Designer Intelligence or Legitimate Concern?: Establishing an Office of National Intelligence and Comprehensively Reviewing the National Intelligence Community Legal Framework

Abstract

The establishment of an Office of National Intelligence (ONI) to collect, co-ordinate, integrate and share intelligence from a variety of sources signals a significant new intelligence facilitative role in Commonwealth governance. The ONI Act provides a reformative framework for implementing the prospective recommendations of the Comprehensive Review of the legal framework governing the National Intelligence Community (NIC). This may well produce an increased securitisation of the Australian polity, a broadened intelligence use and interoperability, and a transformative impact beyond rationally justified national security protective definitions. Harmonising intelligence activities across the NIC may be aided through a Government discourse of safety and security, and the absence of a Charter of Rights to reconcile public policy contestations through criteria of legality, necessity, proportionality and related jurisprudence, from other comparable liberal democratic states.