Preparedness and resilience in an uncertain world
By Justin Bassi
In the week of Australia’s 3 May election, ASPI released Agenda for Change 2025: preparedness and resilience in an uncertain world, a report developed for the next government and to promote public debate and understanding on issues of strategic importance to Australia.
For the past decade, Australian governments and their observers have grasped for just the right term to describe our nation’s strategic environment and its direction. Challenging. Competitive. Complex. Accelerating. Dangerous. They’ve all had a run.
Now, in 2025, the choice seems somewhat clearer. That is, there is no choice to be made. To borrow a phrase from the ASIO Director‑General’s annual threat assessment address: it’s everything, everywhere, all at once.
ASPI’s job, including in this volume, is to see past the immediate tumult, properly define Australia’s defence, foreign and security policy goals, and help illuminate the path to reach those goals. When we talk about the challenges of sharpening strategic competition, we need to be asking ourselves: ‘For what are we competing?’ The answer is that we’re competing to shape the international system that, whether we like it or not, determines our national security, and ensure that it reflects our values and principles such as openness, sovereignty, respect for human rights, and economic competition on a level playing field based on agreed rules that are enforced.
With the rise of authoritarian and revanchist powers, shifts in economic weight and changes wrought by advances in technology, the world has outgrown the old system. We aren’t going back to the way things were. Australia needs to assert itself so that we’re part of shaping what comes next.
Unfortunately, our national political debate has not yet frankly acknowledged (beyond platitudes that the ‘world is changing’), much less begun to address, the urgency of the change that the world has already undergone.
As a US ally of more than seven decades’ standing, Australia has much invested in our relationship with the democratic superpower and, therefore, faces significant strategic disruption if the US departs from its traditional postwar role in the world. Consequently, Australia’s best bet is to help persuade the US to maintain its role as a leader in shaping an evolved liberal order consistent with democratic values, while also acknowledging the need for US allies and partners to invest more in that order, including through defence spending.
If the US is determined to pursue a different path, Australia’s ‘Plan B’ must be to invest heavily in our relationships with the rest of the free world—from Europe to Canada to North and South Asia—to find a collective that can wield enough global influence to ensure that our values are represented in whatever emerges as a new international system. ‘Plan C’, in which Beijing dominates our region and, increasingly, the international system based on the authoritarian values of the Chinese Communist Party, is untenable for Australia’s interests.
The competition to shape the type of international order that both empowers and constrains nations’ behaviour globally is happening whether we participate or not, so we should at least want to have a say in the evolving order and not just say afterwards that we don’t like it. Too many in the democracies, which have benefited from the longstanding order, have either taken it for granted or succumbed to the view that, because not all nations are democratic or liberal, we should stop acknowledging the liberal democratic rules‑based order. But our lack of acknowledgement of, investment in and enforcement of the democratic rules merely facilitates the authoritarian regimes that have set about destroying that order—whether through Russian disruption to create disorder or China’s rule‑breaking to position itself as the dominant power in control of a new authoritarian‑led system. Therefore, Australia needs to reconnect and recommit to the notion of values or principles focused on individual freedom and collective security. For more than a decade, which has included the 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022 federal elections, ASPI has helped to generate ideas and foster debate about Australian strategic policymaking through Agenda for change, which is a wide‑ranging collection of analyses and recommendations to assist the next Australian Government in its deliberations and planning.
In 2025, that means equipping the next government for the reality of the contest in which our country is engaged. It’s a contest amongst nations (and not just between the US and China) for global influence, in which we are not a mere onlooker, that has massive consequences for our prosperity, security and sovereignty.
We can’t afford to have policies that push tough decisions to future governments and generations. Our job, as set out in the following chapters, is to defend our own, uniquely Australian, way of life, including by increasing investment in defence and security and, in doing so, help to encourage the US towards its leadership path of democratic alliances and principles. That requires a recognition that the fight can’t afford to be between democratic allies and must be one in which we’re fighting for ourselves but through the collective power of alliances. That’s the only approach that will successfully reverse the recent successes of the alignment of authoritarian regimes.
We can no longer take for granted that an undernurtured alliance system will automatically outlast an overbearing alignment of authoritarian regimes. This is the fifth edition of Agenda for change. Since the previous edition, before the 2022 election, we’ve seen:
—Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine and public confirmation of the China–Russia ‘no limits’ partnership
—Change in Australia’s policy towards China, with a focus on ‘stabilisation’, accompanied by reduced economic coercion against Australia but a ratcheting up of military intimidation, including an unprecedented PLA Navy circumnavigation of Australia
—Heightened aggression by China against the Philippines in the South China Sea and against Taiwan
—A lowering of the national terrorism threat level to ‘possible’ in 2022, before it was raised back to ‘probable’ not quite two years later
—The 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, the resulting war in Gaza and an increase in politically motivated violence in Australia
—The rise of artificial intelligence, including the landmark release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and then DeepSeek in 2025
—The return of Donald Trump to the White House, bringing tension among allies and question marks over the future of the US‑led international order.
In addressing that extraordinary range of developments, we’ve drawn on a wide range of expertise for the 2025 edition of Agenda for change. The views expressed are the personal views of the authors and don’t represent a formal position of ASPI on any issue, other than a shared focus on Australia’s national interests.
Importantly, and consistently with previous editions, we use the phrase ‘the next government’, meaning the government elected at the upcoming federal election. We see this collection of policy recommendations as relevant to whoever occupies the government benches after the election and to the Australian Parliament as a whole.
Each chapter includes a limited number of prioritised policy recommendations, which are intended to be discrete, do‑able and impactful. Although, when dealing with some of the more existential challenges facing Australia, the recommendations are necessarily and similarly expansive.
The structure of this Agenda for change reflects five interrelated aspects of Australia’s position in 2025, focused on the need to defend Australia; navigate our place in a new world order; reform our security architecture and policies; secure our critical infrastructure; and protect and use our natural resources.
Agenda for change 2025 is a look at our present circumstances to determine our future needs, including—but extending beyond—recommendations for action, by identifying the right questions for ministers to ask themselves and their officials about the future, about the world, and about ourselves. It’s underpinned by a sincere belief in the value of, and our mission to provide, independent, contestable advice. All authors look forward to hearing from those who agree, disagree or just recognise that the issues raised here are of such importance that, regardless of one’s view, they need to be a focus of the next government.