Authoritarian states subverting democracy is a global problem. It needs a global response. Not only governments but also our parliamentarians should be co-operating to defend our shared values. First, let’s be clear that states such as China and Russia have the right to take their place in the world - that’s not up for dispute - and we should be wary of lecturing others. We need to find shared interests and values, where possible. However, what is unacceptable is when authoritarian states co-opt and corrupt individuals and attack our values. In Australia, you are confronting Chinese interference as recent political scandals have shown, which is why your government and Parliament have been taking action. In Britain and Europe, our major threat is Russia. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia sadly failed to integrate with the West. There’s fault on both sides, but the Kremlin now sees the West as a rival and potential enemy. It has redeveloped a highly complex form of malign influence using many levers of state power to subvert democracy and test the NATO military alliance. In earlier generations, some of this covert activity may have been spying, pure and simple. Now, it blurs a line between overt and covert influence, espionage, subversion, divisive information campaigns and disinformation, social media activism, cyberattacks as well as theft of intellectual property. During the Cold War these sorts of techniques, pioneered by the old USSR, were called Active Measures. Some people in the West now call it "hybrid war". Either way, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB operative-turned-Russian President, is once again using these tools against us.

In the US, the scale of Russian attempts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election was breathtaking and will result in a significant worsening of US/Russian relations. The Senate’s Intelligence Committee was told late last year that, on Facebook alone, 470 Russian accounts bought 3,000 ads reaching 126 million Americans – oh, and that’s after Russian trolls cyberhacked the US Democratic Party servers. Russian ads weren’t pushing positives, but trying to subvert, dividing people along religious lines and fanning extremism. This is information used as a weapon of conflict. A fluffy marketing campaign, it ain’t. The building in St Petersburg where Russian trolls worked to interfere in the 2016 US election. Credit:AP As part of my academic work, I’ve developed a simple but comprehensive framework for understanding these new forms of "full spectrum" Russian conflict: hard power (military: conventional and non-conventional), soft power (governance, law and culture), subversive political power (hacking, assassinations, use of proxies and front groups, blackmail), economic power (tariffs, energy supplies, criminality), information power (online and offline information campaigns), and diplomacy and public outreach (everything from biker gangs to espionage). These are wrapped around command and control functions - which we need to identify because we need to know who is pulling the strings. Within these areas are at least 50 individual tools and techniques so far identified. These are the new weapons - online and offline - of conflict, influence and interference.

One of the key characteristics of Russian operations is that they are holistic. Therefore our response needs to be holistic too. I sit on our Foreign Affairs Committee and I’m encouraging Parliamentary colleagues to coordinate our work on Russia so that we see the different elements of this conflict as a whole and understand it through a common framework. I believe that is important for our Australian friends too. There’s one other consideration. Britain and Australia are more important on this issue now, thanks to events in the United States. The US Senate Intelligence Committee has done great work exposing Russia, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia and President Donald Trump has now resulted in bitter divisions in Congress. Mueller’s sheer relentlessness – and thank God for the openness of the US system - is getting closer to Trump. Things will soon worsen for the US President: watch this space. The battle to save his presidency will become all-consuming. The fallout will undermine the bipartisan approach. Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Credit:AP

Therefore our work becomes more important. The British Parliament should have a special role looking at Russian influence, both in Britain and globally. But Australia is critical too in examining the Chinese subversion template, especially in comparison with Russia’s. Is it simpler? What is the role of cyber? What’s the balance between economic and political subversion, etc? We need to share knowledge, with each other, and with our peoples. The English-speaking world, with its traditions of parliamentary sovereignty and rumbustious free speech, is again at the forefront of defending democracy against authoritarianism. It’s a global task for our generation of political leaders. This isn’t something dry and abstract. Our freedoms define us. We need to take responsibility for defending them. So let’s work together and to call out, in a considered and balanced way, those states who are so threatened by our values that they try to undermine them. By exposing their strategies, we help deter them. In doing so, we protect those values and institutions we cherish.