The Politics of Hope: Strategies of Compromise in the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security

Australia's intelligence chiefs explicitly link the role and purpose of their agencies today to two royal commissions led by Justice Robert Hope in the 1970s and 1980s. Such appeals to Hope's inquiries as the genesis of Australia's contemporary professional and apolitical intelligence community lean into the legitimising function of royal commissions, but they also obscure the historical reality of Hope's inquiries as intensely political processes. This article revisits the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security (RCIS). Established in 1974 under the Whitlam Labor government, the RCIS concluded its work in 1977 under the conservative Fraser government. In seeking to understand how Hope achieved broad bipartisan support for his commission despite the political whiplash of those years, we examine the working files of the royal commission to trace the direction and development of the commission's key recommendations. We find that while his focus on the national interest remained consistent throughout, Hope repackaged that message according to the prevailing political context. We conclude that Hope was strategic in his dealings with successive Australian governments and willingly compromised to ensure his recommendations would be politically palatable to those responsible for implementing them.