Multi-task agency centres comprising groups such as police, medical personnel, armed forces, environmentalists and immigration specialists should be formed to counter national security threats, according to a University of Queensland researcher.
Government Department lecturer Dr Peter Chalk said such centres would provide an efficient and necessary alternative to the present situation where bureaucracy often hampered effective communication between expert groups.
He warned organised crime groups did not face the same bureaucratic obstacles and co-operated very well within countries and across borders. If this advantage was allowed to continue, it would be difficult ever to overcome, he said.
The recommendation is contained in Dr Chalk's soon-to-be-published book entitled Grey Area Phenomena: Global disorder towards the 21st century - one of the few texts to take a holistic view of major security threats.
To research the book, Dr Chalk travelled throughout the world, meeting with security and intelligence personnel as well as former terrorists in North America, Western Europe and South and South-East Asia.
While previous texts have tended to focus on violent security threats such as piracy, trans-national crime or terrorism, Dr Chalk's book outlines both violent and non-violent threats and suggests ways to deal with them.
The seven areas examined are terrorism, piracy, the illegal drugs trade, the illegal weapons trade, the spread of disease, environmental degradation and uncontrolled migration.
Dr Chalk said all these security threats had increased markedly since the end of the Cold War.
"These grey areas were sidelined during the Cold War when security was defined in terms of a single enemy State. However, with globalisation, small weapons proliferation, the re-emergence of ethnic and religious forms of identity, increased desires for immediate wealth and unsustainable consumption, they are now re-emerging as major destabilising influences both on countries and the world as a whole," he said.
He said the seven areas were considered "grey" because of their complexity and frequent interaction with one another.
For example, terrorists used the drugs and weapons trade (organised crime) to finance their activities. Equally, organised crime used terrorists to destabilise nations and change legislation, he said.
"The Colombian organised crime group, Cali, was recently discovered to have earmarked a US$9 million fund for terrorist activities to prevent the Colombian Government from extraditing jailed traffickers to the United States for trial," he said.
Environmental problems such as global warming and deforestation often caused unseasonal weather effects such as floods leading to displaced populations living in shanty towns, the outbreak of disease and mass uncontrolled migration, he said.
"Australia can no longer rely on its geographical distance from the world to shield it from these security threats," Dr Chalk said.
"Expatriate communities here have been exploited by overseas terrorist groups for funding and propaganda purposes, the majority of the world's piracy occurs in the major sea lanes between Australia and Indonesia and most Golden Triangle heroin goes to Australia or Canada.
"Conflicts in our near neighbours such as East Timor can also trigger potentially destabilising mass population movements into Australia."
Dr Chalk said multi-task agency centres comprising experts in particular security areas were necessary to overcome current bureaucratic barriers to effective communication between relevant groups.
"There is very little interaction between these groups at present and the situation is further complicated by the lack of co-ordination at the international level," he said.
The United States, Canada and the United Kingdom were all starting to move towards multi-task centre structures to deal with security threats, he said.
In the United Kingdom, police were interacting with scientists during the development of new technologies such as dual-band cell telephones and Internet capabilities.
"The police are keen to understand the implications of these new technologies for organised crime activities. For example, organised crime groups could use Internet encryption technology to shield the activities of Internet shell companies laundering money," Dr Chalk said.
"Equally, pre-paid cell phone packages, which don't necessarily equate a name with a telephone number, provide an effective form of communication that is extremely difficult to monitor."
Dr Chalk was a consultant to The Report of the Special Senate Committee on Security and Intelligence (in which multi-task centres were recommended) presented to the Canadian Parliament in January this year.
Dr Chalk will take up a position with a United States thinktank, the Rand Corporation, in Washington DC in June this year.
For more information, contact Dr Chalk (telephone 07 3365 2910).
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