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The concepts of national security and resilience are growing in importance in the Australian public and political consciousness in the aftermath of COVID-19. While some have seen the concept as a dog whistle for nationalism, Michael Pezzullo, Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, believes the concepts can serve as a “positive and unifying force” in an era of global disruption.
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Far from the promise of the American Peace and an unending era of peace and prosperity in the aftermath of the Cold War, we now see across the globe the US-led liberal-democratic and capitalist economic, political and strategic order is under siege.
Driven by mounting waves of civil unrest, political extremism on both sides of the spectrum, more localised tensions in the aftermath of Brexit and in response to mounting levels of migration and the ensuing socio-political and economic impacts across western Europe, further influenced by economic stagnation across the West, concerns about humanity's impact on the planet and the ever-increasing spectre of geo-strategic competition between the world's great powers.
COVID-19 has served to illuminate many policymakers, both in Australia and abroad, with the pandemic shedding light on the cracks in the foundation of the post-Second World War economic, political and strategic order, exposing the limitations of unfettered globalisation and the impacts a startling over-dependence on global supply chains has upon national security and sovereignty.
Despite its relative isolation, Australia's position as a global trading nation, entrenched in the maintenance and expansion of the post-Second World War order has left the nation at a unique and troubling crossroads, particularly as its two largest and most influential “great and powerful” friends: the US and the UK appear to be floundering against the tide of history.
While the Australian government and the Prime Minister, in particular, have made immense strides to shore up Australia's sovereignty and national security in the face of myriad challenges, often with broad-reaching public support, the harsh reality of both democracy and contemporary society is that attention spans are short and public interest fades when an immediate threat is not present.
As policymakers, economists, scientists and strategic policy experts continue to warn of more disruption, helping the Australian public understand the challenges, the new paradigm of global affairs is an important measure for ensuring continued national security and resilience, raising an important question for both policymakers and the Australian public: what price is our sovereignty worth and can the concepts of national security and resilience be powerful, unifying forces for the Australian public?
Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, Michael 'Mike' Pezzullo in a presentation for the Australian National University's National Security College 10th Anniversary Conversation Series, titled 'Security as a Positive and Unifying Force', details the potential for shifting the public dialogue and policymaking apparatus and the opportunity presented in an era of disruption.
Security shouldn't be conflated with fear
Much of the contemporary philosophical criticism surrounding attempts to use the concept of 'national security' as a cohesive, driving force for public policymaking is the use of fear as a basis point for unifying the population, this isn't without its basis in reality as many totalitarian regimes leverage the concepts of fear and national security to subjugate a population.
For Pezzullo, this is something that needs to be avoided, particularly within the confines of the contemporary public policy discourse and the post-COVID world, stating: "Security should not be conflated with fear and anxiety. I recognise that over the course of the past four decades, the sum of fears has expanded in the security realm. In the 1980s we feared nuclear annihilation.
"After 9/11, it was the global threat of violent Islamist extremism, and the potential terrorist use of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. In recent years, we have come to fear assaults from the natural world – extreme weather, climate change, and pandemics."
Pezzullo added, "Fear and anxiety are not, however, security aids or tools. Security requires clear specification, the rational calculation of risk, and the purposeful enactment of measures taken in relation to defined problems.
"Of course, fear is a biosocial mechanism which is associated with our visceral responses of fight or flight in the face of sensed danger. At some deep level, anxiety too plays a role in vigilance and preparedness but the unease and alienation which is said to be located in human existence – at least according to thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre – is not a force which is able to be mobilised in the security enterprise.
"We have to think differently about ‘security’, as a concept and as an object of policy. In doing so, we need to leave some thinkers or at least some thinking behind. Take Hobbes. He was concerned with security against the attacker, whom we dread.
"In Leviathan (1651), we are presented with the 'war of all against all'. For Hobbes, while each of us is by right of nature the judge of what we must do to protect ourselves, the fear of death creates the basis for civil peace, under the authority of the Leviathan, to whom we cede the right to be the judge of what might threaten us."
One of the major takeaways for the Australian public and policymakers from the year that has been 2020 is that fear, for the large part, doesn't appear to be in the vocabulary of Australians as they bounce back from disastrous bushfires and plough through the domestic and global economic turmoil wrought by COVID-19, accordingly, concerns about fear as a driving force behind national security don't apply.
What does apply in this instance is Pezzullo's belief that national security and the concepts of resilience can be used as a powerful, unifying factor that can provide immense opportunity for Australian policymakers seeking to respond to the era of disruption.
In doing so, Pezzullo posits, "However, if we turn the security question around – with a focus on banding together, and the positive pooling of power and capacity by which to better deal with security dilemmas – then the first question to be asked is ‘what is being secured?’, as opposed to ‘against whom is it being secured?’. Or put another way: what is the ‘unit of security’? Who is banding together, which capacities are being pooled, and to what extent?
"We should take banding together to be a function of the building of common purpose and community, and the marshalling of material and economic resources to this end, a sub-end of which is the achievement of greater levels of protection. On this view, greater agency is exercised by the population at large, whereby the state becomes less a Leviathan and more a platform for unified purpose."
Leverage all means of statecraft
Australia has recently undergone a period of modernisation and expansion within its national security apparatus, from new white papers in Defence and Foreign Affairs through to well-articulated and resourced defence industrial capability plans, export strategies and the like in an attempt to position Australia well within the rapidly evolving geostrategic and political order of the Indo-Pacific.
Each of the strategies in and of themselves serve critical and essential roles within the broader national security and national resilience debate.
Additionally, the formation of organisations like the National Resilience Taskforce, state-based Energy Security Taskforces, and supporting organisations like Infrastructure Australia and broader government departments all serve to provide an intricate yet competing tapestry muddying the water and decision-making process for political and strategic leaders.
Each of these organs and constituencies in the form of state and territory governments have their own individual agendas and lobby accordingly for Commonwealth support and assistance, further complicating a national response, hindering both national security and national resilience in an age of traditional and asymmetric disruption.
The individual nature of the aforementioned respective strategies, combined with the competing interests of the respective portfolios and departments, are further exacerbated by a lack of cohesive, co-ordinating authority managing the direction of the broader national interest and implementation of a resulting strategy.
It is important to recognise that this realisation does diminish the good work done by the respective ministers, assistant ministers and opposition representatives.
But recognising the limitations of siloed approaches to the increasingly holistic nature of national security in the 21st century requires a co-ordinated, cohesive effort to combine all facets of contemporary national security and national resilience policies into a single, cohesive strategy.
Air Vice-Marshal (Ret’d) John Blackburn AO explained the importance of a cohesive, integrated response to national resilience and by extension, national security: "We have our departments doing great work in their respective fields. We have organisations like the CSIRO doing great work in terms of the hydrogen economy, energy security and the like, but the problem is each of these organs is siloed.
"One would expect that there would be a co-ordinating authority within the organs of government, which can support the development and implementation of a national resilience policy framework. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, and we are seeing the affects of that today, so the only way to address this is with a co-ordinated, integrated response."
Pezzullo builds on the points articulated by Blackburn, stating, "Within government we need to integrate all of our tools of national power in the pursuit of security effects. We need to continually examine how best to align missions and functions, and how we might best integrate effort across organisational boundaries. Our systems, processes and capabilities have to become networked, within national jurisdictions and across them, with like-minded allies and partners.
"We need to aggressively tackle the problem of jurisdictional, regulatory and compliance gaps and seams, especially as this relates to those parts of the world where ineffectual state control is in evidence, and in relation to the illicit mode of globalisation which has emerged in recent decades – as evidenced in the global marketplace of illicit drugs.
"Security, however, extends beyond government. It is generated through the whole of society, with government leading and guiding through a networked partnership with the rest of society – which is to say, the population at large and the sectors of which I spoke earlier. It follows logically that security has to be designed into societal structures, institutions and systems. It cannot be an afterthought or a supplementary, appended function.
"It has to be ubiquitous without being oppressive. The domain of cyber will accelerate this imperative. The centuries-old nexus between the sovereign’s protection and the spatial limits of the state is being deconstructed by cyber effects, where everyone and everything within the bordered state is externally-facing, and cyber-exposed, and security cannot be assured within orthodox constructs.
"The approach that I should like to suggest is to be distinguished from the mobilisation of society and the economy during times of total war, such as was seen during the Second World War, where there were theatres of combat, the ‘home front’, civil defence, industrial mobilisation, the protection of sea lanes, ports and harbours, and the rationing of food and supplies, and so on."
Expanding on this, Pezzullo reinforces the calls made by Blackburn and others regarding the growing public and political discourse surrounding calls for enhanced national security, self-reliance and resilience in the contemporary, contested global paradigm that is the 2020s and beyond.
"For this reason, I am not an advocate for expanding the definition of ‘national security’. Where would one stop? If the concept of ‘security’ becomes a synonym for all desirable policy values (such as sovereignty, prosperity, equality, liberty, unity) then security becomes the entire policy agenda," Pezzullo explains.
"I am in favour, however, of emphasising concepts such as ‘self-reliance’ and ‘sovereign capability’ in national policy discourse, which would require the closer integration of security, economic and social policy (For this reason, the most important challenge in this area does not relate to structures and institutional alignment around ‘national security’. This simply avoids the higher challenge of thinking through the proper integration of security, economic and social policy).
In order to maximise the nation’s position, prosperity and security, is it time to introduce a role of a Minister for National Security or special envoy role to support the Prime Minister and respective ministers, both within the traditional confines of national security or national resilience like Defence and Foreign Affairs, to include infrastructure, energy, industry, health, agriculture and the like?
Your thoughts
Pezzullo's final paragraph leaves a clear vision of how he views the need to shift the public dialogue away from a fear-induced need for national security, towards one that prioritises and encourages public investment and participation, one emphasising the immense opportunity presented by leveraging national security policy to provide for all Australians.
"Security should not entail the administration of fearful and anxious subjects. Security should be contested by an informed citizenry who share a common horizon of threat awareness, and agency in relation to risk and opportunity," Pezzullo states.
"On this reading, security is a dialectic between the state’s mandate and capacity to act, and the population’s collective specification of the trade-offs and the costs that it is willing to bear in the name of protection and survival. In the end security effects construct social life insofar as they underpin prosperity and unity, whereby the greater social end is the pursuit of happiness or ‘utility’, in the sense that a philosopher would use that term. As such, security is more than a question of protection, or of survival. It is a question of how we should band together and pool our capacities for living."
The nation is defined by its relationship with the region, with access to the growing economies and to strategic sea lines of communication supporting over 90 per cent of global trade, a result of the cost-effective and reliable nature of sea transport.
Indo-Pacific Asia is at the epicentre of the global maritime trade, with about US$5 trillion worth of trade flowing through the South China Sea and the strategic waterways and chokepoints of south-east Asia annually.
For Australia, a nation defined by this relationship with traditionally larger, yet economically weaker regional neighbours, the growing economic prosperity of the region and corresponding arms build-up, combined with ancient and more recent enmities, competing geopolitical, economic and strategic interests, places the nation at the centre of the 21st century's 'great game'.
Enhancing Australia’s capacity to act as an independent power, incorporating great power-style strategic economic, diplomatic and military capability, serves as a powerful symbol of Australia’s sovereignty and evolving responsibilities in supporting and enhancing the security and prosperity of Indo-Pacific Asia.
Australia is consistently told that as a nation we are torn between our economic relationship with China and the long-standing strategic partnership with the US, placing the country at the epicentre of a great power rivalry – but what if it didn’t have to be that way?
Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia's future role and position in the Indo-Pacific and what you would like to see from Australia's political leaders in terms of shaking up the nation's strategic approach to our regional partners.
We would also like to hear your thoughts on the avenues Australia should pursue to support long-term economic growth and development in support of national security in the comments section below, or get in touch with
Stephen Kuper
Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.
