A review conducted to ensure Australia's intelligence agencies are best positioned to continue to serve the national interest. It found agencies have been successful in protecting Australia’s national interest and Australia’s international intelligence partnerships, especially but not exclusively within the Five Eyes group, are deep and healthy. 

The review provides 67 recommendations including investing in further capability to ensure the intelligence community maintains its high performance.

Key findings

1. Integration and coordination across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise have improved. Even so, there remains at times an imbalance between what the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) is expected to achieve by government and ONI’s ability to bring the rest of the intelligence community along with it. Greater integration is possible on some issues and more can be done to institutionalise a deep and genuine culture of collaboration and the idea of ‘community’.
2. There is a need for deeper integration of intelligence with other arms of government. Closer, more effective working relationships will ensure the intelligence community’s output aligns closely with government priorities. It will also ensure intelligence is used systematically as a tool of statecraft to maximise Australia’s competitive edge in this challenging era.
3. Intelligence agencies must innovate in order to keep pace with a shifting landscape of national security threats. Four interlinked challenges are especially consequential. Intelligence agencies must be well prepared for a future crisis or conflict. They must successfully deploy new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI). They must continue to invest in international partnerships and develop stronger ones outside government. And they must be able to recruit, retain and train a highly skilled and committed workforce.

Recommendation areas

• Role of the ONI
• Enterprise management
• Intelligence support for ministers
• Policy and intelligence
• Economic security
• Value of contestability
• Public release of intelligence
• Preparedness and National Intelligence Community investment
• Collective capabilities and shared services, technology
• Insight and advantage through open source
• Collective action on people and skills
• Partnerships
• Legislation and oversight