Twenty-five years ago, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute began with a deceptively simple proposition: Australian strategic policy would be better if the ideas informing it were contested.
I have spent almost 12 of those 25 years at ASPI, making me its longest-serving current staff member. I have watched the organisation change enormously over that time, and I have changed with it. I arrived principally as a practitioner. I had spent much of my career in places where policy eventually encountered reality and where elegant ideas could become considerably not so elegant when confronted with geography, institutions, human behaviour and adversaries with ideas of their own. ASPI provides somewhere to turn that experience into policy arguments.
My time here has also taught me something about ASPI that can be difficult to see from outside. There is no ASPI mould. Nor is there a single ASPI voice.
I have worked alongside academics and practitioners, former public servants and journalists, economists and technologists, diplomats, intelligence professionals and military officers. Some arrive after decades inside government. Others bring deep academic expertise. Some of the most innovative are the interns who are just starting out and who are now spread across the national security community. Some begin with theory and move towards policy. Practitioners like me often start with the problem and work backwards towards explanation. We disagree, sometimes profoundly, and that diversity matters because ASPI was never established to manufacture consensus.
Hugh White, ASPI’s inaugural executive director, embedded contestability into ASPI’s DNA. To slightly mangle the current government’s phrase about China, White set about agreeing with stakeholders where he could and disagreeing where he had to. The two executive directors for whom I have worked, Peter Jennings and Justin Bassi, have continued Hugh’s tradition – though the three are very different people. Importantly, disagreement is not just with government but among ASPI colleagues. I, for example, do not share Hugh’s view of the world or national security, but I will fight for his and anyone else’s right to have it.
Consensus thinking and censorship don’t support healthy societies and usually result in change being missed, intelligence failures or dots not being connected. The strategic environment of 2026 bears little resemblance to that of 2001. Defence remains fundamental, but national security can no longer sensibly be contained within traditional defence policy. Cybersecurity, technology, economic coercion, critical minerals, supply chains, infrastructure, foreign interference, terrorism, climate and national resilience increasingly intersect with military power and statecraft. ASPI could have preserved the intellectual boundaries of the world into which it was born. Instead, it followed the strategic problems, and following those problems has not always taken us to comfortable places.
Over the years, ASPI researchers have challenged thinking on border security, organised crime, terrorism, China, economic coercion, critical minerals, Northern Australia, national resilience and defence preparedness. We’ve also argued for treating drug addiction as a health problem rather than simply a criminal one. We’ve argued that violent misogyny should be understood through the lens of terrorism and violent extremism. We pushed climate security onto the national security agenda when some regarded the connection as ideological overreach. Those arguments don’t fit comfortably into a single ideological box, and not everyone inside ASPI agreed with every one of them. That’s precisely the point. There’s no committee handing down an approved institutional position.
Sometimes the reaction tells you that you’ve touched a nerve. I have seen our research generate angry phone calls, irritated officials, unhappy departmental secretaries, political criticism and furious social-media campaigns. But if everything you publish is welcomed by everyone who matters, you’re probably not testing many assumptions.
That doesn’t mean criticism proves we are right. Sometimes our critics are right. Sometimes an argument doesn’t survive scrutiny. Sometimes evidence changes, or a recommendation that appears compelling on paper collides with the realities of implementation. I’ve changed my own thinking over almost 12 years because people have challenged my work. Contestability has to work in both directions or it’s not contestability at all.
There’s a remarkably simple institutional response. Do the research. Test the evidence. Write the paper. Make the argument. Recommend something practical. Publish it. Listen carefully to the criticism. Change your position when the evidence demands it. Defend it when it doesn’t. Then write the next paper. That is applied policy research.
ASPI doesn’t replace universities. Academics provide theoretical depth, methodological rigour and long-term scholarship that policymakers need. Nor does it replace the public service, whose officials have authority and institutional knowledge that outsiders do not. It doesn’t replace journalism and the indispensable democratic role of the fourth estate. Instead, it complements all three by occupying the sometimes uncomfortable space between them, bringing together scholarship, evidence, practitioner experience and strategic context before asking an unapologetically practical question: what should Australia do?
ASPI has evolved because Australia’s strategic environment has evolved. We now confront risks that are increasingly continuous, concurrent and cascading. Strategic competition intersects with economic security, technology with sovereignty, climate with infrastructure, supply chains with deterrence and domestic resilience with national power. The neat institutional boundaries through which we organise government are increasingly being confronted by decidedly untidy strategic problems. These blurred lines mean that, in addition to contestability, transparency is vital – and ASPI is almost unique in fully reporting all of its funding sources so listeners and readers do not have to wonder what or who might be in the shadows.
There’s a song I often think about when I reflect on this environment: Believer by Imagine Dragons. At first listen it is about pressure, strain and impact. At its core, however, it’s about the idea that friction isn’t merely destructive but formative. Strength comes from being tested. Ideas are much the same. They are rarely refined in comfort. They are refined through disagreement.
ASPI’s contribution shouldn’t be measured by how often it has been right. We have been wrong. I have been wrong. The more enduring contribution is that ASPI keeps putting arguments into the public domain where they can be challenged before events decide whether they were right.
The paper that prompts a departmental secretary to pick up the phone, the recommendation a public servant thinks could never work, the academic who believes we have simplified something too far, the journalist who interrogates our evidence, the social-media post declaring an analyst has no idea of the subject, and occasionally the policymaker who, after disagreeing vehemently, quietly concludes there might be something in the idea after all – together these are signs of a healthy policy ecosystem. They demonstrate that ideas are being tested rather than merely accepted.
Ministers should disagree with us. Departmental secretaries should call. Public servants should push back. Academics should challenge our assumptions. Journalists should scrutinise us. Australians should argue with what we publish. We should listen carefully, return to the evidence, sharpen the argument and produce another piece of applied policy research.
Australia doesn’t need ASPI because ASPI is always right. It needs ASPI because good public policy depends upon ideas colliding before circumstances test them for us. Twenty-five years after the institute’s creation, and in an era defined by global conflict and strategic risk, Australia doesn’t need a more comfortable policy conversation. It needs a more contested one.
