In 2023, the federal government set up a review of the National Intelligence Community (the NIC). It was to report in the first half of 2024.

On 21 March 2025, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese released, with a flourish, the review’s report, titled “Independent Intelligence Review 2024”.

BY Paddy Gourley

“There is no more important priority than keeping Australians safe,” Albanese said, although a couple of days later he reckoned that “helping with your family budget is our number one priority”. The more number one priorities, the better for Albo.

Forging on, he said that “details of the government’s proposed approach to [the report’s 67] specific recommendations will remain classified”, although why that should be so is unclear. What disadvantage could there be in revealing the acceptance of a suggestion for a chief people officer, of all things, for the NIC?

Then Albanese chucked an extra $44.6 million over the next four years into the NIC bucket that now gets $4.5 billion a year. That modest annual addition could be close to what former “security czar” Mike Pezzullo snares for his Babylonian Canberra habitation – it’s “on the market”.

A few preliminary points.

First, the review was not in normally accepted terms “independent” other than to the extent that the reviewers brought independence of mind to their task. The reviewers, Heather Smith and Richard Maude, are former head honchos in the Office of National Assessment, the forerunner of the Office of National Intelligence. The review’s secretariat, that possibly helped in the drafting of the report, was run out of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the portfolio that houses the ONI. There’s nothing wrong with that but the claim of independence over-works that word. It’s akin to having a review of supermarket prices run by former senior executives of Coles and Woolworths with administrative support being provided by one of those organisations.

Second, the review succumbs to an unhelpful temptation to pretend we are in the most testing of times – “a world class intelligence enterprise is more important than ever”, “kaleidoscope of threats”, “the fragility of borders is more evident that ever”, “major power conflict is no longer unimaginable” and, of course, an “ever more complex, fast changing world.” Really? As the worst century in human history has just slipped into the rear view mirror, surely no extremity of risk can be unimaginable.

Third, the reviewers repeat the self-evidently falsity trotted out by the 2024 Defence Strategy Review that Chinese military expansion is “the largest and most ambitious of any country since World War II”. That distinction belongs to the United States. Since 1945, it has spent vastly more than China. It’s established hundreds of overseas bases and it’s wholly superior in air and naval power and has 5800 nuclear weapons in its backpocket – China seems to have about 250. The US has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers while China has two conventional ones.

Such nonsense about China distorts strategic understandings and dents public confidence in intelligence agencies. It’s akin to the ASIO’s Mike Burgess asserting that “the Indo-Pacific is home to some of the planet’s fastest growing populations”, a falsehood he doesn’t seem to have corrected. The important strategic fact is that the Indo-Pacific is home to some of the slowest growing populations, almost all slower than Australia. Childminding centres in South Korea are being converted into places to care for the aged.

These quibbles aside, Smith and Maude’s report is conscientious and reasonably thorough although it provides scant justification for its conclusion that “the NIC is highly capable and performing well”.

On the other hand, it’s frank about the principles which should regulate the roles of intelligence agencies including the need for:

• intelligence collection and assessment to be distinct and independent;
• a “separation between intelligence assessors and intelligence consumers”;
• intelligence assessment to be separated from policy development “to ensure that neither policy nor political preferences cloud the accuracy and impartiality of judgments”, and
• intelligence assessors not to slip “into policy advocacy”.

Yet when it comes to the question of the portfolio allocation of the ASIO, the reviewers say “we did not identify… any principles-based barrier to the ASIO Act being administered by a minister other than the Attorney-General” although the Attorney-General should retain the function of “authorising sensitive activities under the ASIO Act”. They didn’t look hard enough for there are solid reasons of principle for not placing the ASIO in the Home Affairs portfolio. In that spot, the “accuracy and impartiality of judgments” of intelligence collectors and assessors can be more directly at risk by pressures to ensure that facts fit around pre-determined policy, as happened with the CIA and Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Of itself, the portfolio placement of the ASIO is a matter of political contention and it would have been useful if Smith and Maude could have said it should remain with the Attorney-General.

With sounder acuity, they say that, “The election of more populist governments in Europe and the United States… could introduce considerable uncertainty in global affairs and alter some of Australia’s current foreign and economic policy settings.” Oh boy, and how.

Trump shows no inclination towards intelligence, facts and the truth. He’s a bullshitter, a condition the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues is more reprehensible than lying. And Trump is getting worse by the hour and he’s degrading US intelligence agencies because there’s no significant place for them in a government so dominated by his bloated ego. Thus, there’s a chance Trump will pull out of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence coterie, leaving it with four. And how can Canada continue to be at ease sharing the Five Eyes gig with a country that says it wants to swallow it?

Smith and Maude claim AUKUS is “shaping the way in which Australia works with the United States and UK intelligence communities” and that “international intelligence partnerships… are deep and healthy”. How can Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia keep a deep and healthy partnership with a country with a malevolent, moronic government that is battering them with threats, tariffs and other financial penalties, including Australian universities and the CSIRO?

The Smith/Maude report is useful but it is soft-nosed and composed before Trump and his brown-nosing crew oozed onto the scene. Now Australia needs to take a tougher, more self-reliant and possibly more costly approach to the protection of its interests. A part of that should be an urgent re-think of whether the intelligence community is properly set up to make an adequate contribution to that task. In a sense, the Smith/Maude report is out of date only a few days after its release.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/03/spooks-under-the-microscope/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

"Intelligence agencies are not there to tell the truth, but to protect the Empire from reality."

         Leon Voltaironi