Australian Strategic Policy Institute

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is an imperialist think tank owned by the Australian government. Members of the ASPI Council, its governing body, include current and former members of the Liberal Party of Australia, Australian Labor Party, Australian Army and weapons manufacturers including Brendan Nelson, current president of Boeing Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific, and chairman of the board for Boeing Australia Holdings.

Impact

The ASPI partnered with Twitter to delete 170,000 accounts that supported the CPC or criticized the United States. It is one of the main sources of "Uyghur genocide" claims.

Funding

Governments

The ASPI receives 32% of its funding from the Australian government but also receives $700,000 per year from the Pentagon and $430,000 from the U.S. State Department. ASPI's current grant from the Australian Government Department of Defence provides 20 million AUD over 5 financial years from 2018-2023. ASPI also accepts funding from other foreign governments including the the UK, Canada, Japan, and the Netherlands.

Since initial formation in 2001 funding from the Australian Government as a proportion of ASPI's total income has fallen from 100% to 32%. It now receives the bulk of it total revenue from corporate sponsorships. Funding for the 2021-2022 FY totalled 12,465,475 AUD.

On the 13th of July, 2022 ASPI opened an additional office in Washington DC with the aim of "becoming a more active participant in the lively Washington DC think tank debate about defence and national security." For the formation of this Office the Australian Government granted an additional 5 million AUD transferred to ASPI on the 5th of June, 2021.

Corporations

ASPI's sponsorships include weapons manufactures Boeing Australia, Lockheed Martin, Jacobs Engineering Group, Leidos and Saab Australia, and cybersecurity companies Thales, UpGuard, Macquarie Telecom Group, Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre, Palo Alto Networks, Quintessence Labs, Splunk Technology and Senetas Corporation. It also receives donations from tech-giants Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon Web Services. Political groups, lobbying groups and other think tanks such as Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia and the Center for Strategic and International Studies also provide sponsorships.

The goals of the DC Office are to advocate for Australia to play a more fundamental role in US interests in the Asia-Pacific region. Notable "key purposes" ASPI describes include, "[to] lift the profile of strategic regions and issues of vital interest to Australia but currently under-done in the Washington think tank community. This includes Southeast Asia, the Pacific Island Countries, and the Indian Ocean region." and "[to] Ensure Australian interests are built in to emerging US policy thinking and initiatives, instead of having Australian interest reverse engineered into more mature US plans."