Prologue
Critical infrastructure is a fundamental enabler of Australia’s national security. Australian governments over decades have recognised the need to protect critical infrastructure from evolving threats as a component of national security yet have offered policy guidance with little effective action. Government has put the onus for action onto the private sector to protect nationally critical assets and operations.
The need to act to protect Australia’s critical infrastructure has become more acute as the rules-based world and relative global peace that Australia has benefitted from since 1945 has irreversibly changed in ways that increase risk for Australia. That risk stems from threats posed by the current and foreseeable great power competition between the United States and China, allied with Russia.
Australia is poorly positioned to weather this recent change, possessing insufficient baseline capability and no time to adapt well, and so Australia will have no choice but to accede to the new geopolitical and economic realities that are emerging. Whatever those realities turn out to be for Australia’s national security, Australia’s critical infrastructure will remain at the forefront of the quality of day-to-day life for Australians as well as being the foundation of any capability to defend the nation. We have seen Ukraine’s critical infrastructure attacked, degraded, and destroyed by Russia for over a decade – the risk and the consequences are evident.
Australia needs to recognise the realpolitik of the world as it is today, not as it was, and act today to secure our national interests, which includes protecting its critical infrastructure. Government has its limits – advice, policy, and regulation goes only so far – and so it is incumbent on Australia’s business leaders and citizens to play their role in protecting Australia’s critical infrastructure assets and operations.
Critical infrastructure as a national security priority
Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet states that “national security is about protecting [Australia’s] territory and institutions and ensuring the safety of all Australians.”
This definition is all-encompassing in terms of the elements that might be required to deliver national security. The stated goal of ensuring the safety of all Australians is a lofty aspiration, which is not to say that goal is impossible but rather recognises that ensuring means to ‘make certain or safe’, hence is an absolute term that requires a great deal of planning, resources, execution, and effort to achieve in the context of dynamic world events.
In this article I will focus on one subset of the myriad elements required to ensure the safety of all Australians – critical infrastructure. I will discuss why protecting critical infrastructure is so important that it should be a national security priority. I will discuss the national-level threats that we need to protect Australia’s critical infrastructure from.
In the early 2000s the Australian Government recognised that Australia’s critical infrastructure, in particular the aviation and maritime transport sectors which connect Australia with the world, required national legislation to enhance their security. The Aviation Transport Security Act 2004 (ATSA) and the Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Act 2003 (MTOFSA) were enacted to protect against threats posed by terrorism and organised crime.
In 2018, Australia began to construct a contemporary legislative and policy framework, the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 (SOCI Act), to establish or enhance the security of a much broader array of Australia’s critical infrastructure. This step by the Australian Government was given impetus by the Five Eyes – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States of America – alliance with its ‘Critical 5’ partnership, which began in 2014 as a coordinated allied effort recognising the increasing risk posed from cyber-based threats to critical infrastructure stemming from adversary nation states, terrorists, and organised crime.
Australia’s 2023 Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy defines critical infrastructure as:
those physical facilities, supply chains, information technologies and communication networks, which if destroyed, degraded or rendered unavailable for an extended period, would significantly impact the social or economic wellbeing of the nation, or affect Australia’s ability to conduct national defence and ensure national security.
With this definition we can see the linkage between critical infrastructure and national security, and hence between critical infrastructure and the safety of all Australians.
Accordingly, if critical infrastructure is fundamental to enable the social and economic wellbeing of Australians and for the conduct of national defence to ensure national security, thereby qualifying as a national security priority, what are the threats that Australia’s critical infrastructure needs protection from?
Threats to Australia’s critical infrastructure
Protective security risk doctrine describes threat as an equation, expressed as intent x capability = threat. For a threat actor to be relevant to assets and operations then the threat source must have intent and capability to harm your assets. The word ‘intent’ also makes clear that these threats are from people because only people have intent. In this concept, nil intent or nil capability means there is no threat. Are there threat actors, that is, people-based threats, who have clearly expressed intent and have capability to harm Australia, particularly through attacking Australia’s critical infrastructure?
Australia is a remote island continent astride the Indian and Pacific Oceans, peopled by a relatively small population of predominantly Anglo-European stock, perched to the south of Asia, remote from its northern hemisphere allies and key trading partners, and almost totally dependent on sea and air transport for connection to the materials and manufactured items required for survival. Australia enjoys a generally temperate climate, vast agricultural lands, world-class natural resources, and a small population. India to Australia’s north-west is the most populous country in the world and Indonesia, to Australia’s immediate north, is the most populous Muslim country in the world.
Australia is a prize, bookending the Pacific Ocean with the United States which has been Australia’s principal military, technology, and intelligence ally and partner since 1942 when Australia’s nexus with Great Britain, its benefactor from 1770, was broken by the actions of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces. The British, with the fall of Singapore in February 1942, were proven unable to protect Australia and so Prime Minister Curtin turned to the United States as military partner and protector.
And so it has been for over 75 years, until 2025, when the second Trump Administration called out Australia, and also many allied and other nations, for allowing the United States to shoulder the vastly expensive and heavy burdens of maintaining the global economic and Western democratic security guarantees put in place in the wake of World War II, whilst the vast majority of the nations that benefited from the United States’ protections did little over many decades to cater for meaningful national security and defence capability of their own.
To understand the threats that Australia, and its critical infrastructure, needs protection from today we need to go back in time to see the context by which we might judge recent events.
The threats Australia must face today stem from a great change to our operating environment within which actions and intentions of the United States and China are fundamental. Australia’s operating environment has changed, and there is no going back. Let’s explore the protagonists that are key to the threats Australia faces today.
The United States
The phrase “There are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends, only permanent interests” is attributed to the 19th century British statesman Lord Palmerston. The phrase rings true today and applies in full measure to Australia, given greater piquancy by President Trump’s juddering actions regarding the United States’ national security, allied defence spending and commitments, global tariffs, and world trade in the first few months of 2025.
Trump’s actions in 2025 have shattered the post-World War II geopolitical environment that modern Australia had grown and prospered in, nuzzling as Australia did under the cloak of the United States, comforted by the ANZUS Treaty in 1952 and given succour by the AUKUS Treaty in 2021. However, no nation should have been surprised by Trump’s actions in 2025 because of his previous actions and what he said he would do. Lord Palmerston’s words ring true today in Trump’s words and actions.
Trump levied tariffs in his first administration and he campaigned for re-election in 2024 on a platform of punitive tariffs, particularly targeting China, for the stated aims of rebalancing global trade and security back to favour the United States at the expense of other nations.
On economics, Trump is attempting what might be an impossible task – he wants to return manufacturing to the United States after more than 40 years of offshoring driven by the profit motives of the private sector which influenced successive U.S. administrations that offshoring would be good for business and hence good for U.S. big business and consumers. Trump has frequently said that he wanted to erect trade barriers to adversely affect China which is the United States’ chief adversary and only near peer. Trump wants manufacture, and hence supply chains, to be more U.S.-based for national security and economic reasons – these two elements are inextricably entwined.
Trump’s 2 April 2025 tariff announcement appears to have been a ploy to force countries to approach the United States to secure trade deals that are more favourable to the United States’ long-term interests. As at late April 2025 it appears this tactic is succeeding, noting Trump’s punitive approach to China alone remains in place. It appears that Trump has taken this extraordinary and unconventional approach because diplomacy over decades has rendered the United States as the loser and Trump, labelled as a ‘great disruptor’, recognised a different approach – a revolutionary approach – was needed to break the entrenched paradigm. Trump has said for a decade that he wants to make America great again, and before that in the 1990s he criticised Japan for similar economic actions that were judged as detrimental to the United States. Trump’s actions align to his words.
On national security and defence spending, Trump told allies, especially NATO in his first administration, they had relied for decades on United States military prowess funded by U.S. taxpayers but now the NATO allies needed to pay more of their way. With regard to NATO, Trump told members they were obliged to lift their investment in defence otherwise the United States might quit NATO, or at least not fully honour Article 5 which is the core tenet of the alliance – an armed attack against one member nation is considered an attack against all.
Given the U.S. under President Biden was the most significant donor country to support Ukraine’s war with Russia it was clear, in hindsight, that NATO members should have been well prepared for Trump’s likely approach. Trump, prior to his re-election, expressed doubts about the U.S. continuing to fund and support Ukraine’s war effort. Since taking office Trump has caused Germany to overturn almost a century of budget constraint to agree, in 2025, to go into debt to, finally, lift military expenditure to deliver and maintain military capability that enables Germany and NATO to protect itself, potentially without support of the United States. The Germans recognised in 2022, with the outbreak of the Ukraine war, that the German military was grossly inadequate to meet the Russian threat but were slow to respond due to U.S. historical largesse making it less necessary to do so.
President Trump is not the problem. Trump is the logical manifestation of many ills that have infected the United States in particular and, by osmosis, much of the West, over a period of decades. A combination of American dominance in global finance, advanced technology, trade, manufacture, military capability, research and development, policy (domestic and international), and hubris coupled with American cultural imperialism have manifested in decisions by the United States since 1945 that resulted in what now may be ‘peak United States’. There is a view that the U.S. is now receding in the rear-view mirror as nations continue the journey to some unknowable destination. The United States will not disappear from view, of course, but it will likely appear distorted akin to the ‘items in this mirror may be closer than they appear’ view.
The current geopolitical environment was incubated in the 1990s. The United States, having won the Cold War with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, no longer had a pacing global peer and focused more of its attention on trade and being the sole superpower. Successive presidential administrations, certainly from Reagan in 1981 to Biden in 2024, variously espoused a view that encouraging trade and economic liberalisation, under the banner of globalisation, would plant the seed of democracy in non-democratic nations. The high watermark being the Bush Administration 2001-2009 with its ill-fated forays into Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the 9/11 attacks. America’s ‘base case’ was that democracy, matched with capitalism, is the best form of government, which in turn enables the best way of life. However, not every nation was likely to think this way.
China
This ‘base case’ line of thinking contributed to the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Congress encouraging and supporting China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001. The accession to the WTO had the effect of unleashing China from the constraint of a regular review by Congress of China’s human rights performance in order to retain its most-favoured-nation trading status with the United States. The United States at that time was able to dominate China in military and economic terms. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had other ideas that did not conform to the trade, liberalisations, and democracy construct which the United States and many in the West viewed as inevitable.
The CCP was not only resistant to the ‘base case’ but was hostile to it because it would mean the demise of the CCP in favour of democratic government in China. The CCP leadership formed a view that the United States, and hence it allies and global finance and trade entities, were hostile to the existence of the CCP as its political credo of Leninist communism was diametrically opposed to democratic capitalism. A series of events lead the CCP leadership to conclude that the United States and the Western democracies wanted to destroy the CCP. Waypoints along the formulation of this mindset are many spanning decades, but include:
- the Korean War 1950-53,
- the United States’ and allies’ response to the CCP’s violent crushing of pro-democratic protests in 1989 Tiananmen Square event,
- President Bush’s 1990 remark in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait “This will not stand, this aggression” which signalled the United States’ desire for a new world order it sought to inaugurate based on democracy, rule of law, and non-aggression
- the extraordinary effectiveness of United States’ conventional weapons and tactics in The Gulf War (August 1990 to February 1991) destroying the Iraqi military in 42 days which led the CCP to realise it needed to avoid a conventional military engagement with the United States, as the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) was very similar to the Iraqi military, and so needed to devise a different military strategy to compete with the United States
- the United States and the West winning the Cold War with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the only other major communist nation to China.
So, the CCP came to see the United States, and hence the economic and social liberalism it espoused with its ‘new world order’ as agents of the United States, and so as an existential threat to the CCP. The CCP determined that it would utilise its new trade access through WTO membership not to become a more open trading nation but rather to strengthen China’s economy and wealth to enable the CCP to retain its grip on political power (noting the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) is designed to defend the CCP, with defence of China’s sovereignty a byproduct), and grow to compete with and defeat the United States.
The CCP ‘gamed’ the United States and the West by abusing its WTO membership for the CCP’s purposes, not for the desired outcomes the United States and the West had anticipated. The CCP wrote its own script, and by the early 2000s assessed that the United States was a declining power, with the other Western democracies also in decline, which would enable China’s rise back to its self-proclaimed rightful position as a regional and global power whose reign had been rudely interrupted for the last 150 years by Western subjugation based on superior Western technology.
Recalling my earlier observation that we need to take Trump at his word, and we should not be surprised when he acts as he has said, we must apply this maxim to Xi Jinping as a guide to the China-based threats to Australia. For example, in 2013 Xi expanded his predecessor Hu Jintao’s comment about building a “community of common destiny” which was aimed at uniting Taiwan with mainland China, to become the basis for China’s continued aggression and unlawful action in the South China Sea to construct islands and militarise them. Xi expanded the implication of “community of common destiny” to encompass all countries at China’s periphery.
Xi went further in 2014, repudiating the United States and Western democracies to announce the New Asian Security Concept as the launchpad for a sustained attack on the U.S. alliance system. This has resulted in a program, since 2017 and substantially amplified 2020 in the wake of Western-led global criticism of China over the COVID epidemic, that resorts to overt threats and coercion towards many countries such as the illegal trade sanctions against Australia, corrupt inducements to politicians and business people, ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ through the Belt and Road programme, and bilateral corruption as seen with the Solomon Islands. Xi’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy from 2019 was intimidatory, manifesting in China’s open letter to Australia in 2020 listing 14 grievances China had with Australia, perhaps best captured by the Chinese advice to Australia that “If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy.” The 2015 ‘Made in China 2025’ policy also made clear that China wants to dominate key sectors of the global economy, especially in high value technology, to the detriment of the United States and the Western democracies. China will not open its domestic market to foreigners in any meaningful way having assessed economic domestic self-reliance is a key plank in its national security.
With respect to Australia’s critical infrastructure, China has deployed since at least 2022 a persistent cyber-attack capability, known as SALT TYPHOON, to disrupt and degrade critical infrastructure in Australia, the United States, and probably most Western democracies. SALT TYPHOON is so sophisticated and deeply embedded in critical infrastructure that it is unlikely to be irradicated and so Australian critical infrastructure operators must expect that the CCP, at a time of its choosing as a prelude to or component of war or war-like actions, will degrade Australia’s critical infrastructure, especially electricity and telecommunications.
President Xi Jinping has set a goal for the PLA to be a “world class military” by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the PLA. By way of context for this aspiration, in 1991 the Chinese assessed their military was 30 to 40 years behind the United States military. In 1991 any advanced military equipment the PLA possessed had likely come from a Western source or a copy of Western technology. A consequence of the 1989 Tiananmen Square event was loss of access to Western military equipment. From the early 2000s the CCP’s efforts were directed to acquiring and integrating Western and other military technologies rather than developing their own. The Chinese adopted a military strategy of “informationized warfare” in 2004 which was a marked change in the PLA’s experience of conventional land warfare against the United States in Korea, proxy war in Vietnam, and against India. In 2015 China’s military strategy became the expectation for the PLA to fight and win ‘modern’ wars, stating: “Integrated combat forces will be employed to prevail in system-of-systems operations featuring information dominance, precision strikes on critical nodes and joint operations”. In 2025 we see that China has developed advanced aircraft, submarines, surface vessels and aircraft carriers along with precision strike and strategic nuclear rocket forces.
What will this military capability be sued for? In December 2024 President Xi Jinping said that no one can stop China’s “reunification” with Taiwan. Xi said “The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family. No one can sever our family bonds, and no one can stop the historical trend of national reunification.” So again, Xi has made clear his intention and his actions since assuming the presidency, now for life, of the CCP is to force reunification with Taiwan, by coercion or military means, and to dominate the South China Sea and its nations along with controlling access to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific to Australia’s north. In this scenario, without freedom of the sea (enforced by the United States since 1945) and vulnerable air routes, Australia would be subjugated to the whims and belligerence of the CCP through the PLA. Should that scenario arise then there will be no going back for Australia because we do not have the capability to reverse it.
This threat to Australia was made very clear in February 2025 when Chinese PLA navy vessels for the first time circumnavigated Australia and held unannounced live fire missile drills in the sea between Australia and New Zealand, purposely disrupting commercial air travel between to the two countries as a clear show of ‘gunboat diplomacy’. This group of three Chinese ships included a Renhai-class cruiser, in service from 2017, which houses 112 vertical launch missile tubes, far superior to any vessel the Australian navy has now or is planning for on any vessel. The Chinese navy has more surface ships than the United States, and will continue to grow its navy as part of the biggest military build-up of any nation since World War II. The CCP wants to soon overmatch the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the commander of which has stated publicly that China will be placed, militarily, to take Taiwan by force from 2027. China declared its ambition to become a strong maritime power in 2012 and we see now, in 2025, its actions align with its words.
Competition between China and the United States conforms to an historical pattern known as the Thucydides Trap. This situation describes a declining power in competition with a rising competitor power. In the book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? author Graham Allison cites 16 case studies of the Thucydides Trap, starting in the 15th century, in which a major rising power has competed to displace a major ruling power. Of these 16 instances, 12 rivalries ended in war. The last war in the series being World War II and the two most recent cases – 1940s-1980s United States versus the Soviet Union for global power, and 1990s-present United Kingdom and France versus Germany for political domination of Europe, ended with no war. Whilst each of the 16 cases had unique features, this study indicates that war between the United States and China for global power appears statistically likely.
The Thucydides Trap is denominated in war. But what is war? The Oxford Dictionary defines war as “armed conflict between two or more parties, usually for political ends”. However, over the last 30 years technology has enabled a distinction to be made between conventional warfare and unconventional warfare. Unconventional warfare has many streams, amongst which a few describe China’s actions and words towards Australia in recent years.
- Hybrid warfare combines conventional and unconventional tactics including cyberattack, economic warfare, and information operations.
- Cyberwarfare is actions by a state or organisation (such as organised crime or issue-motivated groups) to attack or damage a nation’s information systems.
- Psychological warfare employs propaganda, misinformation, and other psychological techniques to influence the adversary.
There is abundant evidence embodied in the CCP’s action and words that China is waging an unconventional war against Australia, and also against the United States and other nations, today with the intention of intensifying its unconventional attacks, possibly to presage war or war-like actions to meet the CCP’s nationalist objectives. China’s 2025 decision to send a naval flotilla around Australia, and for the flotilla to conduct live firing missile drills astride a key air corridor between Australia and New Zealand, was a literal warning shot aligned with the threat of conventional war. The deployment of SALT TYPHOON is a marker of unconventional war.
China, under the CCP, is threatening Australia.
Russia
President Putin has made public comments about acting to rectify the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he described as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.” There are many assessments which conclude Putin’s quest is to reclaim and recreate much of the Russian Empire of Peter the Great, tsar of Russia 1721-25.
On Ukraine, Putin has made clear that he sees Ukraine as indivisible from Russia, citing history from the 9th century onwards asserting indivisibility of Ukraine and Russia. Russia’s decades-long program of espionage, political interference, cyberattacks, sabotage, cultural denigration, attacks on critical infrastructure, and military attacks targeting Ukraine, culminating in warfare and occupation in 2014 and again in 2022, make clear that we should pay attention to what Putin says and also what he does.
In April 2025 Putin’s words and actions became even more salient for Australia with media reporting that Russia, fresh from holding its first naval exercises with Indonesia in November 2024, is seeking aircraft basing in Indonesia which would locate Russian strategic military aircraft approximately 1,300 kilometres from Australia.
Russia has been an adversary to Australia for over a century. Prior to Australia’s 1901 federation the colonies feared a Russian naval attack driving a program of sea-facing forts in Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart in the mid 1800s.
Whilst Russia and Australia were allied in World War I, the Cold War led the Soviet Union to treat Australia as a soft underbelly for covert intelligence operations to penetrate the United States and the UKUSA alliance. Post Soviet Russia has continued to run covert intelligence and foreign interference in Australia to this day. Russian intelligence services are highly efficient in cyber operations, espionage, sabotage, misinformation, and propaganda. They are using those tools to threaten Australia today. Russia is allied with China.
Russia and China
Russia and China established diplomatic relations in 1991. On 4 February 2022 (just 20 days before Russia attacked Ukraine), Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin said publicly that the China-Russia partnership has “no limits’. To appreciate the context and significance of this ‘no limits’ descriptor of the China-Russia relationship it is important to look at the opening text of the 2022 communique which that statement refers to.
Today, the world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation. It sees the development of such processes and phenomena as multipolarity, economic globalization, the advent of information society, cultural diversity, transformation of the global governance architecture and world order; there is increasing interrelation and interdependence between the States; a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world; and the international community is showing a growing demand for the leadership aiming at peaceful and gradual development. At the same time, as the pandemic of the new coronavirus infection continues, the international and regional security situation is complicating and the number of global challenges and threats is growing from day to day. Some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind, against the opposition from the international community.
This bold statement – words and ideas agreed by Xi and Putin – describes a fundamental shift in China’s and Russia’s willingness to participate in the post-World War II geopolitical and economic frameworks that have operated under U.S. hegemony since 1945. They either do not want to participate or do so only on their terms. They are asserting for themselves a role in global affairs as a statement of direct competition with the United States and Western democratic states. And the actions of China and Russia, of which a very small amount is listed in this article, do make it clear they are today, and have the intent and capability to be, a threat to Australia and other nations.
In February 2025, Russia and China reaffirmed their close relationship.
Australia
Since 2016, strategic and historical assessments have identified that Australia’s defence capability is on a downward trajectory at a time of increasing geostrategic risk, much of that risk attributed to China. Indeed, since about 2020 we have started to hear from military analysts, the Australian Department of Defence, and military affairs commentators that Australia, and the world, face the highest threat of global conflict – conventional war between the major powers – since 1939. Even Australian politicians have mouthed these words but have failed to act on them in any meaningful way. Despite the threat being recognised, Australia is unprepared. In April 2025, Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s great historian argued that Australia was better prepared for war in 1914 than we are today.
In 1914, with a population of 5 million, Australia possessed the most powerful warship in the southern hemisphere in the HMAS Australia. Australia possessed steelworks, small arms production, textiles, railways, and other logistic and manufacturing to make and maintain much of the military and related equipment required to defend Australia and to project power. In 1934 Essington Lewis, the head of Australia’s then largest company, BHP, toured Japan and concluded that Japan was marshalling its resources to create a military capability that would likely threaten Australia. Lewis eventually convinced the government and fellow industry leaders of the need to prepare for war. This led BHP to produce more and better steel required for the production of military and naval equipment. Another outcome of Lewis’ activism was creation in 1938 of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation which produced Australian-made aircraft to help equip the Royal Australian Air Force. Lewis, leveraging BHP’s capability and financial resources also initiated the production of munitions in Australia. Lewis was appointed Australia’s Director-General for Munitions in 1940.
There is little basis of comparison between 1914 and 1939, to 2025, because technology has moved on from, in 1914 and 1939 cudgel and rock to, in 2025, keyboard and rocket. Australia no longer has the capability or capacity to quickly establish and evolve defence industry. We do not have the underpinning infrastructure and workforce to enable expansion of production required to build and sustain an indigenous military capability because of the quantum leap in complexity and cost of modern munitions, military platforms, and enabling technology coupled with chronic underfunding and lack of strategic vision by successive governments. Australia is totally dependent on the United States and Europe for the military and related enabling means to project hard power and to wage a defensive war to uphold Australia’s sovereignty. Australia has inflicted enormous national security self-harm by pursuing an unbridled idealistic pursuit of renewable energy, paying China for the enabling materials which it produces through carbon-based energy systems, to make Australia’s electricity grid unreliable and electricity so expensive it is extinguishing the few industries that remain. Affordable and abundant electricity used to be a powerful advantage for Australia, but that is no longer the case. Another example of the CCP’s unconventional war against Australia.
In 2025 Australia is unprepared militarily. We have no Essington Lewis and no powerhouse like BHP at our disposal. Perhaps worse, Australia as a society is generally unprepared for any form of conflict or war. Australia’s, and many other Western democracies’ apart from the United States political class, private sector, and society have an aversion to considering the likelihood and consequences of conflict even though, for Europe, Putin’s attacks on Ukraine in 2014 and especially in 2022 have belatedly shocked Europe to the reality of war in continental Europe causing many to rearm.
Australia’s critical infrastructure operators have been warned by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Department of Home Affairs to act now to better secure their critical assets and operations, but many critical infrastructure entities have not taken this warning seriously. Why is Australia resistant to the obvious warnings of threat?
Australia is unprepared because we have grown indolent, sucking on the teat of the post-1945 ‘great peace dividend’ of free trade and limited war under the protection of the United States acting as global arbiter and security guarantor. The global rules-based financial, trade, and security systems the United States largely created in the wake of World War II have encouraged many allied countries to ‘free ride’ on the back of the United States military-industrial complex, devoting scant resources and tokenistic military efforts to remain in the alliances. The post World War II reconstruction of Europe and the rehabilitation of Japan and Germany as functioning democracies and great contributors to global economic growth and liberalism are case studies of American strategic policy and economic intent. However, globalisation and many decades of unfocused short-term governance have left Australia denuded of much of the industry and capabilities required to maintain Australia as a sovereign defendable nation. The defence of a nation requires raw materials, design, fabrication, manufacture, logistics, military equipment, a supportive population, and political will. Australia is missing large chunks of this capability chain.
Trump has signalled that the United States is not in the democratic nation-building game anymore. It can no longer afford the invoice based on borrowed money (China holding the most U.S. debt of any country) and so has made clear that America’s allies must pay their own way, for their defence or at least contribute a lot more resources to secure U.S. military support which, despite formal agreements, may no longer be seen as a guarantee of military support. Again, Trump has a record such that no-one should be surprised when he acts to do what he said or makes changes that align to his stated vision. They have been warned and should be prepared.
Australia’s critical infrastructure under threat
Australia’s critical infrastructure is under attack every day, largely through means of detected cyberattack activity, and likely through undetected attacks. The threat is real and persistent.
ASIO in recent years has made clear its assessment that China and other nation states are acting to degrade or disable Australia’s critical infrastructure, with China’s SALT TYPHOON perhaps the marquee publicly avowed example threat. Organised crime is also attacking Australia’s critical infrastructure.
In workshops and events that we at Pentagram Advisory have run, when we brief on threats, we do find that many attendees from private sector entities, whose assets and operations are subject to the SOCI Act, are incredulous that Australia and its infrastructure are or will be subject to attack.
China is a threat to Australia today and is well placed, in that China has the intent and the capability, to disable much of Australia’s critical infrastructure by overt and covert means. China would prefer to achieve its hegemonic aims without using conventional warfare, a point Xi has made with respect to reunification with Taiwan. For Australia, China’s war objectives will be to diminish and deny the United States and its allies the operating base which Australia provides, akin to its role in World War II. Whilst an invasion of Australia by Chinese military forces is not a foreseeable risk, coercing Australia through denying its air and maritime trade links and disabling Australia as a support base for the United States military and intelligence operations are likely and attainable war objectives. The most efficient and effective way to achieve this denial objective is to degrade and disable Australia’s critical infrastructure, key amongst these are electricity and telecommunications because all other critical infrastructure sectors are reliant on these.
Disabling Australia’s critical infrastructure can be achieved by kinetic and non-kinetic means. Russia, in both its Ukraine campaigns, used kinetic attack including drones, missile, and sabotage, and also non-kinetic cyberattacks to disable Ukraine’s electricity grid and other critical infrastructure. Russia could deliver unconventional attacks, likely cyberattack and sabotage, against Australia’s critical infrastructure perhaps coordinated with Chinese attacks under the “no limits” agreement the two countries have. China, through SALT TYPHOON and perhaps many more undetected and yet-to-be-activated cyberattack capabilities, could disable Australia’s infrastructure. China does have kinetic weapons deployable from mainland China and also from tactical air and maritime platforms that could destroy key critical infrastructure in Australia, in part because Australia has no effective anti-missile defence and no military capability to deny Chinese military air and maritime platforms proximity to Australia.
In less dramatic forms than set out above, Australia’s adversaries – nation states, criminals, terrorists, issue-motivated groups – can and will bring threats that will degrade and deny Australia’s critical infrastructure through insider threats, sabotage, in-house and external cyber-attack, workplace disruption, and social fracturing.
Critical infrastructure is and will increasingly remain essential to the functioning of Australia’s society and economy. Remote from the rest of the world, Australia can be easily disabled and, in the absence of military and logistic support from the United States, could end up as a hulk tethered to the southern oceans of the world yet remain a prize for the taking because we are not equipped militarily, socially, or economically, to protect and maintain our nation.
For those readers who think this narrative cannot come to pass, is tending to the fantastic and even catastrophising, I offer a few events from history that demonstrate that highly adverse unimaginable events do happen.
- The fall of Rome in 476 AD.
- Pandemic in 1918 and also 2019.
- Jews who did not leave Germany and Western Europe by 1938.
- Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbour in 1941.
- Residents of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
- Beijing jettisoning the 1997 ‘one country, two systems’ agreement on Hong Kong by introducing a national security law in 2020 that extinguished Hong Kong’s liberal government and society.
- Russia reintroducing state-on-state war to continental Europe in 2014, the first since 1945, targeting civilians and critical infrastructure.
Australia is not special and so can be struck by the ‘unimageable’. With a less-than-certain security alliance with the United States now and a militant rising China we have to be able to fend for ourselves in new and inventive ways.
Conclusion
This article makes clear the dependence on critical infrastructure as the enabler of Australia’s national security. Successive Australian governments over decades have recognised the need to protect critical infrastructure from evolving threats as a tenet of national security yet have offered only policy guidance with little effective action. There are prescient warnings today of threats to Australia and hence to its critical infrastructure as a key dependency. The rules-based world and relative global peace that Australia has benefitted from since 1945 has irreversibly changed in ways that increase risk for Australia, and that risk is based in threats posed by great power competition between the declining United States and the rising China allied with Russia.
Australia is poorly positioned to weather this change, affording itself insufficient baseline capability and time to adapt well, and so Australia will have no choice but to accede to the new geopolitical and economic realities that are emerging.
For Australia to survive and thrive by any measure in the future, a fundamental component will be the effective and reliable services housed in Australia’s critical infrastructure sectors, especially electricity and telecommunications. For owners and operators of these assets, the Australian Government has done just about as much to help as it can – successive governments have provided policy advice.
We have been attentive in this article to the importance of what is said and what is done, so given governments have said much in terms of policy and regulation, we also must recognise that government has little capacity to ‘do’, that is to act in the scenarios considered in this article which are warlike and war actions for which Australia does not have viable and sufficient military and civil defence capabilities.
Critical infrastructure is, and must be, a national security priority. Protecting critical infrastructure now is very much a private sector task which, witnessing the work of Essington Lewis and others like him in World War II, can be achieved with leadership and cooperation. Lewis never sought money or accolades for his contribution to Australia’s security, he pursued this goal unselfishly because he knew it was the right thing, perhaps the only thing to do, to enable Australia’s survival.
To conclude, I offer this quote from Winston Churchill to suggest a perspective through which critical infrastructure owners and operators might view the need for them to act to protect their assets and operations.
“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!”