Australia faces up to security challenges in maritime arena

Knowledge of the strategic situation of Australia in the last decade is important for understanding the evolution of the Australian response to security challenges - particularly maritime security challenges.

An island continent, Australia has no contiguous neighbours, nor does it have a major state power in its immediate vicinity. The landmass of Australia is just slightly smaller than that of the US mainland, yet its coastline measures 25,760 km.1 While the southern approaches to the continent are sparsely navigated, the northern approaches are inundated with maritime traffic through the strategically significant Strait of Malacca and South China Sea trade routes, as well as the Torres Strait that narrowly separates Australia from neighbouring Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

Australia has 300 port facilities; however, only 70 of these are considered large enough to have significant security concerns.2 With a gross national product of US$528 billion (in 2003, compared with Canada's US$923 billion), Australia depends on unimpeded maritime waterways and port facilities in order to take advantage of a valuable US$180 billion maritime trade in mining and agricultural goods that accounts for 57 per cent of the country's goods and services exports.3 It generates 12 per cent of the world's shipping tasks.4

Australia traditionally depended on UK and then US maritime protection in the South Pacific region. "Australia's size, its isolation, sparse population

and limited financial resources have made security difficult to even contemplate achieving alone… However, although reducing the feeling of vulnerability, this reliance on allies has tended to inhibit the development of strategic independence," commented the authors of a research paper published in 2002.5 Nevertheless, the latter half of the 1990s witnessed a more assertive stance by the Australian government to secure the country's own national and regional interests, plus a desire to participate in the larger strategic maritime environment.

Three major events during the last decade have drastically altered the Australian outlook on security and defence concerns. These events have been described as the 'three posts' in Australia's progression towards a more independent and assertive stance on national security,6 and consist of: the post-1997 Asian financial crisis period; the post-11 September crisis period; and the post-Bali crisis period. It is interesting to note the Australian government's response and, in particular, the debate on national security priorities that ensued after each of these events. The significant legislature and government organisational changes that took place are integral to an understanding of how the Howard government dealt with changes to the global security situation. These responses have led the Australians to several unique approaches in their maritime security and intelligence strategy.

Pre-11 September 2001

During the 1990s the Australian government became aware of increasing international organised crime that included 'people smuggling', and it thus began in earnest to devise ways to control the ingress of humans and goods into Australia. The lead-up to the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 also played an important part in focusing the government's attention on security and intelligence vulnerabilities.7

In the same period, "the financial crisis that afflicted much of the Asia-Pacific region in 1997… reversed confident expectations of Southeast Asia's prosperity and resilience". Due to severe economic strains, the Suharto regime in Indonesia came to an end and a period of democratisation was ushered in that witnessed violence in East Timor and doubt about Indonesia's national integrity. Indeed the arc of instability to Australia's north and northeast served to "reduce Canberra's confidence in the security of its own environment".8 Accordingly, the government assigned the investigation of these areas of concern over security to The Joint Committee on The National Crime Authority, which met throughout 1996 and 1997 and produced a seminal report in 1998.9

One particularly animated exchange during these hearings helped to initiate the creation of a post-modern, 'integrated' government security and intelligence environment in Australia. On 5 December 1996 Raymond Kendall, the Secretary-General of Interpol, was asked to observe on the "traditionally perceived interface between national security issues and criminal justice issues".10 He responded: "It is true that international co-operation, particularly in relation to terrorism, can be complicated by the fact that you are not just dealing with a police matter but you are dealing with an area where the security services are involved. We have allowed ourselves to get into some difficulty… in terms of co-operation between the interests of the security service, on the one hand, [which] may not necessarily be the same as, and are very different from, those that would be normal for… the criminal police side of things.

"We all recognise that if you want to deal with the problem of international terrorism you must exchange as much information as you possibly can relating to the activity of terrorists… I believe that, as soon as you have enough information about somebody, that should go into my public's, the police public's [sic] circuit so that you can make it as difficult as possible for these people to be able to move. Their names should be given to all people at airports, they should be given to immigration services, they should be given to the services which are dealing with the provision of visas and things like that, so that their movements can be restricted to the utmost."11

The Joint Committee took this testimony to heart, as well as Kendall's emphatic point that "the key issue in the lead-up to the Olympics is prevention and… every effort should be made to ensure that information of a preventative nature is freely distributed between relevant agencies, even to the point of removing legislative barriers to such free exchange"12.

In its final report, after noting that neither the Australian intelligence agencies nor the police agencies had a habit of mentioning each other in their annual reports, the committee made a landmark recommendation: "That the Australian government take steps to ensure there are no legislative barriers which would inhibit the free flow of information and intelligence between security and law-enforcement agencies."13 The government "accepted the principles underpinning" this recommendation14 and went on to form Australia's "whole-of-government approach" based on the underlying ideas.

The period before 11 September 2001 witnessed a number of administrative amendments to legislation and organisational changes across government that followed the Joint Committee's trend of thinking.

In 1996 the government strengthened the existing National Security Policy "through a renamed National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSCC) with a wider field of activities".15 Somewhat ahead of its time for a parliamentary system and highlighting the importance that the government places on security, this committee, chaired by the prime minister, integrates top-level intelligence, law-enforcement and defence decision makers at the table in order to consider the full range of domestic and international security concerns. It is "the key policy decision-making body for the government's response to such issues as border security, the East Timor crisis in 1999, counter-terrorism and, more recently, the Bali atrocity".16

Under the "true all-of-government"17 leadership of the NSCC, the Australian government promulgated a number of significant pieces of security-oriented legislation such as: