Australia has always thrived when it builds for the future. The Snowy Hydro Scheme—a major hydroelectricity system that remains Australia’s largest engineering project—wasn’t developed in response to crisis. It was a bold investment made early, knowing that modern industry, energy security and population growth demanded it. That project, called for by the NSW Labor government in 1949 and delivered with national resolve, became an intergenerational asset. What needs building today is not dams and turbines, but rather the digital foundations for the next generation’s national resilience: data, cloud and control.
Australia has already shown what digital nation-building can look like. The National Broadband Network, launched by then prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2009, created a backbone for the 21st-century economy. It continues to connect Australians and enable digital participation.
More recently, the Albanese government has invested $630 million to secure myGov and a $288 million, four-year expansion of the Digital ID program. These are substantial foundations. The next step is to scale up and create a coordinated national digital architecture so that identity, security and resilience become part of a lasting, whole-of-government framework.
That means treating public-sector digital systems as we treat power stations, transport corridors and communications towers: as nation-building infrastructure. These systems are not just back-office plumbing, but the critical arteries of a modern democracy, a dynamic economy and a security system under concurrent pressures. This is the time to coordinate a national upgrade, not only because parts of the system are already strained, but because positioning for the next decade requires preparation now.
Relentless cyber-attacks, the growth of AI and the coming post-quantum shift will challenge the design of Australia’s public-sector digital infrastructure, in particular. Unlike the Snowy Hydro Scheme, where government led from the front, today’s digital foundations rely on sustained private-sector investment. That makes coordination harder and demands both policy reform and cultural change within government agencies.
As public services move deeper into the cloud, the challenge is no longer whether to modernise, but how to deliver and operate national infrastructure securely and effectively with trusted partners. Without coordination, risks will continue to compound. But parts of this system are straining, burdened by legacy code, rising threat levels and surging public expectations.
Recent government reporting shows why action can’t wait. The Digital Transformation Agency’s latest portfolio review found that while 75.9 percent of high-complexity (Tier 1 and 2) projects entering oversight since February 2024 had High or Medium-High delivery confidence, the remaining flagship programs face elevated delivery risks tied to technical debt and outdated architectures. Cyber and infrastructure resilience metrics tell a similar story: scam-related cybercrime losses surpassed $2 billion in 2023, and critical infrastructure incidents reported to the Australian Signals Directorate remain 35 percent higher than in 2021–22, despite a modest year-on-year decline.
Meanwhile, the technology environment is evolving faster than the systems underpinning it. Data from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) confirms that while cloud and AI adoption are accelerating, legacy infrastructure remains a binding constraint across advanced economies. The OECD’s 2023 Digital Government Index found that fewer than one in four member states had fully modernised their core ICT systems to support automation and AI integration, despite near-universal policy commitments to cloud-first strategies. The World Bank’s 2024 GovTech Maturity Index reports that 80 percent of governments globally are prioritising digital service delivery, yet only 20 percent have completed legacy-system renewal or migration to secure cloud environments. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Cybersecurity Outlook warns that accelerating adoption of AI, quantum computing and the Internet of Things is widening the resilience gap, with many organisations facing a five-year lag between emerging technology deployment and corresponding cyber defence maturity. This gap continues to expose critical infrastructure to systemic risk.
Taken together, these indicators show that hyperscale cloud, embedded AI and post-quantum encryption are converging on platforms never designed for automation, resilience or cryptographic overhaul. The gap between technological ambition and system readiness is now quantifiable—and widening. Without deliberate modernisation, the risk is not simply inefficiency, but the hard-coding of fragility into the foundations of tomorrow’s digital state.
Most reform efforts won’t meaningfully scale until 2027. Defence’s Digital Strategy stretches ICT and enterprise data investments over a 10‑year horizon. And the Major Digital Projects Report shows many digital government reforms are still in design, with only a few in full delivery. Planning further ahead, just as we once did with Snowy Hydro and the National Broadband Network, will allow us to build infrastructure that is resilient and trusted. Beyond efficiency, cloud migration a nation-building investment in continuity and control. When shocks come—whether from cyberattacks or economic turbulence—critical services must remain available and reliable.
Ukraine’s wartime experience offers a clear example of what is at stake. Faced with sustained missile strikes and cyberattacks, the Ukrainian government rapidly shifted critical digital systems to trusted hyperscale cloud environments abroad. What was once viewed as a potential vulnerability became a tool of state continuity. That pivot ensured core public services could survive kinetic and cyber disruption. Australia is not in the same position, but the lesson is timely. Waiting for crisis to force a move is far riskier than building resilient infrastructure in advance.
A dollar invested wisely today can yield multiples in future savings, while reducing hidden costs and inefficiencies over time. Digital reform can cut waste, improve continuity and lift service quality. As we have argued elsewhere, the shift to post-quantum cryptography is not a science project but rather a near-term resilience challenge. Long-lived data and critical control systems need upgrading now, not after the threat becomes obvious.
This is not a departure from what the government has already set in motion. It is the natural evolution of a nation-building agenda that recognises that infrastructure needs to adapt with the times. Where yesterday’s priority was to electrify and connect the continent, tomorrow’s priority must be to secure it through digital systems designed for continuity, resilience and adaptability.
That means a national architecture and clear roadmap: auditing core systems, strengthening encryption and modernising data assets. This builds directly on current reforms—lifting productivity, enabling secure AI and reinforcing trust. From there, we can map what to modernise, what to phase out and what to rebuild. The payoff will be resilience, responsiveness and continuity under pressure.
Other countries are moving. Estonia stores systems offshore while maintaining sovereign control. Singapore treats digital resilience as national strategy. The United States has embedded post-quantum computing readiness into federal architecture reviews. Australia is not starting on the back foot, but without coordination, it will fall behind.
This is where two national priorities converge: enabling defence through cloud, cyber and AI; and building infrastructure resilience to strengthen deterrence. Together, they shape how we operate in conflict, how we respond in crisis and how we protect national systems from coercion.
Snowy Hydro was built not because it was easy, but because it mattered. The same logic applies now. Digital infrastructure may not carry water through mountains, but it will carry Australia’s services, security and economy through turbulence. We know that digital infrastructure is important. The test now is whether we can treat it with the same ambition, confidence and national resolve that defined Australia’s great nation-building projects of the past, and whether it is strong enough to carry the country through the next century.