The 2025–26 federal budget is being touted like a supermarket rewards card: something for everyone, neatly packaged, no fuss. But buried beneath the smiling surplus headlines and election-friendly tax cuts lies something far more sobering — and far more important.
Welcome to “The Quiet War”.
Let’s start with the obvious numbers:
We’re throwing nearly $70 billion at the machinery of protection. Which sounds impressive — until you realise this spend doesn’t necessarily buy security. Often, it buys the appearance of control.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: security is no longer a thing you can bolt to the floor. You don’t buy your way to safety. You fight for it — continuously, strategically, and often invisibly.
And we’re not having that conversation. Not properly.
While Defence expands its nuclear submarine program, hiring 883 people just to run the paperwork on the AUKUS deal, the real battle is happening in your email inbox, on your kids’ phones and gaming devices, and on council servers holding hostage notes.
Cyber isn’t a subset of national security. It is national security.
And yet we still treat it like an IT department request with every cliche you can imagine.
The budget shows some movement — sure:
But these are moves on a chessboard that’s changing shape mid-game.
We have to stop asking how much we’re spending on cyber, and start asking:
“Are we designing society for security — or simply reacting when it fails?”
The Office of National Intelligence (ONI) isn’t shouting about its work — and for good reason. We are, as a nation, accumulating data faster than we’re debating its ethics. We now fund intelligence infrastructure like we once funded roads.
But we haven’t had the corresponding public conversation. We haven’t asked:
Let me put it bluntly: we’re becoming a surveillance-capable state without a surveillance-literate population.
This is where the budget unintentionally reveals something darker — a growing digital elite.
We now have a segment of society fluent in zero-day exploits, cloud attack surfaces, and adversarial AI — and another that still clicks on emails from “ANZ support123@email.ru.”
The risk isn’t just technical. It’s societal.
If we don’t democratise cyber literacy, we will soon be protecting a population that has no idea what it’s being protected from — or how easily it can sabotage itself. When we say cyber literacy, again we are not speaking about your cliche security awareness training or phishing testing, we are talking about educating the masses on resilience and overcoming these attacks that so many are falling for.
DFAT’s $6.4 billion allocation might sound like soft power spare change compared to Defence’s $54 billion, but in today’s world, influence is wielded less through tanks and more through terms of service. We’re living in a time where diplomacy is no longer just handshakes and policy briefs. It’s about controlling platforms, shaping narratives, and negotiating the digital architecture that underpins trust, trade, and truth.
But here’s the hard question: Are we building friendships, or dependencies?
Soft power dies when it’s outpaced by quiet influence campaigns, disinformation engines, and grey zone tactics. The budget might pay for our seat at the table — but in this geopolitical environment, it won’t guarantee we’re listened to.
But here’s the miss: resilience isn’t a “program.” It’s culture.
And until we embed that into every school, business, boardroom, and local council, we’re just allocating dollars to an illusion of preparedness.
Because if we can’t articulate that, what are we doing?
Right now, I fear we’re budgeting for hardware and reacting to headlines — while the long-game enemies play in psychology, influence, and systemic erosion.
This budget isn’t bad. In fact, it’s quietly radical in the money it throws at security.
But it’s not honest.
It doesn’t warn the public about what’s coming. It doesn’t explain how deeply intertwined security, liberty, and literacy now are. It doesn’t provoke enough discomfort — the kind that gets people moving, questioning, preparing.
At Shimazaki Sentinel, we see this every day. Organisations panic after the breach. Executives find God after the ransomware hits. Boards act brave after the nation-state probe is traced.
The budget says we’re gearing up. But real resilience?
That still has to be built — organisation by organisation, mindset by mindset.
And that’s not a line item. That’s leadership.
Because securing the future means questioning the present and learning from the decisions of the past.