Organizational Capacity and Resources The Australian government continues to invest in cybersecurity. The 2018/19 budget includes A$9 million (£4,893,363) to be allocated to the Department of Parliamentary Services over a four-year period to establish a cybersecurity operations network. Additionally, the Australian Cyber Security Centre has set up a 24/7 cyber newsroom in collaboration with the Crisis Coordination Centre to foster early warning and outreach efforts. The newsroom is supposed to capture all comments and opinions on cybersecurity issues while also engaging with citizens via Twitter, providing news updates on their website to “influence the narrative more broadly”. The amount spent by political parties during the federal election campaign varies. It was reported that Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party spent $60 million on election advertising, yet failed to win a single seat in parliament (Smee, 2019b). Table 3: Cyber Troop Capacity in Australia Team Size Resources Spent Activity Levels (USD) Coordination Capacity Measure Temporary (elections) Decentralised Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. Russian Interference After the 2016 federal election, the government admitted that they were unprepared for foreign interference on social media. Researchers Tom Sear and Mike Jensen (2019) have found a continuous cyber troop presence by groups associated with foreign countries, especially the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), finding evidence of the targeting of Australian citizens by the IRA as early as 2014. In evidence submitted to Parliament, Tom Sear found a correlation between Russian-generated social media activity and the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), particularly interventions into Australian political social media (Sear, 2018b). Additionally, The National Media Research Council highlighted the work of Russian trolls and media outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik which disseminate misinformation. Chinese Interference The Australian government warned in 2017 of Chinese interference attempts (Westbrook, 2019). Researchers found in 2019 that Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Coalition Government had been targeted by propaganda on WeChat that originated from accounts aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (Cannane et al., 2019). The International Cyber Policy Institute, part of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), warned that the 1.5 million monthly users of the Chinese platform WeChat in Australia could fall prey to misinformation and propaganda as the service is controlled by Beijing. To what extent this control encompasses content published outside of China is unclear, yet there is evidence that Mandarin-language content on WeChat in Australia and China differs (Jensen et al., 2018). The Electoral Integrity Assurance Task Force has worked with Western social media companies to ensure misinformation during elections is minimized, but it has been unable to talk to WeChat or its parent company, Tencent. On 18 February 2019 news broke that several Australian parties were hacked and, according to the prime minister, the attack originated from a “sophisticated foreign state actor”, with suspicion focusing on China (Sear, 2018a). The ASPI has put China “on the top of their list” of suspects although Russia “would not be ruled out”, according to Fergus Hanson, a cybersecurity expert at the Institute. In March 2019, the 19