The hidden cost of Australia’s foreign policy

Carl Gopalkrishnan says Australia’s legally defensible foreign policy decisions are eroding public trust at home, undermining intelligence sharing and leaving the country increasingly vulnerable to covert threats.

AUSTRALIA CONTINUES TO MAKE legally defensible and diplomatically orthodox foreign policy and security decisions, and then underplays how damaging those decisions are to community trust at home. This erosion of trust is the main reason why officials later said “it wasn’t our intelligence.”

Unless we change the way decisions are made by creating a new binding process between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Home Affairs, Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Security Intelligence Agency (ASIOWith an approach that treats narrative and social risks as real security risks, we will continue to harm the underground and make ourselves less safe.

AFP, Israeli President’s Isaac Herzog wouldn’t happen subject to arrest Because of the immunity of the head of state in Australia.

Like many people, including senior MPs, I strongly disagree with the decision to invite Herzog at this time and do not take it lightly.

It is important to acknowledge the true suffering of the Jewish community; just as it is important to acknowledge the accumulated pain and trauma carried by Palestinians and many other communities who are experiencing an increase in racism, polarization, and fear.

These harms are not separate, they intersect. Treating them as if they could be neatly compartmentalized into “foreign policy there” and “community security here” collapses into itself.

When meaning changes faster than institutions

“No intelligence” is a failure of intelligence as well as a breakdown in trust and relationships.

A critical backdrop to this is that many communities have seriously given up on sharing information with law enforcement, government agencies, and higher-level institutions that once mediated between communities and government.

This means organizations are increasingly at risk of flying blind by operating without accurate community intelligence. When officials later say they “have no intelligence,” as in a recent incident terrorist attempt In Perth, this means a serious breakdown in trust and relationships.

In this context, this visit feels like a critically damaging turning point in the narrative. Whatever the legal scope of the decision, it risks putting another nail in the coffin of the public’s trust in the Home Office’s engagement efforts or information sharing with the AFP; further narrowing what remains of community intelligence in multicultural and broader communities that both the far right and ideologically motivated threats silently monitor.

As we saw with the Perth bombing attempt, neither ASIO nor the AFP had any “intelligence” to prevent this attack. What bothers many of us is that this is not just a policing problem, but a relational and institutional wall of silence.

How is damage carried underground?

What is missing from our current arrangements is a clear understanding of the nature of today’s threat. As people feel that institutions will not protect or listen to them, they turn inward; They turn to social media, unofficial networks, rumors, and sometimes darker online spaces where bad actors lurk.

Poorly designed hate speech laws risk reinforcing this dynamic, quickly pushing speech underground that festers beyond any mediating influence. This creates conditions in which hidden, unchallenged narratives grow rapidly and isolated (already anxious, insecure, or ostracized) individuals become more vulnerable to radicalization.

The decision not to treat all visitors to Australia the same could be, for many, the point of no return for corporate trust; This is a high domestic cost to pay for a foreign policy decision.

A missing connection layer

That’s why we urgently need a new, permanent link between DFAT, Home Affairs, AFP and ASIO.

It’s not another committee or another layer of public relations. What is needed is a small, permanent capability that takes narrative and social risk as seriously as legal or security risk and can translate foreign policy decisions into domestic impact in real time.

Such a mechanism must do three things that no existing structure does well:

Build bridges between foreign policy and domestic security.

It will systematically assess how visits, statements and alliances reach Australia across different communities, online ecosystems, protest dynamics and far-right mobilizations, and feed this analysis back into decision-making.

Keep narrative risk alongside security risk.

Currently, only kinetic or legal risks are considered “real.” This body will consider loss of trust, community fragmentation, and cumulative narrative damage as measurable risks that will shape timing, framing, engagement, and contingency planning.

Recreate the conditions for community intelligence.

If institutions repeatedly say “we didn’t have intelligence,” this is not just an intelligence failure; this is a failure of trust. The unifying layer should be tasked with repairing relationships, creating secure channels for information, and ensuring that communities are viewed as security partners and not just messaging targets.

Those with experience working in government know that there are ways to avoid a lengthy culture change project. With clear ministerial leadership, an urgent operational task force can be quickly established that cuts across silos, speaks fluently to DFAT, Home Affairs, AFP and ASIO, and is able to listen and respond to communities without bureaucratic or political baggage.

The point is not to paralyze decision-making, but to make it smarter. We are now often driven by risk managers and legal teams working within assumptions inherited from the 20th century about how power, knowledge and communities operate.

Recent criticism of the term “social cohesion” is significant, but it pales in comparison to the urgent need for truly innovative thinking across policy. Today, for public safety, trust, meaning and social connection must underpin the way we write and interpret statutes and protocols.

Until we modernize this mindset, we will continue to make legally defensible choices that leave us socially vulnerable, defenseless, and distrustful of anyone’s definition of intelligence.

Carl Gopalkrishnan is an Australian artist and policy practitioner with many years of experience in multicultural policy, social cohesion and community engagement.

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