By Ben McDevitt

I felt honoured to be part of the 2020 Summit in Canberra.  The opportunity to share ideas with such a diverse array of people from all walks of life on critical issues affecting our nation was fantastic.  My only regret is that the time we had to actually put ideas onto the table was very limited and the opportunity to actually explore those ideas in a meaningful way was virtually non-existent. 

I think the organisers and facilitators did a great job under considerable pressure to identify key ideas emerging from each of the streams in the limited time available and I was pleasantly surprised at the wrap up session on the second day that some really innovative ideas had been generated.  Prior to attending the summit I held the view that the best we could hope for was to create opportunities for further discussion and I sense that will occur.

I would like to see summits such as this occur on a more regular basis and would also be supportive of a summit which extended beyond our own shores and perhaps included our near neighbours.  In particular I think this would be useful given the level of discussions around our aid programs and nation building efforts in the region.  We could easily fall into the trap of making decisions based upon what we think is best for our neighbours rather than actually involving them in setting expectations of the relationship. 

The summit stream I attended focussed on Australia's security and future prosperity. 

The stream covered an extraordinary breadth of subject matter and in some ways made it very difficult to isolate and spend time on key aspects.  Discussion ranged across issues such as our trade relationships, the emergence of China and India as global superpowers, our regional nation building efforts, building global intelligence into our future generations through language and cultural training, conventional defence and security, regional labour markets, our resource platforms etc. 

Much of my own working life has been spent in community policing and broader law enforcement so part of my perspective for the stream involved the concept of secure communities contributing to a secure Australia.  I was keen to see the development of some form of policing and law enforcement ‘white paper' in the same way as we see defence white papers prepared from time to time.  The reality is that there has been a coalescence of the national security and the law enforcement threats whether they be issues such as terrorism, border protection, people smuggling, transnational crime etc and these issues are better addressed in a holistic way. 

I am pleased that the stream identified the issue of emerging threats as being critical and suggested a specific forum to advice government on these issues.

Ben McDevitt is the Chief Executive Officer of CrimTrac, the government charged with developing the technology required to give police ready access to information needed to solve crimes.