In this election year, I see this as one of the first scare tactics that the Gillard government will roll out over the next nine or ten months. Where would the western governments be without their terrorist bogeymen?
Cyber security is such a handy area in which to play this card. Not many of us really understand the Internet, but we all depend on it, and any threat to it is guaranteed to generate a level of amorphous fear.
Don't look to see any assistance going to Julian Assange, a good man if ever there was one. Hopefully he will run for the Senate and manage to secure a seat.
Gillard thinks being in the pocket of POTUS will work to her advantage. Look to see more deceitful electioneering tricks coming to us from the USA play-book.

Sadly both parties will fail miserably in this arena. The LNP will be no different if the experience of Howard's national security and terrorism legislation reforms are any indication of future behaviours. Much of the rhetoric around national security after 9/11 was just PR and spin.

It is the veneer of protection that resonates with most politicians than reality which was borne out by the persecution of Alan Kessing after he allegedley revealed failures in airport security which contrasted badly with the Howard government's bold claims of strong national security and border protection credentials.

As for cutting defence spending. Seriously, DOD must be the most wasteful department of all. Anyone who has worked in the Commonwealth Government knows it and I suspect Ms Bishop does too. DOD has a history of poor decision making around defence materiel almost to the point where one wonders if these decisions are based more on political imperatives ie. relationship with the US etc.

What was the name of those planes that were the wrong size to land on ships? Boots that were so uncomfortable (but cheap) that soldiers had to fork out their own money to pay for shoes that enabled them to do their job more efficiently and safely.

What will the LNP do for national security and defence? Ms Bishop has not declared how an LNP Government would be any different or what their policies are in this area.

I thought it was Abbott playing the TeaParty tactics, and where did that get him.
Cyber crime is a growth market, and govt; around the world are contributing quite well. A good reason to put up a fire wall.
Military structure is shifting, why fight a war face to face if you can disable a country from abroad.
Time has come to get with it, like the US is content with drones, to pick off their foes.
Wars are becomming to costly and cheaper methods are being applied, so it is headed in the right way.
There will be those that think feet on the ground is the only way to fight a war. Times are changing and so will military tactics.
It takes good forsight and strength of leadership to make these decisions, all in our best interests.

Haldwell

Cyber attack could be real. I forgot which country it was that I saw on a ABC or SBS doco in which the ex-PM or someone of similar standing said that a cyber attack by another nation grounded his whole nation: no banks, no business transactions, etc, could operate for days. His regime got changed, as deemed necessary by some superior foreign forces. (I am 70. My short term memory is not much good any more.)

At a infinitesimal level I was bombarded with a few thousand emails on a day I posted something a little jarring to the ears of the author on this site one day last year. My first such experience. My service provider suspended my internet service, for days! Obviously its security system was not good enough for a sophisticated spam-bomb.

As for Julie, she seems to have acquisitioned Abbott's lost soul.

Will she commit to the restoration of the Defence budget?

She must be capable of coming out with some policies, or some positive thought, after her death stare has subsided that is.

Two years of Abbottism - relentless negative aggro - had not delivered them the head of the PM on a plate. Surely it is time for Julie to grow up, and for her chesty rooster to leave the schoolyard antics.

Chek

@Chek
Are you thinking of the cyber attack mounted by the US and Israel on Iran? That let the cyber-attack cat out of the bag, and western governments now live in fear of blowback. Not without reason, I suspect.
But, I hasten to add and should have included in my first post, Abbott and Lady Stiletto will likely do no better or different than Gillard and Co.

So the defence budget has been cut?
How else could we continue to pay all that welfare for the rich and or, so called, Howard's aspirational voters, with their MacMansions and the two beamer garage.
Perhaps if we were to fully means test public health, public education, and every other form of state supplied public service, we may just find enough money to actually ramp up our defence budget, at this critical time!
However, if we were to do just that Julie, it's London to a brick, you and your side of politics would go absolutely ballistic!
Better, we should focus on finding and exploiting the cheap energy we need to regrow a vibrant and performing economy.
That way we can actually envisage general increases in the public spend, defence first and foremost! That how genuine leaders serve the national interest?
No?
Why?
Is patent politicking more important?
We have lots of thorium, and the energy we could create utilising it, would be cheaper than coal! And we could have untouched hydrocarbon reserves to our immediate north, possibly larger than the entire known Middle East reserves?
Yes sure, the lead time for thorium power generation is significant, and will only ever increase, if we continue to wait for the private price gouging energy market, to do it for us!
Cut spending you say, with your broken record rhetoric Julie, just not defence spending?
Cut welfare you say, with more of the same, just not welfare for the rich and the votes it buy for the conservative side of politics!
So that's how you serve the national interest, is it?
Rhrosty.

Yes, it’s an election year.

No, Julie, in comparison with the previous regime, the current Government has done well on national security.

Don’t imagine we have forgotten the ineptitude of the Howard Government in which you served.

We recall you slashed aid to Indonesia at the depths of its recession by $22 million in the 1996 budget, then by another $11 million in 1997, costing many thousands of lives.

Your administration offended Indonesia through other inept actions, including the infamous 1998 letter from PM Howard to President Habibie on East Timor, regarded as triggering the 1999 massacres.

Your inept foreign minister falsely accused Indonesian police of complicity in the 2004 bombing of Australia’s embassy which killed 10 and injured hundreds. Later Mr Downer lamely claimed that if he hadn’t repeated a baseless rumour he might have been criticised.

Your Government dealt so ineptly with the Solomon Islands that the Australian ambassador was expelled in 2006.

Your administration damaged relations with Papua New Guinea to the point where PM Michael Somare threatened in 2006 to recall your high commissioner and suspend official visits.

Your record on forcing asylum seekers into offshore detention centres is no better than Ms Gillard’s.

Your colleagues announced that refugees at sea on a sinking boat had thrown their children overboard when they knew they hadn’t.

Your Government diverted overseas aid funds to detention centres, embassy buildings, security and promoting trade.

Your Government paid $300 million of aid money illegally to Saddam Hussein through the Australian Wheat Board.

You reduced real overseas aid, after rorts, from 0.34 per cent of GNI to an all-time low of 0.19 per cent during a period of record surpluses.

Along with the US, you illegally invaded Iraq on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

You continued to support the illegal invasion after the falsehoods had been exposed, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Your colleagues ridiculed the 43 distinguished former defence chiefs, diplomats and departmental heads when they expressed dismay in 2004 at Australia’s foreign policy.

Pot, Kettle, Black, Julie. Have you no shame?

Both the Coalition and the Labor Party have a credibility gap as far as the electorate is concerned.

Trying to work out which is worst is a task beyond me. How did politics in Australia come to this?

If the trend continues, we'll end up like the USA where corporations own the politicians and control their actions and the President runs the country and uses assassination squads to get rid of any opposition.

The current Government and Opposition here should be thrown out on their ears and not allowed to contest the election later this year.

We desperately need some new talent, some new inspiration, and, for a change, some nobility and maturity.

While we pay peanuts for the responsability involved, you are going to have to pick from what we have.
Nobility, i think you are in the wrong country.
How did AU politics come to this; not sure what bit you are talking about. Lets take Abbott, tea party tactics, no to any and everything, can't read documents but gives opinions, Not one question about the welfare of AU, foot in mouth sindrome is the norm; no policy, no idea. Yet he is putting himself forward as a statesman, a leader. No wonder you are disalusioned with our politics. Best just to ignore Abbott, as irrelevant.
We may not have had an opposition for the last 4 years.
This year they will probably try and show they are interested, maybe

Dear Ms Bishop,

I thought that your piece was accurate and well reasoned.

We have an incompetent, unmitigated liar for P.M. who couldn't run a proverbial chook raffle.

Best regards

Halduell,

As I recall it was one of those nations which came to being after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Chek

The ' strategy' really was a powder puff generated by spin... What else is new with Gillard? The woman is not only an amoral politician, but I really believe she is a bit thick.
(I mean the woman does not even recognise her own overt racism).

Where is the recognition that, when America is independent of fossil fuels from the Middle East, It will no longer need the financial burden of a fleet in the region, a fleet protecting the supplies of Australia, Malaysia, India and most substantially that of China.

I guess it will then require China to develop and maintain a carrier fleet to replace the Americans.

Hmmm. Could be some Defence policy considerations there but, Foreign policy is not really here thing is it?

Julie, you mucked up the title to this post, it should read "Credibility void on national security".

Labor is to national security what the Catholic church is child protection.

Alan Austin

did you say Julia?

Those who remember the last LNP Government may consider Labor and their Green's polices of loose lip spin got Australia into this mess in the first place.

I agree with Julie Bishop on one point. The current government is incompetent and unprincipled and wouldn't know an independent Australian foreign policy if it got kicked in the face by one.

But to accept that the LNP crowd would do any better is to conveniently let history go down the memory hole as Alan Austin so correctly points out.

The fatal flaw in your reasoning Ms Bishop is that you apparently regard Australia's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as successes of the Howard government. Both interventions were based on a massive series of lies, were contrary to international law, and have resulted in untold suffering for millions of people.

That of course is entirely consistent with the history of the past 65+ years. In 1967 Martin Luther King pointed out that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was his own government. He was killed for that, as successive administrations have killed those who pose a threat to their hegemonic ambitions.

Instead of shooting the fish in a barrel that is the present government, Ms Bishop, let us hear from you an outline of an independent and principled foreign policy that the Coalition would pursue. No? Thought not.

So the Coalition are to be the role models of National Security?

What about National Monetary security Julie Bishop?

Both the major parties have sold off our Govt Banks since the 1980's.We used to have 4 State Banks and the Commonwealth.They used to create from nothing some of the money to equal our increases in productivity + inflation but now we are slaves to the international cartels to just create money to equal our productivity with the click of a computer mouse.

Both your Govt and the criminal Labor Party have sold us all out to contrived debt by our counterfeiting international banking cartels.That is the real national security both you and Labor will not address.

China is our best trading partner and now our Govts and Obama are trying to demonise them because they did not roll over to this cartel of banksters who wanted the Chinese Govt Banks to be sold off just like ours.Note that Obama is sending troops to 35 African countries to contain China.US ships are also in the Artic to lay claim to rich oil and gas resources there.

China was well liked by our Western Elites until they in 2008 decided that they liked their sovereignity and did not want to be enslaved by Western debt.The BRICS Nations as an opposition to Western Imperialism,are good for the people in all countries, since the large Western Corps will not be able to control all the energy/resources thus making energy/resources more affordable for us.

A war with Russia/China will make us ordinary folk as always the poor in lifespan ,poor in quality of life and a few Western Elites even more powerful,if their meglomanic plans of Global domination work.

Gee Alan, I dare say we'll be seeing a lot more of you now Wood's Global Mail has disappeared up its own cyper sphincter.

It's also good to see the absence of any pretense of moderation and civility in your leftist rant.

Are you after preselection, or should that be appointment by Gillard, anywhere?

@cohenite. It is not enough to dismiss something you disagree with as a "leftist rant". If anything that Alan Austin said is wrong then perhaps you could provide a reasoned rebuttal. Your ad hominen approach is frankly tiresome and does nothing to advance the debate.

I'm with you, cohenite!

Cheers,

Allan Thomas

If you are tired James then you had better retire; don't stay on my account.

Alan Austin is, IMO, a one-eyed advocate advocate for the ALP. I find his defence of Gillard particularly galling.

In respect of his list of alleged coalition faults a number stand out as being unreasonable, notably blaming Howard for the 1999 East Timor massacres. This is straight out of the Pilger textbook, blaming the West on the basis of some perverted 'blowback' logic for the barbarism of other cultures.

To blame Howard's reasonable proposal about a referendum for causing violence by the pro-Indonesian forces is grotesque but I'll leave it at that in case someone accuses me of getting personal.

Cohenite the left/right paradigm is used by the elites to divide and conquer the masses.Unless you are worth at least a $ billion you are one of the serfs.Neither of the major parties or the Greens serve the people.

This is the current reality of a world owned by counterfeiting banksters.

Gee Alan

seems everyone is now accepting you are nothing but an off-shore labor leftie propagandist.

Living in the European socialist utopia and telling us what is best for us.

Cheers mon ami, mi amigo, gee can't remember the greek or italian

Shame these important discussions have to shift to the lowest common denominator of left/right politics and football team politics. Why not just look squarely at the debate and learning from the mistakes of the past. Howard's awful decision to intervene (along with the US) in Afghanistan and Iraq is something from which we can learn.

If not Australia is doomed to make the same mistakes into the future. Same goes for the ALP's continued support of that decision and continued overreaching in national security policy vs privacy aspects.

More accountability and transparency is what is needed for government regardless of who is in power.