Australia Cyber Defence Bolstered by $10 Billion via Project REDSPICE

Almost $10 billion over the next decade will be pumped into helping Australia compete in cyber warfare with adversaries such as Russia and China in a major funding boost that will nearly double the size of the nation’s leading cyber security agency.

In its centrepiece defence budget announcement, the government will make the largest single investment in the 75-year history of the Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s powerful and highly secretive electronic intelligence agency. The government said the funding increase — dramatically named Project REDSPICE (Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers) — will significantly expand the ASD’s offensive cyber capabilities, as well as the agency’s ability to prevent hacking and other digital attacks.

The government intends to put national security at the centre of the upcoming election campaign, contrasting its latest announcements with reductions to defence spending during the Rudd-Gillard era. In his budget night speech Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described the $9.9 billion in spending over 10 years as the country’s “biggest ever investment in Australia’s cyber preparedness.” It comes on top of the government’s previously announced expansion in Australian Defence Force personnel and the purchase of new Chinook helicopters, Abrams tanks and combat engineering vehicles.