Episodes over the past decade – including China’s trade measures against Australia and Japan, Russia’s manipulation of European gas supplies, and the tightening of global controls over critical minerals – demonstrate how economic levers are being used to impose costs and reshape incentives without crossing traditional thresholds of conflict.

This has included for the purposes of coercing nations into tolerating military aggression, cyber-attacks and foreign interference, or particularly in the case of China also creating monopolitistic dependencies. More recently, the United States has employed overt economic instruments, such as tariffs, as tools of strategic leverage and industrial policy – underscoring not an equivalence of intent or method, but the extent to which the use of markets for geopolitical ends is becoming embedded across the international system.

Australia’s challenge isn’t necessarily creating new instruments, nor simply coordinating disparate capabilities across government departments, agencies or sectors of the economy. Rather, the task is to embed deeper integration and fusion of the tools and capabilities that already exist.

This report argues that doing so requires strengthening the connective tissue between policy, intelligence, economic and security functions so that information flows more freely, preparedness is built collectively and joint capabilities can be brought to bear under pressure. In practice, this means a system better able to anticipate pressure, absorb shocks and align economic and security decision-making in more ways that reinforce Australia’s long-term resilience – while operating at speed and across multiple fronts concurrently.

Recommendations

1. Adopt a National Economic Security Strategy to define priorities, clarify thresholds and force trade-offs before crisis conditions compress options.
2. Strengthen existing cross-government senior officials mechanisms.
3. Establish a cross-government economic-security capability.
4. Enhance existing resilience initiatives.
5. Further embed structured engagement with industry.
6. Clarify doctrine and terminology.
7. Establish an economic-security dashboard and periodic independent review.