15 Maritime Security

Maritime Security protects Australia’s sovereign rights and keeps our waters safe from things like biosecurity issues, terrorism, organised crime, and people smuggling. Civil and military maritime security work together to keep our marine estate safe and sustainable.

Image COCKBURN SOUND 150304-O-ZZ999-001 by U.S. Pacific Fleet is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

What is Maritime Security?

Civil maritime security advances and protects Australia’s interests by actively managing non-military risk to Australia and Australia’s maritime domain. Effective civil maritime security ensures Australia’s ongoing ability to exercise its sovereign rights and obligations across all activities that occur within or affect our maritime domain.

Australia’s civil maritime security considerations are vast. They include all things relevant to our national interests on, under, associated with, or adjacent to our maritime zones. This includes both human centred maritime activities and the ocean/marine environment.

Security enables the conditions that support our way of life and economic prosperity, which a range of functional areas and sectors underpin. Civil maritime security focuses on our maritime domain. It therefore intersects with, and is dependent on, a broad range of policies and operational activities. The broad policy, systems, processes, assets, and activities that intersect with civil maritime security or have the capacity to affect our national interests include, but are not limited to: people smuggling, terrorism, transnational serious and organised crime, domain awareness, capacity building, international engagement, foreign interference, natural resources and the marine environment, critical infrastructure, cyber security, supply chains, biosecurity, and sustainability.

Civil maritime security settings respond to current requirements while building for the future. In doing so, they identify and address relevant challenges, vulnerabilities, threats, and opportunities that could affect Australia’s ability to secure and protect maritime aspects of our resources, emerging maritime industries and economy, our ocean environment, and our heritage, culture and social identity.

While broad in its construct, civil maritime security is but one component of Australia’s overall maritime arrangements. Australia’s maritime arrangements also comprise military operations and maritime safety. These two components are beyond the scope of this Strategy.

Military operations: Defence deploys military power to shape Australia’s strategic environment, deter actions against our interests and, when required, respond with credible military force (Department of Defence, 2020).

Maritime safety: complements civil maritime security. It promotes vessel safety, including interactions between vessels and vessels as a workplace. It provides the infrastructure for safety of navigation in Australian waters, maintains a national search and rescue service for maritime and aviation sectors, and protects our marine environment by combating ship-sourced pollution (Australian Maritime Safety Authority, 2020).

While these responsibilities, activities and capabilities overlap, they are distinctly and necessarily separate, each with their own guiding policies, strategies and governance arrangements that mutually reinforce and complement civil maritime security.

Why is it important?

Australia is a prosperous nation that benefits from political stability, economic development, trade growth and people movement. Trade as a whole is equivalent to 45 per cent of Australian GDP and is directly responsible for one in five Australian jobs (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2020). Over 80 per cent of trade by value (BITRE, 2019), and a substantial proportion of our domestic freight, transits through our maritime domain. It is estimated that Australian seaports move $1.2 billion of trade every day (Ports Australia, 2021). In 2019–20, Australia’s two-way trade in goods totalled $875 billion (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, n.d.).

Around 70 per cent of the area subject to Australian jurisdiction sits below the ocean’s surface (Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, 2018). It is a growing revenue source, which facilitates employment, supports industry growth, and contributes new revenue streams to our economy. In 2015–16, Australia’s ocean economy was worth $68 billion (Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, 2018) and a 2013 analysis predicted it will contribute around $100 billion per annum to Australia’s economy by 2025  (Oceans Policy Advisory Group, 2013). Our maritime domain contains environmental assets from coral reefs such as the iconic Great Barrier Reef to oil and gas fields and fisheries as well as mangroves, sea grass beds, kelp forests, and rocky reefs, which are home to a diverse range of marine plants and animals.

As the population in Australia and around the world grows, so too does the demand for seafood. Australia’s demand for seafood exceeds the supply from domestic production and continues to grow. Australia’s fisheries and aquaculture production value is expected to rise by 21 per cent in 2020–21 to $3.4 billion following the assumed normalisation of export markets (Department of Agriculture, Water and the Enviornment, n.d.).

Strategic Interests

Explore the Strategic Interests image below to learn more about Australia’s interests when it comes to the marine environment.

This text and “strategic Interests” image is from the “Australian Government Civil Maritime Security Strategy” by © Commonwealth of Australia 2021 which is licensed under CC BY 4.0, except for the Maritime Security introduction, which has been added by Trish Corbett.