Assessing our opportunities and threats as part of a national SWOT analysis

As a nation, Australia stands at a pivotal juncture in the early 21st century, shaped by its unique historical trajectory and poised to navigate a complex global and regional landscape over the next decade, with the opportunities and challenges inextricably tied to its economic, political, strategic and demographic realities.

On the economic front, Australia’s history of dependence upon resource and agricultural-driven prosperity continues to provide a robust foundation for innovation; despite this, Australia’s economy faces a number of challenges both domestically and abroad that will fundamentally shape the future of the nation’s economic prosperity, stability and competitiveness.

The global energy transition, coupled with the advent of artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing and Industry 4.0 are presenting the nation with immense new opportunities for economic diversification, job creation and global competitiveness on the back of our traditional strengths.

Conversely, economic vulnerabilities loom, particularly as Australia’s heavy reliance on China, its largest trading partner, and increasingly other members of the emerging parallel economic, political and strategic organ, BRICS, faces growing scrutiny amid shifting geopolitical alignments.

Politically, Australia’s democratic institutions and stable governance remain a comparative strength, even among its rising and significantly larger Indo-Pacific neighbours, through its historic alignment with Western powers like the United States and the United Kingdom. Australia will need to navigate its traditional alliances while deepening ties with emerging regional partners across the region.

Increasingly, this balancing act will shape the nation’s ability to adapt its political strategies to a multipolar world, which will shape its influence in global settings, and given the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as the epicentre of global economic, political and strategic power, region forums.

Strategically, Australia’s security landscape is increasingly defined by the Indo-Pacific’s rising tensions. Historical experiences, such as its participation in World War II and alliances in the Cold War, highlight the importance of a robust, strategy-orientated defence posture, marking a radical shift in the way Australia engages with both the world and the Indo-Pacific.

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Meanwhile, the demographic front has seen Australia capitalise on its growing, diverse population, while migration has increasingly been established as a key driver of population and economic growth in particular. But it isn’t without its challenges, as Australia’s ageing demographics and uneven regional development present significant challenges, requiring forward-thinking policies to sustain growth.

As the next decade unfolds, Australia’s response to these interconnected factors will shape its trajectory, underscoring the need for resilience and adaptability, bringing us to the “opportunities” and “threats” components of our national SWOT analysis, with the “strengths” and “weaknesses”" outlined in part one available here.

O - Opportunities

Despite a seemingly gloomy outlook based on the “weaknesses” highlighted in the first part of this short series, Australia, as a nation, faces immense opportunities that have the potential to fundamentally rewrite and transform the nation for the better over the next decade, setting us up for a century of growth, stability, prosperity and security in the face of mounting multipolarity and intense nation-state competition.

But where to begin?

Well, playing to our traditional strengths, namely the resource wealth of the Australian land mass – in particular iron ore, nickel, gold, uranium, lithium, copper, metallurgical coal, cobalt and, of course, rare earth elements – which are just some examples where our natural advantages can provide part of the foundation for explosive economic growth off the back of voracious demand across the globe and the Indo-Pacific in particular.

There will be strong demand for these resources over the coming decade. Serving as a powerful example, nickel, according to the International Energy Agency, is expected to see annual growth of between 5–9 per cent over the next decade for rare earth elements and a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5–8 per cent through 2030 while Australia’s traditional strength in iron ore production is expected to see explosive growth of 3.8 per cent CAGR off the back of China and India’s continued economic growth.

However, if Australia’s leaders are genuine in their stated objectives of increasing Australia’s integration in the “value add” side of the supply chain domestically, we will require innovative and novel policy making and a complete overhaul of our world-leadingly burdensome regulatory frameworks in order to fully capitalise on these opportunities.

Critically, the global push to secure critical supply chains underpins this opportunity, with the capacity for Australia to provide partner-nations with assured access to high-quality, reliable supplies of critical industrial inputs from the raw, unrefined level through to moderately refined and manufactured goods without compromising the value proposition early on in the shift towards export-oriented industrialisation (or perhaps reindustrialisation is a more apt description).

Further enhancing the economic opportunities off the back of this foreign demand is linking this reindustrialisation to local industrial base developments, like the growth of Australia’s local defence industry through the Continuous Naval Shipbuilding program, Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise, and the efforts to locally build a suite of armoured combat vehicles and autonomous systems at scale like the GhostBat and Ghost Shark, respectively.

Bringing us to the other pillar of Australia’s historic economic stability and prosperity, agriculture, which has, in recent decades, exploded in value off the back of the demands of the Indo-Pacific, particularly Japan, South Korea and China.

Acknowledging this immense potential, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) and the CSIRO have forecast that Australia’s agricultural industry will be worth approximately AU$100 billion by 2034, largely off the back of demand from the Indo-Pacific for a host of products, ranging from high-quality beef, lamb and pork products, through to rock lobsters, wine, barley, wheat, wool and cotton.

Yet these projections are only based on the current “business as usual” approach to our agricultural industry, with little-to-nothing done at a regulatory, investment, infrastructure and policy level in order to help enhance the resilience, productivity, profitability and expansion of Australia’s agricultural sector over the coming decade.

These opportunities can be embraced through a series of comprehensive relevant investments, particularly in water security technology and critically, water security infrastructure, as well as the widespread adoption of automation, and regulatory and policy support for the emerging fields of regenerative and resilient farming can serve to boost Australia’s status as the breadbasket of the Indo-Pacific, while providing Australia’s population with reliable access to world-leading standards of high-quality produce.

Overarching these uniquely Australian economic pillars is the increasing power and proliferation of transformative technologies, including automation, particularly in sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, energy and resources, healthcare, logistics and supply chain management and finance and education.

The advent of automation has largely been viewed in the West as a threat to human employment opportunities, rather than as a force multiplier for individual, highly skilled humans in the loop, while also promoting enhanced productivity, efficiency and product quality; conversely, our potential adversaries are rapidly embracing automation at scale to provide them with both a qualitative and quantitative advantage over Australia and our partners.

Importantly for the detractors, this hasn’t come at the cost of human capital, rather it has seen the human capital of these nations upskill, retrain and pivot to provide continued value with a “human in the loop”.

Leading us to the trade and diplomatic opportunities available to Australia through a policy of diversification, rather than putting all our economic eggs in a single or small number of baskets – in this case China and India – risks alienating or understating the economic potential of the broader Indo-Pacific and Africa, both rapidly growing regions of the world that provide immense economic and industrial opportunities for Australia, if we play our cards right.

Equally, engaging with these markets provides powerful opportunities for Australia to enhance our diplomatic and strategic interests, presence and representation to position ourselves as a trusted and valued regional partner, invested and integrated in the economic, political and strategic security of these burgeoning regions to the immense benefit and opportunity of the Australian people.

Such an approach would serve to enhance Australia’s security in the region and, more broadly, on the global stage through a diversification of economic opportunity and engagement, robust, realistic strategic doctrine and a level of diplomatic engagement that balances our historic diplomatic partnerships with new relationships, our interests and those of our neighbours to mutual benefit of all.

However, despite these opportunities, threats to Australia’s future economic, political and strategic security, stability and prosperity abound.

T - Threats

Before we start, I need to begin by stating I am not going to focus on the VERY well-documented threats posed by the world’s rising autocratic axis led by China and Russia, nor for that matter am I going to focus on the rise of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) economic, political and increasingly strategic blocs seeking to rival the post-Second World War order.

These threats have been well-documented, and if we manage them appropriately, we can turn them on their head and turn them into opportunities.

Rather, I am going to focus on the political/policy, economic and demographic threats to Australia’s enduring peace, prosperity and stability that if not addressed, mitigated and dealt with over the next decade, will doom Australia to a century of decline into obscurity, irrelevance and poverty, or to quote Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew, becoming the “poor white trash of Asia”.

Provocative, I know.

Beginning with our political threats, the world is currently in the early stages of a trend towards “deglobalisation”, driven in large part by the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, Beijing’s “mask off” moment where it turned to economic coercion in an effort to control recalcitrant, upstart nations like Australia and which will be accelerated by the second Trump administration set to take power in late January 2025.

This has prompted a major shift in the economic policy making of Australia, with Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, during a speech at the United States Studies Centre, said, “These parts of the economy cannot be left to the private sector alone and there is a clear role for government in regulating their operation and ownership. This is often described as the ‘small yard, high fence’ strategy, where a strong set of protections are put around a small number of critical economic activities.”

These comments were subsequently reinforced by Director-General of the Office of National Intelligence Andrew Shearer at the same event, who said, “We can’t have prosperity in this country without security, but we can’t have security without prosperity, and so we have to demonstrate by what we do and what we say to business leaders that we understand that Australia needs a strong, open, dynamic, flexible economy with productivity growth, and that is absolutely essential to pay for the resilience and the defence and other capabilities we’re going to need to navigate this period.”

It is important, however, to identify that while globalisation has provided immense benefits to Australia, it is now a policy and ideology from a bygone era, one where the United States unilaterally dominated the global economic, political and strategic institutions and ecosystem. The rise of multipolarity and national self-interested policy making, particularly among revisionist powers, now necessitates a radical and rapid pivot.

This conveniently brings us to the domestic political threats we face, that being a policy-making community devoid of ambition, seemingly out of touch with the reality of the world and committed to the continuation of a policy of “managed decline” via burdensome bureaucratic red tape; backwards, often draconian regulatory frameworks; and overly interventionist concepts like “stakeholder capitalism” and the perennially maligned ESG scores that dictate investment directions and priorities to the point of making Australia and similar countries unproductive and uncompetitive.

Don’t believe me? Just take a look at Germany’s rapid decline in the past 12 months.

Further enhancing the impact of this is Australia’s mounting levels of public and private debt across all levels of government and households which have detrimental impact on the capacity to invest in a national economy, that are further compounded by mounting tax burdens on individual Australians as governments struggle to pay back their debt obligations.

This then leads us back to the broader economic challenges presented as a result of the mounting debt burdens shared by both governments and the Australian public which has a deleterious impact on the economy’s growth, productivity and the prosperity of everyday Australians.

Nowhere is this better reflected than in the housing market and the increasing lack of employment opportunities available to young Australians outside of work for the government in the care sector, or an ever-shrinking private sector economy continually impacted and undermined by the regulatory burden enforced by governments.

We see this playing out in the most poetic ways imaginable or simply put, “our luck is running out”, with declining investment across the economy and industries, a hollowing out of the industrial base, which is seeing Australia become, as The Australian’s Tom Dusevic put it, “becoming older, flabbier and less nimble to play to the conditions”.

Dusevic further highlighted this, stating, “The nation is getting more expensive to run, invest in and house, revealed by a bulging and indebted state, an overly regulated private sector, threats of capital flight and the punitive cost of homes … Voters increasingly believe the living cost squeeze reflects a failure of the political class to pay attention to their core concerns and everyday hopes and needs...

“Migration and public spending, on benefits, public servants and capital works, have kept us out of recession, while contributing to a homegrown housing crisis. We’re kidding ourselves to think housing will sort itself out if we just stop the visas, hobble demand and root out a few criminals on building sites. It’s a chronic condition.”

Meanwhile, for Dimitri Burshtein, principal at Eminence Advisory, Australia requires an intense period of economic reform in order to avoid, as he believes, “Canberra [is] driving us down the long, slow road to economic ruin.”

Burshtein warned that this is not a new phenomenon, with much of the current policy malaise and ensuing impact on the nation’s prosperity, individual wealth, and productivity coming as a result of successive failed economic policies that have ever-slowly lurched towards tighter control and central planning.

“Like boiling a frog, the cumulative effects of ever-increasing taxes, government spending, and regulations will eventually lead to economic atrophy. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Australian governments commenced steering the national economy away from prosperity and towards penury through ever-increasing planning and control,” Burshtein said.

This position has been extensively reinforced Dr Kevin You, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, who said, “On energy, again Australia used to be a powerhouse, boasting among the lowest electricity prices in the world. Now we are ranked 52nd, the result of a failing transition to net zero emissions. On tax and red tape, Australian policymarkers are engaging in economic self-harm. We are one of the highest taxed people in the developed world.

“On corporate tax and personal income tax we are ranked 56th and 57th of 64. And on the key metric of ‘bureaucracy not hindering economic activity’, Australia has plunged 14 places since our peak in 2004. This means there are more bureaucrats, permits, forms and red tape getting in the way of businesses which want to invest and employ Australians in secure jobs.”

Conveniently bringing us back to the demographic impacts, that were clearly outlined in the “weaknesses” portion of the first part of this series, and can only be characterised as a domestic population decline, if not collapse that is only somewhat slowed by record migration which consequently feeds back into the inflation/stagflation doom loop undermining the opportunities, prosperity and security of current and future Australians.

Importantly, we will require a break with the politics and policy of “the path of least resistance” that has dominated our policy making for the better part of three decades, at least, and embrace a new plan characterised by unbridled and unapologetic ambition and vision and to begin engaging with the Australian public through an optimistic framework for our future.

Final thoughts

As Australia and the Western world face this era of renewed competition between autarchy and democracy, this is part of a broader uncomfortable conversation that needs to be had in the open with our people.

Our adversaries have already shown that economic resilience, capacity and competitiveness will prove equally as critical to military power in this new world, accordingly, we need to begin to recognise the opportunities presented before us.

Expanding and enhancing the opportunities available to Australians while building critical economic resilience and, as a result, deterrence to economic coercion, should be the core focus of the government because only when our economy is strong can we ensure that we can deter aggression towards the nation or our interests.

Succeeding in this new era of hybrid warfare also requires a greater degree of transparency and a culture of innovation and collaboration between the nation’s strategic policymakers, elected officials, and the constituents they represent and serve.

Embracing this approach will need to entice the Australian public, especially young Australians who increasingly feel like they have been left behind, to once again invest in and believe in the future direction of the nation.

If we are going to emerge as a prosperous, secure, and free nation in the new era of great power competition, it is clear we will need break the shackles of short-termism and begin to think far more long term, to the benefit of current and future generations of Australians.

Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below, or get in touch at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..