James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Cyber Security) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to recognise the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS. In May 1952 the horrors of World War II were fresh in the minds of many Australians. The Korean War was underway and the Cold War presented an ever-present risk of going hot. Australia has always benefited from the trusted relationships of our most important allies.

Our like-minded partners were as important in 1952 as they are today. However, the then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, knew that Australia could not simply rely upon friends to share important information. He knew Australia needed to develop its own ability to collect foreign intelligence and conduct covert operations in our national interest. Working closely with cabinet minister Richard Casey, it was Menzies who drove the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, through a then secret order of the Governor-General's executive council.

The new agency was to be led by Alfred Deakin Brookes, a former Army intelligence officer. The new agency took much inspiration from Great Britain's MI6 and was charged with two key priorities: the collection of foreign intelligence offshore and the execution of special operations. These operations were envisaged to be very much like the type undertaken in the Second World War, where brave men and women risked their lives to uncover secrets, cultivate critical knowledge and engage in clandestine activities to disrupt or deter an enemy.

These two priorities remain the core mission of the modern Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and they remain as relevant today as we confront our own dangerous geopolitical reality. By its very nature, Australians will never know the names or much of the work undertaken by ASIS officers in defence of our national interest. Other than the director-general, Paul Symon, and his deputies, Fabio Meloni and Catherine Burn, they cannot even legally be named. But there are many station chiefs, officers, analysts and data scientists, here in Australia and around the world, whose work makes us safer every day.

We do not have to look far to find significant threats to peace, stability and prosperity in the world today. Our European friends face significant hostility from an aggressive and expansionist Russia. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has implications for the whole world and presents a real threat to the free and democratic institutions we seek to defend and uphold. Closer to home, the Chinese Communist Party continues to embark on a military build-up of historic proportions, while the PLA air force routinely harasses the people of Taiwan and engages in increasingly aggressive tactics, in an attempt to prevent free transit in the Indo-Pacific.

We have been warned by our own security agencies, including ASIO, of industrial-scale espionage, foreign interference and cyberattacks against our universities, research institutions, government departments and commercial entities. Meeting these challenges requires all elements of statecraft, including soft-power tools like diplomacy and hard-power tools like a potent and capable Australian Defence Force. We must not, however, see the domain of the shadows to adversaries who would seek to do us harm, as Paul Symon said in his address to the Lowy Institute, which I was honoured to attend in May.

In that insightful speech, Mr Symon acknowledged that our adversaries are spying on us, that they are seeking to weaken our institutions and bend our values. As we have become increasingly interconnected and reliant upon technology and personal devices, we have also witnessed the significant uptick in electronic surveillance, which demonstrates the importance of signals intelligence collection. Australia has rightly invested in those capabilities and provided those collection agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, with appropriate legislative tools to combat cyberthreats. But the current strategic environment underlines the ongoing contemporary relevance of and significant need for a well-resourced human intelligence collection agency.

The challenges posed by technological advances, including ubiquitous technical surveillance, means that human intelligence collection is becoming increasingly difficult as the risk of exposure grows that much higher. But that does not reduce the value of the unique insights that only human intelligence can provide into the plans, intentions and capabilities of our potential adversaries.

I have every faith in our intelligence officers and their leadership, but as policymakers it is our responsibility to listen and consider the best ways that we can equip them with the necessary tools and sufficient resources to carry out their vital work in some of the most dangerous places of the world. So as we thank ASIS and its dedicated people for their 70 years of service in the national interest, we must also reflect what they will need from us to meet the contest in the decades ahead.