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What comprises Australia’s national interest, and how does the risk of insider threat activity in Australia’s critical infrastructure connect to Australia’s national interest? I expect this topic was not the first thing on your mind when you woke this morning ready for breakfast and a hot shower, however the topic is relevant because it is fundamental to you having breakfast, a wash, and getting on with you day. Let me explain.
In mid-2024, when an Australian government minister was asked during a senate hearing to describe Australia’s national interest, the minister replied: “Assuring our security, our prosperity and our economic security.”
But what is the ‘national interest’? The Center for International Relations and International Security (CIRIS) describes ‘national interest’ as: encompassing the core goals, values, and objectives that a sovereign state endeavours to advance and safeguard through its foreign policy initiatives. This concept, rooted in the foundational principles of realpolitik, underscores the multifaceted considerations that shape a nation’s external engagements, reflecting a blend of pragmatic pursuits and ideological imperatives. This description draws on the writing of Hans Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations, 1948) whose realist approach to national interest focuses on competition between nation states and allowed for their use of hard (military) power. For me, the definition is missing a piece, that piece is people. A nation state is composed of people and so their interests must be taken into account to determine the national interest.
I agree with Morgenthau that ‘nation states’ exist and they compete, sometimes militarily. Implicit to the concept of nation state is the concept of citizenship, a definition being: a native or naturalised person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it, a member of a state.
Reaching into history, Aristotle describes the state as “an association intended to enable its members, in their households and kinships, to live well … its purpose is a perfect and self-sufficient life”.
So, the state exists for the benefit of its citizens and there are mutual obligations – state to citizen and citizen to state. If the ‘national interest’ is to assure a state’s security, prosperity and economic security then those outcomes are for the benefit of the state’s citizens, and so the citizens are expected to support the state to enable mutual benefit. This mutuality is highly relevant in times of military conflict.
Why am I musing about Australia’s national interest, some historical comments, and people being able to have breakfast? A key focus of my advisory work is to support Australia’s (the state’s) security uplift of its critical infrastructure as expressed in the Commonwealth’s Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018, known as the SOCI Act. Most of Australia’s critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, including foreign private and government-linked entities.
A key threat vector amongst the risk management components of the SOCI legislation is the insider threat. The insider threat means people: employees and others who have, or had, legitimate access to a critical infrastructure entity’s asset. Insiders use their access to cause harm, unintentionally or intentionally, to the critical infrastructure asset. Some insider threats cause harm at the behest of adversary nation states in acts of ‘grey zone warfare’ tantamount to military action, or to ‘hard power’ in Morgenthau’s language.
In 2024 the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) warned of the insider threat to Australia’s critical infrastructure by noting ASIO is aware of one nation state that has taken preparatory steps to disrupt Australia’s critical infrastructure. Further, in October 2024 the UK’s Security Service warned of Russian actual and planned attacks on the UK’s critical infrastructure. Insiders are a means cited of sabotaging infrastructure assets and operation.
I see, through both my professional practice and decades of study, a decay of the peoples’ – citizens’ – allegiance to the idea of the state (Australia) in favour of a view of themselves as individuals or coalescing with aggrieved groups that seek to live apart from society and usually demand something from society. This decay is caused, in part, by decades of incoherent messaging and lacklustre leadership by Australian governments on what it truly means for a person to be a citizen of Australia. Governments have not fostered the symbiosis to enable people to readily understand the concept of mutual obligation ingrained in citizenship. Successive governments have not made clear the value of Australian citizenship, not made the case for citizens’ need to participate in society to promote the wellbeing of themselves and the state, with the state providing the protections and support for the benefits of its citizens. Australia’s citizenry has become more fractured, seemingly ever more divisible, perhaps unable to appreciate the value of what Australian citizenship can provide.
How does Australia’s national interest relate to insider threat and critical infrastructure? Australian citizens are the people that make society, businesses, the economy, government, and defence force operate. They also operate our critical infrastructure.
Successful societies rely on leadership, throughout history shown as an artefact that people want and need. When leadership and clear direction are absent then the collective frays and becomes less functional – the position Australian society appears to be in today.
When our leaders fail to communicate coherent and clear positions on issues of high relevance to the maintenance of Australia’s core goals, values, and objectives that [will] advance and safeguard (citing Morgenthau) they are failing to make clear Australia’s national interest to its citizens and to others. A consequence is that in private sector and public sector organisations people may not have been told the rules, may not know which behaviours are appropriate and not appropriate, and may have no sense of shared purpose and shared risk / reward in contributing to society, to make their contribution to the national interest. This environment induces insider threat behaviour because people are not being told about expected, appropriate, and legal behaviours resulting in them not seeing they have an equity in acting for the common good. This lack of guidance is a failure of duty-of-care as, arguably, all of society suffers increased risk of failure if leaders are not alerting people to this consequence.
The secure, and hence reliable, operation of Australia’s critical infrastructure is entwined with talking about and modelling behaviour that deters, identifies, and mitigates insider threat. People who have not been told by an organisation’s (or a state’s) leaders about the importance of the work they do, of the behaviours that are required of them to be a part of the team, of the values the organisation strives to operate by and which they are expected to exhibit, are at greater risk of becoming an insider threat because they do not have the benefit of guidance. People without the benefit of such guidance are working in Australia’s critical infrastructure sectors – hospitals, finance, water, food, transport, energy and more. Such people are disposed to causing harm, unintentionally or intentionally, to our infrastructure assets and operations which poses a risk to Australian society and our national interest.
The consequence may be that when you wake up tomorrow morning to fix your breakfast and have a shower there won’t be energy to cook, or water to shower in, because critical infrastructure has been disrupted by fellow citizens, by insiders, who have caused harm. That’s why you have a stake in the security of Australia’s critical infrastructure and share the risk of insider threat acts.
Returning to the idea of ‘national interest’, I contend that it is not solely an issue of externality, of relations between nation states, but rather the real national interest must encompass the citizens, who are the reason the state exists and who are obliged to contribute to, in the minister’s words, “Assuring our security, our prosperity and our economic security.” Perhaps this sentiment is best put by President John F Kennedy in his inauguration speech when he challenged his fellow citizens to contribute in some way to the public good: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”