March 11, 2025
The Coalition and independent experts are demanding the federal government release a long-awaited review of Australia's intelligence agencies, warning that Labor risks undermining two decades of progress on intelligence transparency and accountability.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced in 2023 that he'd commissioned two highly regarded former senior officials — Heather Smith and Richard Maude — to complete the review.
The government was handed the final report in the middle of last year, but eight months later it still hasn't released a declassified version of the document or its response.
That's in sharp contrast to the Howard, Gillard and Turnbull governments who all commissioned — and then released — similar intelligence reviews in 2004, 2011 and 2017.
And with the prime minister now on the brink of calling a May election, both the opposition and intelligence analysts say there's a risk the report will remain buried forever.
Former senior Australian national security official Chris Taylor told the ABC that the government risked breaking a 20-year precedent ensuring public scrutiny of spy agencies.
"This ... is about avoiding absent-minded damage to a system of public accountability and continuous capability improvement that has served Australia well since the 2004 Flood Report," said Mr Taylor, who now heads the Statecraft and Intelligence Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
"If the independent intelligence review never actually emerges, it will mean that by the time we're due its successor in 2031, 14 years will have passed since the last public report on Australian intelligence.
"That's a 14-year information vacuum about a critical dimension of national statecraft."
Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paterson told the ABC the government was responsible for "an extraordinary delay on a critical national security process".
"The clock is now ticking and there is a real risk they won't be able to respond before entering caretaker mode, delaying it even further," he said.
"What was the point of commissioning a review if they didn't intend on acting on it? What harm is being done to our national security in the meantime?
"In an increasingly fraught security environment, the prime minister and his key national security ministers should not drag their feet any longer."
The 2017 L'Estrange–Merchant review triggered a sweeping restructure of Australian intelligence agencies, creating the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) as the community's key coordinating agency.
Most close observers don't expect similarly seismic changes this time around, predicting the Smith-Maude review will focus instead on how intelligence agencies can best tackle pressing technological and strategic challenges.
The head of the National Security College, Rory Medcalf, told the ABC that the government's delayed response was "really quite inexplicable".
"After all, this is a time when optimising our national intelligence capabilities for a turbulent world should be an urgent priority," he said.
"There's plenty of reason to think that our intelligence community is performing well, but the world is moving dangerously fast, whether it is strategic crisis in Europe or the Chinese navy doing an audacious lap of our continent."
Professor Medcalf said the Australian public deserved more information on how intelligence agencies were going to deal with a host of issues, including the growing importance of open source intelligence and the impacts of artificial intelligence and other technological advances.
He said that transparency was particularly important at a time when Australian spy agencies were also trying to deal with "disturbing questions about the future of trusted intelligence-sharing" with the Trump administration.
"Threats to remove Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, plus the outrageous suspension of sharing battlefield intelligence with a besieged Ukraine — these suggest a capricious and transactional approach to what has always been the most trust-based element of security cooperation," he said.
"This concern is compounded by the fact that any sensible intelligence partner will be thinking twice about what sensitive information on Russia they share with this US administration, given who some of its most senior intelligence consumers happen to be."
One former senior Australian official told the ABC that it would be "staggering" if the government failed to release the review before the election, adding there was "no guarantee" it would ever see the light of day after May.
"If this is a fit of absent-mindedness then that's bad enough, if it's deliberate then it's even worse," they said.
The former official said the silence from the government was "particularly mystifying" because the contents of the review were not expected to be "deeply controversial".
"It might be inertia at the top [level] or it might be because of institutional resistance," they said.
But they added that the prime minister's decision to push back the election until May because of the impact of Cyclone Alfred gave them more hope the review might be released.
"[The government] have got a bit more of a window now, and I just hope that it's on the list as the government clears the decks ahead of May," the official said.
"In fact, it should be at the top of this list."
A federal government spokesperson told the ABC it was still "considering the recommendations" in the report, and that "public release will be a matter once that process is complete".
