Well thank you Attorney General, ladies and gentlemen.
I start by thanking so many of you for giving up time to come to Canberra to interact with ministers and senior advisers of the government about something which is of continuing significance not only to the Government and the people of Australia but also very specifically to the business community of our country.
We all, of course, react to the new security environment and the threat of terrorism as individuals, we are all personally affronted by such obscene outrages as the beheading of a South Korean hostage in Iraq overnight. We all have different experiences of interacting with or in some tangential way being affected by the terrorist attacks that have occurred in the United States and other parts of the world and, of course, many Australians were personally touched in different ways by the outrage that occurred in Bali on the 12th of October 2002.
So all of us, whether we're in business or in government or serving the community in different ways, we are all affected as individuals and we all have an emotional response to the new an different environment in which we now live as a result of the onset of international terrorism.
But, of course, above and beyond that, or separate from that rather, not above and beyond it, but separately from that, there is an economic and business dimension to the terrorist threat. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as the Foreign Minister may have alluded to earlier, has recently put out a report on the economic impacts of terrorism and it quoted IMF estimates that the cost of the attack on the 11th of September was 0.75 per cent of American GDP or a sum equivalent to $75 billion US.
So not only does the response to terrorism have a truly human dimension for all of us and requires us to contemplate the different environment in which we live as a result and how we relate to people within our community and how, of course, we as a nation relate to the rest of the world but it also has an important economic dimension. Despite all of the warnings and despite the natural injunction of governments and police and military authorities to encourage people to take care, to exercise greater precautions than before, the overriding injunction, of course, in a free society such as our own is to encourage people to live their daily lives with as little interference and as little interruption as possible because it remains as true now as it was on the morning of the 12th of September 2001 wherever you may have been in the world that the terrorists win if they are able to sufficiently dislocate our natural, free and open way of life as to bring about a marked behavioural change. But consistent with that, we must in different ways recognise that we are living in a different environment, an environment that does in the now relatively famous words of the campaign that requires us to be alert but to not be alarmed and might I say by way of passing observation that many of the jocular derisive critical references to that campaign when it was first launched have in the fullness of time have been demonstrated to have been totally wrong. And for what it's worth, and I think it's worth something and I think it would be worth something in the eyes of the businessmen and women in this audience, that that particular campaign received the highest accolade of all in 2003 from the Australian Association of National Advertisers in relation to a public sector campaign. And as we all understand whether we're in government or business the value of effective communication of a message. And it does make a lot of sense that message and, as the Attorney General indicated this morning, we intend to revisit that campaign in an appropriate tailored way in the weeks and months ahead.
I hope out of today's gathering and particularly your interaction with the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Mick Keelty, and Dennis Richardson, the Director General of ASIO, the Secretary of the Attorney General's Department as well as of course my senior ministerial colleagues, I hope you will go away with a better understanding of what we are doing. I also will be releasing to the public today and obviously to all of you as well a document entitled "Protecting Australia Against Terrorism", which brings together all of the policies and administrative arrangements that the government has put in place over the last two years or more to do with the international terrorism threat.
We, of course, as a nation are a target because of who we are and what we stand for and what we believe in and no matter how we deport ourselves on international relations issues from month to month or from year to year, nothing is going to alter the fact that because we are a free, open, liberal democracy, we are a potential target. We all have to adjust to that reality. We all have to understand that irrespective of whether you're a democracy or not and you're particularly vulnerable if we're a liberal democracy, but there have been plenty of citizens sadly of countries that are not liberal democracies that have died in terrorist attacks over the last two years.
The Government has committed $3.1 billion in additional funding to the various agencies to deal with the terrorist threat and the document that I've launched today will bring together details of that expenditure. But to give you an idea of the dimension of how the Government is responding, let me just make one or two comparisons. The resources of ASIO now are greater than at any time since the Cold War and that is a demonstration of the changes that have been made in...we've allocated $872 million for additional funds for intelligence capabilities, we've doubled the size of ASIO and ASIS, we've established a National Threat Assessment Centre in May and we have dramatically improved our levels of international co-operation. And I want to take another opportunity of this gather to pay tribute to the extraordinary achievement of the Australian Federal Police in its co-operation with its counterparts in Indonesia in tracking down and bringing to justice the people who were responsible for murdering 88 of our fellow Australians in Bali on the 12th of October, it's a great tribute to the quietly effective and the immediate co-operation that our authorities were able to establish with those in Indonesia charged with that responsibility. And I think one of the really big pluses that has occurred is the way in which despite nuanced differences that may occur at an official government or political level between Australia and some of our partners in the Asian Pacific region at an operational level let me assure you, and this is very important, particularly when you think of the challenges that are involved in establishing businesses and your employees travelling and interacting with people in neighbouring countries, the relationship that's been established between, say the Australian Federal Police and their counterparts in Indonesia, in Singapore, in Malaysia, in the Philippines and in other areas of the region, it's been one of the most conspicuous features of our anti-terrorism effort. And in the end governments will have their differences, there will be varied positions taken in relation to official responses, but on the ground police co-operation and on the ground intelligence and security co-operation is absolutely essential.
Our aim out of a gathering such as this is of course, I hope, communicate to you what we have done, to make the obvious point that there is a cost for all of us, there is cost for you involved in taking counter terrorism and security measures. We now live in a world now where we're taking measures to improve security and to fight terrorism is a cost of doing business. There is a cost on the Australian taxpayer and I've outlined some of the dimensions that have been involved in that. And collectively, we do pay a heavy price in economic terms, but over all the price that we do pay in those economic terms has to be put against the extraordinarily high level of disruption and dislocation to our economy as well as to our way our life, let alone of course the cost in loss of life that might occur if a terrorist attack were to take place in this country.
Now I am frequently asked what I think the likelihood of a terrorist attack in Australia is and I say repeatedly, God forbid it should occur, but I can't give any guarantee that it won't happen in this country and any nation such as Australia that believes it's immune, in some way it's going to slip through the net, in some way is going to go by unnoticed is frankly deluding itself and I might also make the very obvious and I hope very relevant point that we're dealing with a group of people who do not reward weakness and equivocation with forgiveness and immunity. Any sign of retreat or equivocation encourages greater pursuit and a renewed emphasis on punitive measures and attacks. And we've seen that sadly demonstrated over the past few months, we saw it demonstrated in relation to the events in Spain and we will see it demonstrated, I'm sorry to say, in the months ahead.
It is a challenge to our society, it's a challenge that we haven't had before. We must simultaneously not become obsessed with it, but equally take all the precautions that are necessary. I want the business community of Australia to go on doing what it's done so magnificently over the last few years and that is take advantage of a great economic environment, if I may say so, to deliver some of the best economic outcomes and the highest levels of employment and might I note in passing the highest corporate profit share the Australian economy has had since those figures began to be recorded, I want that to go on. There are a lot of threats to it but the one I'm dealing with today is strictly of the security and terrorist kind and I just want to emphasise a human stake in this and that is the greatest stake of all because it's a challenge that we haven't had before but we also have a very significant economic stake and the focus of today's discussion is particularly on that, particularly to focus on the importance of critical infrastructure and amongst the investments the government has made is to commit $50 million to address critical infrastructure challenges and to work very closely with owners and operators of that critical infrastructure.
Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome all of you here. I appreciate very much the investment of time and capacity that so many have made to come and I hope you will recognise through the attendance of so many of my senior colleagues and can I say that one of the most effective ways over the last two and a half years that we have been able to deal with the terrorism issue and related challenges on the national security front has been through the very regular meetings of the National Security Committee of Cabinet and the National Security Committee is comprised of myself and the Deputy Prime Minister and the Treasurer and the Minister for Defence and Leader of the Government in the Senate, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Attorney General and meetings of that committee are regularly attended by the Secretary of my Department, the Secretary of the Department of Defence, the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Director General of the Office of National Assessments and the Director General of ASIO and the Chief of the Defence Force.
You can see from that group we bring together every relevant minister on an ongoing basis and every relevant departmental leader and it meets on a regular basis and one of the reasons why I believe that we have been able to provide a degree of coherent and co-ordinated leadership and response to the Australian people is that we've had the relevant people meeting together as a group on a regular basis and we have been able through that to, of course, communicate I think a clear whole of government message and to have, at so many of these meetings, to have advice on hand from the Commissioner of the Federal Police and from the Head of the ASIO and the Head of the Defence Force all in the one room at the same time does give us a whole of government perspective that, if I may say so, is not duplicated entirely in another country with which it is fair to make comparisons around the world.
But enough from me ladies and gentlemen, I'll conclude by warmly thanking all of you for coming along. I commend the interchange that I know will take place later in the morning and can I commend the publication to you and simply emphasis that together we have a big challenge, we have an economic as well as a human dimension and both of them deserve our attention and our focus.
Thank you very much.
[ends]