Page 56 - Australian Defence Magazine March 2019

SECURITY
INTELLIGENCE
Australia’s new intelligence realm
Intelligence sharing between agencies focuses on a number of areas.
PATRICK WALTERS | CANBERRA
When our intelligence chiefs look at the external challenges facing Australia they generally nominate the three “C’s”—China, counter-terrorism and cyberspace—as their primary focus.
WHILE counter-terrorism remains a top priority, China’s rise, including its growing espionage and influence operations in Aus- tralia, are drawing ever more attention and resources across the whole of our national intelligence community.
The China challenge together with the continuing sharp focus on counter-terror- ism and the new emphasis on the rapidly evolving realm of cyberspace, have all helped drive the biggest overhaul of the Australian intelligence community in over 40 years.
The establishment of the Office of Na- tional Intelligence (ONI)—it officially came into being on 20 December 2018— coincided with the coalition government’s decision to create a powerful Home Affairs portfolio. Home Affairs has now brought Australia’s domestic security agencies, in- cluding ASIO, under a single minister. Taken together the changes amount to the
biggest shake-up of our intelligence com- munity since Justice Hope’s landmark Roy- al Commission in 1977.
As Australia’s peak intelligence agency, ONI sits at the top of the national intelli- gence community. Its core mandate is to re- port and assess “international matters that are of political, strategic or economic signif- icance to Australia.” ONI’s evolution from the former Office of National Assessments (ONA) was the key recommendation of the 2017 Intelligence Review commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull and conducted by two former top public servants Michael L’Estrange and Stephen Merchant.
As Prime Minister Turnbull had ex- pressed unhappiness about ONA’s prod- uct—notably it’s assessments on China— and the lack of timeliness and relevance of its reports for government policy-makers. He was also concerned about the differing
assessments he was getting from individual intelligence agencies and the inability of the loosely-federated Australian intelligence community to speak with one voice.
L’Estrange and Merchant found that while the individual intelligence agencies were performing well with high levels of professionalism, there was a need for much stronger top-level co-ordination of our intelligence agencies similar to the model adopted by Australia’s two closest Five Eyes intelligence partners, the UK and the US.
The Review argued that Australia’s intel- ligence organisations were facing “imposing challenges” which would intensify over the coming decade and that “the Western as- cendancy in international institutions and values that characterised the second half of the twentieth century is eroding.”
In 2019 the strains on the “rules-based global order” are manifest. Key assumptions
56 | March 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
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