09/03/2023

KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO COMMSDAY MELBOURNE CONGRESS 2022

SHERATON MELBOURNE

16 MARCH 2022

I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

It's great to be back speaking at another Commsday Congress, and to be talking to room full of people once again.

With such a full house today, all of you obviously missed being at conferences as much as I did speaking at them!

It's been two years since I last addressed a Commsday Summit in 2020, but we've managed to fit two decades of history into the intervening period.

The 2020 Commsday summit was just a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic.

I said then that the world won't be the same after the pandemic and that we would divide the world into before Covid and after Covid.

As we are beginning to, tentatively, consider what our world might look like after the crisis stage of the Covid pandemic, it's clear that we're looking at a number of aspects of our modern society through a different lens.

Covid was THE great a stress test of our national resilience - our ability to respond to adverse external shocks, to prepare for risks, to minimise

human and economic losses, and to bounce back from harm.

It's fair to say that our results in the face of this test have been mixed.

Our sector has delivered some of the high points of our national resilience during the pandemic.

Our reliance on the national broadband network grew exponentially overnight.

Our homes began doing double and triple duties, becoming makeshift offices and schools in additional to personal dwellings.

While Mum was on a Teams meeting with the office,

and Dad was on a Zoom call with a client

and the kids were on Webex calls for their classes,

and half the country was watching the Olympics on streaming services, our broadband infrastructure creaked under unprecedented demand.

But on the whole, it held up, thanks in no small part to the investments in the capacity of our national broadband infrastructure set in train by a previous government that was planning for the future, not just managing the present.

But the sad reality of the last two years is that Australia has been forced to confront the fact that from here on out, stress tests to our national resilience can no longer be expected to be rare and isolated crises, but rather will be increasingly frequent, interconnected and compounding.

In addition to COVID-19, the last two years have brought home the reality of what climate change will mean for our national resilience.

The Black Summer Bushfires and the Queensland and Northern NSW floods broke records, many of which were set just a decade before.

The global pandemic has also been accompanied by a dramatic worsening of geostrategic tensions, a trend that has seen its most extreme and tragic manifestation in the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Each of these shocks - whether driven by the pandemic, climate change or worsening geo-strategic conditions - have challenged Australia's national resilience.

We've seen the way external shocks can have cascading impacts in our increasingly interdependent and interconnected modern society and economy.

In this way, these shocks have threatened the viability of our critical infrastructure and national supply chains.

They've caused large scale losses of personal and commercial property, challenging insurance markets like never before.

And most importantly of all, they've resulted in large scale losses of life.

We can expect similar shocks to continue to hit Australia for the foreseeable future.

The hither and yonning days of the turn of the millennium are well and truly gone.

We need to confront this reality and start preparing for these shocks better as a nation and building our national resilience.

Telecommunications Infrastructure Resilience

A growing challenge for everyone in this room will be building the resilience of our critical telecommunications infrastructure.

I want to acknowledge everyone who has been impacted by the floods in New South Wales and Queensland as well as the emergency workers and members of the ADF who have helped in the clean up efforts.

It's becoming an all too familiar pattern that our natural environment is pushing our communications infrastructure to its limits.

While we don't know when the pandemic will be fully behind us, and with natural disasters set to only increase due to climate change, the time to start increasing the resilience of our communications infrastructure is now.

As Premier Dominic Perrottet acknowledged on Monday, a telecommunications outage during a natural disaster compounds the damage and hampers our emergency response.

At the height of the recent flooding, we also had over twenty communities that were isolated.

This means the residents of those communities had no fixed-line services, no NBN service and no mobile access, and were therefore unable to contact triple Zero.

This left many communities feeling distressed, and indeed very vulnerable.

The floods were a reminder of how the challenge of keeping networks available varies depending on the type of natural disaster.

One of the key issues was being able to access sites to restore power, or to diagnose the network fault.

As flood waters cut off conventional transport routes, and took many days to subside, this meant some mobile towers provided no service for between 5 to 7 days because their power could not be temporarily restored.

There is no doubting the genuine and significant efforts of the telecommunications carriers and the coordinating authorities during this very difficult time, and the front-line technicians, SES and ADF personnel who put themselves at risk.

It is often an impossible situation where everyone is doing their absolute best.

But what is also clear is that the community expects their telecommunications services to be more available, and more resilient, than they have been.

Clearly, more must be done to improve our responsive capability to access sites in the midst of natural disasters, and also our pre-emptive investments to embed deployable communications options in communities identified as high risk of becoming isolated during significant natural disaster events.

There is no silver bullet, but all layers of government, including the telecommunications industry, must remain steadfast is seeking ongoing improvements because these can be the difference between life and death.

The floods were also an important reminder about the benefits of passive fibre networks during floods.

The absence of active electronics in the access network provides one less point of potential failure, and relative to Fibre to the Node, and Fibre to the Curb, the benefits of passive full-fibre networks were apparent up the East coast.

And on the broadcast side, in 2020, both a Senate Inquiry and the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements known as the Bushfires Royal Commission - heard evidence of the need for site hardening of broadcast transmission Infrastructure.

During catastrophic natural disasters, emergency radio broadcasting can be the last line of communications.

Recommendations for site hardening included funding to clear fuel from around the sites, having backup power on standby, and having portable transmission equipment available to enable faster recovery of broadcast services.

Commercial factors determine which sites are hardened and there is a role for Government to ensure that sites with smaller population sizes in risk prone areas are resilient.

National Cyber Resilience

While our physical infrastructure will continue to be buffeted by the natural disasters that accompany climate change, the networks and systems that sit on top of them will be increasingly tested by the cyber attacks that inevitably accompany worsening geostrategic tensions.

While every organisation's threat model will look different depending on a range of specific circumstances, the general cyber threat environment is now strongly shaped by underlying geo-strategic conditions.

As the geo-strategic environment has worsened over the past two years, so too have the cyber threats facing Australian organisations become more acute.

ASIO has described the threat of state backed cyber espionage in the current environment as 'pervasive'.

Government networks are constantly being probed by state backed APTs seeking access for espionage.

And as a recent incident in which a vulnerability in the animal tracking software USAHERDS, was exploited by a state backed threat actor in order to gain access to multiple government systems in the United States shows, you don't need to have a high profile to be a target.

Recent years have also seen state backed APTs increasingly using supply chain attacks leveraging access to smaller firms with lower product maturity levels and less scrutinised software offerings as an attack vector for a down stream espionage targets.

Ransomware groups too have began to exploit this form of attack, threatening not just the confidentiality of information shared on these networks, but their availability as well.

Ransomware groups have long sheltered in