In this episode, Amy-Rose Goodey is joined by Professor Tanya Monro AC for a far-reaching conversation on emerging technology, decision advantage, national resilience and the systems shaping Australia’s future.
Professor Tanya Monro is Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist and leads the nation’s Defence Science and Technology Group. Her work sits at the intersection of science, technology, national capability and strategic policy, helping shape how Australia responds to an increasingly contested and rapidly evolving world.
The discussion explores how governments and institutions make decisions in environments defined by speed, complexity and data overload, and why the balance between human judgement and technological capability is becoming one of the defining challenges of our time.
From AI and machine reasoning to sovereign capability, research ecosystems and defence innovation, the episode examines how Australia can harness its intellectual capital while remaining interoperable with allies and resilient against emerging risks.
There is also a strong focus on the role of collaboration across universities, industry and government, and why the future of national capability depends on building connected systems rather than isolated institutions.
Throughout the conversation, Professor Monro reflects on the importance of stewardship, strategic focus and long-term thinking in preparing Australia for a future where technology increasingly shapes both economic and national security outcomes.
A thoughtful discussion on science, sovereignty, AI and the infrastructure of decision making in the digital age.
A huge thank you to Rafael Florez at the Australian National University for hosting and producting this episode.
About Professor Tanya Monro AC
Professor Tanya Monro commenced as Chief Defence Scientist in March 2019. Prof Monro is head of Defence Science and Technology Group and Capability Manager for Innovation, Science and Technology in the Australian Department of Defence. In June 2022, Prof Monro was awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to scientific and technological development, to research and innovation, to tertiary education, particularly in the field of photonics, and to professional organisations.
Prof Monro also holds the Bragg Gold Medal for the best physics PhD thesis in Australia, Prime Minister’s Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, SA Australian of the Year, and the Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research.
Prof Monro obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in physics from The University of Sydney, and was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Southampton. Previous roles include Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Innovation at the University of South Australia and inaugural director of the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Bio Photonics at the University of Adelaide.
For contributions to optics engineering and advancing Australian national security, Prof Monro is an International Member of the United States National Academy of Engineering. Prof Monro is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the Optical Society of America and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics.
speaker-1: Great to be here, Amy Rose.
speaker-0: Professor Tanya Munro, you make a lot of decisions throughout your career that people never see. What matters the most right now? What’s the most important decision that you’re thinking about right now?
speaker-1: We live in a world where emerging technology is disrupting everything we do. so some of the most important decisions we make is in how we embrace and adopt technologies, technologies such as AI and autonomy that can both disrupt but enable, and how we get that mix right of embracing those disruptive technologies. and having the policy settings right to protect our way of life. So really, I see it fundamentally as trying to embrace the creativity of the human spirit and the power that science and technology brings, but understanding that we’re in a world where increasingly our speed in being able to deploy new technologies is something that allows us to both create and prevent strategic surprise and that we teeter often in this geostrategic environment on the edge of a world where instead of the environment we have right now of competition, we are seeing conflict emerge from crisis and we need to be able to protect Australia’s interest in that increasingly contested world.
speaker-0: And if we misjudge this moment and if we don’t take the advice, what would be the consequences?
speaker-1: The consequences for Australia of not understanding the role technology plays in our future are fundamental and quite concerning. Right now, we have extraordinary intellectual capital in our nation, in our government labs, in our universities, in our companies. But we rarely act alone and we must be interoperable with our allies. We must be able to mount credible deterrence so that those who might wish to act against Australia’s interests say that today is not the day. And this is why technology is critical. We must watch conflicts around the world and understand what we can learn from them. But at the same time, double down on the things Australia does really well to give that strategic advantage to our nation.
speaker-0: Tanya, I hear a fair bit about decision advantage, the ability to make decisions faster than your adversary. Can you elaborate on what that means?
speaker-1: making good decisions is fundamental. We’re deluged with information. Understanding what information in that deluge matters. Being able to sift the wheat from the chaff. Being able to understand when you can rely on tools such as AI and other kinds of decision support tools to help do that sifting and when human judgment is required. So for example, If we’re in a tactical sort of self-defence type of scenario, speed is usually far more important than accuracy. However, if we’re thinking strategically, we need to ensure that we’re making sound judgments and we can’t always then rely on the outcomes of some of these automated decision tools. So really, decision advantage is about understanding which horse you want to run in which race. how you’re going to use technology to sift through the data lake in order to make sure that you make those human decisions with the best possible information for the scenario you’re in.
speaker-0: And in that situation, is there any decision that limits an outcome or that prohibits a good outcome?
speaker-1: Decisions are very rarely in the domain of a single individual. Most complex decision making is done by teams. Teams where people have different but connecting roles, where we need to combine different forms of information, but also with a very human overlay of how humans process information and how humans work in teams. And so really to get decision advantage, we need to have resilient ways of absorbing different types of information, judging its quality. and frameworks for being agile within that context. And technology has a role, but at its heart, it’s a very human science.
speaker-0: And if you are faced with the question of speed or accuracy, which one do you automatically go to first? Which do you protect?
speaker-1: speed is at times the most critical thing. If you have yourself in a tactical environment where things are coming at you, you need to be able to make decisions at the speed of relevance. However, if you are doing something strategic, deploying an effect or making a decision that will be consequential if wrong, then accuracy then becomes more important. So there is no one answer to that question. It very much depends on context. And context is something that we really need the human overlay from. Context comes from understanding scenarios and understanding from deep human experience when you’re likely to have higher consequence of a certain decision and that’s where you need accuracy. So it’s never just one and I think we can sometimes fall into the trap of favouring speed over accuracy when it really we’ve got a factor in consequence at the same time.
speaker-0: Is there any technologies that are leveraged that enable you to have speed and accuracy at the same time or that you can rely on?
speaker-1: The very best decision support tools allow the human teams or individuals to sift through vast quantities of data and see things that cue them to ask deeper questions. That’s the best use of decision support tools. You want to be assured that any tools you rely on in that sifting can work at sufficient speed to be the speed of relevance. There’s no point looking through vast satellite imagery to tell you, cue you to something too late. It needs to be at the time of relevance. But at the same time, you need to be able to trust accuracy to a sufficient degree that those cues are of value. So it’s always a bit of a trade-off between speed and accuracy. That said, I think the more complex piece is the human system. As I mentioned earlier, it’s really a single individual sitting there making decisions in splendid isolation. And there’s a lot of deep science in how humans together in teams make decisions and how they all process information. And so this is where the cutting edge really is, is in decision support tools that help mitigate data deluge while supporting the way teams operate, resiliently under stress.
speaker-0: Are the technologies that you’re able to leverage, are they evolving and are the policy settings right for those?
speaker-1: The technology space that allows us to make better decisions is evolving very, very fast. It builds on real strengths that we have within Australia and within our allies for deeply understanding both the data sources and the types of problems humans try to solve with them. Our policy settings enable us to use decision support tools to a reasonable degree. Where the policy questions become a little more fraught is when We might want to use decision support tools to replace humans in a loop about deciding whether we deploy effects. That does not limit the use of decision supports or decision assurance tools in the broad.
speaker-0: Okay, so it doesn’t really change the decision, just might, technology might make it more effective.
speaker-1: or efficient? The way I’d characterize it is that decision advantage and decision support tools allow you to get to the point of understanding what the decision is and making a more informed decision more quickly. It does not replace a human in making that decision.
speaker-0: that’s important to not replacing the humans in this piece. I’d love to know a little bit more about EDT and what that means for those on the ground and maybe even paint a picture about, you know, that essentially, how you leverage from EVT.
speaker-1: So the ASCO Emerging Disruptive Technology Program or EDT for short is a critical program because what it allows us to do is to work with the bright minds across our nation, our innovators, our scientists, our technologists, communicate at a classified level when necessary the deep challenges that defence is getting after and where we need new disruptive technologies to help us solve those problems. What we do then is set specific topics where we want good ideas to come forward. And what is quite unique to this program and all ASCA programs is that rather than either funding great ideas that people have or commissioning a response to a specific specification, what we look to do is co-create solutions that allow our partners to better understand the defence need and us to better understand what I call the art of the possible. Because I describe all science as being about the art of the possible, proving whether something is possible so that we can then mature and apply it. So in terms of EDT and the particular call we had on machine reasoning and automated data integration and AI, and linking it back to the earlier part of our conversation about good decision making. know, good decisions require an ability to be able to foresee and assess the implications of any decision. And emerging AI can give us some really good tools like developing narratives, given any situational data, and help us with the kind of crystal balling rapidly and considering how we evaluate possible courses of action. But of course, any AI is only powered by data from what has happened in the past. It can’t, of course, see into the future. And it’s trained. Generally, large language models are trained by their very nature to give middle of the road answers. They don’t have that flash of brilliance that we associate as being the human special source that allow us to see the genius strategies or the tactical advantage. So we’ve got to be really careful because AI while it’s incredibly powerful in essentially opening the aperture to think about possible consequences or courses of action, it comes across as supremely confident. And we all know how we feel when somebody comes in supremely confident, whether it’s a computer or a person, we tend to assign a describe it an authority that it may not be due. So it really then is on us to use the AI the right way. almost to you as the fodder for the human consideration.
speaker-0: What worries you more, under trusting or over trusting?
speaker-1: At this moment in our history and our technological evolution, I’m more concerned about over-trusting AI because of the way it mimics the human voice in essentially confidently asserting a fact. Particularly if that fact aligns with your own biases and prejudices because the way we use AIs, that tends to be what we draw from them. So I think we need to develop practices of actively contesting. AI, almost seeing it as that first draft that allows us to get moving faster, but realising that we have this very human and natural reaction to that confident voice that speaks to our biases.
speaker-0: How do you, from your perspective on AI, do you see… I also under trust AI, but I think there will become a time where we might just trust AI and that might be some time away. But do you imagine that it’s a distance away or that we’re on track to be able to rely on it more?
speaker-1: I think that AI does exactly what you would expect it to do. It gives us the middle of the road answers that are coming from data of things that have happened in the past. It gives us that in a confident voice. It tends to respond to our biases and our own thinking because of the way we prompt it. And I think in our workplaces right now, we both… both under trust and over trust AI. In fact, there’s some really interesting research that shows that employees that are really engaged tend to be more thorough in contesting what AI tell them. Whereas employees that are less engaged are more likely to just take what AI gives them as read. So I think we have complex workplaces that either use AI or don’t, but trust or under or over trusted differently. I think the reality is that we all need to get better and better at contesting AI because it will hallucinate. That is the nature of these large language models. In a way, I think the language artificial intelligence is poor language for what we have. We have tools that allow us to make inferences about data and language, which are really helpful in speeding up our own thinking and planning. And that’s the way I like to think about it. But look, you know, back to the EDT program, we have had 123 submissions from across the ecosystem, which really shows the talent that there is that’s aligned to this priority. And we’ve invested $40 million over four years in programs that we are collaboratively working with that ecosystem on. So I think we’ll continue to see new opportunities to use decision support tools. We’re already using decision support tools in order to be able to respond at pace and a lowly increase.
speaker-0: And what does some of these applications, what does one of these successful candidates look like?
speaker-1: If you’re talking about an EDT program, what to me success looks like is partners, whether they be in our universities or in our small to medium enterprises that have come together with Defence to co-create a potential development for technology that addresses a Defence problem that allows these partners to more deeply understand the Defence requirements and thus become a better partner. and helps Defence chart the course from the idea to the capability. The way I like to describe it is that Defence Science Technology Group, which I lead, is the organisation within government that sits between the broader R &D system and our Australian Defence Force. We speak the language of R &D and have deep subject matter experts, but we also work shoulder to shoulder with our people in uniform. Thus, we help that broader national capability understand not just what they need to work on, but the way they need to work on it in order to make sure their work has an impact. And so that’s what good looks like to me. We’re working on projects that are co-created, that have a pathway to making a difference. They won’t all succeed, but they will all help us have better capability, even the ones that don’t succeed. And look, it’s also about seeding the future of our home. Australian industry which comes from our intellectual capacity as well.
speaker-0: That is really exciting. And I say that because often in other government departments and regulators and policymakers, they often look inward to source talent. And that’s sometimes not the best pool to go to. And the pool is at universities. We’re at the Australian National University today. And there’s an abundance of expertise out there.
speaker-1: have such a talented nation and I think the shift you’ve just caught, Amy Rose, is a shift we’ve been deliberately, a journey we’ve been on for about the last 10 years. Historically, when Defence Science Technology Organisation was formed 50 years ago last year, it was the government’s lab to do entirely within it the work the government needed for defence. Over time, a few things have happened. One of which is that more and more fields of emerging technology and fields of research are now directly relevant to Australia’s defence. It is no longer the case that you just need weapons development, you need everything from psychology to new materials. And that means that we need to harness the heft of the nation. And our strategy, is called Accelerating Aesthetics Advantage, talks about how we align and harness from that broader ecosystem, which includes our allies and partners. Because the reality is, I want to see us harness the things Australia is really good at. Things like data science, things like quantum technologies. There are a number of areas where we do pull well above our weight, but we are not of a scale where we can do everything we need. So we work very closely with our international partners in a range of ways through the Five Eyes, where I describe it as the equivalents of DSTG in all of our other Five Eyes Nations partners are one bigger team that serve all of our nations. But also through AUKUS or through bilateral or other multilateral arrangements, we make sure that the work we do helps our allies and in turn that we can harness what they’re uniquely good at. in order to accelerate Australian capability. In working with our National Brains Trust, as I said earlier, my job is to make sure that the priorities the government set for defence science are well understood by that system and that we have the right kind of security arrangements in place to make sure that when we make an advance, that is to Australia’s advantage. And I acknowledge the role universities should play for free exploration of knowledge. But we also need to understand that many areas are dual use and can have significant defence and national security consequences and we need to manage that appropriately. And I’ve been really pleased with the way the Australian university system has been lifting its maturity so that it can work better in that space.
speaker-0: Actually as universities evolve over time, know, their role within the education ecosystem, I think it’s going to innovate itself in different ways. So it might just be a more collaborative ⁓ talent uplift that we see across all departments of the government.
speaker-1: I agree. I think we have to take an intrinsically collaborative approach and that’s why I’m a very strong advocate of mobility. When I came into DSTG nearly seven years ago, it became very clear to me that the vast majority of our senior scientists had come in as cadets or graduates. Extraordinary people. When I look at the role we have today, we need much more mobility across our system and we’ve set a number of programs up. to help drive that. One is our mid-career graduate program, which is called our Navigate program, which won an award through SAGE last year for the work it’s doing in driving a more diverse workforce. Its mix of male and female scientists is 50-50, which is significantly higher than historically. But actually, what is less discussed… is it’s about taking talent, whether that’s talent from universities, talent from industry at the mid-career level, so sort of five to 15 years post a PhD or equivalent, and bringing it into the defence context and saying, you have talent, you have deep experience, you know how it is to work in a company or in a university, you can contribute to the defence mission and we will help you find out where you can make the biggest difference. And similarly, we encourage our mid-career researchers to go out. into the system because ultimately the way I describe it is my people are the science force, the uniformed science force, even though we don’t have a set uniform, and all of our partners are the reserve science force and we’re in a time of competition now but if we were to move into crisis and conflict which can happen on the smallest shift in the world we need to be able to harness our nation to protect our nation.
speaker-0: Having that network, I think, is imperative.
speaker-1: relationships, ways of working and a deep understanding of what we’re really good at. So we have partnerships across our wonderful nation. Every state and territory has access to a state-based node of what we call our ADSAN network, which is our Australian Defence Science University network. And these are partnerships between the state governments and defence where we try and connect talent. and appetite on the ground with defence opportunities and problems. So it’s just one mechanism we use to try and activate the system.
speaker-0: I you could probably, and I never thought about this, but talent is a piece of the defence’s toolkit, I guess. And in Australia, I know that there’s a bit of a tech deficit in some ways, some jurisdictions are more attractive than others. And so retaining that and finding that talent is so important.
speaker-1: ⁓ look Amy Rose, the whole talent pipeline thing is a critical element here. We train extraordinary people and obviously my part of defence is where the majority of the PhD qualified ⁓ scientists, researchers are. But that said, across the broader defence enterprise, STEM talent is in demand and is required because the way I see it is that it’s about being able to ⁓ make decisions based on data and evidence and generating the data and evidence required to make better decisions, which links it back to the earlier part of our conversation. Australia does produce great STEM talent. The bigger challenge I see is in the broader STEM career pathways across our system, our national system. You know, too many of our jobs in this space are transient or short term or fixed term. ⁓ jobs within government are good because they are secure. And you know, when somebody comes into my organisation, they may have five, six, seven careers in one, where they come in to do one thing and end up getting opportunities to move project to project and learn entirely new skills. But we need that broader system ⁓ and particularly our industry to have more R &D capacity. That is the gap in our system at the moment. And while my organisation plays a role there to try and help transition skills and knowledge to industry, it’s a gap we need to spend some time to fill.
speaker-0: On the ecosystem, a lot of effort goes into building those ecosystems and what works and what doesn’t.
speaker-1: Ecosystems is a much used word and really the way I’d like to talk about it is it’s the mechanisms, the relationships that allow us to partner effectively for a shared goal, to deliver a shared goal. And really what an ecosystem requires is a common understanding of the problems we’re trying to solve, the mechanisms to get after solving them and the ability together to move fast as the context changes. It is not transactional, it’s deeply strategic. So to me, you know, if you have, say a granting program where, you know, people within the broader system apply for grants and then get on and do what they want with that grant money, that is not an ecosystem. To me, what an ecosystem is something that is deeply connected and moves as one. So, To give a flavour to it, government sets the defence innovation science and technology priorities. We currently have them and we’re currently in the process of updating them leading up to the release of the next national defence strategy this year. That is government’s direction about the areas of research and development that will make the biggest difference to Australia. Areas like the quantum technology, hypersonics, Some of the elements we’ve talked about today, they’re all out in the public. Beneath that public lens is a deeper, more classified view of exactly what Australia needs in order to secure the deterrence and the denial we need to protect our interests. To bring that ecosystem together, we have classified briefings that give appropriately cleared individuals that exposure so they are more informed, they have more context. We then work together to understand how we need to partner so that they can work on the right way in the right problems, on the right problems in the right way with us. And that then means that as we get unexpected wins or breakthroughs, or we hit perhaps unanticipated hurdles, together we can figure out what that means in terms of the pathway to impact. So I hope I’ve described it. It’s like a living and breathing organism.
speaker-0: thought of it as a web or a network of nodes who support each
speaker-1: In any ecosystem, if some element is not there, other elements fail. And that’s what I think is characteristic of the Defence R &D ecosystem. R &D is critical. We have to get to the point of proving what is possible. We also need to make sure that we have a pathway to using that. And actually the reality we find ourselves in, because funding is constrained, is we have to be very deliberate. and do the things we know we can transition, rather than just all the things that might be of value. And that’s not always a popular view, because I understand what it’s like. I’ve spent most of my career working in universities in various research leadership roles. And you have a passionate and very capable team or leader who wants to do something that they think will make a difference. in a constrained funding environment, we’ve got to be very, very deliberate. And so the ecosystem model is a way of trying to ensure that more of the effort goes to things that can be used.
speaker-0: And sometimes having the restraint of budget means that you’re more efficient as a team and you only choose the most effective and impactful outcome. So I sometimes see that as a positive rather than
speaker-1: It can be Amy Rose and I’d actually argue that time and time again when I talk to my international interlocutors and they see something we’ve proven within our system, some proof of concept, some demonstrator, some prototype, and we often in fact usually blow away our competitors with the breakthrough, particularly when they learn the amount of money and time. we used or took to do it. And I think it’s because of a really Aussie kind of cultural value of really trying to work across boundaries and knock problems aside. And we don’t tend to stay in our silos. We tend to connect across. And I think that is a superpower. At times we have gaps. You we don’t always have the industry capacity or the scale. that our allies do, but I think we’ve got to play to our strengths. And one area we are really strong is in pushing the envelope and demonstrating the art of the possible. But again, we can’t do that across all endeavors or we spread too thin. We have to pick the areas we can make a really big difference.
speaker-0: And we really do like to roll our sleeves up and solve that problem. We all celebrate together I think when we’ve done something brilliant.
speaker-1: We do. And in fact, if I look at the current strategy we have for defence, innovation, science and technology, there are four lines of effort. So the first is anticipating the future. Right. It’s about creating or preventing strategic surprise. The second is experimentation. And what that really means, it doesn’t mean an experiment in a science lab. No, what it means is harnessing emerging disruptive technology along with the end users. In our case, that’s predominantly our uniformed ADF. And together, exploring how emerging tech might change their worlds. And that’s as much a job for our ecosystem as it is for Defence Science Technology Group. The third line of effort is the integrated ecosystem, which we’ve been talking a lot about here to help harness the nation’s brains trust in a way that’s constructive and efficient. And the fourth is mission driven. And really that gets to the heart of it. While there are so many things you can do with the good ideas, if you’re mission driven, you start with the problem you’re trying to solve in mind. And the problem might be in this particular operational context, I need decision advantage. And then you work backwards and you see what good ideas come from that.
speaker-0: It’s fascinating because like I see if we were in some sort of situation as Australia, having the systems around you and the fallback, not a fallback, guess, ⁓ but that network, all of the resources, because I imagine and maybe you can paint a picture of how it used to be before the systems that are in place where you have that ecosystem. But now as part of your toolkit, you have the Brains Trust, you have these four pillars, you have essentially a network of options available to you if Australia requires it.
speaker-1: I like your characterization, Amy Rose. I’d characterize it as still developing. We have a pretty good read on the capacity we have in our nation, but we need to keep exercising it. We need to keep honing it. I am really focused on focus, scale to get impact. So by that I mean, say our universities. Historically, we tended to work on every topic with every university. And yes, particularly our larger, more comprehensive universities have fantastic research across just about every discipline. But we as Defence need to have strategic partnerships that really focus on the big rocks we’re trying to move. And so our approach is to do less specific areas of effort, but do them at much larger scale with specific partners. that we can move fast together rather than managing many itty-bitty relationships and trying to stitch together the patchwork out of that. Does that make sense?
speaker-0: you still, it sounds like you have access to the resources and the options that you require because you’ve already established and understood what those big issues are.
speaker-1: We have the relationships and we have the mechanisms but the way I characterise it is it’s still evolving and developing and there’s still more potential from being more strategic, more coordinated and having a more of a system view and a national view to that. ⁓ But I have great hope and pride in the system we have and in the fabulous partnerships that we have but there’s still more room to make them more efficient, more strategic and more focused.
speaker-0: I just think it’s exciting that there is ⁓ that mindset within defense that it is a brain’s trust. Australians are able to be a part of it, or apply to be a part of it.
speaker-1: I’d actually go a step further to say that we’ve had a mindset shift, which is that that mindset shift within Defence away from setting very specific specifications for solutions to articulating the problems we try to solve because it unlocks the creativity of that brains trust. And, you know, many times you might think if you’re an end user, you might think you know exactly what you want. But technology evolves so quickly, there might be some entirely different solutions. You might have thought you needed a network of sensors, but what you need is a good AI tool, and vice versa. So this mindset shift, I think, opens the aperture for deeper partnerships and opens the aperture for better creativity. But at the same time, we need to be focused. We can’t get after everything.
speaker-0: Yeah. What capabilities must Australia retain control over?
speaker-1: So sovereignty of course is a very hot topic. We never operate alone, we always operate with allies and so key is interoperability. That said there are some elements of capability that Australia must maintain sovereignty over and ultimately it’s decisions from our government of how they use the capability that we have. Even if that capability is off parading In alliance, of course, it is the role of our elected government in order to make those difficult calls about how it uses those capabilities at difficult times. Underpinning that, though, we need to have a deep understanding of the sovereignty implications of that capability. Do we have, if we’re in a conflict, do we have the capacity to do updates, upgrades? and to sustain and maintain our key core capabilities in country. To what degree are we reliant on supply chains or servicing in other nations? Which is why we’ve increasingly over the last few years been thinking about what we need to have in place to both allow us to be interoperable but allow us to have appropriate sovereignty. It’s always been the nature of research to be collaborative and going back through history. like-minded nations have always collaborated on defence R &D and Australia has played a role in helping other nations lift their capability through that R &D partnership and similarly we’ve benefited from those partnerships. But what is increasingly happening is beyond this research collaboration which I describe as co-development, we’re increasingly working with other nations on co-production and co-sustainment. And these are essential pieces for sovereignty as well, because it’s all very well having a system we could deploy in peacetime. When, if in anger, and our governments make choice to use that capability, they need to know that they can replenish or sustain it. So these types of arrangements take time to build and they’re not done in isolation by our nation. So… You’ve unpeeled a very complex kind of wriggling can of worms there, but ultimately the sovereignty, the core of sovereignty is around that decision making. I would note that never underestimate the strategic value of intellectual edge and intellectual property. ⁓ We have some crown jewels in Australia that really give us advantage and open doors to other things we need access to. One that’s in the public domain. I mean, it’s well known that for the last 50 years, we’ve had continuous development over the horizon radar systems. now Canada is looking to export some of those systems to cover their Arctic region. That is a brilliant example of Australian crown jewels, Australian intellectual edge that is sovereign to Australia, but where we’ve embarked on a partnership. with Canada to be able to help them solve their problems through deploying that intellectual edge.
speaker-0: Yeah. Some of the technological infrastructure like AI, ⁓ I’m not sure if the Australian government leverages from other providers. ⁓ Is AI an example of infrastructure that is sovereign or is that being developed?
speaker-1: There are lot of discussions at the moment about the sovereignty of AI, but the sovereignty of the data that underpins AI. And really, I think what is more critical is understanding data sovereignty and some of the risks in terms of ⁓ pollution and contamination of data that can lead to false inferences or hallucinations or the ability of… actors that are not acting in our interest to essentially pollute outcomes through that data. I would also argue though that it’s in the interface between our crude and our uncrewed systems ⁓ that we really need those types of interoperable interfaces that go across our nations. when we use AI tools to help us with that. We need to have a really traceable, trustable AI where we understand the source of the data and the sovereignty and provenance of that data in order to trust the decisions.
speaker-0: And even then we need technology or ⁓ emerging technologies to be able to prove that that data is uncorrupted. And so I know that there’s a bit of…
speaker-1: innovation around there. It’s a rich field. ⁓ But look, the reality is that those areas where we have an edge and a lead, ⁓ there is an intrinsic value that comes with that to our nation that gives options either for sovereign capability or for trade goods that help our nation get access to other things it needs.
speaker-0: It’s a really interesting, not a question, when I now envisage the, which I wasn’t aware of before, but when I imagine the Department of Defence and the tech stack that’s required, the network that’s required, the systems that are required, it’s much bigger than I imagined. So it’s really fascinating, actually.
speaker-1: It is a big complex enterprise and it ranges from the big corporate systems with the largest government department in the federal government. It’s complex. It’s got a large public service, a large uniformed force. ⁓ But at the same time, we have the whole spectrum of risk, you know, from elements where we can be more exploratory and use things that are less proven right through to systems that have to have all the risk beaten out of them. So it’s a great proofing.
speaker-0: Yeah. When our future leaders look back on us today, what are they going to? What are they going to say? Are the lessons learned?
speaker-1: What a great question. I see our roles in leadership in this system today as stewards. know, we are responsible for making sure that our organizations are resilient and are match fit for a world we don’t yet know. And so I hope future leaders will look back at the decisions we have made today and are making today across all of our institutions. and see that we set the foundation for the deep partnerships and that deep connection within that ecosystem that allow us to pivot to our nation’s needs and deliver solutions at the speed of relevance. We don’t know where the crisis will be, but we do know the talent and capability and infrastructure we have to tackle it. And by exercising that and by constantly being reflective, and open to evolution and reform, we will make sure we’re match fit to stay in that infinite game that gives Australia an edge when difficult things happen.
speaker-0: Well thank you so much Professor Tanya Munro, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
speaker-1: Thank you, Amy Rose.
speaker-0: digital, where policy meets innovation. Stay curious, stay inspired and be part of the movement building Australia’s next economy. The future is happening now. See you in the next episode.