The road to hell is apparently paved with good intentions. But often, it’s tarmac laid with thoughtlessness and passivity.

Two years ago the Albanese government described Australia’s immigration policy as broken, owing to unplanned, temporary migration flows since 2005. It claimed this ‘happened without any real policy debate or discussion. It happened not through thoughtful planning and strategy, but by negligence and continental drift.’

Today, a similar drift threatens to break a model of intelligence review, strategic direction and public engagement that has served Australia well for more than two decades.

It’s been more than 210 days since the 2024 independent intelligence review report was given to the prime minister. As noted in The Strategist back on the first anniversary of the review’s commencement (and two and a half months after the review was completed):

The Albanese government did well by instituting this latest review … but the job isn’t finished until the report and recommendations are made public. Then the hard work of implementation and accountability begins.

Back in August 2024 the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet confirmed the report’s receipt before its 30 June 2024 deadline. There’s no public indication of anything abnormal or deficient about the report or its findings—hardly surprising given the eminence of the authors, Heather Smith and Richard Maude. There’s also no hint of a great clash of competing visions or principles to guide our National Intelligence Community (NIC), or of a fundamental intelligence failure requiring remedying, not least given the transformative investments in and fundamental restructuring of the NIC following the last review in 2017.

This only exacerbates frustration with the government’s failure to respond to the review and release a public version of the report. There are two possible explanations. Either it’s timidity or they’re unable to exercise sufficient direction to end this damaging delay.

It bears repeating that the world has not stood still since June 2024—and certainly not since the last inputs into the review, which date to late 2023. Since September 2024 alone we’ve seen civil and military unrest across the globe, including the most audacious intelligence operation in recent history—Mossad’s supply chain attack on Hezbollah—as well as the eruption of antisemitic violence in Australia and the change of administration in Washington.

One interpretation is that for seven months the NIC has been beavering away implementing the classified report. But even this ignores the importance of the public report, including to the NIC itself.

The benefits of public intelligence review reports were outlined in a Strategist article last year.

In short, they enable intelligence reform and transformation, given the NIC’s reliance on the public for workforce recruitment, technology and industry partnerships and social licence. Public reports also help hold government accountable for the implementation of recommendations.

Also, an unclassified version of an otherwise very sensitive and restricted top-secret document is the best way of engaging not just the public but all the NIC’s staff, and officials across the broader bureaucracy.

While Australian voters will make their call at the ballot box later this year, we suspect few votes will turn on this issue alone.  But there is now a much, much bigger problem, which doesn’t just affect the value and future utility of this particular review.

The implication that the Smith-Maude review may never see the light of day places us all on the precipice of a government, albeit without malice aforethought, breaking the system of public intelligence review that has existed in Australia for over 20 years.

Before the 2004 inquiry by diplomat Philip Flood, Australian governments’ understandable but unsustainable historical refusal to engage publicly on intelligence resulted in a series of crisis-response, judicially led inquiries: two Royal Commissions, led by Justice Robert Hope in 1974–77 and 1983–84, and the Samuels-Codd Commission of Inquiry in 1994–95.

Other reviews were also carried out entirely behind closed doors, such as the post-Cold War Richardson and Hollway reviews (both 1992), and the Cook 1994 counter-intelligence inquiry.

It was Flood who gave Australia the significant benefits of intelligence review through scheduled check-ups focussed on the future, and an effective balance between secrecy and openness. Since then, we have had the 2010–11 Cornell-Black review, the 2016–17 L’Estrange-Merchant review and now the Smith-Maude review, as well as the Richardson review of the NIC’s legal framework.

This is an invaluable, internationally unique, bipartisan system that would be sorely missed.

In the 1970s and 1980s, complete nonsense filled an intelligence community-shaped information hole in Australian public life—and that was in a more regimented media ecosystem.

Without the substantive public engagement built into the independent intelligence review system, what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s misinformation hellscape?