Overview: With preparations for the Defence White Paper 2015 well underway, both government and the public are probably more interested than usual in the esoteric topic of Australia’s strategic policy. In this paper, the author unpacks some thoughts about that by talking most about how strategic policy is—ideally—made.

Making strategic policy means solving a puzzle in three parts: understanding an environment largely not of our own making; determining our own global and regional role; and acknowledging a set of constraints that bound that role.