Health security is often seen as a peripheral security domain, and as a problem that is difficult to address. These perceptions weaken our capacity to respond to borderless threats.
With the wind back of Covid-19 pandemic policies, health security is no longer a national security focus. Governments have reprioritised, as there is much more to defend and deter.
However, public health is not the same as health security. For as long as conflict in the global north can reduce food security in the global south, health and human security should be considered part of the national security domain. But current departmental strategies lean into domain separation and perceived misalignment.
The National Preventive Health Strategy 2021-2030 is siloed and excludes Defence contributions to health security and pandemic control. Likewise, the 2016 Australian Defence White Paper made no reference to health security threats, despite the swine flu pandemic that preceded it. Pandemic preparedness is similarly absent from the 2024 National Defence Strategy.
Similar omissions are found abroad, with some exceptions.
Health and defence have been integrated into defence strategies in Canada (2024), Britain (2010 and 2023), the United States (2022) and New Zealand (2023). These documents have presented pandemic risks as tier-one priorities alongside military crises, some developing biodefence plans for transnational challenges. They identify pandemics and health security risks as causes of global standstill and recognise the pressure these risks place on critical investments, undermining the sustainability of defence forces and supply chains.
These issues remain relevant.
Nobody wants another pandemic. But to avoid health securitisation is to ignore the need for top-down collaboration, integration and whole-of-government approaches to tackling new and potential security threats, including borderless threats.
Gaps in Australia’s health security plans are an opportunity to widen the scope of our national security focus. Funding for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Specialist Health Service advisory body ended in 2022, and support for the Australia’s National Action Plan for Health Security ended in 2023. Long-term planning investments seem better established in the regional focus.
The current Partnerships for a Healthy Region Initiative aims to deliver durable, flexible and adaptable outcomes through learning, communication, and coordination with strategic partners. Funding is scheduled to end in 2027.
Alternatively, the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent takes a sweeping view, emphasising that inclusive approaches are needed for future regional prosperity and resilience. The strategy addresses broad concepts, such as the urgent need to act on future pandemic control, the complexity of health challenges and the scope of traditional and non-traditional security issues. It offers a comprehensive, cross-domain and cross-department perspective.
Health security can part of the national security agenda, but new platforms for more modern considerations are needed to maintain its strategic relevance.
The phased establishment of the Australian Centre for Disease Control, with an agenda set to include the heightened surveillance of regional threats, is a promising step forward. The development of the first global Pandemic Accord is another notable opportunity for more strategic interpretations and developments in the post-pandemic environment.
Flexible and inclusive strategies can create more palatable and permanent connections between security domains. Australia must assess the gaps in its strategic preparedness. Otherwise, if disease variants, economic disruptions and systemic breakdowns converge again, global health security may become an impossible goal.
Policy integration may be the most relevant and sustainable approach to curbing an uncertain threat landscape. Australia should view health security as part of the national security domain, not peripheral to it, to better prepare for future threats.