Preventing intelligence politicisation means more than just avoiding partisanship
Upholding the apolitical nature of Australian intelligence is critical to the agencies’ ability to deliver in the national interest, especially as our strategic circumstances deteriorate. But avoiding politicisation means more than just avoiding partisanship.
The often extraordinary powers of intelligence agencies in democracies mean they must operate in explicitly apolitical fashion. This hasn’t always been the case in Australia. Although instances are much less common than claimed, politicisation has occurred. For example, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s official history is rightly excoriating of under-the-table sharing of politically sensitive information with backbench members of parliament in the 1949-1972 Coalition government’s twilight. Sometimes politicisation has been more perception than reality, such as unfounded left-wing incredulity towards ASIO during the Combe-Ivanov affair, in which a high-ranking Labor official was found to have links to a KGB officer.
We also see politicisation of intelligence in other countries, whether it’s the use of intelligence in support of regime interests in authoritarian states or a Washington beset by politicisation and counter-politicisation accusations.
But what’s actually meant by politicisation? It’s typically thought of in two separate, sometimes intersecting, ways.
The first is party political bias, or partisanship. Australian law is explicit in this regard. The ASIO Act 1979, Office of National Intelligence Act 2018 and Intelligence Services Act 2001 all mandate regular agency briefings of the opposition leader and consultation on leadership appointments. They also require agency heads to take all reasonable steps to prevent their agencies being perceived as furthering or protecting ‘interests of any particular section of the community’. The Intelligence Services Act goes so far as to specify that functions of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Australian Signals Directorate and Australian Geospatial-intelligence Organisation ‘do not include undertaking any activity for the purpose of furthering the interests of an Australian political party or other Australian political organisation’.
Then there’s the ‘policy-isation’ of intelligence. This is the infringement of the idea that intelligence and policymaking should be held at arm’s length. This is very much a preoccupation in the United States, reflecting its constitutional circumstances. In Australia, it is more about appropriate demarcation of responsibility and accountability than ideological objection. I have written previously about how Australian governments have asked the intelligence community to fill policy gaps in certain circumstances – quite appropriately, provided ministers, departments and agencies are conscious of the anomaly. What’s unwelcome is when intelligence is used to pursue political ends, selectively supporting particular policy preferences. This includes leaking intelligence reporting, an unfortunate but long-standing feature of Washington.
Nonetheless, it’s increasingly important to be conscious of a third circumstance in which agencies’ words and actions assume an unintended political character when perceived externally. That’s often a result of the best of intentions or indeed the rational pursuit of practical outcomes. It’s an aspect of tumult in the US intelligence community (albeit alongside much more typically partisan accusations) and has even had murmurings in Britain. It can associate intelligence with often hot-button political attitudes and signalling, for example (and for want of a better descriptor than fractious American shorthand) ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, but also critical approaches to questions of sovereignty, sexuality or gender relations.
As noted, these statements are often founded on a sincere desire to engage and address real organisational needs, most obviously in building and sustaining 21st-century workforces. But the danger is that the same exemplary non-partisanship of the institutions in question can dull their senses to external perception of that messaging. This can then lead to an unconscious drift into politicisation – at least as understood by sections of the public in whose name agencies act – at a time of political, social and cultural fragmentation.
Why does this matter? Because intelligence agencies are trying to achieve two critical, separate but potentially conflicting objectives. The first is attracting talent from the widest possible national pool and self-validating segments of their existing workforces (with a political and cultural makeup not necessarily reflecting the general public, and that’s more likely tertiary educated, younger and less conservative). The second is consciously building and sustaining broader support from the public – which is often otherwise little informed or ill-informed about intelligence – in order to do what agencies do. This requirement will only grow as regional conflict looms.
Public communication aiding the first of those objectives can inadvertently undermine public communication serving the latter. What might seem entirely natural mores and attitudes in Canberra’s meeting rooms (indeed unquestioned in polite company) can jar elsewhere. This is what the US intelligence community has found out to its cost – and, by extension, everyone else’s – over the past decade. The great wheel of politics (and culture) turns constantly. What’s up may soon be down.
So, what should be done? This isn’t a call to abandon outreach to those historically underrepresented in the intelligence workforce. Rather, agencies should be more conscious of the ‘national’ in National Intelligence Community and not limit their political antennae to partisanship. They should be open and humble; be alive to a genuine diversity of views (including within their own organisations); and be as hard-headed in approaching these issues as they are in their analysis of Australia’s strategic and security circumstances. In short, they should accentuate unity, not division.
Public communications should be grounded in practical outcomes and objectives, and more first principles-based messaging forsaken, whatever personal views might be. Agencies should do the hard yards by supporting research into the actual effect of related workforce initiatives on the intelligence community. And governments should assist by not tying agencies (indeed the broader public service) to their own necessarily political attitudes and public signalling.
Is this a burgeoning problem in Australia? No, not yet. But the seeds are there. The US can ultimately, maybe, afford chaos and dysfunction in its national security institutions. Australia cannot.
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