Though net assessments are new in Australia, they are a good fit for our national character as pragmatic problem solvers. Many of the nation’s best foreign policy achievements have come from this style of policymaking. In the early 1990s, DFAT’s “niche diplomacy” agenda prioritised regional problems where Australia could make a distinctive contribution, such as assisting post-war Cambodia and preventing chemical weapons proliferation.
In the early 2000s, the Australian government achieved remarkable regional cooperation on combatting irregular migration and terrorism through targeted, behind-the-scenes diplomatic work.
So too in the 2010s, the National Intelligence Community led an effective response to the rising threat of foreign interference through a detailed and targeted approach.
Net assessments provide a way to turn Australia’s pragmatic, problem solving culture into regular and comprehensive accounts of the security issues Ministers care about most, and to empower their decision-making.
So, how might net assessments be put into practice?
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
In 2023, Foreign Minister Penny Wong outlined the Albanese government’s new strategy of seeking “a balance where strategic reassurance through diplomacy is supported by military deterrence”.
Implementing a balancing strategy requires a finely grained understanding of select regions or military domains (such as undersea in the Pacific, or across the Taiwan Strait). A Directorate of Net Assessment, located in the Strategic Planning and Coordination Group, would be the ideal home for conducting assessments of the evolving balances of power that matter most to Australia. This would strengthen the Department’s existing use of futures and horizon scanning, focused on select strategic problems. The Directorate would not only underpin the Minister’s effort to navigate and shift key balances in Australia’s favour, its insights would also be vital to other members of the NSC whose portfolios generate the resources — economic, military, and technological — that Australian influence depends upon.
Department of Home Affairs
Australia’s defence strategy of “deterrence by denial” is not just a military task, given the growing range of non-kinetic threats. These too need to be denied if Australia is to comprehensively deter. A Home Affairs Directorate of Net Assessment would be the ideal place to assess the evolving nature of threats, such as damage to power and industrial grids, cyberattacks, and foreign interference, and how to deter them. This work should be proactive, searching for opportunities to advance Australian interests, such as assessing long-term technological trends that benefit the nation’s security. A Directorate of Net Assessment would help the Minister and Secretary for Home Affairs to strengthen their long-term perspective on Australian resilience and stability.
Treasury
The importance of economics to security — and vice versa — is widely recognised, and Australian officials have capably responded to crises and begun to shift risk assessment frameworks.
Yet as the 2024 Independent Intelligence Review observed, there is a clear need for the Treasury to be able to undertake “analysis of [the] long-term implications of Australia’s economic security decisions … horizon-scanning … [and] scenario planning”.
A Directorate of Net Assessment would be the ideal home for this work, while ensuring economic perspectives and resource issues remain front-of-mind for net assessments produced across government.
Department of Defence
The Department of Defence’s Directorate of Net Assessment already has a clear mission to support force design. This is important and should be kept in place. Over time, and with sufficient resourcing, the Department should supplement this with comparative military assessments (strengths and weaknesses, quantitative and qualitative) of China, the United States, Japan, Indonesia, and India. This is a sensitive task — Australia’s intelligence agencies are prevented from assessing friendly countries as it carries the implication that Australia spies on them. But as a growing number of influential analysts have proposed, Australian decision-makers today urgently need to know how capable each potential adversary or partner is in specific scenarios, and how conflict may play out. Without such knowledge, there is a risk that more Australians will fall prey to a fatalism wherein the PRC seems a “mountain” of an adversary, impervious to any “toothpicks” thrown by the ADF.
Such claims reflect a profound misunderstanding of warfare — just ask the Ukrainians if smaller nations are powerless against larger bullies. But this mindset is understandable when Australia lacks a tradition of net assessments that evaluate the military, political, technological, and economic balances upon which our security depends.
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
Finally and most importantly, a Directorate of Net Assessment in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s International and Security Group would have two roles. First, to coordinate the practice of net assessment — and associated scenarios, futures, and horizon-scanning methods — across the government, ensuring this work is directed towards the primary concerns of the NSC. Second, to assess the handful of security issues that are the Prime Minister’s personal responsibility. Although the 2024 National Defence Strategy identifies deterrence as Australia’s “primary strategic defence objective”, this is not only a defence task.
Deterring aggressors will depend just as much on the Prime Minister’s personal statements and credibility as it will on the lethality of the ADF. A PM&C Directorate of Net Assessment would support the Prime Minister to establish deterrence in the highest priority areas and pursue those opportunities that emerge only at the highest level of national decision-making.