Australia needs clearer guidelines around domestic deployments. Australia’s constitution mirrors many key features of the United States, including a provision that allows federal troops to intervene domestically in states. But unlike the US, Australia has no equivalent to the US National Guard, meaning the Australian Defence Force is the only military force available for such tasks. Currently, thresholds to respond to less-than-riots are controlled not by any clear law, but by inconsistent policy. This policy needs to be tightened.
In recent years, the ADF has been drawn into many domestic operations, from bushfires and floods to hotel quarantine and border enforcement. These are not new: since 1901, the federal government has deployed the ADF domestically 13 times outside of flood relief or bushfire assistance. The most recent of these, with approval for lethal force, was during US president George W Bush’s visit to Australia in 2003. These call-outs were acts of executive power, outside written acts of Parliament. Even the current deployment of the US National Guard and Marines is the result of an act of Congress. In Australia, decisions are often made on an ad hoc basis, guided more by precedent and political expediency than by written law or clear policy.
Section 119 of the Australia’s constitution requires the federal government to protect states against ‘domestic violence,’ but only upon the request of a state government. Yet the 13 previous call-outs have were ordered without state requests: they were initiated unilaterally by the federal government. Unlike the US, Australia has not built a robust jurisprudence or operational framework around this provision. In practice, deployments often occur outside this constitutional mechanism—under policy rather than law—raising important questions about authority, consent, and oversight.
In the US, the national guard gives states a flexible, on-call force for emergencies, run by state governors but available to the federal government if needed. Australia doesn’t have anything like that. Instead, the ADF is the only uniformed force available, even though it’s a centrally run, combat-trained military. That puts strain on a system that is not built for domestic work and pushes the ADF into roles such as managing traffic or enforcing quarantines—jobs that sit awkwardly between civilian and military duties.
Much of the confusion lies in the Australian policy distinction between Defence Assistance to the Civil Community (DACC) and Defence Force Aid to the Civil Authority (DFACA). It is important to stress that this is just policy. It does not reflect legal realities. DACC is used for non-coercive support, such as flood relief or logistics, while DFACA is meant to apply when there’s a risk of force being used. But what counts as ‘force’ is unclear. Does it include restricting movement at a checkpoint? Escorting police during an arrest? Flying surveillance drones? These ambiguities present greater challenges in situations where ADF personnel could be deployed in roles that straddle the line, such as protecting federal buildings. There is little legal clarity as to which policy would apply.
Australia must replace the current binary with a more coherent framework—one that reflects the diverse forms of military work likely to arise in domestic settings. At present, policy fails to capture the full spectrum of roles that the ADF may be asked to perform on home soil. Instead of drawing sharp lines between civil and military tasks, Australia needs policy that recognises domestic military employment as a spectrum of activities—from high-end coercive operations to low-end logistical or technical support. This requires a more nuanced approach to authorisation, consent, legal protection and public accountability.
British doctrine offers a useful reference point, even though Britain does not have a federal system. Throughout the 20th century, Britain developed structured policy language around domestic military employment, treating it not simply as emergency response but as a distinct form of public labour—called ‘military work’—with different rules depending on the nature of the task. DACC and DFACA lack this level of conceptual clarity. They blur the line between emergency aid and coercive presence, and do not adequately distinguish between different legal consequences, consent thresholds, or oversight mechanisms. The result is a policy architecture that treats military involvement as exceptional but offers few tools for navigating the routine, functional roles the ADF increasingly performs in domestic life.
By reframing domestic deployments as military work—a policy construct that acknowledges the different roles, risks and responsibilities associated with uniformed labour—Australia could build a more durable and principled framework. It would also avoid the pitfalls of both over-militarisation and under-regulation: it would ensure that the ADF is not exposed to legal uncertainty when force is involved, without shielding it from accountability when it performs civilian tasks. Such a framework would strengthen military professionalism, reinforce democratic control and provide the clarity that both policymakers and the public demand.
Without reform, the ADF risks being routinely deployed in unclear, potentially unconstitutional ways, with growing consequences for civil-military boundaries and public trust.