Espionage today is less about weapons than insider access to economic policy. Australia’s muted response to the PwC scandal reveals a serious failure to treat economic intelligence as a core national security asset.

Calder Walton’s recent work on the ‘ New Cold War’ makes one point with brutal clarity: the most dangerous weapon today is not the missile, but the insider. Economic intelligence – tax policy, trade manoeuvres, crisis planning, investment strategies – is now as strategically valuable as nuclear codes. States are no longer merely spying on each other’s militaries; they are targeting the machinery of economic governance.

Australia has yet to grasp this shift. While our political class treats the PwC scandal as a regrettable breach of professional ethics, our Five Eyes partners are responding to similar leaks as matters of national security. The contrast is stark – and deeply revealing.

The release of millions of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein estate has triggered a national security investigation in Britain, not a PR clean‑up. Peter Mandelson – a former Cabinet minister and Ambassador to Washington – has been arrested for allegedly sharing confidential Downing Street documents with Epstein during the 2008 financial crisis. Andrew Mountbatten‑Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew) faces allegations of forwarding sensitive trade briefs on gold and uranium opportunities in Afghanistan.

These are not “indiscretions”. They are treated as breaches of state security.

Walton warns that adversaries increasingly recruit “non‑traditional collectors” – people who move effortlessly through elite circles. Whether a peer of the realm leaking tax memos or a royal passing on trade intelligence, the effect is the same: the state’s strategic economic framework ends up in the hands of unaccountable intermediaries.

Meanwhile in Australia: ASIO lets it go through to the keeper.

ASIO has repeatedly warned that espionage and foreign interference now eclipse terrorism as Australia’s principal security threat. Yet the PwC scandal – in which confidential Treasury tax plans were shared with PwC offices in the US and Singapore to market avoidance schemes to multinational clients – has been treated as a professional misconduct issue rather than an intelligence breach.

If foreign interference is defined as covert attempts to influence Australian governmental processes, then PwC’s ‘North America Project’ fits the bill. But no such framing has been applied.

Instead, we have behaved as though the only thing at stake was a few million dollars in lost revenue, rather than the integrity of the state’s economic strategy.

By contrast, the UK has recognised that confidential economic information is a strategic asset. Australia has not.

The United States has long taken a muscular approach to economic espionage. Conduct like PwC’s – the international dissemination of confidential government tax plans to secure commercial advantage – could trigger FARA investigations or charges of economic subversion.

In Australia, we are still waiting to see whether the AFP will consider the more serious foreign interference offences under Division 92 of the Criminal Code, which carry penalties of up to 20 years’ imprisonment.

The deeper problem is structural. Australia has allowed a consultocracy to take root – a shadow governance system in which private firms hold privileged access to the state’s most sensitive economic intelligence, yet remain outside the accountability frameworks that bind public servants.

PwC’s “profit‑first” culture is not an aberration. It is the logical outcome of outsourcing core functions of government to private actors whose loyalty is to global clients, not the Australian public.

By treating the PwC scandal as a tax matter rather than an intelligence breach, we have effectively signalled that Australian sovereignty is negotiable – and available at a discount.

Australia is dangerously unprepared for the weaponisation of economic information. The UK has finally recognised that when a Lord or a Prince leaks a memo, they are not merely embarrassing themselves – they are compromising the state.

Will we recognise that a PwC partner embedded in the public service leaking a Treasury briefing is no different?

If ASIO is serious about foreign interference, it must turn its attention to consultocracy itself. Economic intelligence is the new battleground. And right now, Australia is leaving the treasury door wide open.