Tag Archive for: ONI

Reviewing the intelligence reviews (so far)

With the report of the recent intelligence review by Heather Smith and Richard Maude finally released, critics could look on and wonder: why all the fuss? After all, while the list of recommendations is substantial, the review overall recommends only incremental change. To understand what’s happened here, it helps to reflect on the historical context. This article provides a review of previous intelligence reviews that predated this one and what they mean for today.

Two things to note upfront. First is the incremental and spasmodic shift for intelligence organisations from operating under often secretive prime ministerial executive edicts last century to operating today under formalised and publicly available legislation that can be scrutinised by practitioners, pundits and critics alike.

Second is the expansion in the number of intelligence organisations and the number and consequence of the various oversight mechanisms that have accrued over the years. These mechanisms include a range of parliamentary, executive and independent accountability oversight mechanisms as captured in the below diagram of the NIC Structure and Accountability Arrangements (compiled by the author). The end result is a range of government instrumentalities intended to provide accurate reliable and timely intelligence support to government decision makers coupled with parliamentary, executive and independent accountability mechanisms that are unmatched internationally. But first, let’s review how we got there.

World War II Legacy

The intelligence organisations that emerged following World War II were different from their wartime antecedents. Back then, the combined arrangements working with the United States under General Douglas MacArthur had spawned collaborative agencies in 1942 in which Americans and Australians worked hand in hand. The Central Bureau (for signals intelligence) and the Allied Intelligence Bureau (for espionage, or human intelligence, sabotage and special operations), as well as the Allied Translator and Interpreter Services and Allied Geographical Section are the better known entities. When the Americans left at the end of the war, though, they took with them much of the organisational apparatus, people and equipment behind these organisations.

Source: author.

Early Cold War Arrangements

The Australian remnants of these once combined US-Australian entities were gathered at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne until a post-war plan was formulated. By 1947 a national signals-intelligence agency, the Defence Signals Bureau had emerged; this was the precursor to the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). Also by 1947 there was an analytical arm, the Joint Intelligence Bureau, precursor to today’s Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO). By 1949 the wartime domestic security service was seen as unreliable and compromised. It was replaced by prime ministerial edict with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). By 1952 Alfred Brookes was commissioned to establish a foreign human intelligence collection agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). None of these agencies had any media profile to note.

The Petrov Royal Commission

The defection in 1954 of KGB officer Vladimir Petrov, and his wife, Evdokia, who was the embassy cipher clerk, was a major coup for ASIO and led to national and global headlines that put ASIO in the spotlight. A Royal Commission on Espionage followed which looked at espionage, but not at ASIO or other intelligence organisations. The commission was engulfed in controversy as the Labor Party saw it as a ploy launched by prime minister Robert Menzies on the eve of a federal election. As David Horner writes in his official ASIO history, The Spy Catchers, the truth was less dramatic. Yes, Menzies capitalised on the opportunity, but the defection was genuine. In the end, ASIO was placed under legislation. No one was prosecuted, because much of the corroborating evidence of the so-called nest of spies came from what was then a still highly sensitive source, decrypted Soviet diplomatic messages pointing to Australians supplying secrets to the Soviets. The ASIO Act 1956 followed. This was the first time an Australian intelligence agency was placed under legislation, although it would be some time before ASIO was made accountable to parliament.

The first Hope Royal Commission

Two decades would pass before another royal commission probed into the workings of Australia’s intelligence apparatus. In 1974 prime minister Gough Whitlam commissioned Robert Marsden Hope, a New South Wales judge and civil libertarian, to undertake the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security (RCIS). Hope reviewed the post war intelligence arrangements and recommended a series of reforms, most implemented by Whitlam’s successor, Malcolm Fraser. This included establishing the Office of National Assessments (ONA) in 1977 as well as pushing through parliament a revised and expanded ASIO Act 1979. A Security Appeals Tribunal was established and later absorbed into the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), recently rebadged as the Administrative Review Tribunal.

Protective Security Review

Shortly after completing the RCIS, Hope was tasked to undertake a Protective Security Review (PSR) in February 1978. This followed the explosion of a bomb at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Sydney, which coincided with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional meeting chaired by Fraser. Hope was not tasked to identify the culprit (the bombing was linked to the Ananda Marga sect), but his review led to closer coordination of intelligence and policing, both at state and federal levels, and the prioritisation of organising to counter acts of terrorism.

Second Hope

In March 1983, newly appointed prime minister Bob Hawke commissioned Hope once again, this time to review progress of the intelligence community (AIC) had made since Whitlam had commissioned him a decade earlier. The Royal Commission on Australia’s Security and Intelligence Agencies (RCASIA) coincided with revelations of KGB shenanigans with former ALP National Secretary David Combe, which led to the expulsion of KGB officer Valery Ivanov. The review was then expanded to also consider a bungled ASIS exercise conducted at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. In the public hearings that followed, Hawke took the stand and defended the efficacy and significance of Australia’s intelligence community. Hope subsequently recommended, and Hawke approved, the creation of an Inspector General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS), with enduring powers of a royal commissioner. The IGIS office holder still has these powers.

First Richardson, Holloway and Cook

Hawke’s successor as prime minister, Paul Keating, commissioned Dennis Richardson in 1992 to review ASIO and consider where a peace dividend following the Cold War could be harvested. Mindful of the searing cross-examination Hawke had experienced with the RCASIA a decade earlier, this review was managed behind closed doors and went largely uncontested. But it dealt with weighty issues, including reports of penetration by Soviet spies. It did so by downsizing and clearing out personnel. Also, Sandy Holloway was commissioned to review shortfalls in Australia’s foreign intelligence collection. A former director-general of ONA, Michael Cook, is widely seen as associated with internal security reviews as well. He would have been pleased with Richardson’s work.

Samuels and Codd

By the mid-1990s reports were emerging of further inappropriate behaviour in ASIS. Justice Gordon Samuels and Michael Codd were commissioned to review the matter and make recommendations. Their mid-1995 report proposed that ASIS come under legislation (as ASIO had in 1956 and again in 1979). This led to a drawn-out process as parliamentarians debated over how to respond. Reports in 1999 of a surveillance network run by the Five Eyes partners, Echelon, accelerated the momentum for reform not just for ASIS. Eventually ASIO, ASIS and the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD, later ASD) came under what would become the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS).

By the end of September, parliament passed the Intelligence Services Act of 2001. This saw ASIS and DSD come under legislation for the first time. In addition, the powers of the IGIS would come to cover all six agencies of the intelligence community. These were ASIO, ASIS, DSD, DIO, ONA and the nascent Defence Intelligence and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO), which later became the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO).

Flood

Following the East Timor crisis of 1999, the first Bali bombing in 2002, and a scandal revolving around the unfounded claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the former ONA director Philip Flood was appointed to conduct a fresh review in 2004. His Report on the Inquiry into Australia’s Intelligence Agencies identified weaknesses in the analytical reporting process and reinforced the need for separation of intelligence analysis from policy formulation. He also called for a bolstering of resources and a reinforcing of ONA’s central role of AIC coordination.

Cornall and Black

In line with a recommendation by Flood for periodic intelligence reviews, Robert Cornall and Rufus Black were appointed to conduct an Independent Review of the Intelligence Community (IRIC) in 2011. In addition to commissioning the IRIC that year, prime minister Kevin Rudd established the National Security College (NSC) at the Australian National University (ANU) and appointed an Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM).

AustraliaUnited StatesCanadaBritainFranceIndonesia
Overarching Inspector-General/Commissioner✓✓✓
Agency-specific Inspector-Generals✓
Ministerial oversight✓✓✓✓
Parliamentary oversight✓✓✓✓✓
Executive oversight✓✓✓✓✓✓
Independent reviews or bodies✓✓

Oversight and accountability mechanisms of Australia, compared with allies and partners. Source: author.

L’Estrange & Merchant

In 2017, a former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and first NSC director, Michael L’Estrange, along with a former Defence deputy secretary of intelligence and security, Stephen Merchant, were commissioned to undertake the next periodic review, the 2017 Independent Intelligence Review (IIR), aided by Sir Iain Lobban from Britain. Their review identified the expansion of the Australian intelligence community with the emergence of intelligence functions within the Australian Transactions Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the intelligence arm of the Australia Federal Police (AFP) and the intelligence function within the then Department of Immigration and Border Protection (now Home Affairs). This called for the renaming of ONA as the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), headed by a director-general of national intelligence (DGNI) with more resources and a remit to more closely coordinate and manage this expanded National Intelligence Community (NIC).

The L’Estrange Merchant report was written separately from the plan to establish a more expansive Home Affairs portfolio that would, in addition to ASIO, encompass the four latecomers to the NIC: AUSTRAC, ACIC, AFP Intel and Home Affairs Intel. This construct would in part be reversed under Prime Minister Antony Albanese, who returned ASIO, AUSTRAC, ACIC and AFP to the Attorney-General’s portfolio.

Second Richardson

After having overseen the culling and later rebuilding of ASIO, Dennis Richardson was called back to review the growing body of intelligence legislation, mindful that the Home Affairs arrangements had been announced at the same time as the 2017 IIR report was released. With a wealth of historical insights into the functions performed, in a lengthy report Richardson and his team outlined where significant streamlining of legislation would be useful.

And now Maude and Smith

With all of this before them, Smith and Maude, no doubt, would have realised that in conducting their Independent Intelligence Review, they were following a well-worn path of review and reform that’s been summarised here. The incremental and periodic reforms undertaken over more than half a century have seen Australia bequeathed an intelligence apparatus of state with high levels of accountability.

In the espionage business the secret of success is often enough in keeping one’s successes secret, there are always limits in how transparent these agencies can be. Mindful of this, successive reviewers and governments have recognised the need to bolster accountability mechanisms, including parliamentary, executive and independent ones as well as periodic reports to parliament and the Australian people. In an age of heightened foreign interference, misinformation and disinformation, the importance of these oversight mechanisms is more important than ever.

The surprise of the Independent Intelligence Review: economic security

After copping criticism for not releasing the report for nearly eight months, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese released the Independent Intelligence Review on 28 March. It makes for a heck of a read. The review makes 67 sweeping recommendations to overhaul Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC) on everything from legislation to oversight, open-source intelligence and investment.

But hidden in plain sight in the review is a surprising recommendation that Treasury lead a review relating to ‘economic security’.

That’s a surprise because Australia hasn’t really talked about economic security before. There isn’t a federal policy on achieving economic security, our ministers don’t address economic security in press releases, and it remains a bit of a foreign concept in Parliament.

The review doesn’t stop there. Authors Heather Smith and Richard Maude—both well-known figures in Canberra—say their ‘consultations suggest that more holistic and structural changes across the public service are required’. Two more key recommendations were to establish a dedicated economic security unit inside Treasury and embed members of the NIC in economic security policymaking.

One wonders why the government hasn’t done this already.

It’s because Australia’s security has historically been about its military. As an island nation in the Indo-Pacific, we’ve been forced to use our privileged location to achieve political and diplomatic advantage. We’ve had defence white papers for decades calling for more spending, more alliances, more things. Look no further than the 2023 Defence Strategic Review. Australia’s security was said to be linked to our alliance with the United States and achieving force projection, meaning spending billions of dollars on long-range missiles and nuclear-powered submarines.

Now, it seems the government has finally stopped thinking military power alone will cut it in this degrading geopolitical environment.

In his budget speech, Treasurer Jim Chalmers seemed to glibly admit that ‘in these uncertain times, economic security and national security are increasingly intertwined’. His Future Made in Australia Act, passed in December last year, is the first specific mention of economic security by the Commonwealth ever. The National Reconstruction Fund has finally started handing out some of its $15 billion of investment funding.

But we have a lot more work to do.

A 2024 report by the United States Studies Centre shows that Australia is well behind our closest allies. We don’t conduct outbound investment screening, as the US does, or ban investments with entities that could compromise our research and development, as Canada does. Our investment review bodies don’t seem to have actual teeth like the ones in Britain do, and unlike Japan we don’t have an economic security law.

Don’t forget, a former treasurer (advised by our Foreign Investment Review Board) took no action against a 99-year lease given to Chinese company Landbridge to operate the Port of Darwin. That decision is still haunting the corridors in Canberra today.

Australia needs leadership on economic security and it needs it now, or certainly after the election.

We need to beef up our existing legislation to protect Australian investment from both internal and external threats to our economic security. We don’t even need new levers; we just need to use the ones we have. In the past, we have arguably prioritised investment over security, instead of attracting investments that offer both. For those that we deem contrary to foreign policy, our foreign minister already has the power to cancel any foreign agreements—they just haven’t wanted to.

The Foreign Investment Review Board needs to be given the teeth—and, more importantly, the political capital—to make hard decisions about investment in Australia. The current review of the board is a fantastic opportunity change our inbound and outbound investment framework. Making the board independent from Treasury would go a long way to achieving that, as would a broader ability for it to call in and review investments that could pose security risks, rather than await applications.

More broadly, the NIC needs to be integrated not just with Treasury, but with industry and academia, where technological breakthroughs fuelling our economic growth are being made every day. Having a dedicated economic security policy would probably help too. And we can do all of that without resorting to protectionist or xenophobic responses such as banning whole countries from doing business.

Economic security is not a new concept, but we are definitely late to the party. Hopefully, no matter which government is elected in May, economic security doesn’t prove to be just another election buzzword.

Intelligence review is strong on workforce issues. Implementation may be harder

The 2024 Independent Intelligence Review offers a mature and sophisticated understanding of workforce challenges facing Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC). It provides a thoughtful roadmap for modernising that workforce and enhancing cross-agency and cross-sector collaboration.

But overcoming entrenched barriers—such as institutional resistance, rapid action alongside careful implementation, and investing in change while delivering core responsibilities—will require careful planning, strong leadership and a phased approach to ensure sustainable change.

The 2024 review builds on previous reviews, addressing persistent workforce issues in the NIC. These include security clearance process inefficiencies, inadequate resourcing, difficulties in attracting and retaining specialised skills, a need for greater workforce diversity, and leadership development and agency mobility.

The report acknowledges progress made since the 2017 review, including establishment of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) and introduction of the Top Secret–Privileged Access (TSPA) Vetting Authority. It notes that recruitment and retention strategies have evolved, highlighting some agencies’ innovative approaches.

The latest review addresses the rapidly evolving workforce landscape and mounting pressures on intelligence agencies in increasingly competitive environments—both geopolitical and the labour market. It considers emerging dynamics such as the expectations of younger generations, increasing demand for remote and flexible work arrangements, disparate allowance structures and constrained intra-community mobility.

The review argues for a more sophisticated approach to workforce data collection and bolstering the collective elements of workforce management, such as by developing a NIC-wide employee value proposition, adopting talent management and mobility programs, and introducing a NIC chief people officer role.

Overall, the 2024 review continues to push the thinking about Australia’s intelligence workforce. People and skills are presented not as individual agency concerns, but as an enterprise-wide challenge requiring improved collective action and a stronger focus on modern workforce expectations.

But translating the review’s recommendations into concrete changes is easier said than done. The review itself notes differences across the NIC in work practices, allowance structures, security requirements and workforce data reporting. Alongside a reluctance to commit to workforce mobility, these findings hint at the potential for deeper resistance to centralised action by agencies accustomed to managing their own staffing functions.

Underlying constraints may mean some NIC agencies are not on board with taking a collective approach to building the skills and commitment needed to keep pace with shifting national security threats.

The first constraint is institutional resistance to centralisation. Until the establishment of ONI in 2018, NIC agencies had operated independently in almost all functions. Staffing and workforce planning were no exception. Those accustomed to control over their own processes may resist centralisation—for example, recommendations of a new NIC chief people officer, continued use of a single TSPA clearance and a NIC-wide employee value proposition.

To overcome this, the benefits of centralisation should be emphasised as a complement to agencies’ own efforts. These include enhanced efficiency, consistency, shared purpose, and the ability to meet workforce shortages through collective strength instead of individual action. The proposed chief people officer will need to be a facilitator, not an enforcer, driving alignment while respecting individual agency needs.

The second constraint is the balance between speedy action and rigorous security and procedural practices. The challenge lies in ensuring that necessary processes, such as security clearances and formalising shared programs, do not become bottlenecks that slow down the implementation of key initiatives.

The key to balancing speed with rigor is agile execution. This means having an effective implementation plan where smaller scale initiatives are implemented quickly and adapted iteratively, within the security and process parameters of the day. The NIC should focus on quick wins that demonstrate progress while laying the groundwork for longer-term changes.

Finally, there is the challenge of committing time and funding to achieving collective action on workforce issues, which are already stretched by core responsibilities. Intelligence agencies today address a wider range of security challenges and threats than ever before. Without committed resources, the move towards greater centralisation and optimisation of workforce processes risks detracting from core duties or lacking follow-through.

The government’s allocation of $44.6 million over four years to ONI is a good, but initial, start on implementing the many recommendations, which range from intelligence support for ministers and leveraging collective capabilities to legislative reform and oversight, alongside workforce management.

Australian intelligence work is more important than ever, as we face evolving global security threats highlighted in the review’s focus on conflict preparedness. Successfully implementing the review’s recommendations will not be a quick or simple process. It will require substantial investments of time, resources and goodwill from across the NIC and external partners.

The success of these reforms will ultimately depend on the NIC’s ability to embrace flexibility, innovation and collaboration. And to commit to a community that exists in more than name only.

Technology can make Team Australia fit for strategic competition

In the late 1970s Australian sport underwent institutional innovation propelling it to new heights. Today, Australia must urgently adapt to a contested and confronting strategic environment.

Contributing to this, a new ASPI research project will examine technology’s role in fostering national security innovation, particularly in transcending business as usual.

Australians love sport, especially the Olympics. They particularly love winning—even if they only beat New Zealand. Between 1956 and 1972 Australia won at least five golds (and 17 medals) at each summer games. This seemingly confirmed how effortless national success, prosperity and development were for the post-war ‘lucky country’.

And then the world changed.

Australia returned from Montreal 1976 with zero golds and just five medals. Humiliation was exacerbated by it being the first games broadcast in colour on Australian television. Worse, the Kiwis won two golds—even beating the Kookaburras at hockey.

Australia had missed the global shift in sports to professionalism and (sometimes questionable) sports science. Post-Montreal disquiet motivated Malcolm Fraser to reverse planned cuts and to establish the Australian Institute of Sport in 1981. Beyond the dollars, Australian sport underwent a profound cultural and psychological shift and continued to evolve: in May 2024 the Albanese government invested almost $250 million in the sport institute’s modernisation.

The result? Since 1981 Australia has won at least 20 medals at each summer games except 1988’s. We’ve even become regular winter medallists. Adaptation, innovation and commitment paid off.

Today much more consequential shockwaves are bearing upon Australian prosperity and sovereignty: the prospect of Chinese hegemony in our hemisphere; convulsions in US policy and relationships; and the metastasising threat environment described in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment.

Since the late 2010s, governments of both persuasions have rhetorically recognised the magnitude of the challenge. In 2020, the then prime minister said Australia was facing ‘one of the most challenging times we have known since the 1930s and the early 1940s’. According to a press release from Defence Minister Richard Marles, ‘Australia faces the most complex and challenging strategic environment since the Second World War.’ Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describes ‘a time of profound geopolitical uncertainty’. Foreign Minister Penny Wong says it’s ‘nothing less than a contest over the way our region and our world work’.

So, where’s the imperative to address this ‘new world disorder’? We’re still not organising like a nation under this sort of challenge—despite warnings in ASIO’s threat assessments, the Defence Strategic Review and the National Defence Strategy. How do we create traction? How do we overcome the capacity gap of a nation of 26 million in a region of 4.3 billion?

Like after the 1976 Olympics, this isn’t just about budgets. It’s about creating cultural shift and encouraging and implementing novel, innovative ways of working—particularly through opportunities presented by technology.

A new research project by ASPI’s Statecraft & Intelligence Centre, in collaboration with Australian technologists Penten, is exploring the application of Australian sovereign technologies (including secure mobility) to business-as-usual work practices inside national security agencies. This aims to show how technology may foster innovation, bridge the capacity gap and sustain capabilities.

The project also explores how agencies and staff can access effective, secure tools so that ‘working better’ doesn’t become ‘working around’—which would introduce security and governance risks highlighted in a recent report by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and shown by the Signalgate debacle in the United States.

Agency-level focus recognises that national adaptation will need to be comprehensive, including not just big-picture government and societal changes but organisational and workplace-level reforms. What’s more, it comes as historically significant investments are creating opportunities to transform default ways of working. This is also happening as the recently released Independent Intelligence Review finds that ‘the business model for meeting the intelligence needs of executive government is no longer keeping up with demand and needs re-imagining’ and, separately, that the National Intelligence Community must ‘work hard at recruitment and retention’.

Using internationally tested secure mobility options inside and outside high security spaces doesn’t simply promise convenience and speed. They offer possibilities for better bridging the interface between intelligence producers and consumers—moving beyond pieces of paper (and electronic versions of pieces of paper) to meet actual information preferences of a new generation of ministers, officials and war fighters. This in turn will transform how intelligence is generated, presented and evaluated.

Making IT use and IT-linked work practices inside national security facilities look more like 2025 and less like 1995 isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s an important shift towards meeting expectations of current and future workforce talent. Meeting their needs would improve retention and thereby addresses a key national security vulnerability.

These are just two examples of possibilities being explored as part of the ASPI-Penten project, which will report later this year and provide practical, implementable advice to the broader national security community – while building on the IIR’s findings and recommendations.

Business as usual didn’t cut it in sport 50 years ago. It definitely won’t cut it in the unforgiving international arena today—or tomorrow.

The Independent Intelligence Review is finally out, and it’s a worthy sequel

The unclassified version of the 2024 Independent Intelligence Review (IIR) was released today. It’s a welcome and worthy sequel to its 2017 predecessor, with an ambitious set of recommendations for enhancements to Australia’s national intelligence community (NIC).

The IIR’s authors, Heather Smith and Richard Maude, have definitely met the goals of the review process: to gauge the effectiveness with which the NIC serves the national interest and meets the needs of government, and to examine how well positioned the community is for the future.

Smith and Maude find that the NIC is ‘today a more capable and integrated intelligence enterprise’, and it’s ‘highly capable and performing well’. But they also identify opportunities for ‘greater—or different—collective responses … so that the NIC can more effectively serve the national interest and meet the needs of government in the future’.

Unsurprisingly, given its authorship, the 2024 IIR captures well the state of Australia’s emergent and emerging strategic and security challenges, and the key priority issues facing the NIC. The report’s strategic framing reflects the reality of the international environment.

The report includes 67 recommendations, with the implication that there might also be classified recommendations or parts of recommendations. That is a lot—in 2017 there were just 23. Many of the 2024 recommendations are primarily about drawing attention to issues or sometimes getting down into the weeds. Compare that with 2017 and its singular vision for the creation of the NIC and the concept of ‘national intelligence’.

However, that’s the wrong take. Rather, the Smith-Maude recommendations reflect the breadth of the issues facing Australian intelligence and the complexity of its operating environment.

Smith and Maude’s principal findings are as follows:

—There is a gap between what’s being asked of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI, a creation of the 2017 review) in terms of leading the NIC as a collective enterprise and ONI’s ability to ‘bring the rest of the intelligence community along’. There’s a need for greater NIC integration and the review recommends ways to help ONI achieve this.

—There’s also a ‘need for deeper integration of intelligence with other arms of government’ to ensure intelligence is used as a ‘tool of statecraft to maximise Australia’s competitive edge’. This goes beyond just achieving decision advantage over adversaries and competitors. It includes using intelligence for strategic warning, and for influencing outcomes through intelligence diplomacy and the purposeful public release of intelligence information.

—Finally, innovation is key to preparing for future conflict and crisis, deploying new technologies, building and nurturing partnerships, and in recruiting, retaining and training a highly skilled and committed NIC workforce.

That emphasis on the policy-intelligence interface is important, and may come to be seen as one of the most consequential dimensions of the 2024 IIR. It was a resounding theme of ASPI’s submission to the review, including the idea of transforming the national intelligence community into ‘national intelligence power’.

Importantly, the unclassified version of the 2024 review gives the Australian public a sophisticated and updated understanding of the NIC, which serves them and acts in their name but about which information is necessarily limited. It also explains the very real challenges and opportunities the NIC faces and the laws and oversight mechanisms that govern Australian intelligence.

At 127 pages, comparable to the 2017 review’s 132, the 2024 version is both substantive and substantial. That substance confirms the value of Australia’s world-leading process of intelligence review. It works by scheduled check-up rather than crisis-driven post-mortem, and includes a detailed public version of the review’s findings. ASPI has consistently argued in support of this approach.

Kudos should also be given to the Albanese government for its related announcement of $44.6 million over four years from 2025–26 for ONI to begin implementation of key priorities identified in the 2024 IIR.

There is one disappointment. The prime minister’s media statement releasing the report says that ‘consistent with the approach to past independent intelligence reviews under successive governments, details about the proposed approach to specific recommendations will remain classified’.

As I highlighted in my submission to the review, and in previous analysis of the 2017 IIR, that historic practice of not publicly accounting for implementation of recommendations (at least in some form) has led to sub-optimal implementation and accountability in past. My concern about this approach is only reinforced by the number and complexity of recommendations.

Nonetheless, it was pleasing that the review listened to and made productive use of the contributions and submissions made, including from outside of government. For example, recommendation 66—providing security-cleared personal staff to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security Chair and Deputy Chair, to help relieve the workload on the committee’s members and secretariat, and also enhance parliamentary oversight capability—was suggested in ASPI’s submission to the review.

The depth and sophistication of the Smith-Maude review means there will be further analysis and insights to come as their findings and recommendations are pored over.