describing there as part of the recommendation for the platform, it's quite a sophisticated network in comparison to what currently exists. And it would pose the introduction of AI and advanced analytics. How would we work through the social license dimensions of that? AI can have the effect of mistrust across the community. It can data privacy as well and people wondering how their data is being used. How do we introduce AI and advanced analytics at the border without undermining public trust?

Mike Outram

It's a really important question and when I was having the paper peer-reviewed, this is one of the areas that one of my reviewers asked me to focus on because they felt I hadn't sufficiently attended to it in the earlier drafts. And I agreed immediately that building legitimacy before expanding capability, particularly talking about AI and people being concerned about surveillance and what these systems are doing behind the scenes, transparency and I had a look at what research has been done around social license, particularly around border systems and there's not much. We do a lot around social cohesion and those sorts of things but not so much about the border and I feel that this one of recommendations in the paper that we need to do some work in that regard to understand what is the appetite of the public for a system that the benefit is of course seamless travel or trade. There are significant benefits but you can't have that and not have a conversation about the automation and use of data behind the scenes. So let's take, for example, if you want to allow passengers, international and domestic, to depart and arrive in the same airport and the same terminal, there's only one real way of achieving that and managing security, and that's through biometric anchoring. And that's the reality. And so we have to have that conversation with the community to not only gauge what the social license is, but to build social license and have the conversation. And so that program of public research to assess the community perceptions and trust thresholds is a recommendation in the paper.

Sally Bulkeley

Thanks, Mike. And if I can take us to the steps on ensuring preparedness over borders management at the moment, National Security College at the moment has quite an extensive preparedness and resilience agenda underway, looking to build resilient communities that can prepare themselves for international and domestic shocks. And of course, regular national border resilience exercises to some degree already happen. With an introduction to more visibility platforms, with an introduction to the enhancements that you have recommended in your paper, what would be your vision for what those exercises look like and how they can build on the assurances that you've been talking about as part of this podcast.

Mike Outram

Yeah, it's an important area because I don't think we've done this particularly well in the border domain and I was the border force commissioner so I got to accept some responsibility for that. Before, I'll go back to COVID-19 again, I don't want to keep on using that as an example but it's a good one. Before the pandemic there were something, an exercise was conducted, the subject of the exercise was a cruise ship coming into Sydney during a pandemic. Pretty spot on in terms of the subject matter. It goes back to my earlier point about what people think the border is, because the border force and home affairs weren't invited to that desktop exercise. Yet when the Ruby Princess came into circular key during the pandemic, front page of the Australian, six or seven of my officers got the blame. And I've got to say entirely wrongly, but they got the blame for those passengers being allowed to disembark from that cruise ship and that caused obviously a lot of harm in the community. And that was obviously wrong. But subsequently that sort of fragmentation was called out by the Commission of Inquiry in New South Wales. And so I talk about that.

And when you go back to the threats I just described, we see submersibles, people would have read about submarines around the world being used by criminals to smuggle drugs, drone-type technology underwater.  We talk a lot in Australia about black flights across the top end. We've got containerized weapons systems that I mentioned, dual use cargo, crypto-enabled trade-based money laundering. There are so many scenarios that we need to test and tease out to inform our set, not just our operational settings, but our strategy and our policy settings at the border. And I think the border is such a vital system, as I've said, to stand in its own right, that some of those exercise should be designed around the border entirely.

Sally Bulkeley

Earlier in this podcast, we were describing to listeners that the threat picture posed by borders, while it feels emerging and it feels quite new, it's been around for quite some time. Would you agree that with these exercises, we need to both get those scenarios right, those ones that have been deeply trending as part of the risk exercises with borders, as well as future fore sighting, what risks might look like in the future.

Mike Outram

Absolutely. We've done quite a bit of work in this regard and people wouldn't necessarily realise it but when the ACIC review was completed, one of the recommendations was that the ACIC conduct a border threat assessment every year. And so when you think about that, what should the inputs to said threat assessment be? Obviously, you know, the key operational inputs from the Border Force and other agencies and data, but also thinking about the future and emerging threats is an important part of that. I think that's point A. I think we've already got some of the architecture there.

And also we have a lot of expertise in Australia, fantastic expertise around running, desktop exercising scenarios and those sorts of things. Whether it's in national emergency management, defence, AFP, we've got plenty of capability. It's just focusing them on this particular subject. I don't think we need to create something new. I think we just need to leverage what's already there.

Sally Bulkeley

That's a very thoughtful answer there, Mike. I tend to agree it's about the scenarios that are posed and the right scenarios and the concurrency of all of them put together and how cross coordination can be effectively realised.

Mike Outram

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.

Sally Bulkeley

And of course, the protection and the strengthening and the benefit of economics of borders not only impacts on mainland Australia, but on our international partners and our systems. How does a modernised border strengthen Australia's role as a trusted regional security partner?

Mike Outram

I think if you look at Australia right now in the region, we're respected and trusted as a security partner. We hear that language a lot, whether it's in terms of our security agreements with other countries in our near region, South Pacific, PNG, you know, there's a number of security agreements that we have in place. We have a lot of comprehensive strategic partnerships, some of which have underlying security pillars. We have the quadrilateral, the quad arrangements. We have the now AUKUS.

And so I think that our ability to influence and shape the environment in which Australia geographically sits is important. And if we don't, we lose the ability to set standards.

And standards will be set for us. So our leadership then in terms of its capability of development, working with our near partners, using our colleges, our expertise, our influence basically in our region because we know that our security is going to start at our coastline I think is undermined if we lose that edge. And Australia is regarded as being a thought leader in border management, believe me, I can tell you that because I was, and I'm sure the government also would say the same thing. And that's great that we're regarded as that, but when you look at the systems that we've got in place now, they're not world leading, far from it. We're sort of falling behind.

When the integrated cargo system was introduced in about 2004 or 2005, it was a world first almost as a single window system. We're still relying on the same system. And so I think we're resting on our laurels a little bit and we will lose influence ultimately if we don't modernize our systems.

Sally Bulkeley

And just to extend on that,  the report does discuss treating the border as a sovereign capability. How do you find the balance of the sovereign capability as well as open for trade, open for movement of goods and services and the flexibility with international partners, particularly in a global order at the moment when many minilateralisms are taking place, many bilaterals are being agreed to. How do we bring sovereign capability and our ability to conduct trade flexibly together to balance on borders?

Mike Outram

It's the role, I think, that industry play. I think that we have to shift the relationship between government and industry in a number of ways. And I've been, I've, what, 18 months now since I left public service, I'm advising a number of many technology companies, but not just technology companies. And I've learned a lot. But also being on the other side, if you want to call it that, you see the difficulties that industry and commerce face. And I think that co-design around the border is crucial. I used to say this in the border force, you we've got to move away from the idea that we bolt on our regulatory apparatus to what industry is doing. We have to be using the same data. So a really simple example, new and emerging airports. It wasn't until recently, it was until very recently, I beg your pardon, we were insisting that they install two CCTV systems, one for the government and one for the industry. It's data. They're generating data, you know, and that's not unsolvable for humankind to make sure that, you know, that the border force can get what they need and AFP can get what they need and industry can get what they need out of the same system. So co-designing those systems becomes important. The way we screen containers, I see an argument for allowing industry to X-ray containers at the container terminal on behalf of the government. You could regulate that. You could exponentially increase the number of containers you X-ray by doing that. Different regulatory system and you'd have to make it cost down for industry. Worth looking at I'd say. So I think there are ways we can work with industry. Industry not the enemy here. In the day all of our super funds and our economy and everything relies on industry doing well. We don't want to slow industry down and I believe wholeheartedly that if we work with closely with industry, that we can manage risk better and we can get more prosperity for our country and we get better outcomes for all system users. I think that's doable with the right technologies provided we're getting on the ground early in co-design. So we might have to think about, I know in defense they've used procurement by co-design and principles like that. And I'd like to see us thinking more constructively in that regard, I think.

Sally Bulkeley

I think there's a whole ecosystem at play there in terms of the co-design, whether it's the users, receivers, regulators, whether it's those that leverage the borders already through economic benefit, those being state and territory governments as well. So I really appreciate the idea of a co-design arrangement. It makes it user-friendly and gives it utility.

Mike Outram

Absolutely, and it's one of recommendations in my paper that we establish such a panel to design the border strategy and not just with industry but also with academics. And what made me sort of think about that, Sal, was when I went with the college to Japan on an executive development program last year, and we had some wonderful briefings from the Japanese government counterparts, in terms of national security, they'd established an advisory panel to the national security advisor that was comprised exactly of that. Industry because they're trying to retool their industrial base for a lot of national security reasons, academia because they had a lot of insights to offer and some brilliant people who had some really amazing ideas and then of course government. So that's what really started making me think about, you know, there is a role here, a significant role, I think, not just for industry but also academia.

Sally Bulkeley

Mike, we're running out of time, unfortunately. There so much more to unpack in this paper over due course. But I do want to finish with a closing question on your vision. If Australia gets this right, what should the border look like and feel like for industry, travellers, the public, international partners, those that have interest in conducting both trade or economic benefit with Australia? What does that look like to you?

Mike Outram

So let's go to the Olympic Games in 2032. My hope is that by then, we do have a seamless border that's fully digital. No bits of paper. Where we're able to take our algorithms to other people's data, preserve sovereignty and privacy and all those things, and make sense of this very complex picture. And have much higher level of assurance, much less friction, and everyone is a winner because industries are winner, system users, travellers and traders are winners, and of course the government costs down. So I think that's all achievable. And so for me, it's a seamless, frictionless experience. But for government, it's got to be a high level of assurance that the system's doing what it's designed to do.

Sally Bulkeley

Mike, thank you for joining us today on the podcast. And we're really looking forward to hearing from you again at our National Security College Conference on the 24th and 25th of March. But before we leave today, are there any key points that you would like to offer the listeners about the recommendations of your report?

Mike Outram

So borders, I think, are seen by people primarily through the lens of their interaction with them. And traditionally, that's been handing in your passport, getting it stamped. More recently, smart gates or e-gates, as we call them, or filling in a customer's declaration. And that's fair enough. It is a very modal view of the world. And I think, to be honest, a lot of our policymakers and our colleagues across government still see it that way. And I would say that today, though, you look at the complexity of logistics supply chains, the importance of them for our economy and our prosperity and the reliability of them in this world in which we now live, which is far more contested, geopolitical competition, rules-based order fragmenting, globalization fragmented, I think that requires a different mindset about the borders of system. If we look at it just as being an airport or a container terminal, or a mode of transport or a mode of freight, I think we're missing the trick. And my call to arms would be from the paper that I would like people to approach the paper with a very open mind because of that. Throw away your preconceptions of what the border might have meant to you or currently might mean to you.

Sally Bulkeley

Thank you very much for joining us Mike.

Mike Outram

Thank you, Sal, it's been my pleasure.

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