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Building the resilience of Australia's critical infrastructure

We are bringing together a broad coalition of government and private sector stakeholders to help reduce disruptions to Australia’s critical services and ensure we have the sovereign capabilities to protect the infrastructure that underpins our way of life.

 

Our challenge

Over the coming decades, we are expected to see an increase in cyberattacks, natural disasters and disruptions to global supply chains

Critical infrastructure underpins our way of life and enables every sector of Australia’s economy. Critical infrastructure connects and protects us, powers our homes, hospitals, schools and workplaces and ensures there are products on our supermarket shelves.

Cyberattacks, natural disasters and disruptions to global supply chains directly impact the functioning of our critical infrastructure. Over the coming decades, these three distinct challenges are anticipated to increase significantly both in scale and complexity.

Cyberattacks alone already cost the Australian economy an estimated $29 billion annually and this number is only expected to grow as cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism and cybercrime become increasingly common.

The impact of natural disasters on critical infrastructure can be felt across communities, for example, a single weather-related, state-wide blackout in 2016 was estimated to have cost South Australian businesses $367 million.

The opportunity

Protecting our critical infrastructure as 'Team Australia'

The resilience of our critical infrastructure is important to every sector and jurisdiction across the country and ensuring its operation is the combined responsibility of all three levels or government and thousands of private organisations across most sectors. For this reason, we must take a ‘Team Australia’ approach to this challenge and find the science and technology solutions that will protect our keystone infrastructure into the future.

Importantly, these challenges are not unique to Australia. Solutions to these challenges also represent new market opportunities for Australian businesses and new local jobs for Australia.

Our mission aims to bring together a broad coalition of government and private sector stakeholders to develop solutions, leveraging leading edge science and technology and global expertise, to ensure the ongoing resilience of our critical infrastructure.

Areas defined as critical infrastructure include energy, telecommunications, financial services, defence, water and sewerage, transport, higher education and research, data storage and processing, food and grocery, healthcare and medical.

Proposed focus

The mission will initially focus on three key areas:

  • Addressing acute cross-sector challenges - natural events, cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions
  • Creating integrated cyber-physical and supply chain aware infrastructure
  • Managing interdependency between critical infrastructure and critical and non-critical components

Potential impact

This mission could see:

  • Reduced disruptions to Australia’s Critical Services
  • Increased critical infrastructure protection and resilience on a national scale
  • Growth of Australia’s Critical Infrastructure service sector jobs and exports

Contact us

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