Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence Industry and Support) Share this | Hansard source

I will come back to where I was before I was rudely interrupted. The Intelligence Services Amendment (Establishment of the Australian Signals Directorate) Bill 2018, as I said, has been given full Labor cooperation. As you are well aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security was the beneficiary of great advice from Mr Michael L'Estrange, who conducted an extensive review of the intelligence community and services. I want to commend Mr L'Estrange for his work because he also very effectively drilled down beyond the superficial levels of issues that may have been presented by only senior levels of services and came to appreciate very well the issues that also occupied some subterranean levels of the intelligence community and services and the issues that were playing on and perhaps hampering the best delivery of those services.

As I said, the effect of the reforms has been wonderful for the morale of ASD and its staff. I also want to emphasise, however, that out of that there is no change to the role of ASD in supporting the Defence Force. ASD will report directly to the defence minister. An MOU has been entered into between the CDF and the head of ASD. While I'm on that subject, I'd like to commend Paul Taloni for his service within ASD. Some suggested he would've been a great head for ASD, but that wasn't to be. Paul has been a fantastic servant to this nation in the security area. I've had many wonderful dealings with Paul and really appreciate the service that he has rendered, particularly the service he rendered in his time at ASD.

Before we broke this debate I was also talking about the workforce issues. I know this is an issue that my colleague the member for Chifley is very keen to also pursue. I was talking before the break about the fact that the Australian Defence Force has now gone into the approach of establishing an Information Warfare Division and a cyberwarfare capability within Defence that is more creative and imaginative than simply trying to shoehorn uniform members or shoehorn civilians into the regime within which members are recruited and trained within the Defence Force. They may not need any of that training or need that elaborate framework that supports our uniform personnel to work in this space.

I mentioned we were very pleased with the appointment of Major General Thompson, who is eminently qualified to head up this group and some of the areas that are under his wing. He also works in that role to the Commander of Joint Capabilities Group, so it has been given the appropriate emphasis within Defence. He, as I mentioned, has a PhD in cybersecurity and a special forces background.

That division is starting with about 100 personnel. That was the goal to kick it off, but it is planned that it will grow to about 900 by the end of the decade. In order to support a workforce of 900 you probably need a supply pool of around 3,000 personnel, as we usually work through these things and as a rule of thumb for support for capabilities, taking into account leave, reassignment, turnover and mobilisation issues. That level of work force to sustain just this unit is extremely significant. It poses a real issue for our country about how we supply and support all of our security agencies. I was talking about what the AFP had brought to us. I think you were there with me, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta, the day they talked about those petabytes of data they had to wade through. We met with the PhD student from Data61 who was on loan to hem, helping them design and build the algorithms to penetrate that deep well of data that's so important in the mission they have for tracking terrorists.

This poses issues to us more deeply as to how we manage that workforce issue and how we share these demands with industry. There are examples of how that's been done. My colleague, the member for Chifley, is aware of what is done in Singapore in relation to their service people that are based on their national service requirements. We don't have that available to us. Israel also has a very creative way of approaching this, taking the best and brightest from their high school graduates in the STEM areas and taking them into a program called Talpiot, where they enhance their skills and education over a long period of time, a number of years, without putting them in uniform. When they've finished and completed that refinement, they are then deployed into these security areas right across the security establishments with the specific mission of finding ways to improve what they do, to refine, innovate and develop the capabilities. That has led them to be able to use some really creative and innovative methods of dealing with, for example, terrorist financing. A really instructive work that's come out recently, called Operation Harpoon, describes the journey they've been on in tackling the matrix of counter-terrorism financing that needs to be put in place across the spectrum and across the globe and how you bring down those networks of financing. That Talpiot system is working extremely well for them. Those graduates then go out when they've finished their security time to help build their innovation economy and the innovation state, as we know.

We don't have national service available to us to draw on those Singaporean or Israeli models. We need to look at a creative way of managing and sharing that workforce. The workforce of the future in the defence force may not even be largely made up of the classic warriors we've had in the past. There'll always be a need for boots on the ground in many circumstances, but in the complex technological battlefield of the future a lot of our systems will be automated. You'll be seeing a lot of warriors sitting with bottles of coke and pizzas in shipping containers, steering automated systems. They don't need to be people who can do run, jump, dodge courses and these sorts of requirements.

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