Robert Marsden Hope - Royal Commissions

Royal Commissions

In 1974, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appointed Justice Hope to head the Royal Commission into Intelligence and Security (RCIS). Completed in 1977, Hope reconfirmed the need for a national security intelligence agency and made a range of recommendations for improvement across the board of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)'s scope. Of note is the recommendation that areas of ASIO interest expand from traditional Cold War counter-espionage to include sabotage, terrorism and what Hope called "active measures" by foreign agents operating against Australia and her interests. While the overhaul of the organisation did expand its powers, it also made ASIO accountable to the government and thus the Australian people. One side-effect of the RCIS saw ASIO advertise in major Australian newspapers for intelligence officers as well as employing women for the first time.

Hope was again commissioned only a year later in 1978 to conduct the Protective Security Review (PSR) into protective security arrangements for the Commonwealth as well as co-operation between national and state cooperation on protective security following the bombing of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM). While the review nominally targeted "protective security", it was the threat of international terrorism in Australia that was at the heart of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's decision to use Hope's experience in the area of Australia's intelligence services. When completed in 1979, the review essentially ended up probing, "in a broad sense, terrorism possibilities in Australia, and ways, and means of State, Territory and Commonwealth co-operation in dealing with the threat of terror". Again as a direct result of his recommendations, government policy on intelligence and security changed. Hope designated ASIO as the agency responsible for producing national threat assessments in the field of terrorism and politically motivated violence and at the end of 1979, a new ASIO Act came into being which implemented many of Hope's recommendations from the RCIS and the PSR. At the same time, the Security Appeals Tribunal, another of Hope's RCIS recommendations, was bought into being.

1983 saw the expulsion of Valery Ivanov, the First Secretary for the Soviet Embassy, for espionage activities. The publicity surrounding the affair saw the Hawke Government commission Hope again to look into intelligence issues. Hope completed the Royal Commission into Australia's Security and Intelligence Agencies (RCASIA) in 1984 and made a range of logical and basic recommendations (in terms of the evolution of policies of the time) that again altered the parameters that Australia's intelligence agencies operated under and bought them into the political and cultural paradigms of the 1980s. One of Justice Hope's RCASIA recommendations was that "the ASIO Act expressly provide that it is not the purpose of the Act that the right of lawful advocacy, protest or dissent should be affected or that exercising those rights should, by themselves, constitute activity prejudicial to security". This recommendation was important from a cultural aspect in the sense that it effectively removed security agencies from suppression of civil protest and dissent in Australia. He also recommended the creation of the office of Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to oversee and hold accountable the various agencies. As if to highlight the need for such a position, only the same year RCASIA was commissioned, the Security Appeals Tribunal ruled in a case against ASIO where they had given an unfavourable security assessment on a member of the Australian Communist Party, that "membership of the Communist Party of Australia did not warrant a recommendation against the grant of access to classified national security material (such as required by their job – Ed.). A nexus between the applicant and particular activities of security interest needed to be shown" – all very much in keeping with Hope's civil libertarian position and a marker of where the Australian intelligence and security agencies saw their priorities in the pre-Hilton Bombing environment.

In 1986 the ASIO Act was amended to take into consideration the recommendations of Hope in the RCASIA.