In the various debates and arguments on Australia’s defence, one thing is at least is settled: the government has agreed to continue funding national security strategic policy work undertaken by a sector composed of think-tanks and university centres that is significantly compromised.

This is the inevitable result of the sector being financially beholden to their various funding sources – most often foreign and domestic governments and corporations whose interests require the production and maintenance of threat, and thus weapons acquisition, so as to ensure ongoing high profit levels.

They tend also to attract a clerisy of conservative, even hawkish, thinkers, and where China and Russia are concerned, the evidence is that they attract radically conservative and particularly hawkish thinkers who arrive at conclusions through processes that a great many independent scholars and analysts would find anathema.

An attempt was made in 2024 to address and reform this situation. A distinguished former public servant with extensive experience in foreign policy and national security, and Chancellor of the University of Queensland, Peter Varghese AO, was selected to lead the review.

It was transmitted to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in late July 2024 containing 14 recommendations; the government’s response was published in December of the same year. To summarise: it was a bland acceptance of a schedule of unexceptional improvements to the policy advice ecosystem. The government accepted the finding that the sector was not broken and should be indulged at its current funding level of $40 million per year.

Broadly, this ended the review cycle of an investigation to which only minimal promises were attached. That said, with imagination it could have been the bearer of radical reform and innovation.

In this writer’s assessment, the review was a disappointing outcome: an opportunity missed, and one that lacked imagination. The old order of the ecosystem which had justifiably provoked the review in the first place was, if anything, consulted, heeded, and ultimately strengthened – a common outcome in failed attempts at reformation.

Disappointment gives way to a sense of outrage when a wider angle of focus is brought to bear. Consider the anomaly created by the following cluster:

• Australia has a judiciary whose function it is to interpret the laws by which the country is governed, and thus to determine what is proper conduct; it is, therefore, imperative that it be independent of the legislative and executive branches of government. It is accountable, via public scrutiny, to the public and to whom it is required to provide reasons for their decisions. It is, notably, considered a public trust.
• Australia has an independent central bank — the Reserve Bank of Australia — a statutory authority, established by an Act of Parliament the role of which is to which is to promote the economic prosperity and welfare of the Australian people by maintaining appropriate systems of risk oversight and risk management and, overall, to control the supply of money. Its decisions are not subject to direction from the government.
• There is a Bureau of Meteorology which provides not only forecasts, but observations and warnings to the Australian public regardless of what the government might prefer the weather to be.
• Now, contrast the existence of the three organisations noted above with the lack of anything commensurate when questions that lie at the heart of Australia’s security are asked – namely the methods by which the nation’s defence and security are pursued and achieved through requiring its citizens to fight, kill and, perhaps, to die.

To put it more forcefully, foreign and defence policies may be politely, disingenuously, configured in monetary terms, but their reserve currency, and the reserve currency of a nation is always its people — more precisely, it is the number and quality of disposable bodies it possesses.

When it comes to deciding on the supply and value of these bodies, it would seem that they are questions unworthy of receiving the same deliberation, status and hence the same authoritative advice as questions of legality, the money supply and the weather.

There is an alternative – a hybrid, derived from the strengths of the above organisations: deliberative independence, high levels of qualification in their respective fields, and impeccable professionalism. These are the sine qua non for what is proposed: an Australian Strategic Policy Secretariat.

More precisely, it would be a statutory authority established by an Act of Parliament, independent of the legislative and executive branches of government, with specific powers and obligations which fold into its role: to providing strategies and policies which promote the security of a sovereign Australia. Among these would be the continuous monitoring of risks and threat to Australia.

Under the Act, the government would be required to consult the Secretariat as its first recourse to advice and, notably, to consider that advice in good faith. This obligation would not remove government agency; government might choose to reject it out of hand – but, also under the Act, it would be required to explain its rejection when the advice (declassified, if need be) is subsequently made public, as it would be under the Act.

This Secretariat, as befits its role, would have a simple coat-of-arms: from Greek mythology, Cerberus, the monstrous, three-headed watchdog of the underworld suggests itself. He guarded the gates of the Underworld by preventing the dead from leaving and the living from entering.

For consistency of inspirational source, and following Edward Luttwak’s example (in his Strategy: the Logic of War and Peace), the motto to be appended below Cerberus would be: Strategike Episteme, Strategon Sophia denoting not only strategic knowledge, but strategic wisdom.

Both would be essential for an organisation that thinks in grand strategic terms and such a requirement is what is intended. By this, the Secretariat would be devoted to providing advice according to the following definition of strategy:

The science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological and military forces of a nation or a group of nations to afford the maximum support to adopted policies in peace or war.

The case for establishing a grand strategic advisory body arises from the logic of how peace is maintained and war avoided or concluded on favourable terms: it is, as Luttwak reminds us, at the grand strategic level that the confluence of factors find their resolution and create their final results.

An Australian Strategic Policy Secretariat would be required, therefore, to advise government on the basis of strategic analyses distilled from a whole-of-country/whole-of-government approach, which is to say of a type not previously undertaken by any organisation in Australia’s history.

In other breaks with tradition, its core principle would be the adoption of a rigorous and undiscriminating institutional scepticism — a legacy of the Enlightenment — to all claims regarding the optimum paths to security and its advisories would be delivered in the tone of a weather report or a judicial opinion – with cool indifference for the politics of the day.

And going even further, it would, in addition to providing advice to the government at the latter’s request, exercise the discretion guaranteed to it in the Act, to research subjects of its own choosing and publish a range of reports on all relevant strategic issues for the benefit of the public.

And to be clear, these research findings would almost certainly prove to be uncomfortable and embarrassing where, by way of just four examples, they included:

• A steady focus would be held on the behaviour of Australia’s allies as well as its adversaries.
• Questions estimating the ADF’s casualties, should it be deployed in a conflict, and thus what resources will be required for post-war rehabilitation and life care where necessary.
• Critical discussions as to whether a specified commitment of the ADF met Australia’s overall national interests and was in accordance with international law and its national sovereignty.
• An evaluation of defence procurement decisions in which, once again, the provider is a party with a record of producing equipment or platforms that perform below the contracted performances, are delivered unacceptably late, and considerably over budget.

In this context the choice of Cerberus as leitmotif is justified. The Secretariat would also interface three ways – with the world, with the government and with the citizenry in a continuous engagement.

Appointments to the Secretariat would, accordingly, be distinguished by: their dedication to Australian sovereignty, their high levels of qualification in their respective fields, impeccable professionalism and record of sound judgement.

Some, perhaps many, will need to hold various levels of security clearance. That said, the need should not be inflated: where Australia’s involvement in wars is concerned, highly classified intelligence was either absent, irrelevant, or actually betrayed the decision-making process because it was seriously flawed and/or designed to deceive.

They will also need to be intellectually diverse and large in number – the latter being the consequence of both the grand strategic approach which considers Australia as a whole, and the need for advice that has survived robust contestation internally and is capable of being robustly defended when made public.

But they will be professionally circumscribed. Upon appointment, they will be required to foreswear all connections and entanglements with the military-academic-industrial-complex for the duration of their appointment and for a period of 10 years after retirement or resignation. This is to ensure, to the maximum extent, that they maintain their critical distance and analytical independence.

For that reason they will, under the proposed Act, be protected against dismissal and salary reductions; indeed, following the example of the judiciary they would be recompensed at rates favourably comparable to the higher levels of the judiciary.

What is proposed is a costly undertaking, but it should be manageable within the current staffing level (660) of the RBA. But its potential costs won’t scuttle it; the charge of a lack of realism and its grandiosity could well do it. And perhaps there’s a darker reason: we’ve grown comfortable with this.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.