Denis Moriarty | Thought balloon: We should make Australia more spy-friendly

Back then the boot was on the other foot.

President Joe Biden has just cancelled summit talks with the Chinese because his air force has shot down a large balloon; in 1960 Khrushchev cancelled summit talks with Eisenhower because his air force had just shot down an American U2 spy plane ("weather research plane" - some things don't change).

The U2 affair was a severe humiliation for the US, which had assumed that its planes were flying high enough to be out of reach of Russian retaliation, but the program was nonetheless productive: the Americans discovered that the Russians had been exaggerating their bomber strength all along and there was no dangerous "bomber gap". There was no cause for alarm, and they could stand some of their forces down and spend the money on public education (in your dreams, but still).

Because spying is good, and fussing about it is stupid. I don't simply mean our own patriotic Australian spies (the ones who periodically get caught bugging friendly national leaders like President Bambang Yudhoyono or trying to cheat small nations like Timor Leste): we seem quite happy to forgive them their trespasses. We do, however, go into periodic fits of panic over the possibility that other people are spying on us - that the Chinese, for example, are using the security cameras at the Australian War Memorial to assemble villainous databases of interstate tourists staring at Bluey Truscott's flying boots.

Well, that's obviously zany, but surely there's some reason why ASIO garners half a billion of our dollars every year. There may conceivably be actual spies out there doing all the cute little tradecraft tricks we read about in John le Carré novels, boring their way into the heart of the defence complex and finding out all sorts of secrets about Australian submarines. I'd argue that on balance they're a good thing too.

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If the enemy knows your capabilities in wartime that may well be a problem. Most of the time, however, we're not at war, and want to keep it that way, and the best way to prevent wars is for the aggressor to know that it's not going to be as easy as their generals are telling them.

If Hitler had known how many divisions the Soviets had, he wouldn't have unleashed Operation Barbarossa. If George W. Bush had been positive that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, we might not have had the Iraq war (though, admittedly, he may not have cared). If Putin had known how well-prepared the Ukrainian army was, he surely wouldn't have put his foot in the beartrap. We can only hope that China's spies can dissuade Xi Jinping from doing anything similar.

And, talking about nuclear winter, we've been saved from an extinction-level event largely because occasional high-level spies were able to puncture one or another side's self-fuelling hysteria. There was no bomber gap. There was no missile gap. Ronald Reagan wasn't planning to nuke the USSR, whatever he said to the microphone ("My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."). The spies revealed that whatever provocations the generals waved around, what they really, really wanted was larger budgets and bigger parades.

Back then we needed spies much more, because the world held many more secrets. There was no Google Earth, there were no spy satellites, no social media. Any espionage agency that wants more today than they can get over the airwaves is simply being greedy.

We should make Australia more spy-friendly, if only because transparency is a positive force in national culture. Every secret made public is a point of vulnerability avoided. If every political donation had to be declared, foreign agents would find it harder to bribe Australian political parties. If ASIO was subject to freedom-of-information legislation, we'd learn what the real threat level was before public servants started covering their asses. If our whistleblowers were rewarded more often for leaking classified documents, both we and our adversaries would be able to form more reliable judgements on the workings of Australian governments.

And Australia should invest in a fleet of high-altitude Skywhale balloons designed by Patricia Piccinini to bring joy to the world.