by David Spratt, first published at Pearls & Irritations
The Albanese Government has jammed itself by trying to not talk about the greatest threat to Australia’s future, but has now opened itself to the charge of playing politics with security issues.
The absurdity was on full display in a front-page story last weekend, when The Saturday Paper reported that the government gave a secret briefing on 9 December last year to a number of Teal and independent members of parliament on the contents of the Office of National Intelligence assessment of climate-related security risks — one which the government had classified and refused to release in a declassified form for two years.
In fact, Pearls and Irritations broke the story on 15 January: “Just before Christmas, a number of independent MPs and senators received a confidential briefing on the report from ONI. This means they are not able to discuss what they learned.”
Senator David Pocock was at the secret briefing, which was in effect the selective leaking by a government of an intelligence report it had classified. The briefing occurred after Pocock, the Greens and the Teals had consistently pressed the government on the ONI assessment which was delivered in December 2022 and immediately locked in a bottom drawer after it was seen by members of the security committee of Cabinet.
The independents have consistently said that as parliamentarians it was not possible for them to do their job and oversee the government’s security and climate agenda if the key information on the nature of those risks was deliberately being withheld from them. This was in sharp contrast to the government’s preferred narrative of China as the number one security threat, which ministers were only too willing to constantly articulate in public, often without a great deal of substance.
The (private) response from Cabinet ministers to the ONI report was shock and awe, and alarm that they had not heard anything like this before. Clearly they had not been listening to the expert analysis from within parts of the global security and defence community. In 2021, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group had clearly spelt out the dangers in their Missing In Action report, which, among other things, was the genesis of the ONI assessment.
The picture the ONI report likely painted was described in these pages back in May 2023: Are Australia’s climate–security risks too hot to handle? I understand that the selected briefing in December was generally consistent with that analysis.
Pocock says that: “After hustling the government for the last few years, they gave crossbenchers a private briefing on it and it’s frankly terrifying, what our national security agencies are telling us is coming, and the government is not acting… I think it is actually negligence from both of them… We’re woefully underprepared for what’s coming… It’s no surprise that the government has been sitting on this report from the Office of National Intelligence.”
Three questions deserve answers.
First, why was a declassified version of the ONI report not released, as happened with the Defence Security Review? The clearest answer is that the risks ONI described — “terrifying” according to Senator Pocock and others — would make the government’s policy of expanding coal and gas production look absurd. Indeed, there is clear evidence that the government’s climate narrative has been to talk about the “good news” economic story and not talk about “bad news” impacts. The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group has documented how the government has treated climate-related security risks as “Too hot to handle”.
Second, why were some parliamentarians, but not the Greens who had also campaigned strongly for the release of the ONI report, given a secret briefing? Some participants in the meeting were under the impression that they could not even acknowledge the briefing had occurred. Why not outer cabinet ministers who are still in the dark, or members of the foreign affairs, defence and security committees of Parliament? The only explanation that makes sense is that the government was playing politics and trying to build bridges with those it might need to form a minority government in the next parliament, at a time when polling for Labor was at its lowest point.
Third, what does this selective leaking mean for the ONI report’s classified status? Well, it is now badly compromised. It would be reasonable for the rest of the parliament to go berserk at the government if they are not also briefed. Otherwise the charge of playing politics with security would stand.
And the biggest reason to release a version of the report has nothing to do with politics. It is about humanity’s future. Leading scientists, Western security analysts and global leaders agree that climate now represents an existential (civilisation-ending) threat. Properly understanding that threat and acting upon it should be the highest priority for Parliament. But as previously reported in Pearls and Irritations, work on the government’s domestically-focused Australian Government’s National Climate Risk Assessment has been stalled and/or the project has been sunk.
Two climate and security reports by this government: one has failed to appear and the other locked up and then selectively leaked for political advantage.
