Many of the problems in our relationship with China are of our own making – the consequences of our own inept diplomacy – and we should seek to resolve them bilaterally.
Attempting to resolve them by snuggling up closer to Uncle Sam and miscellaneous US allies with different agendas and history will only make matters worse. (more…)
As currently drafted, the legislation to facilitate the call-out of the ADF Reserves contains too many risks for too little benefit. It should not proceed in its current form. (more…)
Our difficult relationship with China in recent years highlights once again the need for a free-standing Department of Trade, led by a very senior Minister, to ensure our trade and commercial relationships with other countries are adequately represented in any Cabinet deliberations. (more…)
The real story behind the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 (more…)
The mergers of Australian Public Service Departments announced by Scott Morrison on 5 December will do nothing to advance the cause of good government. The claims of efficiency gains that invariably accompany such announcements always turn out to be illusory, and, far more importantly, result in matters that ought to be debated out in full Cabinet being tucked away in individual portfolios. (more…)
Where we are today is that the practice of the last twenty years has purportedly taken the power to send Australia to war away from the Governor-General and placed it at the disposal of junior ministers in the Defence portfolio. This cannot be allowed to stand. The war powers must be relocated to the Australian parliament. (more…)
Iran’s nuclear program, never out of the news for long, is on the front pages of the world with President Trump’s insistence that his belligerence towards Iran is driven by a desire to ensure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. The facts are that there is no reason to believe that Iran has made any moves even to acquire a nuclear weapons option since 2003, that Iran has good reasons to maximise the independence of its nuclear electricity program, and that until the United States ripped them up, there were robust arrangements in place to ensure that Iran didn’t acquire a nuclear weapons capability. (more…)
Australia should not participate in any military action against Iran. The current tensions have been created by the Trump Administration, and the ANZUS Alliance creates no obligation for us to assist. President Trump may think that a war against Iran “would not last very long”, but any significant military action really would set the Middle East ablaze. Iran’s antagonists would be taking on a country the size of Queensland, one with a population of 80 million. Iran itself has substantial capacity to resist and retaliate, Iranian proxies elsewhere in the Middle East could be expected to retaliate, and there could be heightened tensions between the Shi’a minorities and the governments in the Sunni world. (more…)
The 2019 election campaign having begun, I wish, on behalf of Australia21, which I chair, to draw attention to a number of issues that require proper attention and debate in order to enable Australian voters to make an informed choice about the candidates and parties they wish to support. (more…)
On 7 March Pearls and Irritations published my Are all those consultancies really necessary? This dealt with the $129 billion spent by the Commonwealth over the last five years on services the content of which no doubt include a great deal that would traditionally have been regarded as core business for the Commonwealth, and for which both the Public Service Act 1999 and the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 would indicate agency heads have prime responsibility and accountability. Outsourcing on this scale can only be understood in the context of the changing status and powers of agency heads, especially Secretaries of Commonwealth Departments. (more…)
Today 20 March is the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” which was led by the US and included the UK, Australia and others. Far from making the world safer, and establishing Iraq as “a shining beacon of democracy” as its proponents proclaimed it would, the invasion has left in its wake violence, instability, the rise of ISIS (directly attributable to the invasion and occupation) and a permanent reshaping of the political order in the Middle East. We never undertook a Chilcot-type inquiry here, but one lesson is clear – we cannot afford to leave decisions about sending the ADF to war in the hands of Executive Government – which means, in effect, the Prime Minister. (more…)
The Joint Committee on Public Accounts and Audit is currently conducting an inquiry based on any items, matters or circumstances connected with Auditor-General’s Report No. 19 (2017-18). This report reveals enormous expenditure on consultancy contracts, and the matters being inquired into by JCPAA include the effects on APS capability and capacity; the extent to which consultancy contracts are being used to deliver core APS outcomes; the associated benefits and risks; and unforeseen and unintended consequences. (more…)
The war on drugs has failed.
There was a buzz across Australia in March 2017, when former premiers, police chiefs, prison officers and lawyers stood side-by-side with drug users and their families, to throw down the gauntlet on drug law reform. They called for an end to criminal penalties for personal use and possession and a new focus on addressing the health and social issues associated with drug-taking. (more…)
For the discerning reader the Palazzo Report, the classified internal report on how we got into Iraq and how we fared, prepared by Army Historian Dr Albert Palazzo and now released in redacted form, is a remarkable document. Although heavily redacted in places, it offers a rich store of information about how the Howard Government conducted itself in the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Government’s intent, and the state of the Army it sent to war. (more…)
Some of Australia’s most experienced former foreign policy and defence bureaucrats have issued an open submission to the Foreign Minister calling on her to rethink the Australian-US alliance now that president-elect Donald Trump is set to lead the US. (more…)
Summary. Australia should do a ‘really deep stocktake of what is in our vital national interests and what we are prepared to sign up to’ . (more…)
During a segment on war powers reform on ABC TV’s current affairs program Lateline (25 August – see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-25/mps-call-for-iraq-war-inquiry/7786424 ) Australian Strategic Policy Institute Executive Director Peter Jennings expressed opposition to parliamentary involvement in decision-making about deployment of the ADF, saying:
If you look at how parliaments are structured, you’re really saying that you’re going to leave decisions to go to war to a handful of crossbenchers in the Senate,” he said.
So if we were to have a debate today about deploying, that means it’s going to be Jacqui Lambie, Pauline Hanson and her supporters. It’s going to be Nick Xenophon. Are they the people we want to give Australia’s war powers to?
This argument is disingenuous to put it at its most charitable. The key determinant of whether or not a motion to deploy the ADF into international armed conflict would pass both Houses of Parliament is whether or not the Government of the day can persuade the Opposition that our national security and/or the nation’s vital interests are at stake. If the Opposition votes with the Government, the views of the minority parties cannot affect the outcome. (more…)
In releasing his momentous report on 6 July Sir John Chilcot stated that the judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – WMD – were presented with a certainty that was not justified. He also said it is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments, which should have been challenged. (more…)
On 4 May 2016, the last sitting day before Parliament rose for the forthcoming election, Attorney-General Senator Brandis tabled new guidelines in the Senate which ruled that no one in government, including the Prime Minister, could seek the Solicitor-General’s advice without getting permission from Senator Brandis. (more…)
When charting a trajectory to a desired end point it is as important to have an accurate fix on the starting point as it is to know where one wants to end up. So it is with SEA 1000, the Future Submarine (FSM) project.
Much of the commentary is based on a politically inspired perception that the Collins Class submarine project (‘Beazley’s subs’) was a disaster characterised by cost over-runs, delayed delivery, intractable technical problems, and chronic unreliability once introduced into service.
The facts are that the submarines were built to within 3-4 per cent of the original contract price after allowing for inflation, that the average delay in delivering the submarine compares well with other major projects, and that the overwhelming consensus among military insiders is that the submarine project was a great success, with regular claims being made that the Collins Class submarines were the finest conventional submarines in the world[1]. Certainly they are highly regarded by the US Navy.
Furthermore, in 2000 the Government acquired all of the shares in the Australian Submarine Corporation (ASC – now ASC Pty Ltd) so it began the new century in possession of a highly capable submarine builder and maintainer, with associated facilities and skilled workforce.
Some of these painfully acquired advantages were compromised in the first decade of the 21st century by the fact that the submarines were introduced into service without a validated strategy for sustainment throughout the life of the class[2], and without an adequate inventory management system[3]. This in turn compromised availability, with flow-on consequences for crew training and inevitability the availability of trained crew. These situations have largely been rectified.
Our industrial advantages were further compromised by the fact that from the moment the Howard Government acquired the outstanding shares in ASC, it saw ASC as something it was preparing for sale. This got in the way of Governments reaching the simple and obvious conclusion that the successor to Collins should be built onshore by the successful submarine builder it already owned, with the focus of attention being on the required characteristics of the replacement submarine and which overseas submarine builder should become our design partner for the FSM project.
This ambivalence towards ASC, and the feeling that there might be someone out there who would give us an off-the-shelf solution or a bespoke submarine, has led to a succession of governments spinning their wheels for so long that we are now committed to a multi-billion dollar life extension of the obsolescent Collins submarine as well as the cost of FSM, so any potential savings have long since vanished.
To compound this error, there is strong circumstantial evidence that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott did a handshake deal with Japanese Prime Minister Abe to acquire Soryu submarines from the Japanese – a deal he walked away from on the eve of the first challenge to his leadership. In walking away from the deal he set up a ‘competitive evaluation’ (whatever that might be) of potential partners, a process which over time seems thankfully to have drifted back in the direction of being a thoroughgoing evaluation of potential partners.
Is there a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) solution out there? Many of those who see proposals to build a purpose-designed submarine in Australia as an indulgence and/or a branch of industry policy rather than defence policy would assert that there is. The Abbott Government seems to have thought so, based perhaps on advice in 2010 to then Opposition Defence Spokesman David Johnston by Vice-Admiral Robert Thomas, Commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet: ‘you want to find the finest diesel-electric submarine made on the planet – it’s made at Kobe works in Japan’[4]. “Finest submarine for what?”, one might ask.
Those who think the Japanese Soryu submarine is the solution would do well to read Option J for FSM – a Japanese solution?, Rear Admiral (Retd.) Peter Briggs’s comparison of the Soryu with the Collins Class published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
We would contend that there is no off-the-shelf solution, and this is the testimony that a range of expert witnesses gave in 2014 to the Senate Economics References Committee inquiry into naval shipbuilding, leading the Committee to recommend that
Having heard a range of evidence on the advantages of a local build, the Committee concluded:
Given the weight of the evidence about the strategic, military, national security and economic benefits, the committee recommends that the government require tenderers for the future submarine project to build, maintain, and sustain Australia’s future submarines in Australia.
When selecting its preferred tenderer the government must give priority to:
We agree with this conclusion, based upon the evidence presented to the Committee. We note in particular the evidence of Rear Admiral Briggs that the ability to build, sustain and evolve in country puts us in a much better position to manage the cost of ownership[7], and the evidence of Commander Frank Owen of the Submarine Institute of Australia regarding the experience with sustainment of the Oberon Class:
We were second cousin, twice removed of the logistics support capability surrounding that submarine. When the host nation stopped operating them, the supplies dried up and we had occasions [where] submarines were unable to sail because of vital components and spare parts that were unavailable[8].
We also agree with Rear Admiral Briggs that there is no point in buying a submarine that does not do the job:
There is no point spending any money on a submarine that does not do what you need it to do. You have to modify and extend to get a new Collins-like capability. Buying an off-the-shelf submarine with a 6,000-mile range would be worse than a waste of money; it would be an illusion. You will think you have submarine capability and the day you want to use it you will find that it cannot get there or stay there and do the job[9].
Finally, there are some important geo-political considerations to be brought to account. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott commented in Tokyo in February that “for Japan this submarine deal is strategic: for the others, it’s commercial”. That seems to us a good reason to stay away from the Japan option, not only for the reasons cited by Hugh White and many others, but because our interests would be better served by a partnership with an experienced exporter that values its commercial reputation. Japan’s main interest would be served the day the contract is signed; for the Germans and the French, to protect their commercial reputation, the objective is successful, timely delivery of the project.
Second, the submarine arm of the US Navy has demonstrated a high regard for the capability of our purpose-designed submarines, and for working with us in relation to submarine training, exercising and operations. If we simply became the operators of Australian-crewed Japanese submarines, would they sustain that interest?
Our conclusion is that the Government should proceed with all due diligence in accordance with the November 2014 recommendations of the bipartisan Senate References Committee, and not be distracted by the siren-songs of those who would argue that there is a cheaper, lower risk, “adequate” option to be found elsewhere.
Paul Barratt AO, Former Secretary, Department of Defence
ADM (Retd.) Chris Barrie AC, Former Chief of the Australian Defence Force.
[1] Yule, P. and Woolner, D., Steel, Spies and Spin: The Collins Class Submarine Story, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 325-6.
[2] Australian National Audit Office, 2008-09, Management of the Collins-class Operations Sustainment, paragraph 3, at
[3] Ibid., paragraph 11.
[4] Bloomberg 2014, ‘Australia Mulls Japan Submarines Under China’s Cautious Gaze’, Bloomberg Business, 18 December, at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-17/australia-mulls-japan-submarines-under-china-s-apprehensive-gaze.
[5] Senate Economics References Committee, Part II: Future of Australia’s Naval Shipbuilding Industry: Future Submarines, page 38.
[6] Ibid., p. 21.
[7] Ibid., p. 29
[8] Ibid., p. 31
[9] Ibid., p. 61
‘Can you believe the Abbott government has any idea where it’s headed on relations with China? Whatever you think of China’s politics, you can’t just take sides against China or meddle in the tense and volatile issue of China-Japan relations without there being some consequence for our bilateral relations. But the government doesn’t seem to care. From what you can divine from the little it says publicly, it thinks the Chinese will back down under Australia’s glare, and “get over it”. Like the Indonesians will get over it. But the Indonesians, whose thinking we know more clearly, aren’t going to get over it. Abbott and Morrison are so untutored in foreign relations and diplomacy, or so deaf or both, that they don’t understand something has snapped in Jakarta. It’s not about our policies it’s about the language the Abbott government uses and the lecturing, patronising and racist attitudes they convey. A strong, independent, democratic and regionally influential Indonesia is not going to put up with that any longer and relations are never going back to the way they were before.’
Other academic and journalistic commentators have observed that the Government seems to believe either that relations with Jakarta will return to an even keel within an acceptable period, or that it doesn’t really matter very much. The latter attitude would be of a piece with the Prime Minister’s comment that China trades with us because it is in her interests to do so.
It seems timely in the light of this very public conversation to relate a couple of anecdotes that indicate the role that the presence or absence of goodwill between states can play as they go about their day to day business, some of which can be of towering importance.
In 1989 I accompanied then Prime Minister Bob Hawke on an official visit to Korea, Pakistan, India and Thailand, starting in Seoul. This was the trip on which Hawke successfully proposed, in Seoul, the establishment of a forum for Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). I was in Europe immediately prior to the trip and I timed my arrival in Seoul to enable me to meet the Prime Minister and party on their arrival at Kimpo International Airport.
Unfortunately, someone in Canberra had neglected to put in to the Taiwan administration in good time a request for diplomatic clearance for the Prime Minister’s RAAF B-707 to transit Taiwanese airspace. Military aircraft are no more permitted to enter another country’s airspace without permission than naval vessels are permitted to enter their territorial waters.
Urgent clearance was requested, but the Taiwanese did not feel motivated to waive the normal timelines for our convenience, so the Prime Minister’s aircraft had to fly around Taiwanese airspace, and was several hours late into Kimpo. The fact that I was waiting at the airport for the duration is a matter of no consequence; the fact that the Korean Prime Minister was also inconvenienced in this way was embarrassing and of course required us to make explanation.
In 1998, while I was Secretary to the Department of Defence, the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta reached a level of seriousness at which we felt obliged to make preparations for a Services Assisted Evacuation of Australian nationals. At the time there were about 20,000 Australians resident in Indonesia, of whom about 10,000 were in the greater Jakarta area, and the rest were scattered throughout the archipelago in numbers ranging from substantial communities in commercial centres like Surabaya to tiny numbers working in remote locations on aid projects, as teachers, or for service-oriented NGOs.
As soon as we started we quickly received requests for assistance from friendly countries like the United States, New Zealand, Spain and others who had smaller expatriate populations in country and for whom it made little sense to plan a separate uplift.
Planning an evacuation on this scale across the whole of the Indonesian Archipelago is no trivial matter. It involves identifying the most appropriate airfields to use as pick-up points, the types of aircraft that can be landed there and the gross weight that will be able to take off again. For contingencies such as these it also involves figuring out from where these aircraft can fly in and fly out again without having to refuel.
Before implementation, it also requires the home government to give permission for all of these aircraft to land – and agree to appropriate exit formalities for all of the people they are planning to pick up.
Very early in the process the planners began to worry about the vulnerability of the road from downtown Jakarta to the airport. What if we gather together hundreds of people in central Jakarta and can’t get them to the airport because there are disturbances en route or the road is blocked?
Chief of Navy Vice-Admiral Don Chalmers had a ready alternative up his sleeve. At the time an RAN frigate was exercising with friendly navies to the north of Indonesia, in the South China Sea, and the exercise was drawing to a close. VADM Chalmers suggested that the frigate be directed to remain on station in that approximate location, so that it could proceed promptly to Jakarta if required. He also undertook to ring his Indonesian counterpart, with whom he maintained very good working relations, and tell him what was going on, so that the Indonesians wouldn’t be wondering why an Australian warship was hanging around just outside their territorial waters.
The Indonesian response? Words to the effect, “We quite understand and we would like to assist you with the planning” – a response of immeasurable value.
What these anecdotes indicate is that, on occasions when we need from another country assistance or permission it does not have to give, a lack of goodwill can lead to inconvenience or worse, whereas a positive relationship can lead to more being offered than we have requested.
There will be a price to be paid for our Government insouciantly ignoring the clear messages from Indonesia that it is infuriated by the measures we are taking in pursuit of our “stop the boats at all costs” policy. We had better be very confident that we will not in the foreseeable future need any important favours from Jakarta.
Paul Barratt was Secretary of the Department of Defence, Secretary of the Department of Primary Industries and Energy, and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Trade.