Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, , 4:02:49 to 4:05:10
The department discusses a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft and efforts to promote sovereign Australian cybersecurity providers through procurement matchmaking and industry showcases.
Topics: National security, Procurement
Speakers: LTGEN Michelle McGuinness, Hon Jonathon Duniam
Senator Dunyan.
Thanks, Chair. Uh so just uh Ms. Spencer, that uh digital resilience programme you were talking about there, and you talked about signing a contract with Microsoft and working with hyperscalers, so the other large um foreign entities. Is there any work underway to work with uh you know, at different points in the stack, sovereign providers of services or goods that um would assist? So this idea of trying to catalyze an industry here in Australia, is that something home affairs is working on thinking about doing?
I can jump in there. Yes, please. Have a number of initiatives through working groups, and one of them is about provoting sovereign capability. Uh in fact, in the next two weeks they will host the second showcase for our sovereign capability, ACE 26 in Sydney in the first week of November. And that will bring um sovereign start-up cyber capabilities from around the country and allow them to showcase their capability and at the same time we will bring the procurement folk of those large businesses across the country and government procurement together. So we're doing a little bit of matchmaking as well as providing some uplift and running a conference on uh what capabilities exist? If I go back to our mapping of supply chain, we're also hoping that as we provide additional um scalable exercises online that businesses can take and then exercise themselves. They're supporting their own confidence in entering into the supply chain of these big businesses and of critical infrastructure. So we have a range of initiatives across our strategy and across Horizon 2 that we hope will both build confidence, identify and promote sovereign capability.
Yeah. And have this is perhaps outside of your remit, but obviously something that you might have considered. Have you identified any barriers in the procurement rules around trying to procure sovereign?
Uh Senator, I haven't to date, and that is a key question as we engage across our sovereign work group, which is uh industry for industry leading that working group. Um some of the key questions we we are always asking our industry partners is are there policy or legislative barriers that prevent um both uplift but also uh things like building that sovereign capability?