Government Establishes National Office for Cybersecurity

The Australian Government is taking steps to become the most cyber secure country in the world by 2030, with the announcement of a new national office for cyber security and the launch of a consultation on a seven-year cyber security strategy.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the office would be led by a new senior official with the title of coordinator for cyber security, with recruitment for the role already underway.

“[There’s] two really important tasks for this person,” O’Neil said. “The first will be to try to provide some strategy and structure and spine to the work being done across government, so it will mean things like making sure that the billions of dollars that we are investing in cyber security each year are being spent in a way that’s strategic and appropriate, that we’ve got different parts of government communicating with each other and working together on helping lift cyber security protections across the country. The other really important part of this person’s job will be to help manage cyber incidents in a proper, seamless, strategic way across the Australian Government.”

The Government will also open a consultation on the next national cyber security strategy today, following a roundtable with “business, security and tech leaders”.

“We want Australia to be the most cyber secure country in the world by 2030 and the cyber strategy is the main mechanism that will get us there,” O’Neil said. “So today, the discussion paper [will ask] a bunch of questions about how we can be the most cyber secure country in the world by 2030 – and one of those is about how we can work with business to make sure that they are lifting cyber security standards in partnership with government.”