Speech
17 November, 2025
Hosted by Australian Institute for International Affairs (AIIA)
Canberra
Every now and then I speak on a panel like this, look at the synopsis and think ‘Gee that’s a lot’ to grapple with in some scene setting opening remarks.
Democracies like Australia are facing a series of concurrent challenges to our democratic resilience.
We face the decades long decline of the civic spaces of our society, the shared spaces where we come together with our fellow citizens, our community groups, faith groups, trade unions, and political parties.
We face the declining influence of the mainstream media and the space that it held for a shared national discourse.
We face the proliferation of social media platforms optimised for our basest instincts and designed to monetarily reward those who seek to anger, outrage and divide us.
We face a flood of increasingly realistic deep fake images and video disinformation, generated at scale, and creating a world where seemingly nothing is true and anything is possible.
We face the increasingly ubiquitous use of AI chat agents by younger generations bringing with it dramatic changes in learning and human capital development with profound societal consequences.
We face a persistent dissatisfaction with our established democratic institutions, particularly on the part of young people, as our society and economy is unable to deliver to new generations what it did to those that preceded it.
We face authoritarians and opportunists within our nation who are willing to subvert established norms of our democracy in pursuit of power or short-term political benefit.
And we face foreign adversaries with increasing means and motive to exploit these trends to interfere in our democracy for their own ends.
As someone who loves your democracy and has given a large part of my life to working within our democratic institutions, these trends are very disturbing to me.
Without wanting to sound overly dramatic, this ominous confluence of threats to the resilience of our democracy has more than a ring of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” to them.
I do often feel cast as Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s seminal “Things Fall Apart” grappling with the rapid collapse of all of the systems of knowing and order that have governed our lives.
For all of the ominous and complex foreboding in the synopsis of this panel session, at its heart is something fundamental and quite simple.
What we are really talking about in this panel is the ability of Australians to come together as citizens and agree a pathway forward for the nation, informed by the facts and free of outside coercion.
It’s about what I tell school kids visiting Parliament House that our democracy is about - our ability to make decisions together as a group.
This panel’s synopsis asks us “What does democratic resilience require today?”
There will be lots of diplomats and technocrats and academics speaking at this conference, but I want to answer this primarily by speaking to you as an elected representative and a fellow citizen in this democracy.
So yes, foreign interference is a serious threat to Australia.
It threatens to erode community trust in our government and institutions and undermining social cohesion and shared values.
And it’s a persistent, sophisticated and growing threat.
ASIO’s Director-General has stated there have been 24 major espionage and foreign interference disruptions in the last three years alone – more than the previous eight years combined.
We’ve seen some appalling examples of foreign interference in the last 12 months and the government has responded forcefully.
The Albanese Government is clear that we have zero tolerance for harassment, intimidation and surveillance of Australians and we have strong framework in place to deter, identify and respond to foreign interference in our democracy.
The Commonwealth Counter Foreign Interference Taskforce leads the Government’s operational response and brings together a team of ASIO officers, Australian Federal Police investigators and representatives from AUSTRAC, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation, the Department of Defence and the Office of National Intelligence.
We have a robust legislative and policy framework to build whole-of-society resilience to foreign interference threats and build democratic resilience.
It’s a whole of government response for a whole of nation challenge.
It includes fronts of effort as diverse as the University Foreign Interference Taskforce led by Education and Home Affairs, the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme and CFI legislation led by AGD, the Foreign Investment Review Board led by Treasury, the Election Integrity Assurance Taskforce led by the AEC and the Foreign Arrangements Scheme led by DFAT.
We even have a “National Resilience Wheel” in DFAT visualising these separate but related initiatives.
The National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator, supported by the Counter Foreign Interference Coordination Centre within Home Affairs brings together government, the private sector and the Australian community to identify and respond to foreign interference.
And at the beginning of this year we released the Countering Foreign Interference: Working together towards a more secure Australia publication.
Building public awareness of the threat by giving specific examples of how it can manifest in different spheres of Australian life and showing how individuals and organisations can better protect themselves.
So there’s a lot going on in government on this issue.
And yes, each of these streams of work are being delivered by dedicated, patriotic Australian public servants who are great at their job and think hard about these challenges.
But as an MP and a citizen, I know that there is no silver bullet government initiative, or technology innovation for that matter, that is going to deal with the challenges facing our democratic resilience.
The fate of our democracy is up to all of us, as citizens.
We built our democracy, one of the oldest and most successful in the world, and we need to preserve it in the face of profound change and challenge.
So let me talk to you today primarily as an elected representative and as a fellow citizen.
I’ve been a Member of Parliament since 2013 and I’ve experienced all of these trends of division and polarisation getting progressively worse from the inside.
The thing that has worried me the most though isn’t a foreign adversary or a tech oligarch, but it is the way we are increasingly engaging with our fellow citizens.
People who know me, who’ve ever gone to dinner with me or even had a cup of coffee with me, will know that I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the growing prevalence of contempt in our society.
Contempt is a feeling that another person is “worthless or beneath consideration”.
Marriage counsellors identify it as a red flag for relationship breakdowns and it’s becoming increasingly common in the way Australians interact with each other in our democracy.
I’ve seen contempt come to define interactions between Australians on issues as diverse as the conflict in the middle east, the rate of Newstart, Australia’s relationship with China, trans policy, planning policy and cycling policy.
Interactions where Australians have come to viscerally feel that those who disagree with them are “worthless or beneath consideration”.
Interactions where Australians who disagree with them are assumed to do so because they are corrupt or morally compromised.
Contempt for our fellow citizens corrodes our democracy and leaves us more vulnerable to interference from foreign adversaries.
Contempt is corrosive in a democracy as our democratic institutions are founded on norms that assume a baseline of mutual regard between citizens.
Representative democracy is built on the assumption that we will disagree with our fellow citizens, regularly, but that we will continue to share more in common.
That in a diverse, representative democracy, we can’t always get our way, but that we all still need to live together in communities, in schools and in workplaces in our nation.
And that the success of our communities, schools, workplaces and our nation affect us all, collectively, as Australians.
That for better or worse, we’re all in the same boat and need to work together to build a better future for us all.
There are lots of causes for this.
Social media algorithms incentivise performative, polarised engagement between tribes.
We are spending less time in those third spaces – community groups, faith groups, sports clubs, trade unions - where we are able to see fellow Australians as complete human beings, rather than a totemistic belief.
But simply being aware of these forces pushing us towards more divided, polarised engagement with our fellow citizens allows us to push back on it in our day-to-day behaviour.
Knowing about these forces and knowing that our adversaries are trying to exploit them is the first step to choosing a different path in response.
More than any new policy program or legislative reform, my view is that the most important thing we can do for our democratic resilience is to change the way we think and speak about our fellow citizens.
That’s something that all of us can do, every day.
It doesn’t require us to compromise our beliefs or to pretend that disagreements don’t exist.
But it does require us to see everyone in our nation as having worth and giving them due consideration as fellow citizens.
It requires resisting the forces driving us to condemn, dismiss and dunk on people.
It requires listening, curiosity and empathy and an appreciation for the things we have in common and a refusal to allow ourselves to be defined by our differences.
And it requires accepting that as fellow citizens our interests are entwined, that we share an interest in the future of the nation we share.
This is our best defence against foreign adversaries who are trying to subvert our ability to make decisions together as a group by dividing Australians, or trying to intimidate and silence Australians.
In the face of some pretty scary international trends, such an approach is fundamentally optimistic about who we are and what we’ve built together here.
Australia has built one of the oldest and most successful democracies in the world.
A democracy of innovation and of inclusion.
The home of the secret ballot – the Australian ballot, compulsory voting, preferential voting, an expansive view of the franchise, an independent AEC.
We built our democracy to be the most inclusive and representative in the world because we wanted our democracy to reflect our values as Australians.
We wanted our democracy to ensure that every Australian’s voice was heard.
Within these inclusive democratic institutions we’ve built the most successful multicultural nation on earth.
A nation where half of us were born overseas or had a parent born overseas.
A nation of people who chose to come here because they believed they could become a part of something better than where they were leaving.
A nation whose democratic institutions allowed us to grow and change together as a nation.
A nation that was able to recognise mistakes like terra nullius and the White Australia policy and collectively set a different course towards building a better, greater nation.
There’s so much for us all to collectively take pride in as Australians.
The democracy and the society that we have built together leave us better placed than most other countries to face the challenges of division, polarisation, authoritarianism and foreign interference.
But whether we succeed in the face of these challenges won’t be determined by a new law or government taskforce, it will be determined by the individual choices we make as Australian citizens.
