Was Justice Hope wrong? Defence, diplomacy, and assessment in Australian intelligence reform

More than 50 years after commencing his first Royal Commission, Justice Robert Marsden Hope’s contribution to Australia’s intelligence community remains a point of almost universal acclaim in scholarship.

This article offers a more revisionist interpretation of Hope as an agent of reform, exploring the weaker aspects of his thinking about intelligence and their implications for the scope of reform today.

The focus is Hope’s pessimistic account of Australia’s intelligence assessment arrangements in the 1970s, which was overly critical of Defence involvement and failed to reckon with the analytical influence of Australia’s diplomatic service. Whereas much of Hope’s thinking still has value for the task of intelligence reform, his neglect of diplomatic expertise in the practice of assessment now impedes more creative thinking about the organisation of intelligence and its capacity to support Australian statecraft in the future.