By Greg Austin
Australia urgently needs to have an open and public debate on its military, security, and civil needs in cyberspace.
As Australia prepares to release its next White Paper on defense policy, expert eyes are waiting to see whether it will match the declaration by Malcolm Turnbull, the country’s new prime minister, that his government is one fit for the 21st century. Turnbull has set out a vision, in broad terms only so far, that he wants Australia to move more quickly to become a country of digital innovation. As an indication of intentions, he moved the responsibility for digital policy to his own Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and convened an innovation round table just a week ago. What will the new White Paper say about the country’s cyber war planning and capabilities?
The need for 21st century innovation in the defense portfolio is urgent, as a number of submissions to the 2015 White Paper through this year argued, not least those from specialists with direct experience in Australia’s intelligence and security services or its armed forces. One of these submissions, by the author, was revised and published under the title “Australia’s Digital Skills for War and Peace” in an Australian peer-reviewed journal in December 2014.
As part of its case, the article developed arguments and data provided by others, including the Australian Computer Society (ACS), that our universities were doing badly in educating Australians for the cyber age. Between 1999 and 2013, statistics of the Australian Department of Education show that our annual corpus of new domestic student graduates in information technology (IT) fell by 46 percent, though there was an upturn in 2012 and 2013. (This reference to IT graduates does not include electrical engineers, which saw an increase.)
According to the ACS [PDF], we were able to compensate for the sharp decline in IT graduates in part by temporary ICT migrants to Australia, which in 2009-10 numbered 8,530 – double the number of our own IT graduates for that year (ACS 2011: 27-28). (Data for later years does not allow a similarly granular comparison.)
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