Cybersecurity and the Australian Federal Budget: October 2022 Edition

As with the past few budgets, I looked for the cybersecurity line items so you don’t have to.

Initial Thoughts

Not much to see this time around. This was very light in the way of additional cybersecurity spend, with most of the funding already outlined in the coalition’s budget earlier this year, which I covered here.

Spend

The extra money for cybersecurity went mostly (predictably) to the government’s own departments:

• $31.3 million ($8.6 to the Department of Home Affairs, $8 to Services Australia, $7.1 to the Department of Defence, $5.6 to the Australian Taxation Office, $1.9 to the Digital Transformation Agency) in 2022–23 to extend the whole of government Cyber Hubs pilot while an evaluation is completed. Note that the March budget had already allocated $30.2 million to extend the pilot, including the establishment of a fourth Cyber Hub in the Australian Taxation Office. In short, we’re spending $61.5 million on the Cyber Hubs pilot this year.
• $9.9 million over 4 years from 2022–23 to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for initial work on the establishment of a National Anti-Scam Centre.
• $5.5 million over two years from 2022–23 for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to investigate and respond to the Optus data breach.
• $2 million in 2022–23 to the Department of Home Affairs to expand its arrangement with IDCARE to provide specialist identity support services, including counselling and identity recovery services for victims of identity theft.
• $700K in 2022–23 to the Treasury to raise public awareness of the risk of scams.
• $8.7 million in 2022–23 to assist Ukraine’s Border Guard Service to upgrade border management, improve cyber security and enhance border operations in the field.

Ian Yip is the CEO of Avertro, a venture-backed cybersecurity software company. Avertro CyberHQ® is cyber leadership’s command centre for cybersecurity.