Category: Defence

  • Cavan Hogue. When elephants fight, kangaroos can be trampled.

    Current Affairs

    The growing tension in the South China Sea poses a number of problems for Australia. We want to ensure that our access through these important waterway and air routes are not impeded but we want to do so without appearing to take sides in a confrontation between China and the USA. We also need to take into account the concerns of other regional countries which are important to us.

    We should not lose sight of China’s growing assertiveness nor deny that it can act aggressively but nor should we kid ourselves that the US is very different in its international relations. The bottom line is that we have a contest between the ageing champ and the comeback kid.

    When Khrushchev tried to put missiles in Cuba the US almost went to war so why should we be surprised if China sees US actions in its neighbourhood as potentially aggressive. Given the US history in Latin America and elsewhere they are hardly in a position to claim the moral high ground. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed a sphere of influence in the Americas and China almost certainly has its equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine.

    Australia is seen as an American client state by many countries and it is easy to see why. China will probably assume that we will cave in to any pressure mounted by the USA and our history suggests that they are probably right. Is this in our interests? American interests and Australian interests do not always coincide. Australia needs to show more sophistication and more independence than we normally do without descending into some kind of visceral anti-Americanism..

    The American Empire may well have begun its decline but it is a long way off its fall and a realistic foreign policy will recognise this. Similarly, a realistic foreign policy will recognise that China sees itself as regaining its proper place in the world after two centuries of humiliation by the West. By identifying ourselves with “the West” we become members of that dubious gang in Chinese eyes. We need to find a path between the competing interests of other countries. What does Australia have to gain by taking sides?

    When elephants fight, kangaroos can be trampled beneath them.

     

    Cavan Hogue was formerly Australian Ambassador to USSR and Russia, and Ambassador to Thailand and Mexico, and High Commissioner to Malaysia.

  • Peter Hughes. Citizenship Revocation: a very limited tool in the fight against Jihadists

    This is a repost of an article by Peter Hughes which appeared on 20 February 2015.  This repost is relevant in light of recent discussion on revocation of citizenship.

     

    Liberal Federal MP, Andrew Nikolic, has put back on the agenda the question of changing the law on Australian Citizenship revocation as part of the fight against Australian Jihadists.[1]

    He writes:

     “…the issue of state citizenship – particularly that of dual nationals – will be an increasingly important battleground in the continuing War on Terror”

    “Those who persist in associating themselves with terrorist causes must be identified and wherever possible ejected from the state.”

    Current Australian Citizenship law sets a high bar for revocation. Before it can even be considered, the person must have been convicted of a serious offence (primarily, fraudulent acquisition of citizenship) committed before becoming a citizen. Offences committed after becoming a citizen are a matter for the criminal law and are not a basis for revocation of citizenship.

    To deal with the Jihadist problem, the government already has available to it criminal sanctions as well as the ability to withhold or cancel travel documents (as opposed to the substantive status of Australian Citizenship) to limit their ability to travel.

    So, what difference would it make to the Jihadist cause if the Australian government could revoke Australian Citizenship for those who are dual nationals?

    In practice, it would likely be a very limited tool.

    There is little or no public information which tells us whether or not the Jihadists about whom our security agencies are concerned are dual nationals. If they are not, the proposed change in the law would be irrelevant.

    Then there’s the question of nature the “offence” that would lead to citizenship revocation and the process by which revocation would take place.

    Nikolic targets”those who persist in associating themselves with terrorist causes” and writes about “letting our law enforcement and intelligence agencies act on the basis of reasonable suspicion”.

    These are very loose tests and to adopt them would seriously weaken the certainty and status of Australian Citizenship.

    Assuming for a moment that the citizenship of some dual nationals of concern in Australia could be revoked, this does not necessarily mean that they would leave Australia. One course open to them may be to rid themselves of their second citizenship by renouncing it so that they were no longer dual nationals. In some cases, foreign governments refuse to accept their own nationals back if the person concerned does not want to return voluntarily.

    If the person is outside Australia when their citizenship is revoked, return to Australia is prevented, but the government already has some capacity to prevent this with denial of Australian travel documents. Either way, the individual would be free to pursue extremist causes and political violence elsewhere.

    Nikolic cites the fact that some foreign governments, including the United Kingdom, have changed their citizenship law to use it against extremists. It is unclear whether this has made any substantive difference to extremist behaviour in the UK or elsewhere.

    Australia is a country of immigration and Australian Citizenship has, since its inception in 1949, played an important role in integrating newcomers into society.  Easy deprivation of Australian Citizenship on loose criteria, without due process, would seriously devalue it. Why bother to become an Australian Citizen if it can be taken away on suspicion? Some communities would definitely feel targeted by such legislation and their sense of alienation would be increased rather than diminished.

    The Australian government is right to be concerned about the activities of violent Jihadists and to be considering its options.

    However, it would be very wise to consider carefully the efficacy of any changes to citizenship law, and possible collateral damage, before deciding to use revocation as a tool.

    Prosecution, conviction and incarceration of those who have broken Australian law are likely to be much more effective weapons. Domestic programs to reduce the likelihood of radicalisation, as well as denial of travel documents to those seeking to travel abroad to pursue violent extremism, also have an important part to play.

    Peter Hughes is a former Deputy Secretary, Department of Immigration and Citizenship. He is now Visiting Fellow, Crawford school of Public Policy, ANU.

    This article first appeared in The Lowy Institute Interpreter.

    [1] “Let’s Confront Passports to Terror”, Andrew Nikolic, page 12 , The Australian, 16 February 2015.

  • John McCarthy. Foreign Policy. Australia, the United States and Asia.

    Fairness, Opportunity and Security
    Policy Series edited by Michael Keating and John Menadue

    In a conversation in October last year with two British foreign correspondents and a former Japanese Prime Ministerial foreign policy adviser, the subject turned to the United States. All three interlocutors argued that in recent years Australia had superseded both Japan and the United Kingdom as the United States’ closest ally.

    This view should not have come as a surprise.

    The Dominance of the Alliance.

    Like the British, we had just become involved in the third Iraq war and were still in Afghanistan. For the British the latter had been their longest war since Napoleon. For the Americans and ourselves, it had been our longest war ever.

    In one sense Japan, host since the end of the Pacific War to United States bases in Honshu and Okinawa, had to be America’s closest ally. However, Japanese constitutional requirements, even as reinterpreted by Prime Minister Abe in 2014, preclude Japan from playing as unencumbered a military role as NATO countries or Australia in support of United States’ policies.

    Unlike the British, we had entered the 2003 and 2014 Iraq wars without even parliamentary debate. Our contingent for the 2014 Iraq war is now bigger than that of the British.

    In late 2013, our Prime Minister had suggested through the tone of his defence of our right to eavesdrop on the then Indonesian President and his wife, that the framework of intelligence gathering we shared with our Anglosphere friends and allies was more important than our relationship with our neighbours.

    And in October last year, reports had leaked that the Australian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister had successfully halted a proposal by our Treasurer and Trade Minister to become founding members of the Chinese sponsored Asian Infrastructure Bank because of objections from the United States–a position we now seem likely to alter only after the British Conservative Government decided to join.

    Twenty years earlier, the distinguishing feature of the Australian foreign policy framework was the imperative of engagement with Asia.  The distinguishing feature of our foreign policy framework today is the paramountcy of our alignment with United States. We have become an American satrap.

    In Australia, respect for the United States justifiably runs deep. Our alliance with the United States is in our interest. The status of a satrap is not.

    This contention raises three issues.

    The shift in security policy.

    The first is that we have directed the sharp end of our security resources outside our region, and incidentally, outside the region covered by ANZUS. This is a major change for any power, but particularly a middle power.  This has been a fundamental shift from our security and foreign policy foci from the end of WW2 until 9/11.

    While a number of reasons have been cited for our involvement in the Gulf war, Afghanistan and now twice in Iraq, the main one is that the United States have been involved in these hostilities-NOT that Australian security has been directly threatened, at least in such a way that our military involvement would act as a serious counterforce or as a deterrent to any actual potential threats to us emerging from developments in those areas.

    During the Cold War era, our major military involvements –Korea and Vietnam –were in Asia. While to this day, the merits of our involvement in Vietnam are debatable, we were engaged in our own region where in the view of the government of the day, we had a direct security interest in the defeat of North Vietnam.

    The one military venture in which Australia has taken the lead was in East Timor in 1999—also in our own region.

    We did not and do not have to be in the Middle East—certainly  to the extent that we have so become .The ANZUS alliance does not mean we have to be involved militarily alongside the United States wherever it wants us. Canada and Britain –close American allies—did not provide troops to Vietnam. In fact the ANZUS alliance only embraces threats in the Pacific.–including the metropolitan territories of the parties.

    9/11 was an attack on the United States. Hence ANZUS was the premise upon which we justified our dispatch of troops to Afghanistan. The ANZUS treaty could not justify our involvement in Iraq either in 2003 or in 2014.

    To cite historian Peter Edwards, Australia’s security focus has shifted from defence of Australia to defence of Australia’s interests and values –although the question of where our main interests lie is moot.

    The alliance and the region.

    The second issue is the degree to which our alignment with the United States –as it applies both within and outside the region –is a positive or negative factor for our interests within the Asia Pacific region.

    The answer is positive provided we retain independence of thought and action, but problematic if we do not.

    The United States will remain involved in the region primarily because its interests so dictate and its resources so permit –not because it is allied to Australia. But if we indeed want the United States to remain an effective force –as we do –it is inconsistent not to abide by our alliance obligations.

    For most countries, particularly Japan, but also India, and to differing degrees most of ASEAN, Australia’s security link with the United States is seen in a positive light. An American ally in the South West Pacific suits the strategic objectives of most of the region.

    China places value on its relations with Australia primarily because of our resources relationship. It understands the nature of the ANZUS alliance although it might not much like it .It views a strengthening of the triangular relationship involving The United States, Japan and Australia with concern –as it does some Australian statements EG on the disputed territories in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.

    We make no argument here for burying our head in the sand when faced with aggressive Chinese actions –provided our reactions are considered and measured against the yardstick of our own interests.

    The danger posed by an alliance in which no light is perceived between United States and Australian policies is twofold.

    Australian security interests are not ipso facto the same as those of the United States This could be relevant where our armed forces are integrated into American force structures.

    For example if an Australian vessel were integrated into a battle group in the United States Seventh Fleet based in Japan, what would we do if that group were ordered into an action which could involve hostilities with China?

    While protocols exist to extract a vessel in these circumstances, the question would arise how we could handle the matter in political terms. As a former Chief of the Army said recently about our dilemma were the Americans to look to us to take action where we did not think that to do so would be consistent with our interests, ”I hope we would have the courage to say No”

    A second danger is that the current strict contiguity of our views with those of United States on security both within and outside the region, gives support to the perception that we do not think for ourselves, or, when we do, that we do not have the courage to take positions different to those of the United State.

    This perception is harmful. The region shares concerns about the rise of China, but there are different views on how to deal with it. Everyone wants a say in the evolution of the new Asia .If we want to be listened to, we must have views of our own –and be prepared to propagate them even if they are different to those of the United States. The matter of the Asian Infrastructure Bank is a case in point.

    Doing the region justice.

    The third major issue is this. Even if it is accepted that since 9/11, our relationship with the United States has moved from being one of Ally to one of Super Ally, have we been able nonetheless to do our region justice? Have we been able to walk and chew gum at the same time?

    In one sense, we have. Our global diplomatic presence is overwhelmingly weighted to the Asia Pacific. Our foreign policy apparatus is talented and thorough–albeit that it receives scant acknowledgment. We also have a political system which demands of its participants a steady stream of visible achievements amenable to boastfulness. This can lead to foolish pandering to the media and can be counterproductive. But sheer effort can also lead to results.

    Late in the last century, Australia initiated, or significantly contributed to, Asia/Pacific regional structures–in particular APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF).In recent years Australia was in part responsible for the expansion of the East Asia Summit (EAS). Australia has also negotiated FTAs with a number of Asian countries including Japan, China and South Korea and is negotiating one with India.

    On security, transnational and development issues, Australia has since the nineteen sixties—including in recent years –negotiated a network of bilateral agreements and cooperative arrangements with Asian countries which seldom receive public attention but are solidly in our national interest.

    In other senses, we have failed or at best had marginal success.

    As an essentially Western Democratic country whose neighbours have political systems and cultures different to our own, it is incumbent upon us to place an emphasis on educating our society to manage the challenges of living with and working in Asia– particularly as the latter becomes globally more significant. It is often argued that we made a better fist of managing these challenges in the 70s than today.

     In the 2013 White Paper, “The Asian Century”, emphasis was placed on preparing our society and economy better to take advantage of the opportunities in Asia.  The then government was not prepared to find funds to pay for what the White Paper prescribed and the current government, having damned it with faint praise in opposition, wiped it from the DFAT website when it came to power.

    It is into these areas of better preparing Australia and Australians to deal with our neighbours that we should place more of our political energy and economic resources. Because of the absence of a widespread and vocal constituency in favour of such objectives and because of the problem of identifying short term results, the right policies require political courage of an order which has been in short supply in recent years.

    We have also failed to implement consistently solid public diplomacy programs through the range of tools available — missing opportunities to shape perceptions in the region of what Australia and its policies are about.

    Conclusion.

    The foregoing is not an attempt to prescribe how Australia should develop its foreign policy in future years .Nor does it seek to answer the big questions about how power will be dispensed in the region, nor how to the major transnational issues of the era should be managed, nor to canvas the differences between the Cold War and post 9/11 paradigms.

    But if this note conveys a sense of urgency about again directing most of our foreign policy energy into the region, not beyond it, bearing in mind that our security relationship with the United States should be part of –and consistent with –that objective rather than dominating it, it will have served its purpose.

    A final comment is that in policy formulation, there is always one question to be posed. Are we acting in the national interest? If that question is answered honestly, free from febrile intellectualism on the one hand or populist cant on the other, we have a prospect of getting things right for future generations.

     John McCarthy has served as Australian Ambassador to Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, USA, Indonesia, Japan and High Commissioner to India.

     

  • Stephen FitzGerald. Security in the region.

    Fairness, Opportunity and Security.
    A policy series edited by Michael Keating and John Menadue.

    Paul Keating and Gareth Evans used to claim, with justification, that by the mid-1990s Australia had become ‘the odd man in’ in Asia. This was in significant part because of the headway they’d made in Southeast Asia, with ASEAN countries, in gaining acceptance of Australia as ‘one of them’. This was no slogan. Behind it lay a geostrategic idea of Southeast Asian countries as natural partners into the long term future, in a world dominated by competing great powers, and offering the entree to what Keating called ‘finding our security in not from Asia’. Keating and President Suharto’s Agreement on Maintaining Security was a first stage in that direction, flanked by the initiative for a Ministerial Forum with Indonesia. Evans, encouraged by the response of Southeast Asian colleagues, floated a geopolitical definition of Asia that included Australia as a logical component of what he called the East Asian Hemisphere.

    Through this closeness with ASEAN, Keating and Evans had developed an ability to see how policy thinkers in Asian countries viewed the world from their side of the fence, and to take their views seriously. To do this is challenging in any circumstance but quite unusual between countries of such different backgrounds, and it was important in assisting these two leaders to strengthen their framework for thinking about our own foreign relations and their narrative of an independent Australia, distinguished from the interests of the major powers. It was as though they’d gained access to a Southeast Asian think tank that could challenge and balance, if not necessarily always alter, their strategic view. Alexander Downer had something of the same inclination, but it was explicitly and strongly rejected by John Howard, and it’s been absent from the thinking of all prime ministers since Howard.

    Evans has said recently that our relations with ASEAN now seem far removed from the time when as Australia’s Foreign Minister he had no counterparts anywhere in the world with whom he felt more close and comfortable. ‘ASEAN doesn’t feature as largely in Australia’s collective consciousness as it should or (Indonesia perhaps excepted) get the policy attention it should; Australian politicians don’t go out of their way to forge personal relationships with regional counterparts as they should; students don’t study the region’s languages anything like as much as they should, and indeed used to; and — compared to other countries — there is a really striking lack of Australian financial investment in the region.’

    Twenty years on from when Evans was Foreign Minister, Southeast Asia and Australia are objects of rivalry between a China intent on restoring what it sees as its rightful and historic place in the sun and a United States intent – in what it does, not what it sometimes says – on blocking or containing China’s ambition. US resistance to China’s proposed Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank is but one, non-defence or military, example. This gargantuan contest challenges Australian policy thinkers to ask how we should respond strategically, in our interests. The government claims a kind of even-handedness, citing for example economic relations and the recent FTA with China, and the strong political, and (not too loudly) defence and intelligence relationship with the United States. This is also said to be ‘hedging’, which is a giveaway to its real position.

    But the government has offered no framework, and no honest narrative, about how it thinks we can manage ourselves successfully and securely into the next ten to twenty years. If it did it would have to admit and defend the fact that it’s a witting part of the US intent to try to deter and contain China, through alliance arrangements and Australia’s more-intimate-than-ever intelligence and defence enmeshment with the US including our participation in US military command arrangements and military manoeuvres in the Pacific. And it would have to concede the dangers this carries for us. Its position has the complete acquiescence of the Opposition, so there’s no debate from that quarter. And neither side discusses it frankly with the Australian public. Australian independence is crippled by this subordination to the national interests and great power purposes of the United States.

    Among the many blinkers on this policy is that Australia looks from the US side of the fence at China’s assertion of political and strategic influence. As also Asians’ reactions to the shift in power relations. Every move by a Southeast Asian country to deepen relations with the US or stand up to China is hailed as one-way traffic towards supporting, and justifying, the US challenge to China’s bid for regional supremacy.

    Not necessarily so. Take a Southeast Asian view, George Yeo for example, former Foreign Minister of Singapore. ‘Historically, in East and Southeast Asia — until the Western arrival — there has only been one major power rising and ebbing: China. When it rises, it is best to accord it some respect in return for which one derives considerable economic advantage. Over the centuries, a rich China invariably brought prosperity to all of East and Southeast Asia. Therefore, while Asian countries might value the U.S. as a friend, no one wants China as an enemy. There is a spot that is sweet for everyone. If the U.S. moves closer to China and to other countries of Asia, all will benefit. If the U.S., in response to China’s rise, moves too close to some as a move against others, everyone is caught in a lose-lose situation.’

    The US, in its ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalancing’, has in fact already moved ‘too close to some as a move against others’. We’re there with them, and the situation’s drifting towards a lose-lose situation.

    And a big danger about the US and China, to which Australian politicians on both sides seem oblivious, is that their contest is not simply that of the re-emerging world power challenging the existing one, already volatile enough. It’s that each is driven by an idea of itself as exceptional. We’ve long lived with American exceptionalism, although we don’t always recognise it or raise the awkward question of just how completely that idea puts American interests above all others including its allies. But China too is a similarly exceptionalist power, and the contest between these two is not just about power and influence relative to each other, it’s also about who has the exceptional ‘right’ to determine the rules by which the world is run. It’s by no means assured that China’s hegemonic rules will be worse, or better, than America’s. But a clash of two exceptionalisms is ideological, and particularly hazardous, and this is no time for Australia to be picking winners, it’s a time to stand clear of their fight lest some of the blows land on us.

    Assuming there was an Australian government that wanted to return to an independent foreign policy, viewing the world through the Australian prism and serving Australia’s interests, there has to be a strategy for moving to that position. And one effective strategy would be to re-invigorate the relationship with ASEAN, revive the idea of Australia being a part of Asia, re-energise the project of closer regional integration, think creatively of Southeast Asia as our critical geostrategic region, and find our security in not from Asia. Gareth Evans suggested something of this in that recent speech.

    It would have many advantages. It would be welcomed in ASEAN countries as an Australian re-dedication to regional partnership. Neither the US nor China could object and it wouldn’t entail repudiation of them. As a strategic move it would give us collective company in balancing between the two and resisting when necessary both their blandishments and their importunities and pressures. It would give us collective weight in seeking to influence and moderate their more high-risk behaviour. And it would encourage us to plumb the varieties of Asian thinking on regional affairs and power politics rather than discount or dismiss them as we often do, and this would be of immense value for us in developing a long term framework, more predictable policy-making and a more Australian narrative for our foreign policy. There’s also a host of economic and pressing transnational issues on which we can only benefit from much closer cooperation with ASEAN countries, not least the question of asylum-seekers. And domestically, it would help Australia re-focus and re-imagine the positives of our Asian engagement. Who knows, we might even see a diminution in the negative view of our most important neighbour Indonesia, and perhaps even a resurrection of Indonesian language learning!

    This is not to suggest there should be anything but the closest and most constructive of relations with China and the US. Or neglect of other Asian regions or partners. A strategy of this kind should seek also to enhance our independence through closer identification with the ROK and Japan, and engagement with regionalist arrangements in those two countries and their many networks of association with Southeast Asia and with the strong currents of thinking in both that want to avoid being skewered by the China-US trap. It’s to say Southeast Asia is our immediate habitat, and in today’s shifting and dangerous power relations it’s more central for us geostrategically than it was even when Keating and Evans recognised it two decades ago. And it’s achievable, if we could really put our minds to it.

    What about pulling back from the client relationship with the US? How achievable is that? You can’t be too optimistic about today’s political leaders because they have no foreign policy framework and seem frightened of big ideas. They don’t even feel able to debate critical policy decisions, like going back to Iraq with the US.

    But it could be done. When Whitlam took on the fear of China by going to Beijing as Opposition Leader, he also took on the fear of being independent, of offending the US, of daring to see the world through a prism other than that of the US, of taking issue with it on foreign policy. He went to Beijing before the US surprised the world with its reversal of China policy. As Prime Minister, when he publicly condemned the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi this initially infuriated Nixon and Kissinger, but like it or not, in the end America accepted his re-framing of relations. What Whitlam had done was open out the relationship, to one of independence without repudiation of the alliance, and that later became the position of Malcolm Fraser and his two successors.

    What about China? Doesn’t it see Southeast Asia as its pond? China views both Southeast Asia and Australia as coming within the sphere of what it calls its peripheral country diplomacy. This is a mixed blessing. It seeks to reward obliging peripheral countries, for example the FTA with Australia (if you believe that’s a blessing). But periphery supposes a centre, and the doctrine of China’s peripheral diplomacy is aimed at co-opting peripheral countries in the cause of the centre and China’s recovery of the position it once had as the great power of our region. As in Chinese chess, you secure the corners of the board in order to secure the centre. The FTA and President Xi Jinping’s 2014 visit to Australia were first moves, not the last, in our particular corner of the board, to co-opt us into the ‘Chinese dream of the great renewal of the Chinese nation’. Being China’s potential adversary as a client of the United States is dangerous. But being hugged by this panda would be uncomfortable, even painful, and not without its own perils.

    So, Australia part of a more integrated Southeast Asia, caucusing for the common interest, where necessary in resistance to a Chinese interest? Why not? If we could have the fortitude to believe we could stand up to America without damaging our long-term relations, why shouldn’t we do the same with China? It depends on your prism. If you see China through the US or Western prism you’ll tend to believe China’s intentions in Southeast Asia are at best not benign and at worst inimical to our interests, and fear to provoke it and cleave to the United States. Its intentions may at times be both of these, but equally they may not.

    With our own prism, and those of our Asian partners, an independent foreign policy can be had. But to have it, with a strong and strategic bilateral relationship with both these great powers, you have to have politicians who’ve worked hard at the ideas part, done their own hard thinking not farmed in some person or committee to do it, leaders in ideas, not afraid to lead, not afraid to take on the fear of the US or China. I’m waiting.

    Stephen Fitzgerald was formerly Australia’s Ambassador to China.

  • Richard Butler. Australia No Longer Interested in Nuclear Disarmament?

    The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is universally described as the “cornerstone” of nuclear arms control and disarmament. All but four members of the United Nations subscribe to it. Those four; India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons. Five countries, party to the Treaty, are recognized in it as the Nuclear Weapon States, the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council; China, France, Russia, UK, US.

    So, in such an uneven, messy set of circumstances, how is it that NPT is seen as the cornerstone? It’s because it has three elemental provisions: those that do not have nuclear weapons must never get them, those that have them must get rid of them, each party has the right to the peaceful use of nuclear science and technology.

    Thus, NPT posits that the desirable state of the world is that no one should have nuclear weapons. Australia has always claimed to be a robust supporter of NPT.

    The Treaty provides that all parties to it shall meet every five years to review its operation. The meeting due in 2015 started last week in New York. It will last for a month. The crucial issue and the most contentious will be the absence of progress in the second goal; nuclear disarmament.

    There is widespread dismay that not only has there been no reductions in nuclear weapons implemented during the last 5 years, but during the last year, both Russia and the US, who together already hold 90% of the nuclear weapons in existence, have committed themselves to substantial quantitative and qualitative expansion of their arsenals. China has increased its capabilities and Britain and France are persisting with their weapon status.

    The weapon States outside the Treaty are a problem of another order. India and Pakistan are engaged in an arms race, Israel continues to be protected by the US from any serious scrutiny and North Korea creeps along in its opaque fashion.

    As an aside on Iran. It is a non-nuclear weapon State party to the Treaty. It has both the right to national nuclear science and technology and the obligation not to make a bomb. It is effective verification of the latter that has been, and remains, at issue in the negotiations with Iran.

    Global concern about the continuing existence of nuclear weapons, in thousands, with some 3,000 on hair trigger alert has again become prominent, especially since the manifest deterioration in US/Russian relations.

    During the last two years international conferences have been held in Norway, Mexico and Austria, called by those Governments and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) focusing on the humanitarian emergency that would be caused by any use of nuclear weapons. Because of the gravity of such an emergency, it is believed that the only solution is for nuclear weapons to be eliminated.

    There is a basis for this approach in international law. In 1996, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the advisory opinion it gave in the Nuclear Weapons Case ( a case sponsored by Australia ), stated that “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in part, the principles and rules of international humanitarian law”. These words deserve careful reading. They refer to the threat of use, as well as to use.

    The ICJ went on to state that the NPT nuclear weapon states were obligated, under the Treaty, to negotiate without any further delay towards the elimination of their nuclear weapons.

    Following a meeting it convened in Vienna in December 2014 on the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, the Austrian Government drew up a statement, open to accession by all. It tabled that statement at the NPT review conference on April 28th. It had been subscribed to by 159 States party to NPT. Australia was not amongst them.

    The appalling humanitarian and global environmental catastrophe that would ensue from any use of nuclear weapons is widely understood and described in relevant science.

    The politics of nuclear disarmament is similarly clearly known. They are difficult and marked by a profound moral deficit. Yet it has proven possible to make some progress during the last 30 years in reducing the stocks of nuclear weapons. That was made possible, in part, because countries like Australia have demanded it, as have key non-governmental groups. However, the Austrian statement reflects the deep anxiety, widely held, that nuclear arms control and disarmament is slipping sharply backwards. The approach it takes is to emphasize the humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons. It recognizes that this is not new or original but asserts that it should be compelling.

    Why has the Abbott Government declined to sign it? All of ASEAN has, New Zealand, Chile and other partners in the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty have, Japan, Brazil, Norway, Finland, have signed, to mention a small sample of interesting cases.

    Australia’s absence from this initiative represents a serious change in our policy attitude towards nuclear weapons, which had always been bi-partisan, which supported our advocacy in the Nuclear Weapons Case at the ICJ, the establishment of the South Pacific Zone, and the work of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. This started to unravel as the Howard Government went on, Foreign Minister, Downer, was manifestly uncomfortable with Australia’s stance against nuclear weapons.  But, what we see now from the Abbott Government appears to be a full scale retreat into nuclear cynicism, apparently unnoticed by Australia’s mainstream media. Presumably those who notice at the UN will simply chalk this up next to our climate change credentials.

     

    Richard Butler AC, Former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations led the Australian Delegation to the 1995 Review and Extension Conference of NPT, when the Treaty was extended indefinitely. He served as Convenor of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, established in 1995 by Prime Minister Keating.

  • Philippe Le Corre. World War II is also not over in Asia.

     

    Historians estimate that 14 million Chinese died at the hands of the Japanese in WWII. The Chinese economy and society was in ruins. Will Australia attend the 70th anniversary of VJ Day in Beijing on September 3 this year. John Menadue.

    All the controversy on the Russian celebration of the end of World War II has obscured the similarly problematic role of such events in Asia. Indeed, at a recent roundtable among think-tankers and government staffers, one participant candidly asked a simple question. “What will governments do when China’s official invitation letter to attend World War II celebrations in Beijing arrives?” Embarrassing silence ensued. On September 3, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) plans to host a military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and, to use the Chinese phrasing, “victory in the World Anti-fascist War and the Chinese people’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.”

    There is nothing new about the Chinese communist party wanting to demonstrate its military strength in front of foreign leaders. Since the creation of the PRC in 1949, senior representatives of “friendly countries” have been in attendance at celebrations such as the 60th anniversary of the regime in October 2009. That event included a military parade with 10,000 troops and the display of many high-tech weapons held in Tiananmen Square, the precise place in which the pro-democracy movement was crushed in June 1989. This year, Western leaders feel both pressure to attend from the Chinese, and discomfort with an event that is clearly aimed at celebrating the country’s new international assertiveness.

    This discomfort is particularly acute in Asia, where China wants to play a bigger role and where Japan sees China’s rise in a region it used to dominate economically as a threat. The territorial dispute in the East China Sea has particularly been a source of tension between the two Asian powers. China would like to use the 70th anniversary events to show off its military and diplomatic strengths. The September military parade will therefore be a challenge for many non-Asian government leaders invited to attend the celebrations. Only Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose own May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow will not be well-attended by Western leaders due to the Ukraine situation, has confirmed his presence in Beijing. Others are pondering about what to do and who to send to Beijing.

    Most European leaders are pondering whether to go. The situation is somewhat similar to the announcement in March by the United Kingdom that it was to become the first Western nation to join the board of the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). With regards to the invitation to attend the September events, the China-friendly U.K. has been avoiding the question, as it faces a general election on May 7 (the new government will have to decide.) France is focused on making the Paris 2015 climate conference a success, and therefore follows its own agenda; and Germany does not want to alienate itself from the United States and Japan by attending alone a somewhat controversial event.

    All Europeans are keen to expand economic and trade relationships with China, but they do not want to damage their relationships with Japan. They should indeed send a representative to Beijing but probably not their most senior leader in order to avoid interfering in an already complex regional situation in Asia. European governments should consult each other on this matter, and give a joint response to China. They should also consult with the United States to avoid another AIIB situation. The United States will wait for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Washington at the end of April—as well as his annual statement marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in August—to start thinking about who to send. Even more that Europe, it will seek to preserve both China’s and Japan’s pride at the same time. That will be a challenging diplomatic task.

    Philippe Le Corre is Visiting Fellow, Foreign Policy, Centre on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution. This article was published on April 16, 2015.

  • Frank Brennan. ANZAC Centenary Homily.

     ANZAC Centenary Homily

    Harvard Memorial Church

    25 April 2015

    Fr Frank Brennan SJ AO

    Homily

    This Memorial Church here at Harvard was dedicated on Armistice Day 1932 in memory of those who died in World War I.  The inscription over the south entrance to the memorial room reads, ‘In grateful memory of the Harvard men who died in the World War we have built this Church.’

    It is fitting that we, Australians, New Zealanders, Turks and Americans should gather in this place to mark the centenary of Anzac Day, the day on which Australians and New Zealanders landed in the stillness of the early dawn on the Turkish shoreline wanting to assist with the Allies’ advance on Constantinople, now Istanbul, the day on which the Turks commenced a successful, eight month campaign to defend their homeland against the assault.

    Nineteen years after the ANZAC landings, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Founder and first President of the modern Republic of Turkey, who had been Commander in Chief of the Turkish forces in Gallipoli, graciously responded to an Australian journalist’s request and wrote, ‘The landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, and the fighting which took place on the peninsula will never be forgotten. They showed to the world the heroism of all those who shed their blood there. How heartrending for their nations were the losses that this struggle caused.’  A century on, we, the people of both sides of that deadly struggle can gather, people of all faiths and none; we gather in peace, espousing the virtues of all who fought and daring to pray together for peace and reconciliation between us and amongst all peoples.  We gather together helping each other to repair the heartrending and to prosper as best we can from the tragic, irreparable losses.

    We remember the 130,000 who were killed on that blood-soaked peninsula during the Gallipoli campaign, and the other quarter of a million who were wounded.  A century on, we have gathered more inclusively and not just to pray for the 44,000 Allies who died, but also for the 86,000 Turks who perished in their trenches opposite them.  Being ANZAC Day, we particularly call to mind the 8709 Australians and 2779 Kiwis who died.  A handful at the time were honoured by name for particular military feats, ‘but of others there is no memory; they have perished as though they had never existed; but these also were godly men, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; their descendants stand by the covenants; and their glory will never be blotted out’. (Ecclesiasticus 44:8-14)

    We recall the innocence of the soldiers – many aged the same as many of those who today study here at Harvard – and the human values that they embodied of courage and mateship. We recall too the reality, routine and relentlessness of their fighting, their sufferings, and their deaths.  We also recall the idealism, the hope, and perhaps even the naivety of empire which motivated and sustained them and those who sent them to battle.  The ANZACs had sailed from Albany in Western Australia on All Saints Day, 1 November 1914.  They waited in Egypt and then joined the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force of 75,000.  They landed early morning, and in the wrong place. Because of navigational errors the ANZACs landed about 2 km north of the intended site. Instead of a flat stretch of coastline, the boats carrying the 1500 men who would make the first landing came ashore at what is now named appropriately Anzac Cove, a narrow beach overlooked by steep hills and ridgelines.  Thus began an eight month campaign of combat in muddied trenches infested by lice, swarmed by flies, and putrified by faeces.

    Back home, their political masters were sustained both by the pride of selfless colonial service to empire and by the hope of imminent military success.  At 3pm on 29 April 1915, Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher rose in the House of Representatives and proudly declared:[1]

    Some days ago the Australian War Expeditionary Forces were transferred from Egypt to the Dardanelles. They have since landed, and have been in action on the Gallipoli Peninsula. News reaches us that the action is proceeding satisfactorily. I am pleased to be able to read the following cablegram received to-day from the Secretary of State for the Colonies: — 

    His Majesty’s Government desire me to offer you their warmest congratulations on the splendid gallantry and magnificent achievement of your contingent in the successful progress of the operations at the Dardanelles. 

    To this the following reply has been despatched through His Excellency the Governor-General: — 

    The Government and people of Australia are deeply gratified to learn that their troops have won distinction in their first encounter with the enemy. We are confident that they will carry the King’s colours to further victory.’ 

    Next day Fisher read to the House a telegram from King George dated 29 April 1915:[2]

    I heartily congratulate you upon the splendid conduct and bravery displayed by the Australian troops in the operations at the Dardanelles, who have indeed proved themselves worthy sons of the Empire.

    On 5 May 1915, ten days after the Gallipoli landing, Australian members of parliament were agitated that the Melbourne press were carrying details of New Zealand casualties but there were still no public details available of Australian casualties.  A question was put to the Assistant Minister for Defence:

    In view of the many messages of congratulation that we have received regarding the bravery of our troops in action in the Dardanelle, is the Assistant Minister of Defence in a position to tell the House with what result the bravery of our men has been attended?

    The answer was a simple, haunting three words: I am not.[3]

    Gradually, the political masters and then the people became apprised of the more gruesome reality on the other side of the globe.  A century on, we balance the idealism of service to empire, the reality of death in the trenches, and the prospect of reconciliation with former enemies in scales which only grace and forgiveness can hold. ‘Their bodies are buried in peace, but their names live on generation after generation.  The assembly declares their wisdom, and the congregation proclaims their praise’. (Ecclesiasticus 44:14-15)

    Over the generations, we have reached out across those trenches that divided us.  We have embraced a more sustaining myth, a more noble ideal: the brotherhood of man, the dignity of our shared humanity.  We have appropriated the words attributed to Ataturk at the 1934 dawn service which will be recited for us by His Excellency Omur Budak, the Consul General of Turkey: ‘There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours….After having lost their lives on this land they are now our sons as well.’

    Despite the instability and the intractable conflicts on Turkey’s borders today, we dare to gather in prayer dreaming of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ in which the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob ‘will wipe every tear from their eyes’ so that ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’. (Revelation 21:4) We hear the word of Revelation proclaimed to all people of good will, to all peacemakers including those who have fought, those who are fighting,  and those who will fight so that there might be no more war: ‘I will be their God and they will be my children’.  (Revelation 21:7)

    Today, lest we forget.

    They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

    Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

    At the going down of the sun and in the morning

    We will remember them.

    May the Aussies, the Kiwis and the Turks amongst us this morning go forth into Harvard Yard carrying and sharing the memories of those who encountered each other for the first time across trenches a century ago, committing ourselves afresh to transforming our heartrending and our losses into heartmending and tangible dividends of peace for our world.

    Prayer 

    Let’s all pray in silence, each in their own way.

    I will now offer a Christian prayer:

    Lord Our God, on this day, 100 years ago, the Australian  and New Zealand Army Corps, at Gallipoli, made immortal the name of Anzac and established an imperishable tradition of  selfless service, of devotion to duty, and of fighting for all that is  best in human relationships.

    O Lord, we who are gathered here today from both sides of that conflict remember with gratitude the men and women who have given, and are still giving all that is theirs to give, in order that the world may be a nobler place in which to live.

    And with them, Lord, we remember those left behind to bear  the sorrow of their loss.

    We dedicate ourselves to taking up the burdens of the fallen and, with the same high courage and steadfastness with which they went into battle, to setting our hands to the tasks they left unfinished. Lord, we dedicate ourselves to the service of the ideals for which they died.  With your help, O God, might we give our utmost to make the world what they would have wished it to be, a better and happier place for all of its people, through whatever means are open to us.

    We make this prayer through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

    [1] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 29 April 1915, p. 2724

    [2] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 30 April 1915, p. 2814

    [3] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 5 May 1915, p. 2832

  • John Tulloh. Gallipoli: Lest we forget the British promise to the Indians.

     

    One hundred years on, many Australians probably still regard the
    Gallipoli campaign as an event involving only Australia and, to a lesser
    extent, New Zealand. We hear mainly legends, tales of derring-do, myths
    and maudlin sentimentality about the Australians who fought there. We
    hear next to nothing about the others who also participated in this futile
    exercise.

    It was, of course, an international campaign led by Britain and
    France. They suffered more deaths than the Anzacs. As a German general
    commanding a Turkish division observed: ‘Seldom have so many
    countries of the world, races and nations sent their representatives to so
    small a place with the praiseworthy intention of killing one another’. That
    amounted to about 130,000 on both sides.

    Little reported among the mix were the soldiers from the Indian
    Army. India has every reason to commemorate the Gallipoli centenary
    with both pride and anger. Like the others, the Indian troops made a
    magnificent contribution in trying to dislodge the Turks. But Britain broke
    a promise in the process and literally made India pay for it.

    According to the veteran Indian newsman and scholar of modern Indian
    history, Prem Prakash, London made a pledge to Mahatma Gandhi
    to grant India dominion status in return for rallying support for the war
    effort and contributing troops. Gandhi responded enthusiastically because
    he saw this as the simplest means to become a dominion within
    the British Empire without further ado. It was something he had been
    agitating for and which the colonial authorities were loath even to consider.

    India contributed 15,000 troops to the Dardanelles. But once World
    War One was over, Britain had second thoughts about its promise. Gandhi
    had to continue agitating for almost another three decades, including
    time in jail, before he got his wish only to be assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.

    India’s price for its effort was two-fold. One was a loss of 1358 dead
    and 3421 wounded, according to the Australian War Memorial. The other
    was getting a large bill from London for its troubles at Gallipoli and on
    the western front as well. It paid up.

    The Indians were ‘the forgotten soldiers of history’, says Indian military
    historian Wing Commander Rana Chhina in his appraisal of Gallipoli.
    ‘The average Indian is (virtually) ignorant about Gallipoli as a campaign
    in World War One’. The same about the Indian involvement can probably
    be said about the average Australian. The only known permanent tribute
    is a plaque at Ferozepur in the Punjab, from where many of the WW1
    soldiers came.

    India deployed ‘some of the finest classes of its fighting men at Gallipoli’,
    according to Wing Commander Chhina. They included the formidable
    Sikh warriors and the ferocious Gurkhas led by British officers.
    One officer actually drew his ceremonial sword as he led Gurkhas in a
    charge against Turkish positions. Unlike so many of the Anzac troops,
    the Indians were all professional soldiers and steeped in the British military
    system.

    But there was far from unity in the ranks. Some Moslem troops deserted
    as they did not see why they should be fighting other Moslems.
    Others were exploited by Indian activists pushing the ideal of a pan-Islamic
    movement with the aim of international solidarity and unity of all
    Moslems. One Indian battalion, the 89th Punjabis, had predominantly
    Moslem soldiers and it was felt prudent to divert them from Gallipoli to
    France to fight other British enemies.

    The Indians fought elsewhere in the Gallipoli peninsula before teaming
    up with the Anzacs in August, 1915. There was friendship in their
    fraternisation and they often shared food rations. It was said the Indian
    roti and daal appealed more to Australian tastes than their standard bully
    beef and biscuits.

    An important Indian contribution was the Mule Corps. Given the lack
    of roads and the hilly and precarious terrain of the Gallipoli peninsula,
    motorised transport was out of the question. More than 1000 mules and
    10,000 tons of fodder were brought in from India. The mules were used
    to ferry supplies. They and their handlers were the unsung heroes, said
    Rana Chhina. Just as with the Australian Light Horse animals, the surviving
    mules were shot when the Indian troops evacuated Gallipoli in December,
    1915. They did not want them to fall into the hands of the
    Turks.

    Spare a thought also for the 89th Punjabis. They sailed from India in
    late 1914 and did not reach home until nearly six years later. They
    fought for the British Empire in more theatres of war than any other Allied
    battalion. But the reward for them and all other Indians was not
    what Gandhi had expected from what he thought would be a grateful
    Britain. It proved to be an empty promise.

    Prem Prakash says he combed the archives of the India Office in
    London to try to find ‘a serious enough reason’ for Britain to have reneged
    other than ‘India was not ready yet’. Perhaps it was simply a matter
    of the unthinkable: losing control of the strategic jewel in the crown
    of the British Empire.

    John Tulloh has a 40 year career in foreign news.

  • Peter Day. Rather Be Dancing With Me Rosie.

    My grandad, he represented Australia; wore a green helmet, too.

    Walked out and faced the music: ducked a lead ball, not a leather one, mind you.

    Not much of a dressing shed in which to relax and prepare;

    A stinking-bloody-trench, sick mates, a smoke, and a ‘God-help-me’ prayer.

    Such a long way from home; just seventeen, no one has a clue.

    The pollies speak of glory and sacrifice; another teenager’s down … no, not Blue.

    No greater love can a man have than to lay down his life for a friend.

    That Jesus fella knew a thing or two; just wish me Good Friday would come to an end.

    What am I here for anyway; King and country? Is it worth this terrible hurt?

    Rather be dancing with me Rosie than going toe-to-toe with a Turk!

    Letters from mum, they arrive; bring tears and a smile.

    Her words are like a prayer in this foreign land; me home for this next little while.

    Come back alive, dear son, I miss you; hope these socks warm-up your limbs.

    Things are much the same here, luv; dad’s keeping busy mowing lawns and puttin’ out bins. 

    He misses you too, son, but can’t bring himself to write.

    Figures time might slow down if you’re on his mind while out of sight.

    God, what I’d do to be mowing lawns and playing cricket in the backyard;

    Smelling Gran’s scones in the kitchen, and making life for me sisters hard.

    I had my future mapped-out: after Uni I’d teach and inspire kids.

    Instead, I’m rolling in mud and blood and death; another teen heading for the skids.

    “A just war, a waste of life, a sin” … the experts all have their say;

    Like seagulls squawking ‘round a packet of chips; wish they’d just be quiet and take time to pray.

    Pray for our families, our minds; the crippled hearts that no longer feel.

    Pray for our enemies, too; what happened to them and their loved ones was also a big deal.

    Welcome us home, but not with flags, anthems, chest-beating and the like;

    But with silence and humbled hearts, because we all know what just happened wasn’t right.

    War is failure. I know that. There’s not much else to say;

    Man’s inhumanity to man; may it never again hold sway.

    Peter Day is a Catholic Priest in Canberra.

     

     

  • David Stephens. Atatürk’s famous words of 1934 questioned

     

    Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives …
    You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace.
    There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours …
    You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears.
    Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace after having lost their lives on this land.

    These famous words may not be what they seem to be – a statement composed by the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

    The words appear on many monuments in Australia and Turkey, such as the Ari Burnu monument at Anzac Cove and the Atatürk Memorial in Canberra. They are recited every year at Anzac Day ceremonies around the world.

    Now, painstaking research by leading Turkish scholar, Cengiz Özakıncı, has established that the ‘Johnnies and Mehmets’ words were inserted by a former Anzac from Queensland, Alan J. Campbell, during an exchange of correspondence with the head of the Turkish Historical Society in 1978.

    The research is reported by Walkley Award-winning journalist, Paul Daley, in the Guardian Australia, with additional material on the Honest History website: http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/tracking-ataturk-honest-history-research-note/ .

    ‘The words that are everywhere said to be Ataturk’s from 1934’, says Honest History secretary, Dr David Stephens, ‘actually seem to be a combination of something that Atatürk may have said and an amendment inserted by Campbell, for reasons we don’t yet know, but because he was looking for words to go on the Gallipoli Fountains in Brisbane’. (The Fountains were opened in 1978 and demolished many years later.)

    There is considerable doubt also about whether Atatürk ever said the rest of the words.

    ‘It’s generally been accepted that Atatürk composed the words and gave them to one of his ministers, Şükrü Kaya, for a speech in 1934. But there is no evidence that Kaya gave such a speech in 1934. Özakıncı has uncovered a speech that Kaya gave in 1931 (with input from Atatürk) but that was a very different speech, which clearly distinguished between Turkish soldiers and invading Allied soldiers. Nothing about no difference between Johnnies and Mehmets.’

    The material on the Honest History website also looks at how the famous ‘Atatürk words’ became well-known.

    ‘The words allegedly were said in 1934. Kaya recalled them in 1953 in an interview, which was only rediscovered in 1978, and there were personal and political factors surrounding that interview which need to be taken into account.’

    While there is evidence that words similar to the well-known ones were in use in Turkish publications in 1960 and 1969, recent research has not been able to find evidence of them being used before Kaya’s interview in 1953. Atatürk died in 1938.

    ‘They are lovely words’, Dr Stephens said, ‘but we really don’t know that Atatürk ever said or wrote them. It detracts from the dignity of commemoration, whether it is in speeches or memorials, if we keep quoting these words and putting his name under them without proper evidence. Doing it again and again, as we have done in Australia and Turkey, just sets in stone what may well be a myth.’

    Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, used the ‘Atatürk words’ in a speech at a conference last month in Canberra. The prime minister quoted them when he launched the Anzac Centenary Public Fund in December 2013. They appear on the Australian-Turkish Friendship sculpture unveiled just last week by Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, on the Ataturk Memorial unveiled in February in Sydney, and on memorials in Adelaide and Brisbane. (Links are on the Honest History website.)

    The words have also been used commercially, most recently on tins of Anzac biscuits sold by Aldi. Overseas, British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has also quoted them recently.

    David Stephens, Secretary, Honest History. This article was first published in ‘Honest History’ on 20 April. 

  • Julianne Schultz. The Great War and Australia’s future.

    The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. Over the next fortnight, The Conversation, in partnership with Griffith Review, is publishing a series of essays exploring the enduring legacies of 20th-century wars.

    It seems poignantly appropriate that the web address gallipoli.net.au, which features the logo, “Gallipoli: The Making of a Nation”, is owned by Michael Erdeljac of the Splitters Creek Historical Group. Splitters Creek is now a suburb on the western edge of Albury, better known for its active Landcare group, and as the home to the endangered squirrel glider.

    In the competitive market for Great War memorabilia, Erdeljac deserves to be congratulated. He has owned the URL for 14 years, well before commemoration became a national preoccupation. He is motivated by his own conviction that “we must remember”.

    The history recalled on the site is serviceable; the list of names of those killed at the Gallipoli landing, Lone Pine and Nek battles heartbreaking; the opportunity to “own a piece of history” well-priced: A$1200 for a framed print of a photo from the front. The photo was donated by the late daughter of Corporal Herbert Bensch, one of the many Australians of German heritage who fought for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in the Great War.

    It was in a camera belonging to his mate, who was one of the nearly 9,000 Australian soldiers, 3000 New Zealanders, 35,000 Brits, 27,000 French and 86,000 Turks who died on the peninsula a century ago. Years after returning, Bensch processed the photo and it became a family heirloom.

    It is poignant because it was settlements like Splitters Creek in the Riverina that were home to many of the almost 60,000 Australians who died during that war. As has been graphically captured on the screen, and is now easily accessible in the digital records of those who fought, many of the young men who volunteered to travel across hemispheres were country lads woefully ill-prepared for the slaughter they would face.

    Not all, like Bensch, traced their forebears back to England. For many of those who fought it was a chance to be involved in a great adventure, albeit often with tragic consequences.

    Did the Great War really create Australia?

    The notion that this blooding and the other epic battles of the Great War made the nation has become a truism. But it is one that needs to be examined.

    Australia was already a (teenage) nation in 1914. It was a nation crafted from the time, eager to assert its independence (in most things) from the motherland, infected by a racism made (almost) scientific by Darwinism, egalitarian, protectionist, and, in important democratic domains (compulsory voting), marked by a progressive spirit.

    In many ways, Australia was a world leader – forging both a civic and an ethnic idea of nation.

    In Europe, by contrast, at the beginning of the war, as David Reynolds details, there were only three republics – France, Switzerland and Portugal – but five major empires: the Ottoman and British, and those headed by the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Five years later, all but one of these empires had imploded. There were 13 new republics and nine nations that had not even existed before the war.

    In Europe, the 16 million lives lost and 20 million injured literally created nations. The carnage emboldened a democratic, nationalist and in some places revolutionary, spirit. It led to major political changes in Great Britain, the beginning of the end of the old aristocracy, and eventually the devolution of Ireland. In Australia, by contrast, it slowed and divided the progressive movement, tingeing the country with grief.

    Although the trauma and loss was profound in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, there were no battles on home soil in either the motherland or the dominions. In Britain, the outcomes were less concrete. They were more tied, as Reynolds argues, to:

    … abstract ideals such as civilised values and even the eradication of war.

    In Australia, as John Hirst has written:

    Gallipoli freed Australia from the self-doubt about whether it had the mettle to be a proper nation.

    So, in Australia, the experience of war became shorthand for nationhood. In New Zealand, it marked the beginning of a long journey to even fuller independence.

    It is an ancient notion that equates battle and blood with independence and freedom; that there is life in death. The very idea that war “was the truest test of nationhood and that Australia’s official status would not be ratified psychologically until her men had been blooded in war” is, as historian Carolyn Holbrook persuasively argues, evidence of:

    … muscular nationalism [that] was given legitimacy by Social Darwinism.

    The Great War did not make Australia – that had been relatively cerebral activity, notwithstanding the conflict of settlement, which reached its conclusion on January 1, 1901, when the colonies federated into a nation. The nation began as penal colonies, prosecuted battles of settlement, welcomed people from many lands and crafted a constitution. But like many adolescents it was conflicted, as Holbrook argues:

    … the very nation that it sought to distinguish itself from was the nation whose approval it craved.

    The Great War was not even the first foreign war that Australians fought in alongside Britain – that was in South Africa. But as the legend of Breaker Morant has captured, there were important differences in attitude between Australia and Britain that came to the fore in foreign battles.

    Many historians have argued that the lingering feeling of illegitimacy, of having a chip on the shoulder that needed to be avenged, helped fuel the idea that participation in the Great War was a coming of age. This was proof, as Hirst noted, that Australia really had the “mettle to be a nation”.

    Eagerness to participate was not universally shared. This is illustrated most powerfully in the failure of two referenda to introduce conscription. This was another important mark of an independent nation, of a place where people had the right to make their own decisions rather than being the property of the state. So those of Irish heritage expressed anti-British sentiment, those of German descent were regarded suspiciously, and Indigenous Australians joined the fight. It was complicated.

    Afterwards, the tragedy of loss and grief was palpable. Australia’s progressive spirit was divided and lost momentum.

    And then, in little more than a generation, another war began which layered trauma on catastrophe, left the air full of human smoke, changed global geopolitics and renamed the Great War, World War One.

    In an enduring sense, it was the Second World War that really changed the world. It consolidated the American Century, defined in part by conflict with the Soviet Republic and its empire; triggered the end of colonialism and its multi-faceted implications; created space for the assertion of international law; and provided the framework for the remarkable transformations of the past seven decades.

    How Australia changed

    Undoubtedly, the wars of the 20th century shaped – arguably even made – modern Australia. But this was not because of an ancient blood sacrifice in distant lands or even the closer strategic battles that followed. It was a product of the responses, realignments and decisions that followed.

    Every country has its most symbolic year from each of the world wars, and can trace the consequences of the bloodletting that accompanied the global realignment of the last century.

    In Australia this can be measured in many ways, but three major legacies stand out: increasing independence from Britain, deeper engagement with the rest of the world and more multiculturalism at home. It was in the aftermath of these wars that Australia found its voice in international forums – at Versailles and in the formation of both the League of Nations and United Nations.

    After excluding the Chinese, deporting German residents and treating the first Australians as subhuman a century ago, Australia slowly let down the gangplank and after the Second World War began again to welcome large numbers of people from all around the world. While the legal separation from Britain took much longer to achieve – and is still a work in progress – the reaction to the knighting of Prince Philip on Australia Day, 2015, suggests this is a project nearing completion.

    At a more prosaic level, one of the greatest media empires the world has ever known can trace its antecedents to the wartime reporting (and political dealmaking) of Sir Keith Murdoch. And it was the wartime experiences of Gough Whitlam that shaped his political agenda that was implemented three decades later, and still upholds the foundations of contemporary Australia.

    Not just an intellectual exercise

    It is striking that 2015 is the centenary of the Gallipoli offensive, the 70th anniversary of end of the Second World War in the Pacific, and the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This is a good time to reflect not only on the actions of those wars, but on their consequences and their enduring legacies.

    The battles are important, but the lessons to be learnt in their aftermath need to be interrogated to explain how we got where we are.

    This is essentially an intellectual exercise. Australians generally shy away from such activity, preferring celebration, commemoration and consumption. This year is replete with travel agents offering guided journeys to far-away battle sites (because, apart from Darwin, none of these modern wars occurred on mainland Australian soil), books, films, television series, exhibitions and coins.

    The ballot for places to attend the Gallipoli commemoration was massively oversubscribed. The Perth Mint’s 99.9% gold Baptism of Fire $5050 coin sold outquickly, but there are still plenty of the 99.9% silver Making of a Nation coins for just $99 and others from the Anzac series. The first episode of Channel Nine’s Gallipoli miniseries attracted more than one million viewers before sinking into ratings netherland.

    And the Splitters Creek Historical Group still has copies of Corporal Herbert Bensch’s colleague’s battlefront photo, and the list of many of those who died at Gallipoli 100 years ago.

    You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war here.

    Julianne Schultz is the Founding Editor of Griffith Review; Professor, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on 15 April 2015.

    See also:  http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/investing-our-legacies/

  • John Menadue. Best we forget – the Frontier War and the Maori Wars.

    See below post I made on this subject in October 2013. John Menadue

    Repost.  The drumbeat grows louder. 

    In the lead-up to the centenary of Gallipoli in 2015 the military drums are growing louder. We are expected to cheer it all. In the process we will be encouraged to engage in a lot of mindless myths. Amnesia will also play a large part.

    In an interview published in the SMH on October 5 this year, Brendan Nelson, the Director of the Australian War Memorial, former Minister for Defence and Parliamentary Leader of the Liberal Party, said: ‘The soul of the nation is embedded in many ways in the [Australian War] memorial’. Is it? I certainly hope not. He then added ‘the more obscene the war, the more inexplicable for us it seems today, the more many [young people] admire these men and women who went in our name.’ What an extraordinary thing to say!  In short, he is saying that the more ‘inexplicable’ or dubious the war, the more young people admire the values of those that served in those wars.

    Inexplicable or dubious wars must surely include our involvement in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. What is the SAS really doing in Afghanistan, in our name? Even the worst of wars like these seem to be an opportunity to burnish the Gallipoli and Anzac legend. In this interview with Brendan Nelson, the correspondent Mark Dapin commented that the kind of ‘rhetoric that you hear today [from Brendan Nelson] lay dormant for decades after the Vietnam War. So there has been a recent militarisation – or a re-militarisation – of the Australian imagination.’

    This growing surge of militarism was triggered by the campaigns of the Hawke and Keating Governments to revive Anzac Day with highly publicised visits and commemorations of the Anzacs at the battle and grave sites in Turkey and France. Interestingly, this campaign to revive Anzac Day did not highlight Australian sacrifices in the Pacific where we live.

    This surge of interest in Anzac has continued. John Howard was proud to note that Anzac Day had been successfully revived.

    In the lead-up to the Centenary of Gallipoli there will be extensive media campaigns and programs in schools. The PR machines in Departments of Defence, Veterans Affairs and the War Memorial will pull out all the stops. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has appointed himself as the Minister for the Gallipoli Centenary. Michael Ronaldson will be the Minister Assisting for the Centennial.

    To help promote the Centenary, the Australian War Memorial will be exempted from reducing costs by providing an “efficiency dividend” like all other Commonwealth departments and agencies.

    Tony Abbott has committed Australia to raise its defence expenditure to 2% of GDP. This can only be directed at deterring China. How absurd it is to suggest that Australia could build a military capacity to deter China. As Mike Scrafton has commented, this is ‘naïve militarism at its worst’.

    World War II was the most critical this century for our future, even survival. But it remains quite secondary to the myth-making about World War I and our service to Britain.

    In World Wars I and II, the fallen were invariably buried overseas and the family notified by telegram or letter from the Minister for Defence. Now the bodies are returned to Australia and their valour acknowledged in a funeral, usually attended by both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. One deceased serviceman who accidentally shot himself in Iraq was buried in his home town in Gippsland with full military honours, a three volley gun salute and even a fly past. The Prime Minister and Minister for Defence attended.

    In all this honouring of the valour of service people, we refuse to acknowledge that successive Australian governments have involved us in “inexplicable” and dubious wars. To cover our moral and political failure, we hide behind the valour of our service people. Who was it who said “the sacrifice of brave men does not justify the pursuit of an unjust cause” This hiding behind the valour of others is also a device to hide our slavish adherence to the United States with its militarism both at home and abroad which President Eisenhower warned about over sixty years ago

    In my blog of September 19 ‘Frontier War and asylum seekers’, I pointed out that the most reliable estimates show that over 30,000 indigenous people were killed in this country by police and settlers from the late 18th Century to the early 20th Century.  The killings occurred in small and isolated skirmishes over a long period. It was an epic war for control of a great land mass. In proportion to our population more people died in this war than any in our history.Many more died of disease and a broken heart. We ignore it like the Turks refuse to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. We have memorials all over our land for those that fought against the Turks and Germans in World War I, but not any monuments for the 30,000 indigenous people who died trying to stop the occupation of their land. The Australian War Memorial ignores the Frontier War completely.

    In my blog of April 22 this year, I highlighted that Australia and New Zealand did not first fight together at Gallipoli in 1915. As the State Library of South Australia records ‘between 1845 and 1872, just over 2,500 Australian volunteers saw service in New Zealand. … It took many steps including a local militia and troops rushed in from Australia … to conclude the first Maori war .. In 1860, the grab for land sparked further conflict between Whites and the Maoris … again the Australian colonies were asked for urgent assistance.  The colonies rallied and sent troops. The colony of Victoria even sent its entire navy which comprised the steam corvette HMVS Victoria. NSW also sent gunships to support the troops.’ There was no mention of these events as we celebrated the Centenary of the Australian Navy this month. What convenient memories we often have.

    As we listen to the gathering drum beats that lead us to the Centenary of Gallipoli, we should be careful not to be swept away by militarism and patriotism. We have much to be proud of in our history. We also need to be honest with ourselves.

    As Professor Henry Reynolds put it, we are encouraged to intone ‘lest we forget’ in memory of the fallen For many of our wars the public mood is ‘best we forget’. .like the Frontier War and the Maori Wars.

  • Marilyn Lake. Fracturing the nation’s soul.

    You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue.

     

    During World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.

    World War I had consequences for individuals as well as nations. HB Higgins’s life would be deeply affected by the British decision to invade the Ottoman empire in early 1915. As a member of the new federal parliament in 1901, Higgins had opposed Australian participation in the Boer War, fearing that this would set a terrible precedent for involvement in other imperial wars, whose purpose, goals and strategy would always be determined by other powers. He also doubted the legitimacy of the European war, writing to his friend Felix Frankfurter, Professor in Law at Harvard, ‘What do you think of it? … [T]here are higher ideals than attachment to a country because it is my country. I blame our British jingoes…’ Higgins was deeply troubled when his only child Mervyn elected to join British forces fighting in the Middle East.

    When his son was killed in battle on 23 December 1916 Higgins and his wife Alice were devastated. Higgins poured his grief – and his bitterness over the imperial cant that had justified the war – into a new commitment to internationalism and disarmament. The only good that might come out of the war was not national pride, but a new world order. ‘Vengeance is a fruitless thing’, he wrote to Frankfurter. ‘I feel that the best vengeance my dead boy could hope for would be an integrated world, an organized humanity.’ No nationalist flag-waving or eulogies to the Anzac spirit for him.

    We tend to forget the doubts and expressions of opposition to Australia’s participation in World War I in which in fact only 30 per cent of eligible men chose to enlist. The anti-war mobilisations have largely gone unheeded in official and contemporary accounts of the war, which have recast the widespread destruction as a creative experience, one that gave ‘birth to the nation’, conveniently forgetting that our distinctive Commonwealth of Australia, with its world famous democratic reforms, made its name on the world stage in the years before the war, between 1901 and 1914. Australian nation-building was a peace time achievement.

    A decade before the outbreak of the European war, in 1904, an American visitor to Australia, Victor Clark, one of a number of investigators who journeyed south to Australasia, noted that ‘New Zealand and Australia are the most interesting legislative experiment stations in the world and they experiment so actively because their political institutions are extremely democratic’. The colony of Victoria had first invented the idea of a legal minimum wage in 1896, which was later elaborated as a living wage calculated to meet the diverse needs of workers defined as human beings, in the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court by HB Higgins, in the Harvester judgment of 1907. Australia and New Zealand had pioneered industrial democracy and women’s political rights. ‘While the principles of democracy were first enunciated in the United States’, noted the historically-minded American suffragist, Carrie Chapman Catt, ‘Australia has carried them furthest to their logical conclusion’. Thus did we take our place on the world stage, not in fighting an imperial war.

    In Australia, it was noted by numerous overseas commentators, the working man and the voting woman advanced together, during the first decade of the nation’s existence, which saw a steady increase in the Labor vote, until the Fisher Government was elected, with majorities in both Houses in 1910. By war’s end, however, the Labor Party had split, conservative forces had triumphed, and the British Empire had gained a new lease of life in Australia. In World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nation’s soul.

    Let’s look at this impact further through the experience of Higgins, now a largely forgotten Australian, but one of our unsung national heroes. Henry Bourne Higgins was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1896, when it introduced the minimum wage. He became an opponent, as noted above, of the British imperial war in South Africa, a member of the federal parliament from 1901 and then, from 1906, President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, whose path-breaking reforms, shaped by a profound commitment to social justice and the public good, won him renown around the world. In 1914, he was invited by the Harvard Law Review to contribute an article on his innovative jurisprudence which he titled ‘A New Province for Law and Order: Industrial Peace through Minimum Wage and Arbitration’.

    By 1920, however, the conservative backlash unleashed by the impact of World War I and the fevered imperialism of Prime Minister WM Hughes, who sought to by-pass the Arbitration Court by setting up his own tribunals saw Higgins submit his resignation. It would seem appropriate to remember Higgins, the Australian idealist, and others of his generation, as we prepare to deal with the veritable tidal wave of military commemoration, funded already by $140 million, even as our universities face further funding cuts, increased student fees and the number of historians employed to teach students actually declines. Which funding bodies, one wonders, might finance commemoration of those who fought for Australia’s distinctive democratic and political ideals and support projects to carry their ideals forward?

    My current research project on the international history of Australian democracy has highlighted Australia’s high reputation around the world before World War I as a distinctive, pioneering, bold, independent-minded democracy. It was the perspective afforded by distance that enabled American Professor Hammond of Ohio State University to write of ‘the most notable experiment yet made in social democracy’ established in Australia in the first years of the Commonwealth, in the years preceding the outbreak of war.

    In 1902, in the shadow of the South African War, HB Higgins wrote an essay called ‘Australian ideals’ in which he asked prophetically whether the new Commonwealth of Australia was to become a militaristic nation or a progressive one: ‘Australia must make her choice between two ideals – the ideal of militarism and the ideal of equality’. Australians had to choose between the opposing standards of militarism and social reform, he suggested. He and his generation dedicated themselves to the latter, while we in our time seem to have committed to the former. Australian values we are now ceaselessly told are military values.

    One hundred years on from 1914, Australia has seemingly become the militarist nation Higgins warned about. Rather than celebrate the world-first democratic achievements forged by women and men in the founding years of our nationhood, the years that made Australia distinctive and renowned, we are told that World War I, in which Australians fought for the British Empire, was the supreme creative event for the nation. But those who lived through it knew that our nation was not born in the carnage of the world war, which left the country divided, disillusioned, disoriented, desolate and dependent on a resurgent British Empire.

    In the inimitable words of novelist Miles Franklin, writing to her American friend Margaret Drier Robins in 1924,

    it seems to me that Australia, which took a wonderful lurch ahead in all progressive laws and women’s advancement about 20 years ago has stagnated ever since. At present it is more unintelligently conservative and conventional than England and I am sad to see the kangaroo and his fellow marsupials and all the glories of our forests disappearing to make room for a mediocre repetition of Europe.

    Miles Franklin knew that although men could do many things they could not give birth to nations. Only women could do that. And in 1902, Australian women’s political ‘lurch ahead’ had made Australia the most democratic country on earth, an object lesson to humanity.

    Marilyn Lake is Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. 

  • Vicken Babkenian. Gallipoli’s inconvenient ‘other side’.

    Leading up to the Gallipoli centenary, a growing trend emerged in Australia of presenting the ‘other side’ of the story. From popular books, official histories, films and academic conferences, the ‘Turkish’ perspective of Gallipoli became widely told.[1] According to this perspective, as illustrated in a recent article by Dr Jennifer Lawless, the allied landing at Gallipoli was an invasion of the ‘Turkish homeland’ and by the end of the campaign, many more ‘Turks’ (87,000) than Anzacs (8700) died.[2] The campaign is portrayed as an almost wholly Turkish and Australian affair, contributing to the birth of both nations and a symbol of a centenary of friendship.[3] A deeper understanding of the history, however, reveals that many of these narratives are anachronistic interpretations, promoting nationalist agendas with fundamental errors and omissions.

    In reality, when the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, they were part of an Anglo-French invasion of the Ottoman Empire, not Turkey. The republic of Turkey was not established until 1923. Like the British and French imperial forces, the Ottoman Army reflected the multi-ethnic make up of the Ottoman Empire. While most of the officers were ethnic Turks, the army included large numbers of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Circassians and Jews. According to Australian military historian Bill Sellars ‘two thirds of the troops who made up Colonel Mustafa Kemal’s 19th Division that faced the first wave of the Allied invasion were Syrian Arabs’.[4] A more comparable casualty comparison should be made between the empires and not ‘Turks’ v Anzacs.

    During the war, the Ottoman Empire was led by a dictatorial triumvirate of Young Turks – Enver, Talaat and Djemal. Since coming to power in a violent coup in 1913, the Young Turks had been pursuing a policy of ethnic and religious homogenisation of the empire in order to create a ‘Turkey for the Turks’. The Young Turk participation in the First World War on the side of Germany allowed them to speedily accomplish this goal under the cover of war.

    ‘Gallipoli’, derived from the Greek word for ‘beautiful city’, was historically a Greek peninsula but had been absorbed by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. Just two weeks prior to the Anzac landings, the Ottoman authorities deported about 22,000 of the peninsula’s native Greek population into the interior of Anatolia (current day Turkey). [5]Many would die of harsh conditions. This was only a precursor to the larger persecutions to follow. Triggered by what many scholars argue was the impending landing by the Anglo-French forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, the Young Turk government arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals in the capital of the Empire, Constantinople (now Istanbul), on 24 April 1915. This marked the beginning of what Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1915, described as a ‘campaign of race extermination’. As a representative of a neutral nation, Morgenthau stood at a critical juncture in the flow of information. His key informants were US diplomats, missionaries and businessmen stationed throughout the Ottoman Empire.

    In almost every town and village in the Empire, the Armenian population was arrested and deported by orders from the central government in Constantinople. The men were in most cases killed just outside their towns and villages. A much worse fate awaited the women and children. After being uprooted from their homes, they were forced to walk southwards in huge convoys to the burning deserts of northern Syria. Most would die of starvation, murder and disease. In the Ottoman war theatre, Anzacs witnessed the Armenian tragedy—some even helped rescue survivors of the death marches. Many Anzac prisoners captured by the Ottoman Army were held in abandoned Armenian churches and homes and they became key eyewitnesses to the unfolding events.

    Every major newspaper in Australia covered the genocide with regularity—the Melbourne Age having published more than 40 articles on the event in 1915 alone. Headings such as ‘Armenians Butchered’, ‘Million Armenians Massacred’ and ‘More Armenians Massacred—girls sold in open market’ were indicative of the tone of the articles being published around this time.[6] By December 1915, the United States consul in Syria reported that some one million Armenians had died and another half-a-million destitute refugees were scattered in or around his consular district. Australian prisoner of war, Private Daniel Creedon of the 9th Battalion AIF, wrote in his diary just two months later: ‘The people say that the Turks killed 1¼ million Armenians.’ Creedon was held captive in an isolated internment camp in the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia and died a few months after he made his diary entry. His figure was close to the figure accepted for the death toll of the massacres and suggests that the magnitude of the outrage was known and discussed by the Anzac prisoners of war.

    The story of Armenian suffering evoked a strong humanitarian response in Australia at the time leading to the establishment of the Armenian Relief Fund, which began in Victoria in 1915, spread throughout the country, and continued its work for over a decade. The Victorian state war council recognised the Armenian fund as a ‘patriotic fund’ – one considered as having been formed for the purpose of supporting Australia’s allies as well as its own soldiers. The relief movement culminated in the establishment of an Australian-run orphanage for some 1700 Armenian orphans in Beirut, Lebanon.

    When the war ended, the victorious Allies arrested over a hundred Turkish officials for their role in the ‘Armenian massacres’ and the ‘ill-treatment’ of Allied (including Anzac) prisoners of war. However, the subsequent rise of a new Turkish nationalist movement headed by Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) succeeded in revoking the post-war Treaty of Sevres which had stipulated an international trial of the Turkish offenders. When the new Turkish republic was established in 1923, the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire had become a mostly homogenous Turkish nation state.

    By the mid-1930s, the Armenian genocide had largely faded from the world’s collective memory. It was an observation not missed by Adolph Hitler when he made his infamous remark in 1939: ‘Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost 49 members of his family during the Holocaust, coined the word ‘genocide’ in 1944. Lemkin cited the Armenian case as a defining example of what the word meant. International jurist Geoffrey Robertson calls the event an ‘inconvenient genocide’ because recognising and remembering the crime in many countries often results in harsh diplomatic reactions from Turkey. In the case of Australia, the Turkish foreign ministry banned some NSW MPs from visiting commemorations at Gallipoli after having voted in favour of an Armenian genocide resolution in the NSW parliament in 2013.

    It was not until 1967, some 50 years after Gallipoli, that Turkey and Australia formally established bilateral relations. Since then, the relationship between the two nations has developed rapidly with frequent high-level visits and expanding bilateral trade and investment.[7] On the issue of the Armenian genocide, the Australian federal government has been faced with a moral dilemma. For decades, the government has maintained a policy of non involvement in ‘this sensitive debate’. However in 2014, for the first time, Australia’s foreign minister, Julia Bishop, expressed her Liberal government’s position on the issue in a letter to the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance organisation. She wrote that the Australian government does ‘not … recognise these events as “genocide”’ adding further that ‘Australia attaches great importance to its relationship with Turkey, which is underpinned by our shared history at Gallipoli, and by the recent cooperation in the G20’.[8] Diplomatic cables between Ankara and Canberra obtained under Freedom of Information laws revealed that last year the matter arose in a letter from Ms Bishop to her Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu. Ms Bishop wrote that ‘recognising the important interests at stake for both countries, I assure you that there has been no decision to change the long-standing position of successive Australian governments on this issue’.

    It seems that our nation’s collective memory of Gallipoli and the government’s position on the Armenian genocide are influenced more by current economic and political relations than a true reflection of the past. If, as some historians have suggested, that telling the honest truth about Australia’s First World War experience is the best way to honour our war dead, than it’s time for a more truthful representation of the ‘other side’ of Gallipoli.

    Vicken Babkenian is an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney. He is the author of a number of articles on Australia’s humanitarian response to the Armenian genocide.

     

    [1] Russell Crowe’s movie, The Water Diviner is an example.

    [2] See Dr Jennifer Lawless, ‘Gallipoli: A Turkish Perspective’, Teaching History (NSW), March 2015.

    [3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-28/friendship-wall-unveiled-at-auburn-for-gallipol-centenary/6270026

    [4] http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/01/200849135129326810.html

    [5] http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/Greeks-of-Gallipoli-1915.pdf

    [6]http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=armenian+massacres&exactPhrase=&anyWords=&notWords=&requestHandler=&dateFrom=1915-05-01&dateTo=1923-12-31&sortby=dateAsc

    [7] http://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/turkey/Pages/turkey-country-brief.aspx

    [8] http://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2014/07/23/australian-fm-armenian-case-not-genocide

  • David Stephens. The magic Anzackery pudding

    Norman Lindsay was busy during World War I. When he wasn’t doing propaganda posters of slavering Huns or sketching buxom young women he was writing a children’s book called The Magic Pudding: being the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff. The magic pudding was remarkable for its ability to keep regrowing itself, regardless of how many slices were taken off it.

    There are some people who think Anzackery is like the magic pudding. There are two elements which are essential to the Anzackery concept and which reinforce each other: sentimental and jingoistic commemoration of an Anzac myth; making money from this commemoration. Anzackers hope they can go on doing Anzackery indefinitely (or at least till something better comes along) and the pudding will just keep growing back.

    There are, for example, the promoters of 2015 centenary cruises to Gallipoli via all sorts of exotic places. A ticket on one of these expeditions costs anywhere between $9000 and $90 000 for about 35 days, with the price varying depending on whether you simply want to see out the porthole or, at the other end of the scale, have a room big enough to practice your chip shots in. All comers, though, get to listen to the on-board historians and entertainers.

    The highlight of one of these cruises is standing off Anzac Cove, like Sir Ian Hamilton, before dawn on 25 April, possibly with champagne in hand, with an expert helping you to imagine what it was like heading to shore in those boats a century ago. Unlike those men then (and Sir Ian) you get to leave Gallipoli on the afternoon of Day 1. At some point, one imagines, the strains of the Last Post will drift over the water.

    There are always, as someone said, people with more money than sense. Gallipoli cruises, though, that arrive in Anzac Cove on a date other than 25 April ‘the centenary of the Second Battle of Krithia perhaps, or Lone Pine, or the evacuation’  might not have the same cachet. Will the enthusiasm for military tourism last till the centenaries of Fromelles (1916) or Villers-Bretonneux (1918) or will African safaris or the North-west Passage become the rage instead?

    At home, one feels for the promoters of the Spirit of the Anzacs Arena Tour (‘a musical experience commemorating 100 years of Anzac pride’ tickets $89 with $3 going to charity) who are not getting their show on the road until 21 August. They’ll be signing up bums on seats early in case the punters are bored witless by the Lee Kernaghan song which headlines the program and which will have had saturation airplay by then. (Mr Kernaghan will be able to buy lots of new Stetsons.) In an era of rapid fad turnover how much cloying patriotism can a market stand?

    Those who specialise in more durable commercial Anzackery might do better from the pudding. Somebody sent us a page from a bookshop catalogue which carried blurbs for 20 children’s books about Anzac. Then there are Anzac pot holders, oven mitts, stubby holders, t-shirts, ear-rings and other knick-knacks. Perhaps being less ambitious and taking smaller slices off the pudding is the better option. Even then, how many Anzac-themed items can one acquire before the brand becomes passé?

    Should we care about commercial Anzackery? A radio presenter asked the author that very question just the other day: in a market society isn’t it OK to make money from everything? Are there no sacred cows any more, only cash ones? One answer is: see above, about fools and their money. Another answer is: what would the men of Anzac thought? One could also answer with a question: do buyers of Anzackery assume that some of their money is going to charities like Soldier On and Legacy? One enterprise has been misleading about how much of a cut charities get and another which can genuinely claim to be not-for-profit freely admits that its merchandise provides attractive commercial opportunities for suppliers.

    Then there is the political side. Politicians help mix the pudding. They set people up for commercial Anzackers by promoting and fronting seductive commemorative occasions. When two former prime ministers, Bob Hawke and the late Malcolm Fraser, and other luminaries produced a report to help the Rudd government get things rolling for the Anzac centenary they came up with a ‘partial’ list of some 250 events in our military history that were worthy of commemoration over the years 2014 to 2019. The list was that long mainly because the bureaucrats, uniformed and not, supporting the commission could not agree on whether the object of commemoration was World War I or ‘a century of service’ (by military people to their country) so they decided to do both. The list of 250 events thus dates from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first.

    Was there not a concern that Australians might be commemorated out before the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, the author and others asked some senior commemorators more than 18 months ago? Might the pudding stop regenerating? (Some of these commemorative events won’t even offer a souvenir t-shirt.) ‘Yes, of course’, was the reply, but ‘it’s what the bogans want’, the ‘bogans’ being not the government but the voters, represented by focus groups, to whom the government was listening. And, we can add, to whom the commercial Anzackers have been selling.

    More recently, Joan Beaumont, joint winner of the prime minister’s history prize for Broken Nation, a book about the Great War, suggested that commemoration fatigue might be setting in. She noted, among other things, the ratings failure of Channel’s Gallipoli. Brendan Nelson, director of the Australian War Memorial, was quick to demur. Promoting an insatiable appetite for Anzackery pudding is good for public budgets as well as commercial revenue, and possibly good for careers, as well. A regenerating pudding is what both the commercial and political Anzackers are counting on, the former because there are potentially big bucks in it, the latter because wrapping oneself in the flag, with moving music playing and a Victoria Cross winner or two nearby, never did a politician any harm.

    David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au) a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History. There is more on these subjects at honesthistory.net.au; use the Search function.

     

     

  • John Menadue.  Alcohol and junk food – winning at the expense of our health.

    If you seriously follow almost any major Australian sport as I do, you will be conscious of the saturation alcohol and junk food advertising.

    And in the run up to the centenary of Gallipoli there are no holds barred to link heroes and booze… VB now have a new television advertisement filmed at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance which tells us to bow our heads to the 16 th Battalion,AIF at Gallipoli and raise a glass of VB to their heroism. How tacky can you get!

    This is a re run of the campaign that VB have been running since 2009. The 2012 campaign was fronted by General Cosgrove  now our Governor General. He sits at a bar and tells us how good VB is in supporting veterans and their families. There is an explicit link between the military, heroes and alcohol.

    The evidence is clear that  alcohol and junk food are causing long-term damage to our health. We cannot  ignore it.

    The Council of Australian Governments’ (COAG) National Partnership on Preventative Health was established because of the alarming increase in preventable chronic diseases as a result of people’s lifestyles. As Nanny Endovelicus pointed out in this blog in October last year and reposted on 22 and 23 January this year ‘These lifestyle issues – in particular smoking, poor nutrition, alcohol misuse and physical inactivity already account for some 40% of potentially preventable hospital admissions. … The growth of lifestyle diseases worrying those watching health expenditure were primarily in diabetes, various cancers, COPD, strokes and other preventable cardiovascular system diseases.’

    Alcohol Consumption

    Latest statistics are that about 20% of the population continues to drink at levels risky to their long-term health – pretty well unchanged from the ABS results in 2007-08; half of males and one third of females drank riskily for single occasion risk.  The estimated economic and social cost of alcohol is over $30 b. per year.. The good news is that since the 1970s our per capita alcohol consumption has declined although it remains above the OECD average.

    Obesity

    By mid-2012 almost two thirds of Australians over 18 years were over overweight or obese according to the ABS, a significant increase from a decade ago. The current combined level for obesity and overweight is 63% for adults.  Of children between the ages of five to 17, about 18% are overweight and 8% are obese. This is very bad news. Australia is now in the top league tables in the obesity stakes, still lower than the US, but we are catching up fast.

    Smoking

    We have clearly made progress in reducing tobacco consumption despite the activities of The Australian newspaper and Institute of Public Affairs in defending. Big Tobacco. In 1980, 35% of our population smoked. In 2012 it was down to 20%. It has been a success story and major contributing factors have been the bans on tobacco advertising on TV and radio, and major public education programs.  It is quite a success story in showing what can be done although smoking amongst our indigenous communities and country people is still high.

    We have a job ahead of us to address poor health, particularly as a result of alcohol addiction and junk food, including sugary drinks that are driving our obesity epidemic.

    But the signs are that the federal government is turning its back on the problem. .

    In the last federal budget, Program 1.2 for the Health Department which deals with drugs like alcohol, education against illicit drug use and tobacco was reduced from $224 million in 2013-14 to $161 million in 2014-15. According to the forward estimates it will be down to $131 million in 2017-18.  In money terms this is a reduction of 40%.

    The COAG Partnership on Preventative Health with the states has been abolished together with some $400 of promised funding. The programs that will be mainly affected were focused on children, community exercise, nutrition, education and lifestyle risks.

    The Australian National Preventative Health Agency was abolished in the 2014 budget.

    The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare which provided invaluable data on health risks and preventable disease has been abolished and its functions transferred to a large productivity and performance authority.

    The government’s  compromised position  on prevention was also clearly shown a year ago when the Assistant Minister of Health Fiona Nash hired a junk food lobbyist as her Chief of Staff. She tried to wipe out the industry’s voluntary food-star labelling system. With control of ministers’ staff by the Prime Minister’s Office this appointment of a junk food lobbyist could not have been a misunderstanding..

    This all adds up to a story of short term success for the alcohol and junk food industries with the complicit national sports organisations, sports people and the broadcasting media.

    It is also a good example of budgetary cuts for financial short term advantage which have long term and damaging consequences for our health. The bad health consequences of alcohol and junk food consumption don’t show up immediately. But the consequences down the track are clear and horrible.

     

    In this post I have drawn heavily on earlier posts by Nanny Endovelicus, Preventing Prevention.

  • John Menadue. Who and for what are we fighting in Iraq.

    Australia has sent troops to fight in Iraq Wars I, II and III. Our participation has been disastrous in each.

    The latest news tells us that in the battle to oust IS from Tikrit the victory belonged to the Shiite militia controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp. So our ‘allies’ in Iraq against IS are now Shiite militia led by Iran. This is a sectarian war in Iraq into which we should never have blundered. What side are we on now? Presumably it is the Shiite militia who have a cruel record as bad as IS.

    Perhaps the US will let us know what side we are on.

    We should get out of Iraq as soon as possible.

    See link below to an article in the SMH today by Paul McGeough about the sectarian nature of the war in Iraq.  John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/world/is-crisis-brings-iraq-divisions-into-focus-20150403-1me1n1.html

  • Tributes to Malcolm Fraser.

    See below, tributes from Fred Chaney and Robert Manne on Malcolm Fraser’s achievements in public life. John Mendue.

    Fred Chaney in The Guardian.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/malcolm-fraser-a-leader-who-believed-there-is-a-moral-compass-in-our-nations-life

    Robert Manne in The Guardian.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/frasers-great-conservative-achievement-cementing-whitlams-progress-on-race

  • David Stephens.  Anzackery in the time of Anzac

    Anniversaries sharpen sensations and heighten moods. Christmas brings on good feelings, New Year provokes resolutions, siblings’ faults are set aside on their birthdays. Centenaries accentuate this quite normal process. The centenary of Anzac has brought on a welter of commemoration, slopping over into celebration, with a good lashing of commercialisation as well. Honest History revived the term ‘Anzackery’ to apply to what was happening.

    The word ‘Anzackery’ seems to have been coined by the historian Geoffrey Serle in 1967 to describe Anzac Day addresses from his primary school days in the 1930s, when ‘fire-breathing’ officers from the Great War described how Australia had been ‘born’ at Gallipoli. Professor Stuart Macintyre used the word to the present author in March 2013 and attributed it to Serle. Some years earlier James Curran had wrongly taken ‘Anzackery’ to be Serle’s synonym for Australian nationalism in general.

    As minted by Serle, in fact, the word had a flavour of irritable, pompous jingoism and that is how Honest History has used it. There are doubtless examples in speeches by RSL representatives. More recently, the current Director of the Australian War Memorial, Dr Nelson, has developed a standard speech which is medium strength sentimental Anzackery; it brings audiences – and sometimes Dr Nelson – to tears. He also refers to a set of ‘Anzac values’ (mateship, courage, resilience, and so on) which are really universal values.

    Recently, a group of military historians and retired soldiers took up the challenge to define ‘Anzackery’ in an etymologically defensible way. Work is proceeding but the outline of the definition is clear. First, Anzackery distorts Australia’s military history to make the Australian contribution more important than it was in reality. Gallipoli, for example, becomes ‘Australia versus the Turks’ and the efforts of British, French, Indians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders and Germans fade into the background. Similarly, in 1918 in France, General Monash becomes the military genius who turns the fate of the war.

    As well as the inflation of Australian contributions to wars, Anzackery encompasses the Australian lack of interest in the impacts of war on non-Australians. This comes up every year in February, for example, when Australians commemorate the deaths of a few hundred civilians in the bombings of Darwin and other towns in February 1942 but mostly ignore the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Australian deaths in wars in the twentieth century amount to around 0.04 per cent of all deaths in wars and conflicts around the world in that century but there are surely not war deaths anywhere else in the world (with the possible exception of Civil War deaths in the United States) that are commemorated so relentlessly and repetitively.

    The inflated version of Australia’s military role in the Dardanelles and elsewhere is used to promote patriotism and encourage support for current wars. Emotive rhetoric prevails; emotion, sentiment and nationalism are at the heart of Anzackery but it is rarely peddled without purpose. Prime Minister Hawke’s memoirs show that he consciously linked Australian efforts at Gallipoli and the first Gulf War. Howard made similar connections, as did Gillard. A lyrical version of Anzac (sometimes rendered as ‘the Anzac tradition of arms’ when soldiers are in the audience) has become a staple of prime ministerial speeches. Here is Prime Minister Rudd in 2010:

    For Australia, our identity has been etched deeply by what we call ANZAC. For nearly a century … ANZAC has occupied a sacred place not far from the nation’s soul. It shapes deeply our nation’s memory. It shapes deeply how we see the world. A hundred years later, it shapes too what we do in the world. Neither religious nor secular, whatever our beliefs are, ANZAC is profoundly spiritual – inspiring pilgrimages still to that far-off place where our modern-day pilgrims drink deep from the well of national memory … I believe each generation of Australians has a duty to pass this torch to the next.

    Honest History’s favourite exhibit, though, is ‘The Spirit of Anzac’, composed by the long-time chairman of the Anzac Day Commemoration Committee of Queensland, Colonel Arthur Burke OAM (Ret’d). It has been extant for many years, it was written to inspire children, and it has been quoted regularly in entries by Year 9 and 10 students in the Simpson Prize essay competition.

    The Spirit of ANZAC is invincible [according to Burke]. It is the flame that burns forevermore in the heart of every true Australian and New Zealander. Today we stand safe and free, clothed with all the privileges and rights of citizens in these great free countries. And all these things – liberty, security, opportunity, the privileges of citizenship – we owe to those men who fought, endured, suffered, and died for us and for their country. Their deeds and their sacrifices gave us the invincible, the intangible, the Spirit of ANZAC.

    Burke’s piece is a good example of how Anzackery targets children. The commercial aspect of Anzackery is almost as egregious, though this element could be seen as the inevitable response from business to demand from politicians, commemorative institutions and the public. As examples of this strain of Anzackery, Carolyn Holbrook, author of Anzac: the Unauthorised Biography, has catalogued the Anzac Run, Camp Gallipoli, various Anzac Centenary Cruises, a ‘Spirit of the Anzacs’ CD, Gallipoli ear-rings, oven mitts and pot holders, the ‘Anzac Day Thank You Baby Blanket’, the ‘Anzac Descendant’ t-shirt and another item, the ‘Anzac Pin-up Girl’ t-shirt, which is no more than soft core pornography. Anzackery is a cash-cow.

    Phenomena like Anzackery spread when they are not contested. There is growing anecdotal evidence that many Australians, while respectful of our war dead, are uncomfortable at extreme forms of commemoration-celebration. (Some people feel intimidated by the noise coming from the Anzackers or are afraid of being seen as disrespectful.) Hyperbole ultimately devalues its object. Sentiment prevents us asking important questions about why we fight wars. The Anzac centenary should be marked by vigorous debate. Anzackery is a bubble that needs to be pricked.

    David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au) a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.

     

     

  • Tony Kevin. A Confused Military Endgame in Tikrit

    In an effort to understand what is happening in the very important battle to retake the Sunni city of Tikrit in Iraq, now approaching its climax, I consulted yesterday’s news and editorial coverage in the Washington Post, (‘Iraqi forces break militants’ hold on Tikrit in major battle against Islamic State’),

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraqi-forces-battle-islamic-state-in-streets-of-strategic-tikrit/2015/03/11/a0dca5c0-c778-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html

    CNN, (‘Battle for Tikrit: Despite billions in aid, Iraqi army relies on militia, and Iran’),

    http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/11/middleeast/lister-iraq-iran/

    Al Jazeera, (‘Why the US is sitting out Iraq’s most important assault on ISIL’),

    http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/6/what-it-means-for-the-us-to-sit-out-tikrit-offensive.html

    and the Christian Science Monitor (‘The non-military victories in Iraq’s battle of Tikrit’ – editorial).

    http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2015/0311/The-nonmilitary-victories-in-Iraq-s-battle-of-Tikrit

    Here is what emerges. A powerful Iraqi offensive is gaining ground against ISIL forces still occupying Tikrit, a major Sunni city in central Iraq. The offensive is likely to succeed because it has superior forces. At its core are well-trained, well-motivated Iraqi Shia militia forces, allied with a well-led force of Iran’s battle-hardened Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Units of the re-building Iraqi National Army, and a very few anti-ISIL Sunni militia force elements, are going along for the ride as it were.

    Curiously, US air power elements are sitting out, or giving very quiet behind-the-scenes support (it is not yet clear which), to a campaign shaping up as the most important and successful military counter-offensive against ISIL since ISIL’s sweeping advance through Sunni areas of Iraq last year .

    The strategic dilemma facing the US is apparent from reading these four articles. The US fears two things.

    First, that an Iraqi recapture of Tikrit – now seemingly imminent – may be followed by uncontrolled Shia militia sectarian revenge killings against Sunni civilians found in the retaken city (where ISIL killed and brutalised many Shia during its occupation). The US does not want to be seen as a leading part in this, because it is pressing a message of sectarian reconciliation under the present Iraq National Government . The Christian Science Monitor editorial puts the most positive possible gloss on the hope of achieving sectarian peace in a recaptured Tikrit, but other media sources are much less sanguine. Al Jazeera comments that ISIL , as it withdraws from Tikrit, is regrouping in Sunni cities elsewhere, e.g., Mosul and Ramadi, and is projecting itself as the only credible military force that can protect Iraqi Sunnis from Shia revenge.

    The second US fear is that, with the Iranian Army and pro-Iranian Shia militias playing such a powerful and well-publicised role in this offensive, Iran will claim all the political credit and further cement its influence over Shia regions of Iraq and the Iraq National Government – to the detriment of US influence.

    On this, I am persuaded by a comment by a MIddle East analyst reported in the Al Jazeera article:

    ‘ Concern has been expressed that the US risks losing Iraq to Iran in the fight against [ISIL]. But it is probably more accurate to say that the US has already lost Iraq to Iran.’

    Amen to that. I believe the US should now be making its peace with Tehran, including on nuclear industry safeguards, as the least bad alternative in this situation where there are no good choices and no entirely trustworthy allies. This is where Israeli PM Netanyahu’s and the American pro-Israel lobby’s strong influence on American policy, especially through the Republican Party’s ascendancy in Congress, is most unhelpful at this important moment. Politicians like John McCain want the US to get more deeply militarily and politically involved in Iraq, to confront Iranian influence there at the same time as stepping up its military campaign against ISIL.

    Such advice is, frankly, terrible. ISIL’s secret backers in the Sunni regions of the Middle East – Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, especially Qatar – would simply dip into their deep pockets to keep ISIL afloat in the Sunni-Shia proxy war, as they see it, in Iraq. Such a forward military policy would leave the US propping up a weak national government in Iraq in a war it cannot win, and where the real power will inevitably be the Shia majority community . It will leave the US exposed, with no ally in the Middle East except Israel (and maybe this is what Netanyahu and the Lobby really want).

    When we look across the border to Syria, the US and its Western allies like Australia face equally dreadful choices. A country that was once a model of intercommunal harmony and tolerance is rapidly destroying itself. Ancient Christian minorities in the north-east have all but been obliterated by ISIL fanatics. In the West, sophisticated multicultural cities like Aleppo have been ravaged. Millions of refugees have fled across the borders, into Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. The non-sectarian Alawite government of President Assad looks increasingly like the least bad alternative (and this has always been Moscow’s consistent view).

    But the US and its Western allies have backed the now all but defunct democratic opposition against Assad, operating out of a Turkish border town, and they now do not know how to reconstruct a working alliance with Assad against ISIL. Again, the powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington would be arguing strenuously against this course – the present bloody chaos in Syria suits Israel quite well, at least in the short term.

    But I hope that Obama will continue to resist the siren songs of those in Washington who argue for a stepped-up US military role and more assertively challenging Iranian influence in the Middle East.

    Before it does this, the US first needs to sit down and think clearly about what it really wants, and with whom it wants to be most closely allied, in this volatile and often treacherous region.

    Tony Kevin is former Australian Ambassador to Poland and Cambodia.

  • Spencer Zifcak. The Martin Place Siege

    I first came across Man Haron Monis, the Sydney siege gunman, in early 2013. The High Court of Australia had just handed down an important new decision on the breadth of the protection the Australian Constitution provides for freedom of expression. The facts of the case centred upon offensive letters sent to the parents of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. The issue was whether sending offensive letters through the post to the private addresses of parents could properly be regarded as an exercise of constitutionally protected free speech. The person who sent the letters was Monis.

    In one letter, he described a soldier son as having murdered civilians. He likened the soldier to a dirty animal. He described the son’s body as the dirty body of a pig. He wrote that the son’s moral culpability was no less reprehensible than Hitler’s. Justice Heydon described the communications as ‘sadistic, wantonly, cruel and deeply wounding blows during the most painful days of parents’ lives’.

    He seemed to me to be deranged – not necessarily mentally ill but nevertheless profoundly disturbed, the disturbance having a distinctly paranoid character. I thought to myself that this is a person who should probably be watched.

    What we have learnt subsequently confirms that impression. Monis described himself as a sheikh but had no qualifications to be one. It appears that he had engaged in criminal fraud in Iran prior to obtaining refugee status in Australia. He owned a rifle, but no one seems to know in what lawful capacity he was able to obtain one.

    He uploaded a photo of the ABC’s religion presenter, Rachel Kohn, under the heading ‘You Will Pay the Price’, after she described him as an Islamic renegade. He described the deaths of people in the Victorian bushfires as Allah’s revenge upon Australians because the Government had not opposed the death penalty for the Bali bombers.

    He placed advertisements in local newspapers, holding himself out as a spiritual consultant. This rather brought him undone as he was later charged with forty offences of sexual and indecent assault many of which arose from his ‘consultations’. Early in 2014, he was charged with being an accessory after the fact to the murder of his former wife who had been beaten and set alight. Yet he wasn’t on ASIO’s surveillance list.

     

    There has been a lot of discussion since the Sydney siege as to whether Monis was a terrorist or, more prosaically, had committed a murderous crime. This is splitting hairs. The act was terrifying and people died. Whether Monis acted as a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist, or as a deranged criminal, doesn’t seem to count much when weighed against that.

    It is relevant, however, in determining how the siege could have happened and what might be done to prevent similar shocking events in the future. It is almost certain that Monis acted alone. It is also clear that he had had several encounters with the law that could reasonably have led one to the view that he was manipulative, religiously extreme, conscienceless and had a propensity towards violence. He should never have got a gun.

    Monis was on bail for serious criminal offences. Being charged as an accessory after the fact to murder is not nothing. Nor is the allegation that one may have engaged in multiple instances of sexual and indecent assault. Apparently, one reason that bail was granted in relation to the accessory charge was that the Magistrate decided that the case against Monis was weak. Another was that the prosecution did not oppose bail, even on the murder-related charge. Extraordinarily, Monis’ girlfriend, the person charged with the murder, also obtained bail.

    Without being in court to hear the evidence provided, it is difficult to disagree with the Magistrate’s decision. It might have been a reasonable one in the circumstances.  Nevertheless, had it been me in the chair, at the very least I would have put the totality of the charges to the defence and the prosecution and asked them to explain clearly and persuasively how it was that each thought that bail was appropriate. And I would have questioned Monis.

    The NSW Attorney-General has asserted that had his proposed reforms to the Bail Act, been in force, Monis would not have been given bail. These reforms provide that any person charged with a serious crime would be required to prove that they were not a danger to the community. Reversing the onus of proof in a criminal matter is hardly ever desirable as it requires the person concerned to demonstrate a negative. How does one prove that one will not be dangerous? Better to leave it to the prosecution to make the case that one is likely to be.

    So, what are we to do about ‘lone wolf’ terrorists? The honest answer appears to be that nobody knows. The US Attorney-General, Eric Holder, remarked recently that ‘that is the thing that keeps me up most at night, this concern about the lone wolf who goes undetected.’

    Without knowing the details, it seems clear that ASIO has managed to break up a number of terrorist cells that had been in the course of planning terrorist attacks. A small but not insignificant number of individuals have been subsequently tried and convicted. The irony (thankfully) is that it is more likely that terrorist plots will be foiled when they are planned on a large scale and involve several actors, than when all that is involved is a a random plot devised by a psychopathic zealot. The ‘lone wolf’ may communicate with no one and, planning alone, may evade suspicion and detection altogether.

    Turning to a present political controversy, the comprehensive retention of metadata, as currently proposed by the Federal Attorney-General, Senator Brandis, may assist in establishing a pattern of activity by an individual or group that alerts law enforcement officials to the possibility of a terrorist attack. That fact, however, does not provide a complete justification for access to every Australian’s data.

    Individual privacy is important. It forms a component part of what it is to live in a free and democratic society. We dismiss its significance at great peril.

    By all means require ISPs to retain individuals’ metadata for two years. But do not allow law enforcement agencies to access it without prior, independent judicial review. A judge should not agree to the provision of access to an individual’s private internet or telephone activity unless it can be demonstrated that there is a reasonable suspicion that the targeted person may engage in criminal or terrorist activity.

    It is unlikely that the examination of metadata would have netted Mon Haron Monis prior to his siege. As a lone wolf, not even his girlfriend may have been aware of his terrible plan. And he wasn’t on a watch list when patently he should have been.

    In the end, however, more terror laws aren’t going to cut it. Radicalisation must be tackled from its outset. One place to start is at school.

    Every school, primary and secondary, private and state, should be required to teach civics in the context of democracy, political plurality and cultural diversity. The communication of hatred, intolerance and discrimination in schools on racial, religious or ethnic grounds should be prohibited. The study of comparative religions, including secular morality,  should be strongly encouraged. The exposure of children to a wide and balanced diversity of political, social and cultural opinion should form an imperative part of every school’s curriculum.

    This won’t stop the spread of terrorism now. But it could make us safer and more respectful of each other in the foreseeable future.

    Spencer Zifcak is Professor of International Human Rights Law

    This article first appeared in Arena, no 134, 02-2015 – 03-2015.

    See www.arena.com.au

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Spencer Zifcak. Proportionality Lost: Australia’s New Counter-Terrorism Laws. Part 2

    The Foreign Fighters Bill

    The second tranche of counter-terrorism legislation introduced by the Attorney-General, Senator Brandis, late last year was contained in the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill. This Bill (now passed into law) amended several Commonwealth Acts, most notably the Commonwealth Criminal Code. The primary purpose of these new laws is to enable the investigation, arrest, prosecution and punishment of people supporting foreign conflicts.

    1. Foreign Incursion Offences

    Each of the foreign incursion offences pivots upon the definition of ‘to engage in hostile activity’. A person engages in hostile activity in a foreign country if they engage in conduct intending to:

    overthrow the government of the country, or any other country, by force of violence; or

    subvert society in that or any other country; or

    intimidate the public in that country or any other country.

    This definition substantially expands the one formerly contained in the Crimes (Foreign Incursions) Act 1978. The expansion is achieved by the inclusion of the subversion and intimidation components. Consequently, every offence added to the Criminal Code Act, which turns on the broader conception of ‘engaging in hostile conduct’ has a much expanded scope from that in existing foreign incursion laws.

    So, for example, in the former law the penalty for incursion into a foreign state with the intention of engaging in hostile activity was 20 years. In the new law, the penalty for the more widely defined offence is life imprisonment. Similarly, the former law provided for a penalty of 10 years imprisonment for actions in preparation for hostile activity, whether or not that hostile activity occurs. In the Foreign Fighters legislation, the much broader offence again attracts a life sentence. The idea that preparatory conduct will attract a life sentence is of particular concern. It might, for example, catch a family member in Australia whose only relevant act is sending medicines to a relative engaged in an incursion abroad.

    ‘Subverting society’ is also defined extraordinarily widely. It may for instance apply to serious damage to any property, serious interference with an information system or a serious disruption to transport infrastructure. Such activities may legitimately be criminalized but the attachment of a life sentence to them is manifestly excessive.

    Importantly, too, the new subversion offences are not tied directly to terrorism. Subversive activity encompasses a range of actions that need neither be intended to influence a government by intimidation nor be motivated by the advancement of a political, ideological or religious cause. Subversion takes in the disruption of electronic, communications, transport and postal systems and any and every infringement of property rights, whether or not they form part of a terrorist attack. To avoid substantial legal over-reach, therefore, these offences must be tied directly to the explicit definition of a terrorist act in the Commonwealth Criminal Code.

    To appreciate the breadth of what is proposed, one might take another Timorese example. An East Timorese person who had been granted Australian citizenship or permanent residency and who returned to East Timor in the 1990s to participate in the rebellion against the genocidal Suharto regime’s oppression of the country would have been caught by the Foreign Fighters law and faced a life term. Jose Ramos Horta was resident in Australia for some time while carrying on his diplomatic work in pursuit of Timorese independence at that time. No doubt his activities consisted of advocating for, making preparations for and supporting the commission of hostile activity against the Indonesian government. It would have been a pity, given his subsequent receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, if he had had to serve a long term of imprisonment in Australia.

    1. Declared Area Offences

    The problems attached to overly broad ministerial discretion are illustrated graphically by the offences attached to travelling to ‘no go zones’. Pursuant to the Foreign Fighters law, it is an offence for a person to enter an area in a foreign country that has been declared by the Minister for Foreign Affairs as a no-go zone, where the Minister is satisfied that a listed terrorist organization is operating there. To enter or remain in a declared area attracts a penalty of 10 years imprisonment.

    The relevant provisions create a list of exceptions that include, for instance, cases in which a person has entered an area to engage in humanitarian or journalistic activities or for bona fide family reasons. The exceptions are narrow however. They may not, for instance, cover business travellers, pilgrims, adventurers, ill informed tourists, people who enter inadvertently, people in transit, others who have gone to visit or support friends and so on. The exception for journalists extends only to those who are working in a professional capacity. Social media correspondents, bloggers, researchers, independent cameramen and others are unlikely to fall into the professional category.

    A person picked up in a declared area is also placed at a significant legal disadvantage. To make out a case against her, a prosecutor need only demonstrate that she has been found in a zone, and that the Minister has declared the zone. Once those two requirements have been met, it becomes a matter for the accused to prove that she falls within a lawful exception. Not only that, but she is required to demonstrate that the excepted purpose for her presence in the zone is the sole purpose for her being there.

    This is not strictly a case in which the presumption of innocence is negated, but it comes pretty close. The accused person must prove that they are in an area for a legitimate reason rather then the prosecution having to demonstrate that the accused’s purpose falls outside the mandated exceptions. Further, for a person to prove a negative, that is that they are not in an area for a nefarious purpose, presents formidable evidentiary difficulties.

    The declared area offence should be excised from the legislation. Alternatively, the parliament should include a general defence for a person who has travelled to the area for an innocent purpose which nevertheless falls outside the present narrowly defined, legitimate reasons for travel.

    Conclusion

    It will be clear that in critical respects the new counter-terrorism laws are a disproportionate response to real but manageable threats. While it is highly unlikely that the laws canvassed here will be reviewed in the foreseeable future, a number of supplementary reforms should be considered. These would strengthen the mechanisms through which the legislation could be continuously reviewed and amended when that is found necessary.

    A new person should be appointed to the Office of the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor immediately. The Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security should be given stronger powers to monitor Australia’s domestic and international intelligence agencies particularly in relation to their conduct of special intelligence operations. The Parliament’s Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security should report annually on issues and problems arising from the implementation of counter-terrorism laws.

    It is imperative that the laws analyzed here should be subject to sunset terms of no longer than three years. The great problem with counter-terrorism legislation is that no government will ever wish to court the blame for a terrorist attack if ever it occurs. There is consequently, no political incentive for such legislation ever to be repealed. With all its disproportionality and violations of civil liberties, it will stay on the books indefinitely unless, by law, it must be brought to an end when national security and human rights considerations suggest that it is justified to do so.

    Spencer Zifcak is Professor of International Human Rights Law

    This article first appeared in Arena, see Terror Laws: Arena, No 133, 12 2014-01 2015.  www.arena.com.au

  • Cavan Hogue. Australia will not be safer.

    Australia’s upping the ante in Iraq is a recipe for disaster. It is hard to see anything positive coming out of it.
    Mr. Abbott said the request came from the Iraqi Government and the USA. As in the past, the request from the USA was almost certainly what it is all about plus the domestic need to show how hairy his chest is.
    Did the Americans have to lean on Iraq to invite us this time as well?
    As Vietnam showed, the trainers will end up as combat troops and if the Americans ask for more we will give it.We have all been training Iraqi troops for years to no avail.  How will Australians improve morale and loyalty among the Iraqi army troops?
     This is Vietnam all over again. We are intervening in a civil war which has nothing to do with us. Iraq is a mishmash of competing factions only one of which is the Iraqi Government.When it fails we will be tarred yet again with the same brush as the US.
     This escalation will not make Australia safer as the Government claims but, on the contrary, will increase the likelihood of terrorism in Australia. How will it decrease the attraction for young Australians of joining ISIS.?
     Where will the money come from in a tight budget? What will be sacrificed to pay for this exercise?
    The Opposition’s support of this foolishness can only be described as depressing.
    Cavan Hogue is a former Australian Ambassador to USSR and Russia.

  • John Menadue. Here we go again – more mission creep in Iraq.

    We seem unable to learn from the history of past centuries and decades as we plan to send another 300 Australian troops to Iraq to train forces fighting IS.

    To show his patriotic fervour Tony Abbott needed eight Australian flags as a backdrop for his announcement yesterday. I don’t recall seeing a Prime Minister wrapped in so many flags!

    For centuries foreigners like the Greeks, Romans and British, thought that they could subdue Iraq to their wishes. In the process, the fragile country of Iraq has been subject to imperialism, resource exploitation, despotism and religious rivalry. The most recent calamity inflicted on the long-suffering Iraqi people was at the hands of George W Bush, supported by Tony Blair and John Howard. We were told that the invasion of Iraq was to expand freedom and democracy in Iraq and free that poor country from Saddam Hussein. Not so frequently mentioned was access to the fifth largest oil deposit in the world as Rupert Murdoch told us.

    The result has been catastrophe for the Iraqi people and almost everyone except the US companies who gorged themselves on military contracts.

    In opposing IS we chose to forget that the Saudi government and wealthy Saudis, along with the wealthy in the Emirates, have been funding IS.  They did the same for Al Qaeda.

    The result of all the most recent foreign intervention has been seen most recently in Mosul where the brutal advance of IS has ended 1,600 years of Christian worship in the province.  Saddam Hussein was a monster but at least he kept the IS ‘death cult’ caged. Do George Bush and John Howard and Tony Abbott feel responsible for the consequences of earlier actions in invading Iraq?

    Have we forgotten Vietnam and all the other disastrous wars that we have got involved in at the request of the US?  Invariably these wars start with humanitarian aid, then advisers, then logistic support and all the way from there to full-scale military involvement in causes we don’t understand. In Vietnam and later in Iraq and Afghanistan our role steadily expanded with disastrous consequences for everyone concerned.

    Having withdrawn from Iraq, we are now back again. First it was humanitarian air drops. Then it was arms to elements of the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Northern Iraq, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation. Our mission creep then moved to sending 200 Special Forces to help train the Iraqi army. Then we sent 600 RAAF personnel and aircraft to operate out of the Gulf. Now we are planning to send another 300 Australian trainers. And there is probably more to come.  Prime Minister Abbott refused yesterday to rule out further military commitments. ‘I’m not going to be too prescriptive’ he said. If all that is not mission creep, I don’t know what is.

    The recent attempts to save Iraq by sending more trainers go back to 2003. Since then there have been enormous contributions of blood and money from many countries – the US, Iran, Israel, Rumania, NATO, Japan, Jordan, New Zealand, and many others including ourselves. In all, the US alone has spent between $US20 billion and $US28 billion to train the Iraqi army. But last year the Iraqi army which we thought we had trained threw its arms away and surrendered to the IS in northern Iraq. Our training of the Iraqi army has been an abject failure every step of the way. This is despite the fact that we were told ad nauseam about the enormous progress that was being made in training the army. In fact it was a failure on such a scale that it is very difficult to admit.

    At its most basic level this is a sectarian war between Shia and Sunnis. Foreign fighters make it worse.

    Foreign interests have brought disaster to the Iraqi people for centuries. The history lesson is quite clear that foreigners and particularly westerners cannot solve Iraq’s problems. We invariably make them worse. Only the Iraqis and their neighbours can solve the problem of IS.

    Our intervention over the last decade in Iraq has also made us more prone to domestic terrorism. Once again Tony Abbott won’t acknowledge the obvious that our foreign intervention is counterproductive not only in Iraq but it increases the risk of more terrorism in Australia.

    Sadly the ALP, once again allows itself to be wedged

    In The Guardian yesterday Tom Switzer a long-time supporter of Tony Abbott said ‘It pains me to say it but Abbott has learned nothing about Iraq. He’s taken the Islamic State’s bait.

    See link to article below.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/03/it-pains-me-to-say-it-but-abbott-has-learned-nothing-about-iraq-hes-taken-the-islamic-states-bait

     

  • Stuart Harris. China is not seeking to break the rules of global order.

    Australia’s foreign policy, and notably its relations with the US and China, has been a mix of positives and negatives under the Coalition government, as was true of the previous Labor government.

    This reflects the lack of a broad strategic vision of Australia’s geographic realities and the evolving relationships involved.

    Former prime ministers, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke recognised the need for Australia to think strategically about future regional developments, and John Howard‘s thinking gradually moved in that direction. Such long term strategic thinking is more urgently needed today.

    The Asian region is changing, as are its regional dynamics. While the US is a Pacific power, it comes to Asia from outside. To complicate the picture, this is a region not only featuring China, but a China which is the largest trading partner with all Asian nations, including Australia. Our future relations with the region, in Northeast Asia and with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) particularly, will depend upon our relations with China as well as with the US.

    A coherent strategy needs to reflect the reality that we are linked to Asia from within the region. It needs to reflect the growing importance of China globally and to Australia, and to develop a political depth with that country similar to that with the US. And it will be increasingly difficult to continue separating economic and strategic issues (paralleling, as we do, the divide between engagers and confronters in US policy). Consequently, adapting historian Michael Howard’s injunction, we need greater understanding of China’s environment, history, and culture, including its political system; that understanding does not imply that we like that system, but that we are able to work effectively with it.

    The dominant and often one-sided Western perspective is not always helpful when judging whether China will be aggressive and expansionist, or whether it will live more or less peaceably with the rest of the world. We assume that terms like ‘international rules’, ‘global order’ and what constitutes ‘responsible behaviour’ are understood and accepted by all others. Yet for China, these terms have emerged from a different culture and historical experience. These differences in vision affect China’s foreign policy. Even so, despite obvious exceptions, such as human rights, in practice China is well integrated into the international system as we know it and largely complies with international rules – probably at least as well as other major powers. Despite criticism of China’s reluctance to lead internationally, that approach might suggest not just free-riding, but reluctance to challenge the existing global order.

    When China opened up under Deng Xiao-ping, it joined an international order that reflected a pluralistic view of the international community, that acknowledged differences in political and domestic value systems, and that pursued mutually acceptable global rules and geopolitical equilibrium. Then the common vision shifted and the membership bar was raised.

    Ultimately, a US led international system emerged that involved an agenda of good governance, ‘free’ markets and ‘democracy’ (usually just elections). These aimed to advance US security and its other interests. The objective of regime change under this agenda in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and perhaps Ukraine suggests we should be cautious about what we wish for. For China, in any case, it implies regime change, social instability, and the end of the Party/state.

    Of course, China has regional and global ambitions and China’s relative military and other capacities will grow, probably substantially. China wants a role that commands attention and respect from its neighbours, particularly in its ‘near abroad’, and we may not always like what it or others do. So a continued US presence in the region is critical; it needs, however, to manage relations between states rather than just pursue political change or impose views of complex issues that then become part of the problem.

    China feels internationally vulnerable and, as with the US, domestic nationalism influences its policies. Internally, China’s leaders fear fragmentation, instability and, after Bo Xilai, competition for power. China has major problems: corruption, inequalities, pollution, resource shortages, an aging population, and an economy that needs structural reform. Consequently, with domestic issues as its main priority, its foreign policies will remain largely defensive and reactive to external influences, rather than offensive and expansive. Moreover, it knows it needs stable relations with the US and its neighbours in order to sustain its development. It will seek changes to the rules by basically working within the existing framework.

    Obviously, maritime disputes are worrying but hardly central to Australia’s strategic interests. Sovereignty claims by all parties in the South China and East China Seas are unhelpful and pose serious risks of miscalculation. Outcomes that reflect resolution of sovereignty claims are unlikely. Our attention is understandably focused on China, but the historical context needs to be understood including China’s ‘missing out’ on territory in the 1960s/1970s regional ‘island grab’. Provocations and efforts to change the status quo are not limited to China or unconnected to the US pivot and the regionally divisive Trans Pacific Partnership.

    A US regional presence remains strategically important; our values, however, are often different, as at times are our vital interests, and we need to re-examine our concepts of regional order. There are considerable risks in Australia’s growing enmeshment in the US regional security system to where our security policy is increasingly a function of that of the US, and an independent Australian position difficult to maintain.

    These issues will become important in the future, possibly with long term potential dangers in adverse regional developments, notably potentially over Taiwan. US diplomatic management of such problems will remain critical, but history will treat unkindly any Australian political leader who, consciously or inadvertently, commits Australia to military conflict involving China without clear public support and a full parliamentary debate for which an explicit strategic assessment of Australia’s long term vital interests would be a prerequisite.

    Stuard Harris is emeritus professor in the Department O International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. 

    This article was also published by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific website: http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/

    – See more at: http://www.policyforum.net/playing-by-rules/#sthash.ad9r7c6b.dpuf

  • Ukraine: Watch This Space 

    UK Prime Minister David Cameron has announced his decision to send a contingent of 75 trainers to Ukraine as a demonstration of support for Kiev in its fight against Russian supported rebels in South Eastern Ukraine. The deployment will provide instruction in command procedures, tactical intelligence, battlefield first aid and logistics.

    (more…)

  • The frontier wars – best we forget.

     

    I have posted many blogs about our refusal to acknowledge the frontier wars,  when we suffered the largest death toll in war in our history in relation to our population at the time. In the SMH on February 12, see link below, Tim Flannery draws our attention to the valour of 52 indigenous people who were killed near Casterton, Victoria, in the 1840s. The victors write history! These heroes have been largely expunged from our history. There were no rewards for those who were defending their homelands in the battle known as ‘Fighting Hills’. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/we-shouldn8217t-forget-the-sacrifice-of-our-aboriginal-warriors-20150212-13bzib.html

  • Don’t arm Ukraine.

    In July last year, Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop were eager to commit Australian police and Australian troops to Ukraine in the aftermath of the shooting down of MH17 by Russian separatists. Their plan didn’t work out as they hoped.

    I have carried blogs by Richard Butler and Cavan Hogue about the geopolitical risks of NATO and the West expanding to the border of Russia.

    As the war in Ukraine is now escalating, there have been increasing calls within the US for the arming of the Ukraine. John Mearsheimer in the New York Times of February 8 presents a compelling case for not arming Ukraine. He urges that the best outcome would be a neutral Ukraine. For NY Times article see link below.  John Menadue

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/dont-arm-ukraine.html?_r=0

  • John Menadue. Fairness, Opportunity and Security – Filling the policy vacuum

    I sense that there is great public concern that both the government and opposition keep playing the political and personal game at the expense of informed public discussion of important policy issues.

    We have become concerned about the trustworthiness of our political, business and media elite. Insiders and vested interests are undermining the public interest. Money is unduly influencing political decisions. There is gridlock on important issues like climate change and taxation.

    After a near death experience Tony Abbott has said the he is open to new thinking and ways of governing. ‘Good government begins today’  Time will tell. Bill Shorten has said that 2015 will be the year of ideas. I hope so.

    In this blog over the next few months I will be posting a series of articles on important policy issues. I posted a three parter on health policy on January 27, 28 and 29.

    There will be range of contributors.Some  have contributed in the past to this blog

    Each of the policy articles will be about 2000 words. They will not be “pie in the sky’ but realistic, given our political and financial constraints.

    It is planned that these policy articles will be published in a book by ATF Press in October/November this year

    Policy areas to be canvassed

    Economic policy

    Fixing the budget

    Taxation

    Federalism

    Productivity

    Job creation and participation

    Foreign policy

    Security, both military and soft power.

    Health

     Development of our human capital in the fields of education, science, research and development and innovation.

    Transport and infrastructure

    Population/migration/refugees

    Welfare priorities

    Retirement incomes

    Indigenous affairs

    Communications and the Arts

    Environment and climate change

    Inequality

    Role of government including tackling corruption and bad behaviour

    Democratic renewal – the lack of trust in government and the hollowing out of our political parties.

    Terrorism and internal security whilst protecting of our freedoms

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Ships and Boats and Please Explains

    If the main aim of building ships in Australia for the Royal Australian Navy were to keep locals in work, then the South Australian-based Australian Submarine Corporation (ASC) would be a pretty good model. It spent around $400 million on salaries last year, about half its budget. If the aim, however, is to build on time, on budget, and to obtain value for money for Australian taxpayers, ASC would be a terrible model.

    South Australian spruiker Senator Nick Xenophon and others are on the warpath against competition from Japan, ahead of the long-delayed decision on supplying the next generation of submarines for the RAN. Xenophon thinks the government-owned ASC (formerly Australian Submarine Corporation) is the ticket. He claims the ASC-built Collins-class subs are now “very good” at what they do­­––proof that local know-how is perfectly able to meet the Navy’s future requirements.

    Defence Minister David Johnston intemperately (though not unreasonably) claimed last year that ASC couldn’t be trusted to “build a canoe”––and lost his job for saying so.

    Who is right?

    ASC exists to fulfill two major defence contracts: for the 6 Collins-class submarines currently (or at least sometimes) in service and the 3 Air Warfare Destroyers (AWD) now under construction.

    The company’s performance delivering and maintaining the Collins submarines was, until recently, woeful. The final report of the Coles Inquiry into the debacle, issued last year, said there had been “remarkable progress” in several areas, with reduced breakdowns and speedier maintenance. The Navy was pleased to say now that 2, and often 3, of its 6 subs were available to put to sea at any time. If that sounds less than spectacular, consider this: there were times after the Collins-class subs came into service when none was available to defend the country.

    The first subs ASC built were too noisy to avoid detection and so prone to engine failure due, among other things, to “poor design and manufacture”, it was felt in 1999 they would never meet the standard for military operations. Retrofits and redesigns have brought the subs up to scratch, but this laborious process (“ASC is a learning organisation” says the company’s annual report) has taken 27 years of a 35-year life of project, i.e. from contract-signing to when the subs will have to be replaced. The Navy began its search for a replacement submarine several years before the Collins class started delivering on its original promises.

    Now, if ASC is, at it says, a “learning organisation”, given the experience with the Collins project, one might expect it to do a lot better with the more recent AWD project. Unfortunately it has not. The first of the destroyers was due for delivery last December. The deadline came and went unfulfilled. The project is running 3 years late (for the 3rd ship) and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. In 2013-14 the project crawled from 70% complete to 73% complete. ASC admitted to “significant challenges” in the program. Once again, the government has had to devise a rescue plan for ASC in a bid to prevent another gap opening in the country’s defence capability. This is not the “old story” of the Collins debacle, that defenders of ASC would have us discount; it is the current state of affairs in the biggest naval project Australia has ever undertaken. Who would not wish that things were different, and we were able to sing the praises of an Australian success, but nothing is gained by hoodwinking public opinion with cheap, unsubstantiated claims of a “secret” Abbott-Abe deal to give the next submarine project to Japan.

    I am, of course, not privy to the discussions taking place, though I have written here before about the close interest shown by both Tony Abbott and the now former Defence Minister Johnston in Japan’s submarine capability and, therefore, I have no doubt that Canberra would be well disposed to such a result, if it happened. But this is a far cry from the uninformed, jingoistic claptrap that is overtaking the debate on radio talkback, etc.

    Here are some facts to consider.

    The Defence Department and the RAN began scouting for Australia’s next generation submarine in 2007 and continued the process under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments.

    One of the major lessons the Navy learnt from the selection process used for the Collins contract was that an open tender proved more open to political influence and fudged specifications than to public, or even departmental, scrutiny. The term “open tender” was a misnomer. European consortiums either joined the bidding with designs for “export only” submarines they had never ordered for their own navies or with designs that required significant modifications to meet Australian requirements. This flawed process greatly contributed to the project’s chronic problems.

    Navy and Defence decided that a better approach would be to survey what capabilities existed here and overseas to actually deliver to performance specifications that, on this occasion, would be defined more precisely than they were for the Collins project. They did not want to invest in another unpredictable and costly “learning curve”. Time went by, governments came and went, and by 2014, seven years into the study program, it became apparent that, at this rate, there was a risk the Collins-class subs would be obsolete and unserviceable before a replacement could be delivered––especially if a design were chosen that required major modifications and the fitting out of a completely new manufacturing operation.

    From the beginning, the Japanese were in the periscope sights of the RAN, because of the widely held opinion in international defence circles that their non-nuclear powered submarines are second to none. They are reliable and run almost noiselessly: two key requirements. Back when the Collins project was being tendered, Japan was not in the business of exporting military technology. Once that changed the Japanese automatically became front-runners. It did not take any “secret deal” to bring this about. The Sōryū-class diesel/electric submarine is the model being assessed. A sale to Australia––which could easily involve a major component of local manufacture and maintenance––would undoubtedly be a feather in the cap for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a proponent of a greater Japanese defence capability, but news reports this week that Japan’s Defence Ministry was thrown into confusion by the Abbott leadership challenge were sheer hyperbole, presumably intended to bolster conspiracy theorists like Xenophon and his ilk.

    It reminds me of the way the Japanese proposal for a Multifunction Polis in the 1980s was exploited by an ignorant commentariat––until the controversy, among other things, derailed the 1990 election campaign of Andrew Peacock (who fell for the “Japanese invasion” rhetoric). If the submarine project is swept up into the maelstrom of Liberal Party politics once more, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Labor and the Greens, etc., a rational decision-making process may prove to be impossible. Better to scrap the whole project if it means building subs that arrive late and incapable to a future conflict.

    Walter Hamilton is the author of “Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story” and “Serendipity City: Australia, Japan and the Multifunction Polis”.