Australia’s Submarine Cable Challenge

Date: August 10th, 2026
Time: 6:00pm - 7:00pm AEST
Venue: AIIA Victoria, Level 13, 356 Collins Street; Melbourne

"The seabed is becoming a battlefield," Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles warned at the Shangri-La Dialogue in May, and "we have been slow – collectively slow – to recognise [submarine cables] as the strategic targets they have become."

Some 16 privately operated submarine cables carry around 99 per cent of Australia's international data – the financial transactions, government communications and cloud services on which the country's economy and security depend. Recent incidents in the Baltic Sea and around Taiwan suggest that state actors are actively probing this infrastructure, and history suggests Australia's cables would be among the first targets in any regional conflict.

Yet submarine cables barely rate a mention in Australia's key strategic documents, responsibilities are fragmented across Commonwealth agencies, and these agencies have no means of ensuring priority repairs even in a national emergency.

What must Australia do to secure its submarine cable network? And how can it seize the opportunity to become an Indo-Pacific preferred cable hub?

A La Trobe Centre for Global Security event, co-hosted with AIIA Victoria and the Australia India Institute.

The Melbourne launch of Connected & Protected: Building Australia's Submarine Cable Resilience, the most comprehensive assessment of Australia's submarine cable network to date, and Dr Bashfield's newly published short book Submarine Cables (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

Speakers:
Dr David Brewster (ANU National Security College)
Dr Samuel Bashfield (La Trobe Centre for Global Security)