Pearls and Irritations

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  • Douglas Newton. The Centenary of the Great War – and Anzac

    The Great War. What we fought for and why were peace initiatives resisted for so long.

    Many of those promoting the Anzac Centenary appear to believe that there are certain essentials the Australian people must learn about the Great War: that Australians fought exceedingly well; that they fought even better when led by Australians; that in fighting so well they gave birth to our national consciousness; that we owe them so much because they fought for our freedom; that in serving our country they displayed the values of the Anzac Spirit that define the Australian character – a fierce egalitarianism, contempt for privilege, democratic instincts, and mateship, that is, a generous solidarity inspiring a collective spirit, never shrinking from support for each other through thick and thin. Sadly, it must be said, many of those rhapsodising upon this Anzac Spirit show not the remotest faith in this kind of egalitarianism or solidarity in their public policy.

    Much of this may serve to distract the Australian people from deeply significant questions arising from our plunge into the Great War. How did Australia get into this catastrophe? For what objectives, precisely, did the Australian government commit our forces to the fighting? And why were they still fighting there in 1918?

    Some see the Anzac Centenary as a stand-tall moment. It is milked as an opportunity to tell see-how-great-we-are stories, and to raise our national self-esteem. Surely the centenary of a cataclysm such as the Great War, that took tens of millions of lives across the world, by acts of state policy, is not a moment to blow our own small trumpet. This is unworthy and provincial. It is the acts of state policy that led to and prolonged the disaster of war that should focus our attention, not just the courageous acts of one small fragment of the men caught up in the quagmire.

    What are the real lessons of the Great War, for Australians, and for all? That war is a blunt instrument, unleashing all manner of evil. That unqualified loyalty to big and powerful friends means being trapped in their misjudgements. That the war aims declared to the people, and the war aims for which wars are prolonged, are seldom the same thing. That war is never a simple choice between victory and defeat. That peace by negotiation is the live, innovative and often the most courageous alternative to gambling again and again with the blood of the young. That wars are so destructive that victory itself can be impotent, providing no lasting peace and no vindication for the mechanised killing.

    The articles linked below are an attempt to sketch out these neglected aspects of Anzac. What did we fight for? What opportunities for a negotiated peace were lost along the way? They are an attempt to interleave two real stories of Australia’s Great War that took place largely behind the scenes – the escalation of war aims by those to whom the lives of Australia’s men were entrusted, and the choices that were made to shun peace by negotiation and keep Australia’s men in the firing line. Those who perished there demand respect. True respect demands a deep inquiry into why they died.

    Douglas Newton. What we fought for from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916.

    Douglas Newton. What we fought for from Bullecourt to the Armistice 1917-1918.

    Douglas Newton.Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War from 1914-1916, Part 1.

    Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War from 1917-1918, Part 2.

  • John Thompson. Surgeon’s report shows the ineffectiveness of private health insurers to control health costs

    Private health insurer Medibank has worked with the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons to produce a report that shows enormous variation in fees charged by surgeons for similar procedures.

    The Surgical Variance Report for General Surgery reviewed thousands of procedures performed on Medibank members in eight common operations – gallbladder removal, gastric band procedures, bowel resection procedures, hernia procedures, gastroscopy and colonoscopy.

    The data shows that some surgeons working in private hospitals are charging 15 times the amount charged by their peers for the same procedure. For example, surgeons performing gastric sleeve operations for weight loss charged average private fees (in addition to what the insurer and Medicare covered) ranging from $231 in South Australia to $3593 in Queensland. The average fee in NSW was $3160 and in Victoria it was $1874. For gall bladder removals, fees charged ranged from $369 in Tasmania to $1166 in NSW. In Victoria, the average fee was $387.

    It is important to emphasise that fees in the Medibank/College report are those charged privately to patients after Medicare and Medibank have made their contribution to the cost of the patient’s treatment.

    The report also provided information on complication rates for these operations. These rates also varied very substantially. For example, complication rates for bowel resection procedures varied from 0 per 1,000 procedures for some surgeons, to 571 per 1,000 for others.

    President of the College, Professor David Watters said, “These reports will provide surgeons with information that may help them gain a better understanding of, and learn from, variations, for the benefit of the service they provide to their patients and the community,” he said.

    There are two important conclusions that arise from this work. First, it emphasises the lack of financial control on health costs when there is a reliance on private health insurance. In Australia, there are 33 private health insurers registered under the Private Health Insurance (Prudential Supervision) Act 2015. While Medibank’s initiative is to be welcomed, it illustrates the problem of a crowded and fragmented market where the numerous competing insurers are unable to act collectively to influence the suppliers of health services. A single insurer provides the opportunity to develop the necessary financial control on ever increasing costs of health services. As a national insurer, Medicare, is also a far more efficient and equitable operation than the 33 disparate insurers competing with each other, all with their substantial administrative and marketing costs. As Ian McAuley (University of Canberra) wrote in 2014, “Norway and Sweden remind us of a vision we have lost: the economic benefit of a strong, single national health insurer.

    The second conclusion from the report is derived from Professor Waters’ comment above. This report, Professor Waters states, is aimed at providing information to the supplier of the service, not the purchaser. For more effective financial control of these important services, the client should have the information on costs and performance of surgeons so that he/she can make a rational consumer’s decision on price and quality. As Medibank’s Chief Medical Officer Dr Linda Swan said at the release of the report: “Information sharing is key to improving the delivery of healthcare, and ultimately to improving patient outcomes.” Agreed, but it is important that the patient also shares the information. A single insurer could also perform this function more efficiently.

    John Thompson is an economist with experience in primary health.

     

     

     

     

  • Greg Wilesmith. Guantanomo Bay: Obama’s big failure.

    Good news on Gitmo. There are just 80 prisoners left in their cramped, high security cells in a small, far off, scrubby peninsula on Cuba.

    That’s about 160 fewer than when Barack Obama became president in early 2009 promising to close Guantanomo within a year.

    So not exactly Mission Accomplished! as President Bush trumpeted after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Obama’s presidential promise won’t be fulfilled and amounts to another big political failure.

    Having filmed at Guantanomo two years ago, under strict military censorship, for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program, reported by Lisa Millar, www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2014/s3991385.htm I’ve been keen to see what would happen to the prisoners, many of whom having been interrogated numerous times, were cleared for “transfer” (Pentagon code for release) years ago.

    The Yemenis have been dispatched to Saudi Arabia, where all have family connections. None were charged with any crime let alone attacking New York or Washington. All have called Guantanomo home since 2002.

    You’ll remember the shackled, shambling orange-suited inmates of Camp X-ray which proved such a US public relations disaster; bent over, sometimes hooded, being frog-marched along the wire.

    We were assured by Vice President Dick Cheney they were the “worst in the world”. Some were but the truth was that many just happened to be the wrong place at the wrong time.

    One of the more notorious of the men and boys swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the post 9/11 period – like many he says he was “sold” to the Americans by Pakistani police – and labelled an “enemy combatant” is Tariq Ba Odah. He was 23.

    Ba Odah, now 37, is notorious not for any alleged crime but for his extraordinary persistence as a Guantanomo hunger striker.

    He’s been refusing solid foods since 2007. Being strapped down twice a day and force fed by a tube up his nose seemingly failed to quench his spirit even when by last year he had lost close to half his normal body weight and was down to 36 kg.

    His lawyer Omar Farah quoted Ba Odah in an essay for Rolling Stone, saying, “My method of delivering my message is through hunger strike. You can cut me to pieces, but I will not break it. I will stop on one of two conditions: I die, or I am freed and allowed to return to my family.”

    One can only imagine Ba Odah’s feelings, now aged 36 and having been incarcerated for more than a third of his life.

    Along with the other former prisoners his confinement is not yet over. Saudi Arabia, waging a largely hidden but bloody insurrection, has a “rehabilitation” program for alleged jihadis and the Guantanomo 9 will have to enter it. A few months, maybe longer, but ultimately most will be free.

    The Saudis have taken their time; they were first approached close to a decade ago to take Yemeni prisoners, some who had been born in the Saudi kingdom or had been long term residents.

    Obama’s rhetoric on Guantanomo is familiar. And so again in February, this year, Obama launched a new effort to persuade Congress to close Guantanamo saying, “It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit…Guantanamo harms our partnerships with allies and other countries whose cooperation we need against terrorists.

    “Americans, we pride ourselves on being a beacon to other nations, a model of the rule of law.  But 15 years after 9/11 – 15 years after the worst terrorist attack in American history – we’re still having to defend the existence of a facility and a process where not a single verdict has been reached in those attacks – not a single one.” *

    Congress wasn’t convinced. For many Republicans and some Democrats, the political downside to allowing non-convicted “terrorists” to be relocated to mainland American prisons is too high.

    Or put it another way there’s more political kudos in proclaiming the dangers of bringing “terrorists” to maximum security prisons on the mainland than worrying about whether some innocent men languishing at Guantanomo will remain there indefinitely without trial – until they die.

    Of the 80 men left at Guantanomo the bulk are from Yemen. The US maintains that the civil war raging there, in which Saudi Arabia is an active participant, using US supplied weapons, makes it impossible to return them, particularly given the growing power base of AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula).

    And yet it’s vital to remember that of the remaining 80, 26 were cleared for release years ago. In any conventional US judicial system they would have been enjoyed years of freedom by now.

    Of the rest 49 are categorized as “forever” prisoners – labelled so dangerous they can’t be freed – and 10 are on trial before the stop/start military commissions held at the military base; which as Obama noted acerbically haven’t yet handed down a single verdict.

    These figures were compiled by the remarkable Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald who has been reporting Guantanomo intensively since January 11, 2002 when she watched the first 20 prisoners arriving.

    Without her constant probing over the past 14 years – and an outstanding commitment to the story by her newspaper – the military censorship cloaking Gitmo would have been much more effective.

    Rosenberg’s editor in 2002 asked her to cover the Guantanomo beat until it was over. It isn’t over.

    Greg Wilesmith is a freelance journalist and was an ABC foreign correspondent and producer.

     

  • Kim Williams. Fair use does not mean free: Copyright recommendations would crush Australian content

    As someone who has spent my life running organisations that take risks, invest billions and innovate to provide the best of local and international content to Australian consumers, reading the Productivity Commission’s draft report into our intellectual property arrangements was profoundly dispiriting.

    I cannot think of another recent report that so seriously misses the main drivers of its area of inquiry – namely innovation and the incentives to produce new work. At the same time, the report treats Australian creative content and its production with a disdain bordering on contempt, and that is surprising for any economic statement.

    The commission makes recommendations which would have such a deeply detrimental impact on the ability of film and TV makers, writers, artists and journalists to tell Australian yarns, and make a living doing so, as to be worthy only of rejection.

    Take the commission’s conclusions on what drives innovation. The draft report claims our intellectual property and copyright settings inhibit investment and innovation. Really? Most people who run businesses and invest money know that what really drives innovation is a clear operating framework which enables companies and entrepreneurs to manage their risk appetite and capital investment, as well as access to highly skilled people.

    In the creative landscape, the bedrock of production is copyright – the Copyright Act provides the critical framework for ensuring returns from investment.

    The Prime Minister recognised the drivers of innovation in a statement last year. He committed over $1 billion to ensure the right incentives to innovation were in place; to encourage risk-taking; and to promote science, maths and computing in schools. There was no mention of intellectual property in his statement, given there is already a clear protection framework in place.

    So, having spent considerable amounts of time answering the wrong question, the commission then demonstrates what can only be described as a breathtaking disregard for the creativity of Australians. It dismisses concerns that its recommendations would lead to less Australian content, with this response: “most new works consumed in Australia are sourced from overseas and their creation is unlikely to be responsive to the changes in Australia’s copyright (laws).” So, that encapsulates the commission’s thinking – American and British material will suffice and Australian original work doesn’t really count for zip.

    But make no mistake, if the commission’s recommendations to implement “fair use”, for instance, were implemented, there would be less Australian content on our screens, on our bookshelves (real and virtual), and in our schools and universities.

    “Fair use” is an American legal principle which would allow large enterprises to use copyright material for free, which, under Australian law, they currently have to pay for. PwC recently estimated that introducing “fair use” in Australia could result in a loss of GDP of more than $1 billion.

    PwC’s report (provided to the commission) outlined three reasons for this collapse. First, “fair use” would strip millions away from Australian storytellers and content creators because governments, companies and large education institutions who now pay to use content, would stop paying as much or stop paying at all.

    PwC examined what happened in Canada when similar changes were made in 2012. Universities and schools refused to pay for the educational content they used. This led to a 98 per cent reduction in licensing revenue,  the closure of many publishers and a loss of jobs. Oxford University Press stopped producing Canadian textbooks for schools.

    The Canadian Writers Union’s John Degan described the effect this way: “We are headed back to the bad old days of 40 or 50 years ago, when everything you read in Canadian schools was produced in the US or Britain.”

    Second, “fair use” would permanently lift legal costs in Australia. US copyright cases are almost five times the volume of cases in the UK, whose law is comparable to ours. Good for lawyers, bad for creators and consumers.

    Third, fair use would undermine the effective and fit-for-purpose licensing system that has evolved here allowing Australian teachers to share and copy almost every book, magazine, image or journal published in the world, with their students, for less than the cost of a single book each year. This fee is paid by school departments, not students.

    None of this means that we shouldn’t continue to update our Copyright Act. Industry-led reforms to the Copyright Act are already well advanced in an unprecedented collaboration between rights holders, libraries and education institutions. They deliver on a promise by the Attorney-General George Brandis to review the Act in the government’s first period in office.

    So let’s aim for sensible reform which balances the incentives and protections for creators with the rights of consumers to access wide ranging material on fair terms.

    But remember, fair does not equal free, and no one needs a manufactured revolution driven by armchair economists who want to blow up Australia’s content sector – as this disappointing report proposes.

    Kim Williams is chair of the Copyright Agency and Viscopy. He is a former CEO of NewsCorp Australia, FOXTEL, Fox Studios Australia, the Australian Film Commission, Southern Star Entertainment and Musica Viva Australia.

  • Michael Keating. The 2016-17 Budget. Part 1 of 2.

    The Turnbull Government’s Budget for 2016-17 reflects an essentially ‘steady as she goes’ fiscal strategy. Not that that is a fault – indeed it can be a virtue, especially when matched against the give-aways in other previous pre-election budgets.

    Furthermore, we could not have realistically expected any other sort of Budget, given the extent to which the Government had narrowed its options before Budget day. In addition, a policy of matching every new spending initiative by a saving, is bound to produce minimal change; not least because cutting existing programs typically generates more opposition than the support for the new initiatives. But that said there are a few interesting and useful initiatives in this Budget.

    First, the changes to superannuation go further than just about anybody expected. While the big super funds will not welcome the consequent reduction in the funds that they have to manage, the changes should be widely supported by all but the top 4 per cent of superannuants, as better targeting the tax concessions and improving equity. In particular, I welcome the changes that should help women with broken work patterns. I think, however, that it would have been better to have reduced the threshold for the increased 30% tax on superannuation contributions to $180,000 rather than the proposed $250,000 per annum; the lower $180,000 threshold would then correspond with the threshold for the maximum income tax bracket.

    Second, the other useful initiative is the new approach to assisting young unemployed people make the transition into employment. This represents a marked improvement on the Abbott Government’s harassment of these young people, as if their unemployment was purely their own personal fault. Of course, there are risks that the new approach might be exploited by unscrupulous employers – and that has happened in the past – but this approach does seem worth trying. My main concern is that governments tend to spread the funding too thinly with labour market programs, in favour of assisting more people with the limited funds available, but at the risk of dropping the quality of the assistance to the point where it loses effectiveness.

    Nevertheless, overall, and in stark contrast to the 2014 Budget, this Budget does seem to generally pass the test of ‘fairness’. Perhaps the biggest future concern for fairness is that the Government clearly intends to increase the fees paid by university students to cover an average of 50% of course costs, instead of the present average of 40% of course costs. So far as I am aware there is no evidence that the private benefit from a university education is as high as 50% of the course costs, in which case this change will be unfair and it will very likely particularly impact on enrolments by disadvantaged students.

    I also think that it would have been fairer if the Government had kept the deficit repair levy in place which affects the people in the top tax bracket. After all the deficit is as far as ever from being repaired, and lower income people have been called upon to make bigger sacrifices to help repair the deficit in the past, and they are not now going to get any relief.

    The major criticism of this Budget, however, is that it does not really represent any further progress towards achieving fiscal repair and a return to surplus. On the relatively optimistic Budget projections we are being promised that a surplus will be achieved by 2021. But we have heard that one before, and many have ceased to believe such projections.

    Of course, some will say why should we worry? Certainly Australian Government debt is not high. Even at its projected peak in 2017-18 it will still represent only 19.2 per cent of GDP, much less than half the ratio for the US. And as for the rating agencies they lost all credibility after their incredibly optimistic ratings leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, and they still seem happy to give the US Government a AAA rating.

    Instead, the real concern about continuing budget deficits is that they have already greatly reduced Australia’s capacity to respond to the next external shock to our economy. Furthermore, these deficits are continuing even after twenty-five years of uninterrupted economic growth in Australia. While on the other hand, the risks of an external shock are if anything increasing as the world economy continues to be highly volatile and uncertain, with the outlook for China – our most important trading partner – being perhaps especially problematic.

    Frankly Australia needs a more ambitious medium-term approach to Budget Repair. The Government, however, continues to proclaim that this repair must come from more restraint on the expenditure side, and rules out increases in taxation; even if this is achieved by reductions in tax concessions, which really are an alternative form of expenditure.

    The reality is that on the evidence in this Budget, this Government is running out of options to further reduce expenditure. The Government has made great virtue of its claim that since the 2015-16 MYEFO all policy decisions have been more than fully offset, resulting in a small surplus over the four years of $1.7 billion. But this claim is itself suspect. The claimed surplus of $1.7 billion over the next four years is dependent on a projected net surplus from policy decisions of $5.9 billion in the final year, 2019-20. In the other years, policy decisions have in fact added to the budget deficit, including as much as $3 billion in the forthcoming financial year. While the likelihood of the net $5.9 billion saving being achieved in the last year is highly problematic.

    In addition, this budget is continuing to factor in $13 billion of previous expenditure savings and $1.5 billion worth of revenue increases that have not passed the Parliament. Maybe that will change after the election, and maybe it won’t. In fact, the likelihood seems to be that following the election even if the Government is returned it will not have a majority in the Senate, in which case it really needs a better fiscal strategy to repair the Budget.

    Instead of continuing to remove funding from a lot of small programs, with a loss of services – especially cultural and welfare services – the Government needs to refocus on achieving improvements to the efficiency and effectiveness of the big spending areas such as education, health, infrastructure and defence (as discussed in my article “Fixing the Budget – Part Two” and published in Fairness, Opportunity and Security). But even if the rate of growth in the Forward Estimates for these expenditure functions were reduced by as much as a feasible two percentage points per annum, it is doubtful that would be enough to restore a Budget surplus equivalent to around 1 per cent of GDP which is the medium term target.

    Furthermore, this pre-election Budget strongly suggests that this Government does not envisage that the majority of Australians actually want smaller government. Thus the overall Budget outcome according to the Government’s own figuring is that, even in four years’ time, in 2019-20, total receipts will still represent 25.1 per cent of GDP and payments will represent 25.2 per cent of GDP – both higher than under Labor’s last year in office in 2012-13 when they were 23.0 and 24.1 per cent respectively.

    As the Balanced Budget Commission of experts, appointed by the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, found Australia has a revenue problem rather than just an expenditure problem. Furthermore, that Commission identified sufficient revenue options that had a reasonable chance of gaining majority support to play the major role in restoring the Budget to a satisfactory surplus (see my post 29 March 2016).

    In sum, sooner or later politicians will find that they have to talk about the revenue options if we want to maintain the present nature of our society and the social obligations that involves. And frankly the sooner that conversation begins the better. But unfortunately don’t expect that conversation to happen over the next two months of this election campaign.

     

  • Michael Keating. The Government’s Plan for Jobs and Growth. Part 2 of 2.

    On Tuesday night the Treasurer announced that this year’s Budget was like none other – this Budget represents the Government’s Plan for Jobs and Growth. Presumably the Government hopes that its Plan will represent such a compelling narrative that it can then sail to victory in the forthcoming election. Accordingly, in this article I propose to assess how the Government’s Plan measures up in terms of its probable impact on jobs and growth.

    As stated in the Budget the Government’s Plan for jobs and growth is based on:

    1. A ten year enterprise tax plan
    2. Continued investment in the national innovation and science program
    3. Securing an advanced local defence industry
    4. Opening up more export opportunities through trade agreements
    5. Its plan to get more than 100,000 young people into jobs.

    According to the Government’s own Budget forecasts, however, the growth in output over the next four years is expected to be relatively poor, and notwithstanding its Plan. In fact the forecast growth in GDP has been revised down yet again, and is now expected to continue growing by less than its potential in the next 2016-17 financial year. Indeed it is precisely because of this weak economic outlook, that the Reserve Bank took its decision on Budget Day to reduce interest rates to the lowest level ever for the cash rate of 1.75%. Of course, the Bank and the Government attributed the timing of this decision to the recent low inflation numbers, but those numbers only provided the opportunity to reduce interest rates. The need to reduce them was occasioned by the inadequate level of aggregate demand, and especially the poor rate of business investment in the economy.

    The good news, as the Government keeps reminding us, is that around 300,000 jobs have been created in the last year or so. But these new jobs are predominantly due to the very low rates of wage increase that have pertained in the last few years. Furthermore, according to the Budget these low rates are expected to continue, with nominal wages forecast to increase by only 2½ per cent and 2¾ per cent in the next two financial years, representing a forecast real annual increase in wage rates of only ½ per cent each year.

    No wonder employment is growing rapidly, but this has little to do with the Government’s strategy for growth and jobs. Rather what we are experiencing is how, following the reforms of the labour market by the Keating Government, the labour market is now much more flexible and how the price of labour is now much more responsive to economic conditions. But the counterpart of this success in creating jobs is that the rate of productivity increase has dropped to around only ½ per cent in each of the last two years, and is not expected to increase by much more in 2016-17.

    In that context, what is surprising and disappointing about this year’s Budget Statement on the Economic Outlook is that there is no section dealing with productivity, and this despite productivity having been at the centre of all discussion about economic reform for the past couple of decades.

    In addition to our poor productivity performance, what is also worrying about the economic outlook is that non-mining investment is projected in the Budget to continue to remain sluggish. To some extent both phenomena may be related. But this non-mining investment is precisely the area that one would expect the Government’s Plan and especially its innovation agenda to have an impact on if that Plan is to succeed.

    So what is the problem with the Government’s Plan, that its own forecasts do not seem to provide much evidence that it will be successful?

    First, one would have to be extremely sceptical about the claim that ‘the tax and superannuation plan can be expected to lift the level of GDP by just over one percent in the long term’. Frankly it is difficult to see how this claim could be modelled given the shortage of empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is most curious that this modelling was not done by the Treasury, but by private consultants, who too often assume what they have to prove. Perhaps it is therefore no accident that it is still not possible to find out how this modelling was done. But what we do know is that whenever the company tax rate has been changed, it has never made a perceptible difference to investment, either here in Australia, or anywhere else. And even if we were to accept this dubious self-described “modelling”, a one percent difference over twenty years is next to imperceptible, and Australia needs a much faster pick-up in non-mining investment than that.

    Instead the required pickup in investment will mainly depend upon the demand for each firm’s products. The profit share and the rate of return on investment is high enough, but the lack of demand is why so many firms are engaging in share buy-backs and acquisitions of existing assets, rather than expanding through new investments to create new assets. In this regard a credible path to accelerate the restoration of a sustainable budget surplus would make more difference than these tax cuts. A Budget surplus would reduce the relatively high real interest rates in Australia and would probably also lead to some further reduction in the exchange rate over time. Therefore the ten-year funding for the tax plan should be progressively re-deployed to bring the Budget back into surplus quicker.

    Second, there is the issue of what can realistically be expected from the innovation and science package. The most important elements of this package aim to improve:

    1. the collaboration between industry and researchers which according to an OECD study is worse in Australia than in any other advanced economy, and
    2. Australian business attitudes to risk and experimentation, and the incentives for early stage investment in start-ups.

    These are worthy aims, but how much difference can government make, especially when the funding largely comes from a re-arrangement of existing programs, and overall the funding has been cut for business assistance, and cut significantly.

    The third leg of the Plan is the support for an advanced local defence industry. Readers of this blog will have seen previous articles querying the suitability of the submarines to meet our defence needs and their cost. (The mistaken decision on submarines and A more efficient submarine solution.)  In brief, building the wrong boats at a cost at least a third higher than purchasing them off the shelf, is not the future for a competitive manufacturing industry. Australia does need to, and I believe can, have a future in advanced manufacturing which produces high value added products based on technological leadership. On the evidence, however, building these submarines in Australia does not meet these criteria and cannot be expected to ensure our industrial future.

    The other legs of the Government’s Plan identified above – opening up exports through trade agreements and the plan to get 100,000 young people – are also worthy endeavours, but again cannot realistically be expected to have a large impact on the economy as a whole.

    Instead having a comparative advantage in skills is the most critical element if Australia wants to pursue high value added industries based on technological leadership. The Prime Minister’s Innovation Statement did in fact recognise the importance of skills, but unfortunately his words haven’t been matched by action. Instead the funding for education and training, along with research, has been cut.

    A second critical element in improving Australia’s comparative advantage in high value industries is to make better use of the skills that are available. This is also the key to enhancing future productivity growth. But unfortunately there is considerable evidence that most firms in Australia are not at the frontier of best practice when it comes to making the best use of the skills of their workforce. What is needed is a renewed management focus on achieving improvements in the organisation of work, a principle source of innovation, and less focus on cost cutting, which at worst can lead to lower productivity.

    Closely related to this second element, and its focus on improving the organisation of work, is the scope to improve the effectiveness of education and health services, and consequently their productivity, by re-organising how they are delivered. This means breaking down some of the silos, developing teams, and particularly in the case of health it will require changes in the payments systems and consequent incentive structures.

    Finally, a good plan for jobs and growth would require much more carefully targeted infrastructure investment, based on the introduction of proper pricing signals and proper evaluation. While the use of infrastructure continues for the most part to be free, we should not be surprised if there is over-demand. Instead in future infrastructure investment (which is a huge drain on the Budget) should be guided by what will deliver the greatest economic returns, having regard to the value that users are prepared to pay for, and not in response to political whims.

    In sum, one can applaud the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for innovation and his efforts to encourage the embrace of new technology. However, the agenda for jobs and growth needs to broadened as there is much more to do, and the funding is inadequate to support many of what the Prime Minister himself has identified as priorities.

     

     

  • Jon Stanford. French submarines and the East and South China Seas. – why?

    A response to Richard Broinowski. 

    While the government might emphasise the roles for the new submarine that may be regarded as defensive – “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” – Richard Broinowski ignores perhaps the most important role, namely power projection in the East and South China Seas.

    This role was perhaps most graphically illustrated the Rudd government’s 2009 White Paper, which first made the case for 12 powerful new submarines. Rather extraordinarily, that White Paper mooted the possibility of unilateral action by Australia against a ‘major adversary’:

    “But we do assume that, except in the case of nuclear attack, Australia has to provide for its own local defence needs without relying on the combat forces of other countries. The Government considered such contingencies because although they are unlikely, they are not so remote as to be beyond contemplation. …In such circumstances, in order to defend ourselves we might also have to selectively project military power beyond the primary operational environment described in this White Paper, for instance in maritime Southeast Asia.” (Page 65)

    Lest there be any doubt, the 2009 White Paper (Page 59) suggested that “we will use strategic strike if we have to”. (Page 59) It stated that:

    “The Government places a priority on broadening our strategic strike options, which will occur through the acquisition of maritime-based land-attack cruise missiles. These missiles will be fitted to the AWD, Future Frigate and Future Submarine. …The incorporation of a land-attack cruise missile capability will be integral to the design and construction of the Future Frigate and Future Submarine.” (Pages 70 and 81.)

    Although the 2016 White Paper dropped all references to strategic strike, this does not mean that the aspiration has been discarded. Certainly, the requirement for 12 powerful, long range submarines has not changed since 2009. This is not the first time that Australia’s defence strategy has required the acquisition of a unique military platform. In 1963, the Menzies government ordered a special version of the American F-111 aircraft with the range extended so as to allow it to reach Jakarta.

    In any case, it seems clear that one of the reasons that Australia requires a unique conventional submarine is so that the RAN could undertake operations that most navies would leave to nuclear submarines, namely power projection against a ‘major adversary’ in contested waters far from home. For example, Rear Admiral Ray Griggs, former Chief of Navy (2011-14), defined the most significant operational task for the future submarine as “sinking hostile ships and submarines” and said that the area of most interest is the South China Sea. [1] Also, the new submarine will have the ability to launch either American or French cruise missiles through its torpedo tubes.

    It is difficult to build a logical strategic case for the acquisition of twelve large submarines with a very long range unless this power projection role plays a central part. Yet, as Australian Strategic Policy Institute has pointed out, it is not clear that the Americans would welcome Australian submarines playing such a role in the case of a conflict in which we were part of a US-led coalition. We can only hope that any Australian aspirations to take on a ‘major adversary’ unilaterally have, like a former sabre-rattling American general, “simply faded away”.

    [1] Peter Layton (2015), “Australia’s next submarine – will it be the Soryu”, Defence Today, Vol 11, No 4, page 8.

  • Alison Broinowski. Who decides when we go to war?

     Setbacks for democratic reform of war powers.

    Having taken one step forward, Australia’s major allies have now taken two steps back from reform of their war powers.

    In the UK, the Defence Minister has set aside years of bipartisan promises of legislation that would require British governments to consult the Parliament before committing forces to war, and has rejected what he now calls this ‘artificial’ constraint. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/18/ministers-abandon-plan-war-powers-law-mps-troops

    Prime Minister Gordon Brown sought legislation to bring to an end the exercise of the war powers by a prime minister under executive privilege. He hoped to transfer the decision for war to the Parliament, but abandoned the attempt in 2007. A bipartisan committee secured support of both houses in 2011 to enshrine in legislation the convention of executive consultation with MPs before committing armed force. Having asserted, in Opposition in 2006, that public trust depended upon MPs having the final say in troop deployments, David Cameron in government allowed the initiative to drift, but his plan to send RAF planes to Syria was defeated in the Commons in 2013. Cameron then secured a majority in favour of a similar deployment this year. Cameron has now reversed himself and rejected the prospect of legislation to change the war powers, even though the convention that governments should consult Parliament apparently remains in place.

    In the US, following several attempts to revise the 1973 War Powers Act, President Obama requested Congress in February 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/us/obama-war-authorization-congress.html?_r=0) to authorise him to dispatch forces against Islamic State, and to repeal the 2002 authorisation for President G.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He offered to limit the new deployment to three years, and to restrict ground combat to Special Forces. The measure was opposed by some Democrats and rejected. Obama subsequently sent US planes and troops to Iraq and Syria regardless, relying upon the authority granted by Congress in 2001 to his predecessor to fight Al Qaeda, which remains law. Then, in January 2016, in Obama’s final year as president, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican majority leader, introduced a Bill for the ‘Authorisation for Use of Military Force’, for which Obama had signed an executive order in September 2015. If it passes, the Act will take effect in August 2016. What the Bill appears to seek is virtually unlimited power for the President to deploy US ground forces anywhere in the world and for any length of time, including in the United States, without having to provide legal or strategic justifications to Congress.

    These US and UK developments set a dangerous example for Australia, where politicians have in recent years begun to see the risks of allowing ‘captain’s picks’ to decide the dispatch of Australian forces to war. When democratic processes are bypassed, the restraints of international and domestic legality are overridden. When accountability for war and its outcomes is not shared with the people’s representatives, the executive can do as it pleases, can withhold from the public the details of what is being done in their name, and can repeat its past errors with impunity.

    ‘Australian governments’, historian Henry Reynolds has recently written, ‘find it easy to go to war’ (Unnecessary Wars, 2016: 238). Reynolds calls Iraq an episode of military adventurism for which Australian leaders suffered no opprobrium nor inquiry; made no public expression of regret; and showed no sense of culpability or responsibility. ‘Calls for a formal investigation into the circumstances of Australia’s entry into the Iraq war,’ he adds, ‘have met with official silence’. We and many others live with the consequences of the Iraq disaster, and the prospect that our governments may repeat it.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Alison Broinowski. Losing ‘our’ Uruzgan.

    Most Australians live in cities where the only newspapers are owned by Murdoch. So unless they found Fairfax on line, they were spared the sorrowful report on 3 May that Afghan government troops have pulled out of more ‘strongholds’ in Uruzgan province. http://www.smh.com.au/world/australian-troops-fought-and-died-in-uruzgan-now-afghan-troops-are-pulling-back-20160302-gn7z1i.html To the surprise of no-one who read it, Taliban are back.

    The withdrawal, Reuters reported mournfully, followed ‘many years of work and much blood shed by Australian troops to maintain peace and stability in the province, before the last Australians left in 2014’. After Australians spent thirteen years in Tarin Kowt, 41 died, and many more were injured, the Afghan authorities have made ‘a tactical decision to deploy forces more effectively’. So many Afghan soldiers and police have deserted or been killed, they say, that the province is short of its ‘assigned strength’. (One thing they appear to have learnt from years of US/NATO training is Western management-speak).

    The sombre announcement stirred barely a ripple of interest in Australia, for three possible reasons.

    First, Australia is over Afghanistan. Only a fortnight ago those at Anzac day services swore not to forget our past wars, which include several egregious disasters, but we do forget them. Many of us forget, for example, that Australia has not declared or won a war since 1945, unless East Timor and Gulf War I count as victories. Since well before Federation, Australians have habitually and repeatedly gone to fight in distant countries, which are then forgotten as we prepare for the next one. As Henry Reynolds says in his new book Unnecessary Wars (2016), most Australians don’t ask why we fought or what resulted, only how we fought, as if war was a game of football.

    Second, Afghanistan can’t be occupied. The British learned this to their cost in the Afghan wars of 1839-42 (‘Auckland’s folly’), 1878-80, and 1919, after which the rulers in Kabul took control of their country. The USSR fell into the Afghan quagmire in 1979 and was forced to withdraw ten years later by the United States’ proxies, the Mujahideen and the Taliban. In 2001 America attacked Afghanistan in revenge for the 9/11 attacks (in which no Afghan took part). The invasion made even less sense after Osama bin Laden fled al-Qaeda’s Afghan headquarters and was allowed to escape to Pakistan. Iraq was top on Bush’s list of target countries: Afghanistan was merely low-hanging fruit on the way to the invasion. Starting as a counter-terrorist war, the conflict in Afghanistan became a counter-insurgency, in which the only local support the US/NATO could expect for their objectives was what money could buy, and only for as long as they kept paying.

    Third, Uruzgan is not Australia’s province. It can no more be claimed as uniquely Australian than Nui Dat or Kapyong, the Kokoda track or Gallipoli could. As the junior ally of Britain and the United States, our troops have always gone where they tell us to go, fought who they tell us to fight, and left when they leave (with the honourable exceptions of Curtin bringing Australian forces back to defend Australia in 1942 and Whitlam pulling them out of Vietnam in 1972). Uruzgan meant no more to Australia than it did to our Netherlands predecessors there, who gave it up as a bad job. Australia was stuck in Uruzgan at the United States’ pleasure, as a consequence of John Howard’s unilateral globalisation of the Anzus Treaty.

    If anything can be learned from the current collapse of ‘strongpoints’ in Uruzgan, it is that invasion rarely defeats insurgency, that neither invasion nor occupation can last forever, and that Western invasion of Islamic countries attracts Muslim hostility like a magnet. Australia, learning nothing from Vietnam, repeated its errors by invading Iraq in 2003 and again in 2015, and by bombing Syria in 2015-6. The sooner the decision to commit Australian forces to these futile wars is taken out of the hands of an ill-advised prime minister, the better.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Richard Broinowski. French submarines for RAN – Why?

     

    The 2016 Defence White paper asserts that Australia’s future acquisition of 12 French submarines costing around $50 billion is the largest defence procurement program in Australia’s history. The first vessel is to be delivered ‘in the early 2030s’, the twelfth in ‘the 2040s or 2050s’. They are said to be for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, not only in Australia’s maritime zones, but in our maritime approaches and further afield. They are to be ‘regionally superior, with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’.

    No doubt the boffins in Defence put much expert thought into submarine selection, but given their enormous cost at a time of financial stringency, we groundlings are entitled to candid and detailed explanations about the choice of these vessels and the uses to which they will be put.

    First, why French? Apart from its small fleet of nuclear-powered and armed ballistic missile submarines, France operates six attack submarines, currently being phased out and replaced by the Barracuda class boats also being chosen by Australia. But compared to the submarine industries in Japan and Germany, France’s is small and relatively inexperienced. Japan began its submarine industry in 1904 and its main factories at Mitsubishi and Kawasaki have designed and built a huge variety ever since. Both Japan and Germany made enormous technical strides in submarine design during World War Two when France was occupied by Germany. German submarine technology has an equally long history. Its Dolphin-class attack boats currently built by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and used by the German and Israeli navies are just as sophisticated as the Sōryūs.

    One suspicion worth ventilating here: Direction des Construction Navales Services (DCNS) that makes Barracudas at Cherbourg, predominantly builds nuclear-propelled submarines. Is the Australian government, which favours an international spent fuel nuclear dump in South Australia, surreptitiously planning to widen Australia’s nuclear industry by dropping nuclear power plants into its Barracudas at some later stage of their development? How would Australian punters feel about that?

    Second question: precisely how will our French boats be ‘regionally superior’? Compared to which other fleets? A cursory look at Jane’s Fighting Ships shows that a dozen Royal Australian Navy Barracudas won’t hold a candle in numbers to 15 Korean, 18 Japanese, an unknown number of Russian and nearly 60 Chinese diesel electric boats currently operating in the Western Pacific, let alone new ones constantly being built and added to these nations’ fleets.

    What about local fleets? Indonesia has had a submarine force since 1960. Its current fleet comprises five attack submarines with five more being planned. Singapore has two Swedish Vastergotland boats with more on order. Malaysia has two French-built Scorpene class boats based at Kota Kinabalu. Thailand is planning to acquire two German boats. More potent than any of these, Vietnam plans to take delivery of six Russian Kilo-class submarines between 2013 and 2020. The Chinese have considerable experience with these boats, and will be very concerned if the Vietnamese manage to operate them competently.

    These acquisitions do not represent a flat-out arms race, but add a sudden and significant new maritime sea-denial capability to littoral states in the South China Sea. Inevitably, these states will also acquire anti-submarine warfare counter measures, such as surface ships equipped with helicoptors, drones, sonars, mines and depth charges. The area will suddenly becomes a very crowded space indeed.

    According to the 2016 Defence White Paper, the Australian government hopes to be able to operate its Barracudas in these contested waters ‘with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’. But, my third question: why should we be interoperable with the US alone? Our submarines won’t even be available for deployment for another decade and by then may not be regionally superior. And is interoperability what Washington wants? Radical thought though it may seem, wouldn’t it be more productive for us to operate our boats in cooperation with those of Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia? After all, their desire for a ‘rules based’ maritime environment is geographically more urgent than the perceived needs of a great power which is finding itself manoeuvred out of its customary position as top dog in the western Pacific.

    A footnote on Japan’s failed bid to sell us Sōryū submarines. On 16 April 2016, the Japanese Ambassador hosted a reception in Sydney for crews of three MSDF ships which had just engaged in exercises with RAN ships. One of them was Hakuryu, a Sōryū submarine. Amid speeches and toasts, Australian and Japanese guests were aglow with goodwill and the optimistic expectation that the imminent announcement of Australia’s next submarines would be for Sōryūs. In his short speech, Harukyu’s skipper said this was the first visit by a Japanese submarine to Sydney since 1942. There were quiet smiles at his unintended solecism. A photograph of Hakuryu heading home through Sydney Heads the next day coincided with newspaper headlines that France, not Japan, had secured the bid. The poignancy of the situation was palpable, and those of us who have had a long association with Japan felt it. The bilateral relationship is strong enough to withstand the decision, but the healing will take some time.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico. He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW. 

  • Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War: from 1917 to 1918. Part 2.

    During 1917-1918, the Australian divisions in France endured casualties far worse than at Gallipoli. There were huge losses.[1] New evidence shows that ‘four out of five’ of the AIF who survived were affected by disability of some kind.[2] Yet, for contemporary Australians, it is battle-honours that leap to mind, especially Villers-Bretonneux. This is scarcely surprising, considering the money being spent.

    The lesson hammered home in the Anzac centenary is quite simple: war is a bad but necessary thing – so it is just as well that Australians are so good at it. This is to keep Australians locked in a kind of protracted adolescence with regard to war.

    Missing almost completely from speeches and from many books on Australia’s Great War is the history of alternatives to the appalling loss of life. 

    In fact, from 1917 to 1918, across Europe there were rising popular pressures to revise war aims, to democratise, and to resolve the war – by negotiation. The war was kept going only by authoritarianism, propaganda, and censorship. Promising opportunities to end the cataclysm were stifled.[3] 

    1. Emperor Karl’s peace initiatives (December 1916-June 1917)

    Following the death of Franz Josef in November 1916, the new Austrian Emperor, Karl, pressed for peace. He used his French brother-in-law, Prince Sixte de Bourbon, in secret negotiations with France. In March 1917, Karl accepted the restoration of Serbia and Belgium, and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France. Lloyd George and French premier Ribot were interested, but the Italians hostile, fearing that territory promised in the Treaty of London of 1915 might be sacrificed. The Italians stonewalled.

    1. Anglo-German negotiations on POWs (June-July 1917)

    A British delegation, led by Lord Newton, negotiated with a German delegation, at The Hague. British diplomats and politicians opposed the extension of these talks from POWs to peace. 

    1. Stockholm Socialist Conference proposal (May-August 1917)

    Planned by Scandinavian and Dutch socialists, a conference for European socialists was promoted by the new Russian government. They hoped to hammer out a compromise peace. The USA, France, and Britain sabotaged the plan by refusing passports to their socialist and labour representatives. 

    1. Russian proposal for an Inter-Allied Conference (May-June 1917)

    Russian Foreign Minister Tereshchenko proposed a conference to revise war aims and prepare for negotiations. The Entente and the USA dragged their feet, then ignored the proposal, following the failure of the Russian offensive of July 1917.

    1. Morgenthau Mission (July 1917).

    Henry Morgenthau, the ex-US Ambassador to Turkey, undertook a mission to test a negotiated peace with the Ottomans. In Gibraltar, he met with a British mission. It dissuaded Morgenthau from continuing, arguing that any peace was impossible without gains for the Armenians, the Arabs, and British control of Palestine (a prospective homeland for the Jews). 

    1. Reichstag Peace Resolution (July 1917)

    The Reichstag’s Centre-Left majority pronounced in favour of a non-annexationist peace guaranteed by a League of Nations. This was scorned by the Entente nations. Attempts to mount matching resolutions were defeated in the parliaments. The western allies made no coherent response to this breakthrough by the future Weimar Coalition, favouring peace and democratisation. 

    1. Papal Peace Note (August 1917)

    Benedict XV proposed a territorial settlement close to the status quo before the war, plus a League of Nations and disarmament. Wilson dismissed the note, bizarrely calling on the German people to revolt. The Entente powers hid behind his answer and made no reply. Chancellor Michaelis then spoiled the effort, refusing a public commitment to Belgian independence. Private assurances were not revealed.

    1. Armand-Revertera talks, Switzerland (7, 22 August 1917)

    These French-Austrian talks showed Austria ready to moderate terms; this prompted the Kühlmann offer. 

    1. Kühlmann Peace Feeler (September-October 1917)

    German foreign minister Kühlmann privately contacted both the British and French. The deal was for a territorial compromise: the restoration of Belgium in return for western concessions: territorial integrity for Germany and Austria-Hungary, colonies, and a disavowal of commercial war. The plan was weakened by French political infighting. Kühlmann then dodged and weaved, vowing to keep Alsace-Lorraine (9 Oct.), and Lloyd George announced unequivocal support for France (11 Oct.). 

    1. The Lansdowne ‘Peace Letter’ to the Daily Telegraph (29 November 1917)

    Lord Lansdowne went public, pleading for war aims revision in the Daily Telegraph. The ‘knock-out blow’ press rubbished him. The government cut him adrift. The USA failed to support him.

    1. British-Austrian talks, Switzerland: Smuts-Mensdorff (18-19 December 1917) and Kerr-Skrzynski (March 1918)

    British secret talks luring Austria-Hungary away from Germany, while avoiding general peace – failed. 

    1. Brest-Litovsk talks (December 1917-January 1918)

    Lenin’s new Bolshevik-led Russian government issued a six-point program for a general peace in December 1917. The Germans, under Kühlmann, made an offer accepting a non-annexationist peace. The Allies censored all news of these approaches for a general peace. Fearing domestic repercussions, the Allies rejected peace brokered by socialists. 

    1. Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ and ‘Four Principles’ speeches and the Central Powers replies (January-February 1918)

    Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points Address’ (8 Jan.) marked a significant moderation. Promising public speeches followed from Austrian and German leaders, Czernin and Hertling. Lloyd George and Clemenceau sabotaged this with a belligerent statement, rejecting all negotiations, at Versailles on 4 February 1918.

    1. Archbishop Söderblom’s international Christian conference, Sweden, (December 1917 and February 1918).

    Some British Christians pressed for acceptance of Swedish Archbishop Söderblom’s plan for church leaders to discuss peace in Uppsala in December 1917. But most Anglican bishops opposed the meeting. Söderblom called a second conference for February 1918. Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, warned that British delegates would not be given passports.


    Reflections at Villers-Bretonneux

    The Tasmanian-born Radical MP, Leonard Outhwaite, warned the House of Commons in February 1916 what a disaster it would be ‘to hoist the flag of victory over an international graveyard.’[4] And so it was. Visitors to Villers-Bretonneux will reflect upon the dead – German, British, and Australian. We should reflect also upon the many lost opportunities to make peace, before these men were ordered to turn the machines of industrialised slaughter upon each other.

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that 10,738 missing Australian servicemen are commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial. http://www.cwgc.org/find-a-cemetery/cemetery/93000/VILLERS-BRETONNEUX%20MEMORIAL

    [2] See David Noonan, Those We Forget: Recounting Australian Casualties of the First World War (Melbourne, 2014), 194. ‘Of the total of 255,800 men [of the AIF] who survived the war, some 206,500 were either discharged medically unfit (130,500) or applied for pension assistance (76,000) before they turned sixty.’

    [3] For sources on the search for a negotiated peace in 1917-18, in addition to those cited in an earlier post, see Rex Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February-October 1917 (Stanford, 1969), V. H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1971), Arno J. Mayer, The Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917-1918 (New York, 1979), F. L. Carsten, War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (London, 1982), David Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution: International Socialism at the Crossroads (London, 1986,) David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1991), Daryl Le Cornu, ‘Bright Hope: British Radical Publicists, American Intervention, and the Prospects of a Negotiated Peace, 1917’, unpublished PhD thesis (Western Sydney University, 2005): http://researchdirect.uws.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:801

    For German sources see Wilhelm Ribhegge, Frieden für Europa: Die Politik der deutschen Reichstagstagsmehrheit, 1917-18 (Essen, 1998) and the major document collections assembled by Wolfgang Steglich.

    [4] R. L. Outhwaite, HC Deb 23 February 1916 vol 80 c773 (23 Feb. 1916).

  • John Menadue. Are Conservatives better economic managers?

    According to opinion polls the public clearly believe that Conservatives are better economic managers. Like other Conservative leaders, Malcolm Turnbull keeps asserting that this is so.  Tonight in the budget, Scott Morrison will probably tell us about the importance of growth and jobs and that the Coalition can deliver in this area but Labor cannot.

    But the evidence does not support the view that the Conservatives are better economic managers.

    In this blog on 20 April 2016, Ian McAuley discussed this issue in ‘Are Conservatives better economic managers?‘  Amongst other things, Ian McAuley pointed out that over the last 50 years we have had 17 Federal Treasurers and that only two have been awarded the coveted Euromoney ‘Finance Minister of the Year Award’.  They were both Labor Treasurers: Keating and Swan.  The former received this award for leading major economic reform in Australia in the 1980s and early 1990s. The latter received the award because of his handling of the global financial crisis.

    In The Guardian on 2 May 2016, economist Stephen Koukoulas asserts that ‘Labor’s economic record is better than the Coalition’s‘. Koukoulas points out that

    ‘in terms of jobs and growth, the ABS data show that average quarterly GDP growth and average monthly increases in employment are stronger when Labor has been in government compared with the Coalition. … GDP and employment growth both rise at a faster pace when Labor is in government.’

    I will be posting additional articles on this issue ‘are Conservatives better economic managers?’

  • Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War: from 1914 to 1916. Part 1

    A big centenary is approaching: the battle of Villers-Bretonneux, April 1918. Right now $93.2 million is being spent on the battle site to build the Sir John Monash Centre, ready for Anzac Day 2018.[1] Villers-Bretonneux is irresistible. It simplifies everything: German invaders, liberating Australians, grateful French. But it will provide a mere pinhole on the war, obscuring the big picture.

    No one at the opening ceremony is likely to ask: Why were millions of men, including Australians, still struggling on the Western Front in April 1918?

    The centre is likely to teach one lesson: the war was awful, but a dire necessity. Our political leaders frequently say so. On Anzac Day 2014 Prime Minister Abbott asked rhetorically, ‘But what was the alternative, in Britain’s time of need, and when Europe was at risk from Prussian militarism?’[2]

    The governing assumption clearly is that there was never an alternative to the carnage. In fact, there were many lost opportunities for a negotiated peace.[3] 

    1. Woodrow Wilson’s deathbed cable (4 August 1914)

    On 4 August 1914, US President Woodrow Wilson, from his wife’s deathbed, cabled all the major belligerents, offering to take the Balkan dispute to The Hague. All made excuses, protested their innocence, railed against the enemy, and pretended war was irrevocable.

    1. Danish initiatives 1914-15

    The Danes began shuttle diplomacy in late 1914 between Berlin and St Petersburg, seeking a compromise peace. Loyal to the Pact of London (September 1914), Tsar Nicholas slammed the door.

    1. Ambassadorial mediation, Washington (September-December 1914)

    In September 1914, prompted by German Ambassador von Bernstorff, William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State, launched British-French-German ambassadorial talks in Washington. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was negotiating to bring Italy, Greece, and Rumania into the war, and to give the Straits to Russia in order to keep her in the war, closed the talks down. 

    1. Christmas truce (December 1914)

    Inspired by Pope Benedict XV’s suggestion (supported in the US Senate), soldiers on the Western Front began a spontaneous truce on Christmas Eve. Horrified, the Entente was careful to include ‘Article 15’ in the Treaty of London (April 1915), agreeing to shut down all Vatican peace diplomacy. 

    1. The first Colonel House Mission (January-May 1915)

    House travelled to Europe as special US emissary. He found both sides coy on disclosing war aims. US proposals for a simultaneous end to both German submarine warfare and the British blockade of Germany were then derailed by the Lusitania crisis. 

    1. The International Congress of Women, The Hague (April-May 1915).

    Female suffragists met to promote the liberal internationalist alternative to the bloodshed: neutral mediation, a diplomatic settlement, and a new rules-based order with stronger international institutions. This boosted new like-minded pressure groups, the League of Nations Society in Britain, the Dutch-sponsored Central Organisation for a Durable Peace, the League for a New Fatherland in Germany, and the League to Enforce Peace in the USA. 

    1. The Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation (1915 to 1917)

    The American peace movement urged America to lead neutral mediation. Wilson was reluctant, preferring private diplomacy. US peace activists then set-up the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation in Stockholm in February 1916 and later at The Hague. There were successes: a delegation to Berlin persuaded German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to announce Germany’s acceptance of international arbitration and a League of Nations on 9 November 1916. 

    1. The second House Mission (January-February 1916)

    House encouraged both sides to moderate war aims and compromise. But London and Berlin preferred to gamble on coming battles (Verdun and the Somme). House and Grey did sign a memorandum: Grey agreed to invite US arbitration at a favourable moment; House agreed that, if Germany refused a reasonable settlement, the USA would ‘probably’ enter the war. Grey refused to initiate US mediation. 

    1. Wilson’s speech to the US League to Enforce Peace (27 May 1916)

    Wilson committed the USA to enter a League of Nations, based on collective security, thus offering the ‘guarantees of security’ all claimed to be fighting for. Responses were cool.

    1. Emily Hobhouse’s ‘peace mission’ (June 1916)

    Emily Hobhouse journeyed to Berlin from Switzerland, and obtained an interview with von Jagow, German Foreign Minister. He declared a readiness to respond to a peace offer from Britain. Grey refused to see Hobhouse on her return to Britain. 

    1. Asquith Cabinet discussions and Lansdowne Memoranda (November 1916)

    In September, British Prime Minister Asquith invited his Cabinet to reconsider war aims. Lloyd George told the US press there must be a fight to the finish, a ‘knock-out blow’. In November, Lord Lansdowne opted decisively for negotiations. With the support of the ‘super-patriotic’ press, Lloyd George then rolled Asquith. On 5 December, he headed a Tory-dominated government, shunning peace by negotiation. 

    1. German and American Peace Notes (December 1916)

    Bethmann-Hollweg offered a Peace Note on 12 December. However, the new High Command hobbled it by insisting that no terms be specified. The new Lloyd George government condemned the offer as a ruse of war. An American Peace Note followed (December 18), urging peace terms. This evoked an incomplete response from the Entente (10 January 1917). The Germans offered to enter talks, but were silent on terms. Wilson then lifted the pressure. In his ‘Peace without Victory’ speech (22 January 1917) he argued that a negotiated settlement would be more durable. Peace hovered. He had stopped loans and supplies to the Entente. But Wilson’s efforts were wrecked by the German elite’s decision to reinstate unrestricted submarine warfare (1 February 1917) – much to the relief of ‘knock-out blowers’ everywhere. Here, typically, the wild men on one side came to the rescue of those on the other. And peace was snuffed out.

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Report 6/2015, Referrals made May and June 2015.

    [2] Prime Minister Tony Abbott, ‘Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra’, 25 April 2014, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23446

    [3] For sources on the search for a negotiated peace, see Kent Forster, The Failures of Peace: The Search for a Negotiated Peace During the First World War (Washington, 1941), Laurence W. Martin, Peace Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the British Liberals (New Haven, 1958), Z. A. B. Zeman, A Diplomatic History of the First World War (London, 1971), David S. Patterson, The Search for a Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York, 2008), Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (New York, 2011), Neil Hollander, Elusive Dove: The Search for Peace During World War I (Jefferson, 2014).

  • Peter Gibilisco. A Synergistic Approach to Disability

    Here is my proposal for a Dictionary definition of Synergy:

    the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

    “the synergy between artist and record company” or disability support workers and people with disabilities with high support needs.

    In some of my writings I have referred to what I call the “synergistic” outcomes that result from the interaction of people with disabilities and their support workers. These effective working relationships should be given the respect that is their due since they make an indispensable contribution to ongoing efforts to devise effective models of leadership in such workplaces.

    But then I ask: Why are these highly successful working relationships so often below the radar when it comes to forming social welfare policies for the disabled? Could it be that these highly efficient working relationships are simply out of sight and out of mind? Is that why they seem to be ignored when it comes to the discussion of how to make improvements in the disability workforce? Maybe we need to look again at the manuals that are written for workers and develop a distinctively new theory of management. And why not? The synergistic approach I advocate might best be seen as an “inside out” approach to the management and organisation of the disability workforce. It will demonstrate public confidence in the abilities of the people who are served to exercise control over their own lives. Let me try and explain this “synergistic” model of work-place leadership in more detail. In order to make sure that this kind of model is flexible enough to allow change, even if complete change does not take place, the aim is to avoid an approach which sees the disabled person as a problem and instead reckon with such a person as a “problem-solver”, just like anyone else, and just like the support worker as well. In this a “synergistic” model develops a distinctive understanding of societal inclusion.

    In this context, an emphasis upon synergy for the disability workforce aims to provide a corrective to the guidance that is often put to people with these “different abilities” and their support workers. To have an “inside out” approach is about reckoning with life chances and the creation of opportunities. Therefore, by initiating such an approach we confront the support worker who sometimes sees him/herself as a person languishing at the lowest, grass roots level who then needs the disability sector for employment. We need to turn this around. In my view a synergistic approach to the disability sector is not just about better help for the disabled person – it is about raising the status of all involved, and ascribing due respect.

    It may be highly contentious to say outright that disabled people are second-rate citizens but if so much of our social value is measured by income then maybe “2nd rate citizen” is exactly what the income disparity tells us.

    In the disability field, does love conquer all?

    The best form of care is, of course, supplied by family members or close friends. These are those whose support is supplied by love. They are living testimony that love conquers all. Love is mighty and powerful and particularly when administered with compassion, empathy and patience.

    Wherever we may be located by the flow-charts of such organisations, we are all human with our own individual pursuits of happiness. When it comes to high support needs for people with disabilities, love is something that is beyond the control of the “medical model’s” contribution to meeting the needs of disability. But hopefully it will be there as the indispensable motor of any positive medical contribution. A person with a disability at times will require more than just physical support in medical, dietary and psychological terms. That is, we need to promote communities of people who consciously function in ways that humanise the clinical methodology of the medical model, and this can be done by giving greater attention to what I would thereby call “the social model”. Society is a network of coinciding and interdependent responsibilities. An emphasis upon a “social model” of disability support will find it is necessary to emphasize this again and again.

    Let me give an example that has stuck in my mind. Some time ago, around 1987, a friend of mine with Friedreich’s Ataxia (the same disease I have) was to be married to the guy of her dreams (an able-bodied individual). But as she signed the register, she became so excited that she suffered a heart attack and died. In hindsight, the wedding was a beautiful moment, and the embodiment of the social model. But now I am wondering: what should have been done to prevent the heart attack? Perhaps those enthused by the prospects of her wedding had under-estimated the impact of their own advice upon those with “medical model” responsibilities. In other words, we need to find the wisdom to enhance the interaction, the synergy, between the medical and social models of disability. That synergy is important. It is so important. 

    I have come, much to my own surprise, to another related conundrum: how can the medical model be modified to avoid a standardised approach to disability care that simply confirms mythic stereotypes about seriously disabled people. I struggle daily with the way the facility where I live in shared support accommodation is managed. I am therefore wondering whether at a deep, cultural level its modus operandi presupposes the medical model. I’m wondering: is the organisation somehow stuck in a rut assuming that we residents are actually “sick”, that our lives are basically structured by illness?

    I’m not saying that the residents are free of physiological problems that require special care. I am not even thinking here primarily about physiology; I am thinking about the way in which our “roles” are understood by the prevailing management. Are we, in effect, occupying the role bundle of the person who is sick, who is subject to medical care?

    It is perhaps somewhat dangerous (it might seem that I am tooting my own trumpet) but consider my own case. Before coming to live in this place, I lived for 21 years(1990-2011), on my own and during those 21 years I completed a double degree in Arts and Accounting at Monash University, a Master of Arts at Monash University and finally a PhD at the University of Melbourne. This is not to say those years were easy; of course I had added pressure upon me in my studying because of the physiological complexities that had to be addressed by medical means since the onset of Friedreich’s Ataxia at 14(1976). University started when I lived on my own at 28, and graduating with my PhD at 43(1991-2006)). Over the 21 years of living on my own I had two long stays in hospital, but all in all my educational conquests far outweigh any medical complications. This all has me thinking: I’m living as part of a situation in which I have been confronted by nothing less than the reality of what I have referred to above as “the social model”. This is a situation that will be endorsed by most people who have physical disabilities without any intellectual impairment.

    To conclude this reflection about synergy – love and the management of the disability sector, leads me to encourage us all, particularly public policy researchers, senior management in “not for profit” organisations and elsewhere, to think carefully about the “who?” question when dealing with the severely disabled people they are committed to serving. This certainly means that an ethos of equity is needed along with the legislated provision of further assistance. It will require political courage to ensure that an ethical culture is developed in which people with disabilities who have high support needs are cared for individually and effectively.

    I prefer the term “resident” to the current lingo that wants to view me as a “customer”, which can be used in stereotypical ways to standardise care and thus give rise to stereotyped opinions in public discourse.

    My desire to rise above the privations of this shared support accommodation fuels my motivation for this and also many of my previous articles. Thanks for reading.

    A special thank you to Bruce Wearne for his editing and helping to tweak this piece and Christina Irugalbandara for her excellence and academic support work.

    Dr Peter Gibilisco is an Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne. He has published a book ‘The Politics of Disability’. 

     

     

  • Douglas Newton. What we fought for: from Bullecourt to the Armistice, 1917-1918

    From 1916 to 1918 on the Western Front, the Australian divisions suffered 181,000 casualties, including 46,000 dead.[1] Some 10,892 of these dead have no known grave.[2] They died mostly from shrapnel and high explosive shells designed to tear people to pieces, or bury them alive. Pulverised, or ploughed under, their remains were unidentifiable.

    So, more terrible centenaries loom from 1917-18. Bullecourt, Passchendaele, Villers-Bretonneux, the Hindenburg Line. For what did Australians die?

    To repel the German invader? It is simplistic to see in the German enemy a singular evil, a complete explanation for the protracted war, or a vindication of all that was done to resist German aggression. In this imperial bloodbath, all sides clung to territory conquered, all planned more conquest, all became more authoritarian, and all had their wide-mouthed politicians and generals insisting on more war.[3] The plague was on all houses – and they reinfected each other.

    For democracy’s sake? Enthusiasm for war and enthusiasm for democracy were at opposite ends of the political spectrum in every belligerent nation.

    What then were the Entente’s war aims for which the war was prolonged?[4]

    The Entente Reply to President Wilson’s Peace Note, 10 January 1917 (PUBLIC)

    In January 1917, while Australian soldiers on the Western Front endured a severe winter, Britain and her Entente partners, after 29 months of warfare, at last published war aims. They issued a formal reply to the German and American Peace Notes of December 1916. It ruled out a negotiated peace. It promised the Entente was ‘not fighting for selfish interests.’ It proclaimed moderate aims: ‘reparation, restitution’ and ‘guarantees’ against aggression. The war was to liberate Belgium, France, and Serbia, and get ‘indemnities’ for them. Grand aims followed: ‘the reorganisation of Europe’ along lines of nationality, the liberation of the oppressed inside Austria-Hungary, and the ‘expulsion’ of the Turks from Europe. The insincerity was stunning. There was to be self-determination, but only for enemy empires. There was silence on the secret treaties of 1915-16, and silence on plans for economic war.

    The Franco-Russian ‘Left Bank of the Rhine’ Agreement (or the ‘Doumergue Agreement’), 14 February and 8 March 1917 (SECRET) 

    Oblivious to imminent revolution, Tsarist Russia and France still played grab. Russia agreed to support France’s claim to the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and the seizure of the Rhineland. In return, France gave Russia ‘complete liberty’ to fix her borders with Germany and Austria. In short, France winked at Russian grab in the east, and Russia winked at French grab in the west.

    Agreements on German colonies and other territories, 1914 to March 1917: (SECRET) 

    The German colonial empire was carved up in a dozen agreements from 1914. Britain and France split German Togoland and the Cameroons (while Britain confirmed her annexations of Turkish territories, Egypt and Cyprus). In July 1916 Japan and Russia agreed upon their claims in China. By March 1917 the Balfour-Motono agreements were confirmed: Britain, France, and Russia granted Japan the German North Pacific Islands, and the German lease on the Shantung Peninsula, in China (Qingdao).

    The Imperial War Cabinet Committees, April-May 1917. (SECRET)

    While Australians endured hell at Bullecourt in April 1917, various Imperial War Cabinet sub-committees redrew maps of the colonial world. Louis Mallet’s ‘Committee on Territorial Changes’ recommended colonial seizures and swaps. Two imperial nabobs, both reactionaries, headed more powerful committees. Lord Curzon’s ‘Territorial Desiderata Committee’ insisted on Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) for Britain, Germany’s elimination as a colonial power, and British territory running Cape to Cairo. Lord Milner’s ‘Committee on Economic Terms’ wanted more protection: ‘imperial preference’, ‘Control of Imperial Resources’, and indemnities to pay for the war. A League of Nations was ‘impracticable’.

    St-Jean-de-Maurienne Agreements, 19 April 1917 (SECRET)

    At the St Jean de Maurienne conference, France, Britain and Italy agreed to more annexations in Turkey, adding to Sykes-Picot. Italy was to gain a vast share, the ‘green’ area, that is the southern third of Anatolia (now Turkey) including Smyrna, and an area of indirect control to its north, on the Aegean coast and hinterland.

    The Caxton Hall speech, 5 January 1918 (PUBLIC)

    After the disaster of Passchendaele (38,000 Australian casualties), and facing pressure from both revolutionary Russia and President Wilson, Lloyd George shifted ground. At the Caxton Hall in London he espoused moderate aims. He disavowed annexations. Britain was fighting above all for Belgium and France. There was ‘no demand for war indemnity.’ Germany’s colonies were ‘held at the disposal of a conference’. Alsace-Lorraine deserved ‘a reconsideration’. Soaring ideals prevailed: the ‘sanctity of treaties’, ‘self-determination’ for all, and ‘some international organisation’. So, after 41 months of terrible war, Britain’s Empire at last had moderate war aims. But Lloyd George’s rhetorical slithers were everywhere.

    True respect for Anzac 

    Thus, from Bullecourt, through the quagmire of Passchendaele, and on to the armistice, Australians continued to die on the Western Front – for all these war aims, known and unknown, sincere and insincere.

    Contemporary speakers on Anzac often indulge in sacrificial fantasies – young blood spilled to bring our nation to birth. They shower praise on the dead, imagining this is respect. It is not respectful of the dead to shun knowledge of the dubious causes smuggled into their heavy kits. It is not respectful of their generous instincts to gloss over what comes of empire. Catastrophes – such as the mechanised slaughter on the Western Front – demand the most searching inquiries.

    To what war aims were the diggers sacrificed in 1917-18? Did the Australian government carefully weigh costs and objectives? Did it try to prevent the steady enlargement of war aims? Sadly, the truth is stark: our inexhaustible loyalty to our great and powerful friend saw our government marginalised and our soldiers left fighting largely in the dark.[5]

    Therefore, was this horrific war truly a national awakening for Australia, or was it the high point of our imperial subservience?

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] ‘WWI The Western Front’: http://www.army.gov.au/our-history/history-in-focus/wwi-the-western-front

    [2] Peter Pedersen, The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front (Camberwell, 2007), 411.

    [3] John Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), see Ch. 4 and 158: ‘It would be quite incorrect to speak of a German singularity of destructiveness…’ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985), 194: ‘Wilhelmine Germany was not the only country to possess this sort of lunatic fringe.’ David Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War I: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2014) p. xii: ‘This work reaffirms that German Society was a highly complex hybrid of competing groups and interests and that to compare the Kaiser’s war aims in 1914 with those of Hitler in 1939 (as some British military historians have attempted to do) is far too simplistic.’ Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, 2011), 50: ‘Yet Imperial Germany was not Nazi Germany. Despite the horror of the German wars in Africa, the Imperial German suppression of colonial revolts did not differ significantly from the violent campaigns of other colonizing powers during the nineteenth century….’

    [4] In addition to sources listed in an earlier post, ‘What we fought for: from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916’ (https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=6275), works with a special focus on Britain, the Entente, and US war aims include Paul Guinn, British Strategy and Politics 1914 to 1918 (Oxford, 1965), Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913-1923 (Oxford, 1987), John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict (Yale, 1992), David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918 (Oxford, 1995), Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, 1992), Brock Millman, Pessimism and British War Policy 1916-1918 (London, 2001), and Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge, 2013).

    [5] Neville Meaney, one of the most prominent historians of Australia’s Great War, has written that regarding Gallipoli Australia was ‘neither consulted nor informed about the British plans’; that on Japanese entry into the war London ‘was not disposed to consult Australia’; that in the formulation of war aims during 1917-18, Prime Minister Hughes ‘had had no part in making British policy’; and that Lloyd George simply ‘took the Dominions’ assent for granted.’ See Neville Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923 (Sydney, 2009), 44, 59, and 247-8.

  • Richard Woolcott. Australia/China and Barracuda submarines.

    It seems that one of the important roles for the new Barracuda submarines that we are to purchase from the French is for the submarines to be able to operate at long-range in the South China Sea. Quite apart from the cost of the submarine purchase, is this a wise strategy for Australia to pursue. I have reposted extracts below from an earlier article by Richard Woolcott in which he warns of an adversarial attitude towards China based mainly on Japanese policies and US support. John Menadue.

    Extract from earlier article by Richard Woolcott ‘The Burning question – should Australia do more on the South China Sea‘ 9 March 2016.

    Australia must develop a more balanced approach to its relationships with the United States and a rising China.

    There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China, based mainly on Japanese policies and US support, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony.  This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former Ambassadors to China, as well as a number of well informed academics, including Hugh White at the ANU. While China can be expected to resist American hegemony in the Asian region, it does accept a continuing and constructive US role in Asia.

    Australia should not take sides on China/Japan or Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine disputes within ASEAN, on rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, as the United States has done. Australia’s focus should be on the unimpeded passage to the mainland of China through international waters in the South China Sea, as the United States insists on in respect of its access to its ports. There is no reason why China cannot rise peacefully if it is not provoked.

    China maintains it is simply protecting its regional interests from the US “pivot to Asia “, or “rebalancing “as it is now called. Although President Obama has not defined this policy in any detail, two senior US Admirals have recently said, in public, that it is directed at restricting China’s influence in the South China Sea.12

    Richard Woolcott was previously President of the United Nations Assembly, Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and many other countries.

  • Richard Broinowski. Australia’s maritime espionage

    According to The Australian’s defence editor Brendan Nicholson, an Australian submarine twice penetrated the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam in 1985. Nicholson’s claim appeared in an article in the newspaper on 27 April 2016 analysing Canberra’s decision to build French Barracuda submarines in Adelaide. HMAS Orion’s first intrusion resulted in ‘brilliantly clear’ footage of sonar and other hull fittings on a Soviet Charlie-class nuclear submarine. On the second, it shadowed a Soviet Kirov-class nuclear-powered cruiser and monitored its communications.

    In 1985 I was Australia’s Ambassador to Vietnam, resident in Hanoi. I knew nothing of Orion’s activities. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden had instructed me to repair relations with the country, damaged by the war and by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s over-reaction to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia in December 1978. I was to encourage bilateral trade, re-start an aid program halted by Fraser, formally hand back to the Vietnamese our extensive embassy properties in Saigon, initiate a missing-in-action mission for Australian soldiers, facilitate a Royal Commission into Agent Orange, and generally re-build trust with Hanoi. I was to engage the Vietnamese in a dialogue on Cambodia and find out specifically if and when they intended to leave.

    At the time, the Cold War was at its height and Vietnam was commonly and quite mistakenly regarded in the West as a Soviet colony. Mr Hayden’s initiatives were strongly criticised by China, and five of the then six members of ASEAN (Indonesia, distrustful of China, and wanting a strong Vietnam to stand up to China to its north, was the exception). The Thais were particularly incensed, certain that the Vietnamese army would soon invade across the Cambodian border. Still smarting from their pull-out from Vietnam in June 1975, the Americans thought Hayden naive and foolish. Trenchant critics of Hayden’s initiative towards Hanoi also existed in Canberra, particularly in the Office of National Assessments and parts of Foreign Affairs.

    Despite the static, I was getting on with my job. We began an aid program and hosted a trade mission from Australia. I handed back our embassy properties in Saigon. With Vietnamese cooperation, we conducted the first MIA mission by any participating country in the Vietnam War and gathered evidence for the Royal Commission into Agent Orange.

    And I was also getting somewhere with Vietnamese officials on Cambodia. During meetings over several months, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach became increasingly frank with me. Since reunifying the country in 1975, Hanoi had been doggedly trying to pull the place together. By 1978, China, which had been unhappy with unification, was making threatening noises from the north. And that ‘madman’ Pol Pot persisted in attacking Vietnamese villages across the border from the south west. Vietnam had insufficient military strength to challenge China, but could certainly put a spoke in Pol Pot’s wheel. So on Christmas Day 1978, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh. Vietnamese forces would leave when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been neutralised. Thach ridiculed the suggestion that Vietnam would stay in Cambodia or had territorial designs on Thailand.

    I reported our conversations to Canberra, along with my view that Thach and his colleagues were telling the truth.

    Meanwhile, if Nicholson and The Australian are to be believed, Orion was busy in Cam Ranh Bay. At the least, its activities were contrary to customary international law and the newly promulgated 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention. If detected in Vietnam’s internal waters, the consequences would have been horrific. Orion could have been depth-charged or captured, its complement of 63 crew interned, its armaments including its Mark 48 US torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles stripped. Bilateral relations could have come to a grinding halt. I could have been recalled or expelled from Hanoi. The increasing goodwill and understanding created through Hayden’s initiative and my activities would have been lost, and our sceptical western and ASEAN allies would have glowed with schadenfreude.

    In spite of its appalling baggage, this spying hubris appears not to have given either the Australian government or opposition cause to reflect. Indeed, it resonates in at least two respects with Australia’s recent decision to build at enormous expense a dozen French Barracuda submarines. First is range. The government says it wants long-range subs, a capacity the German and Japanese boats lack. This is presumably to enable us to spy on Chinese assets in the South China Sea. But 1960 British-designed Oberon-class boats costing a mere $10 million a copy (triple that in 2016 terms) had the capacity to reach the same neighbourhood in Vietnam. What is so special about the range of the vastly more expensive French Barracudas?

    Second, why is the Australian government so fixated on submarine espionage outside our immediate maritime neighbourhood? The consequences of discovery by China are more appalling than by Vietnam or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It’s one thing to sail on the surface through waters claimed by China in the interests of reinforcing ‘rules-based’ freedom of navigation, but quite another to penetrate coastal waters by submarine and conduct maritime espionage. If that’s not the purpose, why spend such colossal amounts on new submarines? To sustain the South Australian economy, keep Christopher Pyne in parliament, catch up with our neighbours? All of the above? I will explore motives and consequences in a following article.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico.He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW.

  • Evan Williams. ‘A Month of Sundays’. Film Review

    I went to see A Month of Sundays, Mathew Saville’s new Australian film, expecting a comedy about real-estate agents. It was the impression I’d gained from a careless reading of publicity handouts and other usually unreliable sources. And sure enough, the film has some witty lines and one or two moments of gentle satire at the expense of the real-estate profession. But Saville’s film isn’t really a comedy – unless you get your laughs watching lonely old widows coping on their own, grieving teenage boys pining for parental love, divorced husbands pining for lost wives, and other unhappy souls. (more…)

  • Robert Mickens. Cardinal Pell and the Vatican power struggle.

    The Holy See’s abrupt suspension this week of anexternal audit of all its financial operations by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is being described by almost everyone as the Vatican old guard’s latest attempt to derail Pope Francis’ reforms.

    This narrative pits “a powerful Italian bureaucracy resistant to greater transparency” (including the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin) against Australian Cardinal George Pell, the controversial figure the pope handpicked two years ago to lead the newly instituted Secretariat for the Economy.

    The problem with this explanation is that it is far too simplistic and, in other important ways, more than a bit off the mark. Because if it were true it would mean Pope Francis himself is trying to thwart efforts at transparency or, at the very least, has been duped or co-opted by those who are.

    In fact, the pope approved the letters that Cardinal Parolin and his deputy in charge of internal Church affairs, Archbishop Angelo Becciu, sent out this week to all Vatican departments to inform them that the PwC audit has been “suspended immediately.”

    Andrea Tornielli of La Stampa points out that the concern was not with PwC, but with the manner in which Cardinal Pell and his deputy, Danny Casey, forged the three-year deal with the global accounting firm.

    “The suspension resulted from three possible irregularities in the contract signing process and the missing consultations required by the statutes approved by the pope,” wrote the veteran Vatican analyst this week.

    Cardinal Pell’s department – contrary to what he had boasted before its final statutes were published last year – does not report directly to the pope. It actually takes its marching orders from a 15-member Council for the Economy, composed of eight cardinals and seven laymen; chaired by German Cardinal Reinhard Marx.

    Yes, this council approved the PwC audit last December. Technically, the council actually ordered the audit, because it is the only office (except the pope himself) with the authority to do so.

    But according to Tornielli some of the council’s members complained that Cardinal Pell’s office then kept them in the dark over the terms of the contract with PwC when it should have first sought the council’s approval of those terms.

    Some people also did not seem amused that the Australian signed the $3 million agreement on behalf of the Vatican as “manager of the Holy See.”

    All this was seen by some officials in the Secretariat of State as just one more instance of Cardinal Pell going it alone, bypassing proper channels and – ironically, given the task he claims to be trying to achieve – acting in a less than transparent manner.

    But concerns over the former Archbishop of Sydney’s activities at the Vatican go much deeper than merely his role in bringing forth financial reforms.

    It is in the area of Church finance and management, and this small area alone, that it can be said that Cardinal Pell is fully on board with Pope Francis’ more important project of overall Church reform. In fact, he is part of a conservative group of cardinals that backed the losing candidate (believed to have been Angelo Scola, then Marc Ouellet) at the last conclave.

    This group, now expanded to include other bishops, has been less than enthusiastic about the pope’s broader Church reforms, evidenced especially by the objections it has raised to the way he led the last two gatherings of the Synod of Bishops. The group has become a respectful but firm opposition that seems to be waiting out what its members hope will be a short pontificate.

    Pope Francis surprised a lot of people two years ago when he chose George Pell to lead the Secretariat for the Economy. It appeared then to be a move to give his conclave opponents a share in Vatican governance, but in an area he has not made his top priority.

    Francis wants a clean hands operation when it comes to money. No doubt about it. But efforts to achieve this pale in significance to the more urgent and difficult reforms that are required to pull the entire Church out of the deep hole into which his last two predecessors have driven it.

    His decision to temporarily halt the PwC audit, via the two letters this week from the Secretariat of State, looks like another message to Cardinal Pell and anyone else who thinks they can set up a powerbase of opposition.

    Cardinal Pell turns 75 in June. That’s the age when bishops, including Vatican officials, submit their resignations. Pope Francis will probably not accept it immediately, though he is likely to do so before the cardinal completes the initial five-year term that is the norm for a position like his. That would not be until 2019.

    The 79-year-old pope has shown a lot of patience and restraint with prelates resistant to the ongoing change of mentality he is bringing to the Church. But he will not tolerate them playing him or his closest aides as fools.

    Keep your eye on the calendar.

    This article first appeared in Global Pulse on 22 April 2016.

  • Jon Stanford and Michael Keating. the mistaken decision on submarines.

    The government has made a bad decision on acquiring the future submarines (FSMs). It’s bad for the Navy, bad for the taxpayer and it represents a major regression in terms of industry policy.

    It’s bad for the Navy because in terms of capability the decision fails to deliver on the objectives set out in the latest Defence White Paper. DCNS’ conventional Barracuda class boats will not be ‘regionally superior’ submarines in terms of their technology. By the 2030s, if operating in the South China Sea, they will be confronted by nuclear attack submarines (SSNs), of greatly improved performance compared to current models. The FSMs will not be, as the Prime Minister said, “the most sophisticated naval vessels being built in the world”. But on a ‘bang for the buck’ basis, they may well be by far the most expensive with the longest delivery timeline.

    An advanced, nuclear powered Barracuda class submarine, with underwater endurance limited to 100 days only by crew resilience and a submerged speed of 30 knots, could claim regional technological superiority. But no conventional submarine (SSK), however advanced, will be technologically superior in the South China Sea in the 2030s, nor will it be safe to send RAN submariners on offensive operations there on such a platform.

    The irony is that if the government’s power projection ambitions were to be pursued, the nuclear powered version of the advanced Barracuda class would be the ideal platform for the RAN. Yet Defence’s requirements have led DCNS to remove the single element in the Barracuda class that provides its overwhelming technological advantage, namely the nuclear reactor, and replace it with an updated version of the diesel electric propulsion that powered Australia’s first submarines over a century ago. It’s the naval equivalent of removing the engine from a Ferrari and replacing it with a motor from a Citroen 2CV.

    The ridiculous corollary of this is that it will cost Australia a lot more to procure the dumbed down version of the Barracuda submarine than it would have done to buy far more capable nuclear powered Barracudas as a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) purchase from France. If the Navy had acquired, say, four nuclear boats supplemented by six conventional submarines of an existing design to undertake the other roles required of the FSM, the overall cost could have been around $20 billion, as against over $36 billion plus at 2016 prices (the oft-quoted $50 billion represents future inflated costs). The Navy would also have been much better off in terms of capability.

    Another benefit of a MOTS purchase is that the new submarines would have been available a decade earlier, thereby avoiding some significant risks. There would be no need to attempt, at high cost, to upgrade the obsolescent Collins class, with a high risk of failure that would leave the Navy without an effective submarine capability for a decade or more. There are also major design risks in a new submarine, particularly in integrating American systems with the French platform and transferring power hungry systems from a nuclear design with a high availability of electricity. This could delay delivery of the new submarine beyond the current unacceptable timeline and increase the already unacceptable cost.

    The implications for industry policy constitute a particularly egregious element in the procurement decision. In this context, we need to remember that the Abbott government showed the door to the car industry. The end of the age of entitlement meant that around $500 million a year, not high by international standards, was too much to pay to support a high technology industry that, directly and indirectly, employed around 200,000 people.

    Now the government is keen to support an industry with a cost disability, according to the RAND Corporation, of up to 40 per cent. Given the likely moderate local value added in an industry where all the sophisticated hardware is imported, the effective rate of protection (assistance to value added) will be much higher than this. Indeed a leaked paper from Defence last week suggested an effective rate of protection of 500 per cent would be required to build the submarines in Adelaide. Even at the height of the Fraser government’s protectionist excesses in the early 1980s, the effective rate reached ‘only’ 143 per cent for the car industry.

    The government justifies a local build on the basis of job creation, developing an innovative industry and the ability to undertake through life sustainment of the submarines in Australia.

    On the Prime Minister’s figures, 2,800 jobs will be created directly and indirectly, a far cry from the 200,000 jobs that are related to the car industry. Some early estimates suggest we are looking at a cost of around $4 million for every job created.

    There is only value in building an innovative industry if it is internationally competitive. Little thought appears to have been given to developing an industry plan directed towards this objective. If this was an issue, the government would have given much greater attention to the German bid, which offered a substantially lower price ($20 billion), much earlier delivery, no cost penalty for a local build and the transfer of substantial digital technology to Australia.

    The defence argument for local acquisitions can be the last refuge of a scoundrel; in the past it was even applied to protecting the clothing industry. We already know that we do not need to build military assets, including missiles and systems, in order to maintain and upgrade them. We do not build RAAF fixed wing assets or missiles in Australia yet we deliver high quality through life support. Australian industry was perfectly well able to maintain the British-built Oberon class submarines and, indeed, to upgrade them.

    It’s not too late to amend the decision and deliver a better outcome. The submarines have not yet been designed, commercial terms have not been agreed and contracts have not yet been signed. A much improved approach could maintain DCNS as the preferred supplier, while providing the Navy with the capability it needs much sooner, at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer and with positive industry benefits in South Australia.

    The first step would be to negotiate with the French government (and the US) to acquire four nuclear powered Barracuda class submarines as a MOTS purchase. If agreed, the Navy could also acquire six conventional Scorpene class SSKs from DCNS, to be built in Adelaide on a fixed price contract if the cost penalty is acceptable. All these submarines would be delivered in the early 2020s with no need to upgrade Collins.

    If the acquisition of the four SSNs is ruled out, the capability requirement should be amended to exclude offensive operations in contested waters far from home. This would mean focussing on operations that are well within the capacity of a SSK, namely sea denial in Australia’s littoral and reconnaissance and intelligence gathering in neighbouring waters and archipelagos. This would require acquiring between six and nine SSKs of an existing design, to be built in Adelaide if the price is right.

    Of course, there would be political difficulties in making these changes. This would require strong leadership by the Prime Minister. Better this, however, than taking significant risks with Australia’s defence, imposing a large and unnecessary burden on taxpayers and going down in history as modern Australia’s most protectionist Prime Minister.

     

    Jon Stanford and Michael Keating are Directors of Insight Economics. Previously they worked together in the Prime Minister’s Department, where Dr Keating was Secretary.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Arja Keski-Nummi. Manus – “The Worst Angels of Our Nature” 

    The PNG Supreme Court decision has again thrown into stark relief the bankrupt nature of Australia’s asylum policy and the disingenuous way that both sides use trite slogans such as “ saving lives” and not “starting up the people smuggling business” as justification for their cynical and inhumane policies.

    People working with asylum seekers and who have processed and resettled refuges from within and outside of Australia have all urged Australian political parties to find a way to return to a bipartisan policy based on treating all people with dignity and common human decency, even if in the end they are not found to be refugees. But this has fallen on deaf ears.

    Despite many experienced commentators in the past day offering reasonable policy advice and approach it is clear from the statements of both parties that they will not take such advice.

    The scene has been set. Cynical political calculations ahead of a July election trump good policy or treating people humanely. Indeed, one could argue that there is a de facto bipartisan policy – one based on cruelty and selfishly inward looking in its intent.

    Asylum policy does not change many votes, handling the economy, education, health and industrial relations does. However the Government knows it does them little harm to raise the spectre of uncontrolled boats. Equally the Opposition is stuck in its defence of its decision to reopen offshore processing centres and then, in the heat of an election campaign in 2013, to extend that to no resettlement in Australia.

    This seismic shift in Australia’s asylum policies and its abrogation of any moral responsibility towards people who have reached its territory is deeply troubling. It is not clear that this genie can easily be put back into the lamp.

    This unseemly debate sits uncomfortably with anyone who actually looks outward – we live in a interconnected world, more than ever people are on the move because of diminishing economic opportunities, civil war and other conflicts, environmental degradation and exploitation and a combination of all of these factors in any one cohort.

    We should not be squabbling over 800 men stuck on Manus, shifting the responsibility to PNG and offering to throw money in their direction to make the problem go away. There are perfectly reasonable and common sense approaches to resolving the status of all those on Manus. The Howard government did just this with the remaining Nauru population in 2005-6.

    There are over 50 million displaced people globally, Australia’s issues with asylum seekers does not amount to a hill of beans – so focused are we on Manus and Nauru that we have not yet honoured our small commitment to resettling Syrian refugees from the Middle East.

    Both parties could make a difference by agreeing to take a reasonable bipartisan approach by working to resettle people found to be refugees and building a stronger regional cooperation framework – taking the politics out of an issue that demeans us all.

    But this will not happen, because both major parties are focused on narrow, immediate political gain.

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Her primary responsibility was in the field of humanitarian and refugee programs.

     

  • Douglas Newton. What we fought for: from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916

    Formal speeches about Australia’s Great War normally follow simple rules. The focus is upon military achievement, and defining national values – service, sacrifice, and mateship. Hardship and horror are added, giving lustre to military achievement. National awakening is emphasised: the diggers were ‘the founding heroes of modern Australia.’[1] Audiences are flattered: the Anzacs were ‘our mighty forebears.’[2]

    But the objects of that war – the ‘war aims’ for which so many Australian lives were lost – are seldom mentioned. Ignorance of purposes is assumed. ‘Few of us can recall the detail,’ Tony Abbott told the Gallipoli Dawn Service in 2015, ‘but we have imbibed what matters most: that a generation of young Australians rallied to serve our country, when our country called.’ And fought for what? Generalities suffice. ‘It was for country, Empire, King, and the ideal that people and countries should be free.’ The diggers fought ‘for duty, loyalty, honour and mates: the virtues that outshine any cause.’[3]

    But what cause? Many speechmakers simply confuse 1914-18 with 1939-45. They retrospectively democratise Britain’s Great War. Thus, our diggers fought for ‘freedom under the law, representative democracy and the universal decencies of mankind.’[4]

    This draws a veil over everything difficult: the expansion of war aims, the Great Powers’ jostling to redivide the colonial world, the private corporate interests masquerading as national interests, and the blundering ‘old diplomacy’ – all the systemic evils that prolonged the slaughter of Australians.

    Why did Australians die by the thousands at Gallipoli in 1915? At Fromelles in 1916? It is not enough to point to the wickedness of the German enemy.[5] We must explain the prolongation of the war. We must dig deep into our ‘war aims’.[6]

    As a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, but without control of her own foreign policy, Australia was bound by Britain’s diplomatic deals. These included:

    The Pact of London, 4 September 1914 (PUBLIC)

    Britain, France and Russia became ‘Allies’ and promised not to conclude peace separately. Russia pressed for this. Britain and France truckled to Russia, to keep her loyal. Tsarist Russia – Europe’s most reactionary power – was already eyeing annexations in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and beyond, the so-called ‘Thirteen Points’. Tsar Nicholas II and his ministers dreamt of stifling democratisation in Russia with victory. In signing up, Britain and France accepted the risk that the war would go on – until Russian war aims were achieved.

    The Straits Agreements, 8 and 12 March 1915 (SECRET)

    After great pressure from Russia, Britain and France agreed to plans for Russian annexations in Turkey. These included control of the Straits (Gallipoli and the Dardanelles), and Constantinople (Istanbul) – Russia’s great prize. As compensation, Britain gained the oil-rich ‘neutral zone’ in Persia (Iran). France won Russian backing ‘for the realization of plans which they [France] may frame with reference to other regions of the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere’, such as Syria. The agreements were secret. Thus, Australians died at Gallipoli so that Russia might rule in Constantinople. Truly, a Gallipoli ceremony should be held every year in London – outside Chesham House, Belgravia, the old Russian embassy.

    Cabinet Document ‘The Spoils’, 25 March 1915, CAB 63/3/104-7. (SECRET)

    On Gallipoli’s eve, Lewis Harcourt, Britain’s Colonial Secretary, drew up ‘The Spoils’. It outlined a repartition of the colonial world. Britain must ‘dictate any terms’. If Russia gained Constantinople, Britain had a long shopping list: annexations in Mesopotamia ‘from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad’, and a brace of colonial seizures and swaps among the victors, in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa and the Pacific. Britain, her Dominions, and Japan would take all German Pacific colonies – anticipating ‘great trouble’ with Australia. To counter ‘Australian prejudices’, Britain aimed at ‘sweetening the pill’, giving Australia in addition Bougainville and the British Solomons.[7]

    The Treaty of London, 26 April 1915 (SECRET)

    During March 1915, Italian negotiators in London bargained on the price of Italy joining the war. The landing at Gallipoli closed the deal. It opened up the prospect of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. So, the day after Anzac, the Italian elite signed the Treaty, agreeing to bounce Italy into war. In return, Italy would gain swags of Austro-Hungarian territory, in the north and along the Adriatic. Italy was offered a slice of the Ottoman Empire, a war indemnity, and a £50 million loan. Under Article 15, the Entente agreed to support Italy in ‘not allowing the representatives of the Holy See [the Pope] to undertake any diplomatic steps having for their object the conclusion of peace or the settlement of questions connected with the present war.’ Catholic Anzacs, perhaps 25% of the AIF, had no inkling of this. The treaty was secret.

    The Sykes-Picot agreements, January-May 1916. (SECRET)

    British and French diplomatic negotiators struck a deal in May 1916. The victors planned to gobble up the great bulk of the Ottoman Empire. Later Britain and France also agreed to Russian and Italian gains. Again, secrecy prevailed. Australians would fight on in the Middle East from 1916 for all these objectives – and 1,400 died – knowing nothing about them.

    The Inter-allied Paris Economic Conference, 14-17 June 1916 (the ‘Paris Resolutions’) (PUBLIC)

    Britain, France and Russia agreed to form a trade bloc after the war. The ‘Paris Resolutions’ proclaimed a post-war economic boycott of the enemy. German commerce would be shut out. This would hobble the defeated, as the victorious empires became exclusive economic zones. Protectionism would triumph across the British Empire. This public deal strengthened the hands of the German militarists: they argued that Germany’s war was now indispensable. Sadly, Australia’s Prime Minister Hughes loudly promoted the ‘Paris Resolutions’.

    For such ‘war aims’, mostly secret, Australian troops endured their 5,533 casualties in one night at Fromelles on 19 July 1916. One hundred years later, the dead deserve better than to be washed into their graves afresh with a cascade of clichés and hyperbole. To honour them truly, we should ask ‘Why?’

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017

    [1] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Anzac Cove Address’, 25 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24397

    [2] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Address to Legacy Clubs of Australia’ 18 Oct. 2013, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23045 and ‘Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra’, 25 April 2014, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23446

    [3] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Lone Pine Address, Gallipoli’, 25 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24398

    [4] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Remarks at unveiling of the Sir John Monash Centre winning design, Villers-Brettonneux’, 26 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24400

    [5] As Fritz Fischer has argued, ‘There is no question but that the conflict of military and political interests, of resentment and ideas, which found expression in the July crisis, left no government of any of the European powers quite free of some measure of responsibility – greater or smaller – for the outbreak of war in one respect or another.’ Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967), 87.

    [6] For surveys of ‘war aims’ on the Entente side, see David Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2005), David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1988), David Stevenson, French War Aims Against Germany 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1982), Christopher Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion (London, 1981), V. H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1971), William A. Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War (New York, 1987), Jukka Nevakivi, Britain, France and the Arab Middle East, 1914-1920 (London, 1969), Ronald P. Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (London, 2006), Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Harvard, 2013), Wm. Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1967).

    [7] Lewis Harcourt, ‘The Spoils’, Secret. Cabinet Paper. Printed for the use of the Cabinet, dated 25 March 1915, in CAB 63: War Cabinet and Cabinet Office: Lord Hankey: Papers. ‘Magnum Opus files’, CAB 63/3, 104-107 (The National Archives, London).

  • Richard Eckersley. Wellbeing and sustainability: irreconcilable differences?

    Better concepts and measures of quality of life and wellbeing make sustainable development more achievable. 

    The debate about progress and development is converging and merging with that about sustainable development. My analysis of the flaws in equating progress with modernisation, discussed in my previous article, contributes to this debate because it shows the equation counts modernity’s benefits to wellbeing but not all its costs.

    Modernity’s dominant narrative of material progress gives priority to economic growth and a rising standard of living. It is being increasingly challenged by the alternative narrative of sustainability, which seeks to balance social, environmental and economic priorities and goals to achieve a high, equitable and lasting quality of life. Material progress represents an outdated, industrial model of development: pump more wealth into one end of the pipeline of progress and more welfare flows out the other.

    Sustainable development reflects an ecological model, based on our understanding of complex systems, in which wellbeing results from many entities or factors interacting in often multiple, diffuse and non-linear ways. (Its implications include paying more attention to the quality of economic activity, not just its quantity; and trading off some growth to achieve other, social and environmental benefits.)

    One approach to measuring sustainable development is to divide quality-of-life or wellbeing measures by energy use or environmental impacts. The New Economic Foundation’s Happy Planet Index does this, multiplying national life satisfaction by life expectancy and dividing the resulting ‘happy life years’ by a country’s per capita Ecological Footprint. My aim here, however, is to assess the wellbeing side of the equation. Wellbeing measures tend to reinforce the conventional view of progress by suggesting wellbeing is continuing to increase; even indices which include environmental impacts show Western nations performing best on the social and economic measures.

    There is often an assumption, explicit or implicit, that there will be a cost to current quality of life in shifting to a sustainable path, as reflected in the title of a recent paper on the topic: ‘Untangling the environmentalist’s paradox: Why is human well-being increasing as ecosystem services degrade?’. The Happy Planet Index notes the ‘undeniable tension’ between its numerator of happy life years and the denominator of the Ecological Footprint. The Sustainable Society Index no longer aggregates beyond the three dimensions of human, economic and environmental wellbeing because of the negative correlation between human and environmental wellbeing, which it says seem to be on a ‘collision course’.

    A 2008 study comparing countries’ Human Development Index scores with their per capita Ecological Footprints shows environmental impacts rise steeply with high development. Only one country (Cuba) of the 93 surveyed met the requirements for both high development (an HDI score of 0.8 or more) and global sustainability (a footprint of less than 1.8 global hectares). Among high-income countries over the previous 25 years, improvements in index scores came with disproportionately larger increases in their footprints, showing a movement away from sustainability. Some lower-income countries, in contrast, achieved higher levels of development without a corresponding increase in their footprints.

    My wider perspective on wellbeing helps to resolve this dilemma by highlighting how Western high-consumption lifestyles and the type of economy and culture they reflect and require are not only increasing resource consumption and environmental damage, they are also hostile to health and wellbeing (especially in countries that are already rich). The importance of ‘correcting’, or at least questioning more deeply, the conventional picture of progress and development is underscored by environmental analyses which demonstrate the extent of the environmental costs, the limits they impose on orthodox development, and their potentially catastrophic impact on human health. That most measures of progress, including newer indices, do not reflect this reality – and show, in effect, that we are enjoying a high or improving quality of life even as we move ever closer and faster to an ecological abyss – demonstrates how far we have to go.

    This perspective reinforces the message which is becoming clearer from global threats to humanity such as climate change, food, water and energy security, economic collapse, and technological anarchy. This message is that we need to change the myths, worldviews and values by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals. The necessary transformation can be compared to that in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment: from the medieval mind, dominated by religion and the afterlife, to the modern mind, focused on material life here on earth.

    Without this deeper change, we will not close the gulf between the magnitude of the challenges and the scale of our responses. A cultural transformation of this depth is very different from the policy reforms on which our public discussions and political debates focus and which, by and large, our indicators of development track. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, hailed politically to be an outstanding success, but judged scientifically to be a failure, exemplifies well this ‘reality gap’

     

    Richard Eckersley is a director of Australia21, a public-interest, strategic research company. This article draws on a longer paper published this month in the leading international development journal, Oxford Development Studies. For those with subscription access, it is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197. An author version is available at: www.richardeckersley.com.au

     

  • Frank Brennan SJ. Manus Island proposal.

    Asylum seekers on Manus Island should be brought to Australia and processed.  Those who are refugees should be permitted to stay in Australia.

    Neither the Liberal Party nor the Labor Party agree. The race to the bottom and the race against time is now on as the country prepares to go into election mode on or about 12 May 2016.  The Labor Party is adamant that the Rudd government’s MOU with PNG was posited on the firm understanding that the processing and resettlement of the asylum seekers would be done and dusted within 12 months.

    So here is my proposal for consideration by the major political parties.

    Before the Turnbull government goes into caretaker mode, it should move the asylum seekers to Christmas Island for processing.  To move more than 850 single men to Nauru would be highly irresponsible behaviour, no matter how much money we were prepared to offer Nauru.

    The government should guarantee that all refugee claims for this cohort would then be determined within 12 months, ie by 12 May 2017.  The government should also guarantee that all those proved to be refugees will be resettled within 18 months, ie 12 November 2017.  For many of these people, that will have meant a five year delay between initial detention and resettlement.

    The Labor Party should then endorse the plan so that there is bipartisan commitment to the plan before the election commences.  Both parties need to accept that they were in government when their ministers knew or ought to have known that the initial MOU was posited on illegal, unconstitutional activity by the Government of PNG.  If resettlement places cannot be provided for any proven refugees in this cohort by 12 November 2017, there will be no option but to resettle them in Australia.

    Fr Frank Brennan SJ
    Professor of Law
    Australian Catholic University

  • Ray Cassin. No moral mystery to 60 Minutes child snatch disaster.

    The mystery of the 60 Minutes child snatch that went so disastrously wrong is that there is no mystery, although some people want to contrive one.

    Ethically there are no shades of grey here. We know what happened, and we know that what 60 Minutes and TCN Nine agreed to do by helping Sally Faulkner abduct her children in Beirut violated a fundamental tenet of journalism.

    That tenet can be simply expressed: don’t make yourself a player in the story, especially not by paying other players in the story. Because if you do, your audience has no reason to trust your account of what the story is.

    That’s it. It’s as basic as that, and it is what 60 Minutes did. No amount of obfuscation and special pleading will change that.

    But the obfuscators are emerging nonetheless, unctuously intent on mystifying the story after all.

    Not least among them is Tara Brown, the reporter 60 Minutes sent to Beirut.

    After Brown, her producer Stephen Rice, camera operator Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment had returned to Australia from their two-week stint in a Beirut jail, she insisted that they ‘were just journalists doing their job’.

    Apparently this is why Brown felt confident that she and her colleagues would quickly be released.

    “The ‘mistakes and failings’ narrative evades the truth, too. It is another attempt to mystify what is not mysterious, because it replaces a moral evaluation of the events with a technical one.”

    ‘I really thought, we’re journalists, we’re doing our job, they will see reason, they’ll understand that,’ she said. ‘That we are here just to do a story on a very desperate mother.’

    Except that 60 Minutes‘ involvement in the story went way beyond following Sally Faulkner to Beirut to see whether she could reclaim her children Lahela, five, and Noah, three, from their father, her former partner Ali Elamine.

    Lawyers acting for Adam Whittington and his euphemistically named ‘child recovery team’, who are all still in custody in Beirut, have tendered in court a document indicating that Nine paid Whittington nearly $70,000 for his work.

    Nine has not officially admitted funding the abductors, but in the circumstances the network’s refusal to comment comes about as close to exemplifying the maxim that silence gives consent as can be imagined.

    The reason for the disclosure of the payment to Whittington’s company, Child Abduction Recovery International, is obvious enough.

    Whittington’s lawyer, Joe Karam, said that he wished his client and the three contractors who worked with him had been included in the settlement that allowed Faulkner and the 60 Minutes team to be released from jail.

    Nothing brings out the truth like pique at being left behind.

    Nine is reported to have paid Ali Elamine $US500,000 to drop abduction charges against Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew. In return, Faulkner waived her right to custody of the children, which had been granted by the Family Court in Australia.

    She might never see them again, unless their father, who was given custody by a Shia court in Lebanon, allows her to visit them in Beirut — in which case she could still be at risk of criminal charges.

    So ‘doing a story on a very desperate mother’ involved paying a team of international kidnappers to abduct the children, then paying their father an eye-poppingly large amount of money to allow their mother and the journalists to walk free.

    The release of the 60 Minutes team had nothing to do with them being ‘just journalists doing their job’, and after this grubby set of payments the very desperate mother is worse off than she was before.

    All of this amounts to what Brown’s 60 Minutes colleague Michael Usher has described as ‘mistakes and failings’ in the handling of the story, which is now subject to an internal review at Nine.

    Mistakes there certainly were. The Lebanese police were able to find the children, their abductors, Faulkner and the 60 Minutes team because Ben Williamson asked Faulkner if he could film her calling Elamine to tell him she had the children.

    When she rang off, Elamine reported the call to the police. They checked the number and found that the phone Faulkner used belonged to Whittington, who astonishingly had registered under his own name in a Beirut hotel. His arrest led to the arrest of everyone else involved.

    Yep, it was massive bungle piled upon gross ineptitude. But the ‘mistakes and failings’ narrative evades the truth, too. It is another attempt to mystify what is not mysterious, because it replaces a moral evaluation of the events with a technical one.

    “Whatever 60 Minutes might say in their defence now, it is almost inconceivable that they would have acted as they did in Australia or any other Western country.”

    There have been attempts by some in the media to mount a moral justification of 60 Minutes‘ actions. The usual defence is that at least they were trying to do the right thing, by helping a mother who would not have been denied custody in Australia.

    But that opens another, distinctly slimy, can of worms. Do we think 60 Minutes would have funded a child abduction in Australia, however much the parent they were purporting to help might seem to have been denied custody unfairly?

    Almost certainly not. But it’s different, of course, if the children have been taken to another country, especially a Muslim country with religious courts, the very mention of which can be guaranteed to raise the hackles of 60 Minutes viewers.

    Whatever 60 Minutes might say in their defence now, it is almost inconceivable that they would have acted as they did in Australia or any other Western country.

    What will be the ultimate consequence of their actions? It is not clear, although Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said that the $500,000 payment to Ali Elamine could be investigated by the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Exchange Commission (ASIC): ‘Nobody is above the law, and if you break the law in other parts of the world you may well be breaking Australian law as well.’

    Maybe. ASIC might investigate, and Nine might even be prosecuted. But I’m betting that if this saga deters news organisations from following 60 Minutes‘ example, it will only be because shareholders and corporate boards don’t want to pay the cost.

    The gap between principle and practice in journalism won’t close anytime soon.

     

    Ray Cassin is former Age journalist and a longstanding contributor to Eureka Street. This article was first published by Eureka Street on 26 April 2016.

     

  • Frank Brennan. Cheque book solution on asylum is unconstitutional

    A bench of five justices of the Supreme Court of Justice, the highest court in Papua New Guinea, has unanimously ruled that the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island is unconstitutional.

    The successful applicant in the case was Belden Norman Namah, the PNG Leader of the Opposition. Unlike the Australian Constitution, the PNG Constitution contains a list of basic human rights including section 42 which deals with ‘liberty of the person‘. That provision states that ‘No person will be deprived of his personal liberty‘ except in specific circumstances.

    Back in 2001 when John Howard’s government instituted the first Pacific solution, there was only one exception which came even close to dealing with the deprivation of liberty of asylum seekers being brought to PNG and detained there. That was section 42(1)(g) which permitted deprivation of liberty ‘for the purpose of preventing unlawful entry’ into PNG.

    But it was a long stretch of the bow to argue that this provision could cover the entry into PNG of persons brought there with the PNG government’s agreement on receipt of a cheque from Australia.

    The Australian government and its lawyers have been on notice about this illegality for 14 years.

    When the now grandfather of the House of Representatives Philip Ruddock was Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, he made a habit of criticising Australian judges whom he thought too soft on asylum seekers wanting to vindicate their legal rights in court.

    At the same time, he had gone ahead instituting Australia’s first edition of the ‘Pacific Strategy’ for warehousing asylum seekers offshore. I wrote to him on 9 June 2002 saying:

    ‘Despite your recent adverse comments about the Australian judiciary, I note that you have not refuted my concerns about the legality of the Pacific Solution preferring simply to observe that no court proceedings have been instituted in Nauru and that the action in PNG was struck out for non-appearance of counsel on 6 May 2002.

    ‘I concede that the PNG government may well have issued conditional visas to the detainees on Manus Island but any visa with a condition amounting to detention would still be unconstitutional.’

    Mr Ruddock replied on 22 August 2002:

    ‘I note your continuing concerns about the legality of the government’s Pacific Strategy. The constitutionality of the arrangements for accommodation of asylum seekers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea is a matter for the governments of the countries concerned.

    ‘It is relevant to note, however, that to the extent that the asylum seekers in those countries are subject to restrictions on their freedom of movement, those restrictions were imposed by the legislation of Nauru and Papua New Guinea respectively.’

    Needless to say, the constitutionality of arrangements was not the province of the governments of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. The thing about constitutions is that they bind governments and even parliaments, and they are definitively interpreted not by governments but by courts. Legislative restrictions have to comply with constitutional constraints.

    In 2003, I published the first edition of my book Tampering With Asylum. I wrote:

    ‘The detention of asylum seekers is contrary to the constitutions of Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Imagine if every first-world country decided to engage in this sort of unlawful people trading.’

    After Kevin Rudd revived the Pacific Solution on 19 July 2013 and once Tony Abbott perfected it on his election as prime minister, the PNG government decided to amend its Constitution to try and legalise the detention second time around.

    In 2014, the PNG parliament purported to amend the Constitution by adding a further exception to section 42, thereby permitting deprivation of liberty ‘for the purpose of holding a foreign national under arrangements made by Papua New Guinea with another country’.

    “Just because Australia does not have a constitutional bill of rights, that is no excuse for our governments exporting their cavalier disregard for human rights to our mendicant neighbours.”

    Unlike the Australian Constitution, the PNG Constitution permits the parliament to amend the Constitution without the need for a referendum of the people. But the PNG Constitution does specify that amendments to the Constitution paring back constitutional rights can only be made subject to strict conditions in relation both to the content and form of the new law.

    In relation to the content, a new restriction on an existing constitutional right can be legislated only if it is necessary to advance defence, public safety, public order, public welfare or public health, or if it is necessary to protect the rights of others, or if it is necessary to resolve a conflict of rights.

    In all these cases, there is a need to establish that the proposed law ‘is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society having a proper respect for the rights and dignity of mankind’. The proposed law legalising detention of asylum seekers sent from Australia did not get to first base according to the judges.

    The judges, having quoted UNHCR’s adverse report on the Manus Island Processing Centre, agreed with the Leader of the Opposition’s contention

    ‘that treating those required to remain in the relocation centre as prisoners irrespective of their circumstances or their status save only as asylum seekers, is to offend against their rights and freedoms as guaranteed by the various conventions on human rights at international law and under the PNG Constitution’.

    In relation to the form of the new law, it needed to state the purpose for which it was made and to ‘specify the right or freedom that it regulates or restricts‘. The court ruled that the new law ‘did not specify the purpose of the amendment or the right which it purported to limit. On that ground alone the amendment is invalid and should be declared so.’

    So the law aimed at legalising long term detention of the asylum seekers being held in the Manus Island Processing Centre was struck down. It’s unconstitutional.

    Yet again, Australia has been complicit in its Pacific neighbours (PNG and Nauru) prostituting their Constitutions and undermining the rule of law in exchange for a fistful of dollars, with hapless asylum seekers, most of whom are ultimately proved to be refugees, being left to languish.

    Just because Australia does not have a constitutional bill of rights, that is no excuse for our governments exporting their cavalier disregard for human rights to our mendicant neighbours. The PNG judges thought their legal reasoning would be even more compelling ‘if the conditions of detention are such as to damage the rights and dignity of the detainees or, worse, cause physical or mental suffering’.

    “So the spiral of abuse continues until ultimately Australia convenes a royal commission to get to the bottom of our complicity in the abuse of asylum seekers and trashing of the rule of law in our region.”

    These asylum seekers now have a claim for damages for wrongful detention. The PNG court has ordered that ‘both the Australian and Papua New Guinea governments shall forthwith take all steps necessary to cease and prevent the continued unconstitutional and illegal detention of the asylum seekers’.

    No doubt we will hear unctuous pleas from Australian ministers that Australia was not even a party to the court proceedings. Our government was no more involved in the unconstitutional detention of these asylum seekers than was Channel 9 in the attempted abduction of the children in Lebanon last fortnight. So the spiral of abuse continues until ultimately Australia convenes a royal commission to get to the bottom of our complicity in the abuse of asylum seekers and trashing of the rule of law in our region.

    Of course, Peter Dutton, the Australian Immigration Minister says these asylum seekers and proven refugees being detained on Manus Island ‘won’t be coming to Australia’. For months now he has been insisting that the 263 asylum seekers here in Australia awaiting return to Nauru after medical treatment must be sent for fear that their remaining in Australia might send a message to people smugglers.

    That cry is starting to ring hollow. The boats have stopped, and they will stay stopped. And those 263 are still here.

    Not only should those 263 be allowed to remain; those 850 held in detention on Manus Island should be brought to Australia under an agreement whereby they receive prompt processing and resettlement in exchange for their agreeing to drop their substantial damages claims for unlawful, unconstitutional detention in unconscionable conditions on Manus Island.

    It’s time to close the Manus Island Processing Centre and to allow PNG to return to the rule of law. It’s better that Australia cut its losses now, rather than waiting for the inevitable royal commission which will lay bare the long term cost of what has been done in our name.

    And have no fear, the boats will stay stopped provided only that our defence and intelligence services do their job in cooperation with Indonesian authorities.

     

     

    Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at Australian Catholic University and Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. This article was first published in Eureka Street on 27 April 2016.

    Footnote:  Incidentally, it’s worth noting that one of the main two judgements in the case was written by Justice Higgins, one time Chief Justice of the ACT.  The ACT has its own Human Rights Act, so His Honour is well familiar with the jurisprudence required to interpret the human rights provision in the PNG constitution.  John Menadue.

     

  • John Menadue. Slogans or advocacy.

    At the last election, Tony Abbott gave us a long list of slogans.

    One of them was to ‘axe the tax’. And he did axe the carbon tax. But it was a serious mistake. With the continuing strong evidence of global warming, we badly need a carbon tax or an ETS to reduce carbon pollution. In addition to reducing our capacity to reduce carbon emissions, axing the tax meant that the Commonwealth Budget lost $7.6 b. p.a. in revenue. The slogan won the day. The losers were the planet and the budget.

    Tony Abbott said that he would ‘cut the budget deficit’. But we now know that under his leadership and that of Joe Hockey, the budget deficit has doubled over the forward estimates. Budget repair is still essential if we are to reduce annual interest payments and be in better shape to face possible global economic recession or collapse. The simplified slogan of cutting the deficit has not been delivered.

    Tony Abbott said that he would ‘eliminate the debt’ but net government debt has increased by almost $100b in the last two years. Yet Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull tell us that they are superior economic managers.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison said that they would ‘stop the boats’. They didn’t. And it seems likely that Malcolm Turnbull in his commitment to ‘continuity and change’ will continue to make the claim that the Coalition stopped the boats.

    The facts tell us something quite different about how the Coalition triggered an increase in boat arrivals in the first place and then did not stop the boats. But the slogan ‘stop the boats’ served its political purpose and an uncritical media accepted then and continues to accept the Coalition’s spin that it ‘stopped the boats’.

    Forgive me for stating the facts again, as Peter Hughes and I set out in two posts in December 2015, ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals Part 1’ and ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals Part 2’.

    There are two important issues relating to boats.

    The first is that the action of Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, together with the Greens, in opposing the Malaysian Arrangement, opened the door for a dramatic increase in boat arrivals from about four boats per month at the time the Malaysian Arrangement was rejected in September 2011, to 48 boats in July 2013.

    The second is that the decision of the Rudd government in July 2013 to refuse settlement in Australia of anyone who came by boat resulted in boat arrivals falling from 48 in July 2013 to 7 per month in December 2013 when the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders commenced.

    By December 2013, boat arrivals had fallen dramatically.

    The Abbott government was only involved in the end-game and in a very marginal way. It was the Rudd government’s decision of July 2013 that was the game-changer and not Tony Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders and a few turnbacks to Indonesia. Yet Tony Abbot and now Malcolm Turnbull contend that they stopped the boats. The facts just do not show that at all.

    When he became Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull promised us ‘advocacy rather than slogans’. He told us that there would be a ‘more mature and adult conversation’ about important issues.

    Whether it is on boats or negative gearing, we are seeing a continuation of slogans and very little mature conversation.

    Disappointments continue to mount.

  • John Menadue. Defence White Paper. US, China and Barracuda – class submarines.

    Rather than acquiring military off-the-shelf (MOTS) submarines, the Australian government has committed us to the French submarine that will be built to Australian specifications. It will be a ‘unique’ build, non-nuclear and very expensive

    The Defence Minister says that the Barracuda submarine will meet Australian Government ‘requirements for a submarine with considerable range and the capacity to remain undisturbed and undetected for extended periods’.

    The government hopes that this submarine will be able to operate in the South China Sea without running unacceptable risks for the crews lives,

    Notwithstanding that by the time these submarines are actually delivered these already ‘contested waters’ in the South China Sea will be much more dangerous for a conventional submarine..

    In this way the government believes it will be helping the US resist China.

    We are apparently going to do this as a US ally at a large additional cost whether or not the US needs or wants our support.

    But is it in our interest to get involved militarily against China in the South China Sea?

    Hugh White, in this blog on 9 March 2016, (Australia’s Defence White Paper and the China threat), says. 

    ‘The White paper promotes a vision of the “rules-based global order” as a seamless and indivisible whole that must be either preserved unaltered or surrendered in its entirety and it sends a clear message that Australia should be willing to join a war against China to preserve it unaltered. This is plainly wrong. … So what are the implications of the White Paper’s view of regional order for the Defence policy it presents? The blithe assumption at the White Paper’s heart is that we can preserve the current rules-based order without serious military confrontation, because China will back down in the face of our threats. … This may prove a big mistake. Over the next few decades Australia will face a new order in Asia in which the US will play a lesser role and may even play no substantial strategic role at all.’ (Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies and the Strategic Studies Centre at the ANU and formerly Deputy Secretary, Department of Defence) 

    On the clash between China and the US in the Pacific, Geoff Miller in this blog on 31 March 2016 said:

    ‘We don’t know how the clash between these two great powers will be resolved. But I believe we can conclude that it is not a matter for or against freedom of trade, but rather a struggle for position between a superpower and its regional challenger, taking place near the challenger’s homeland. It’s not in our interest to become involved in such a clash, particularly militarily, and particularly when our relations with both contenders are both very good and very important.’ (Geoff Miller was formerly Australian Ambassador to Japan and Korea and Director-General of the Office of National Assessments.)

    In this blog of 18 April 2016, Richard Woolcott said:

    ‘Western “rules” of world order are no longer accepted by the major countries as the basis of world order. … There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China based on mainly Japanese policies could become a self-fulfilling policy. The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony. This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former ambassadors to China as well as a number of academics.’ (Richard Woolcott was Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and the Philippines and Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia, Ghana and Singapore. He was Australian Ambassador to the UN and President of the UN Security Council. He was Secretary of DFAT from 1988 to 1992.)

    It is clearly an assumption of the Defence White Paper that we need a ‘unique’ naval capability that can operate in ‘contested waters’ in the South China Sea and close to China. I don’t think there is much doubt that that is a mistaken and risky strategy as Hugh White, Geoff Miller and Richard Woolcott outline.

    The Defence White Paper and Government also assume that the US would like our naval cooperation in the South China Sea. But that is far from clear.

    In September 2014, a conference was organised by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). entitled ‘Strategy -The Submarine Choice.’ The ASPI describes itself as ’an independent, non-partisan think tank that produces expert and timely advice for Australian strategic and defence leaders’. At that conference Benjamin Schreer a Senior Adviser for Defence Strategy at ASPI raised serious doubts about whether the Americans wanted us involved in the South China Sea. He said

    ‘Operationally, it is hard to see Australian submarines contributing to any critical Coalition objectives in the South China and East China seas. The underlying assumption for such a function is that the US would want Australian submarines to operate in this space, but it’s questionable that the US has ever had enough confidence in Australian submarines performing such high-risk operations. And it’s even more difficult to see any future utility in having Australian submarines hiding off Hainan to threaten Chinese vessels as they leave port or hunting down PLAN submarines in open water. Given the enormous stakes in a future crisis involving the US and China, it’d be prudent to assume that the US would want to preserve this critical role for its own undersea force in order to maintain a single line of command and control, especially escalation control. In other words, the US would be likely to regard Australian submarines as an operational liability, particularly since their small numbers would mean that they wouldn’t make a significant difference to the outcome of the conflict.’ (See link to this Conference and Schreer’s piece on pages 45-48. https://www.aspi.org.au/publications/the-submarine-choice-perspectives-on-australias-most-complex-defence-project/Strategy_submarine_choice.pdf .Benjamin Schreer is presently Head of the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University.)

    This assessment by Schreer is consistent with the advice I have received that the US will not cooperate in Australia acquiring nuclear powered submarines.

    In their article in this blog on 16 April 2016 ‘A more efficient submarine solution’ Jon Stanford and Mike Keating said

    ‘If the government is determined to operate submarines in the South China Sea in support of the Americans, we should make it clear that Australia’s participation is contingent on the US allowing Australia to acquire nuclear submarines. On the other hand, if Australia cannot or will not acquire nuclear submarines, then it should abandon the ambition of projecting offensive power against a major adversary in far off contested waters. As ASPI has pointed out, there is no evidence that the US expects the ADF to undertake this role, which in reality is a great power role. Abandoning this force projection mission makes the capability requirement much more straightforward. Other roles include sea denial in the approaches to Australia, together with intelligence gathering and surveillance in our region. Indeed a smaller SSK (conventional submarine) readily available off the shelf is better suited than a large boat for these tasks.’ See link https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=6169. 

    The Defence White Paper and a future role for Australian submarines seem based on two very dubious assumptions.

    The first is that we should if necessary involve ourselves militarily in the contest between China and the US in the seas adjacent to China.

    The second is that the US needs or wants us to operate submarines alongside it in the South China Sea.

    We are likely to foolishly waste a lot of money on ‘unique’ submarines whose capacity to operate successfully in the South China Sea twelve years or more from now is also very questionable.

    Footnote:   The media release on the submarines says that the decision is subject to commercial terms being agreed later. This is ominous. I would have thought the commercial terms were key matters that should be resolved up front. We have had too many examples of escalating defence costs.

  • John Tulloh. The odd couple – the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and their uneasy relationship.

    As enduring international couples go, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia must rank among the oddest. They have been kind of firm friends since 1933 when oil was discovered in the kingdom. Yet their societies are so different as President Obama might have seen for himself when his limousine drove through the streets of Riyadh last week. For starters, he would not have found a woman driver anywhere or one buckled up lest the bodily contours the seatbelt creates excite the male driver. America is a wide open democracy with rights for one and all whereas Saudi Arabia is like a feudal fiefdom where rights are limited – especially if you are a woman or non-Moslem – and it is an offence to question or challenge the king’s word. America has no restriction on religious establishments, but in Saudi Arabia only mosques are permitted. Apostasy is punishable by death.

    It is money, oil, security, arms, influence, investment and even more money which keep them together. But the strains are showing. The Saudis cannot wait to see President Obama leave the White House. They feel he has let them down. No doubt, he must feel fed up with them as well. A lot of his time has been spent dealing with Islamic global terrorism, much of it inspired and even subsidised by Saudi Arabia’s Wahabism, the kingdom’s austere interpretation of the religion. A recent report in The Times said Saudi Arabia has contributed more fighters to Daesh than any other country.

    The Saudis blame Obama for many things, starting with not supporting President Hosni Mubarak when Egyptians rebelled against his rule and forced him from office. Then he had second thoughts about confronting a Saudi nemesis, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, after he crossed the line in the sand regarding chemical weapons. Next he turned his main foreign attention away from the Middle East to Asia only to return and do a deal with Saudi Arabia’s arch rival in the region, Iran. The Saudis showed their displeasure when Obama arrived in Riyadh to attend a Gulf summit last week. King Salman, having personally welcomed Gulf leaders arriving earlier in the day, pointedly sent the local governor to greet Obama. State television, unusually, ignored the president’s arrival altogether.

    Back in Washington, relations are fragile. Congress is considering a bill which could hold the kingdom responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Saudis have threatened to sell up to $975 billion in securities and other assets in the U.S. lest they be frozen by American courts. President Obama has lobbied Congress to block the bill and, if necessary, promised to veto it. But a group of families of the 9/11 victims blame Saudi Arabia and want justice.

    (The majority of the 9/11 airborne terrorists were Saudis. But the commission which investigated the attacks found ‘no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials individually funded the organisation’. However, suspicions to the contrary linger. There is now a move to release the suppressed 28 pages of the commission’s report which might answer that scepticism once and for all).

    ‘We’ve seen a long deterioration in the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and it started well before the Obama Administration,’ a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, Charles W. Freeman Jr., told the Los Angeles Times. ‘The U.S.-Saudi relationship is based entirely on interests, not values. It’s been an impossible relationship in value terms from the beginning’.

    ‘U.S.-Saudi relations have never been in complete harmony’, observed the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. One of its senior analysts, Ray Takeyh, goes further. ‘Saudi Arabia is no longer tethered to the American alliance’, he writes. ‘The House of Saud is beginning to rely on its own resources. It is hard to see what role, if any, the United States has in this evolving foreign policy’.

    Saudi Arabia arouses savage passions in the U.S., especially because of the 9/11 culprits and the country’s adherence to sharia law under which primitive punishments, such as beheadings and stonings to death, are still valid. 

         ‘The tragedy for the Arabs, especially, has been who got the oil wealth. It wasn’t the sophisticates of Beirut or even the religious scholars of Cairo, but Bedouins with a bitter view of faith. The Saudis and their fellow fanatics in the oil-rich Gulf states have used those riches to drag Muslims backward into the past and to spread violent jihad’.

    So wrote Ralph Peters, a Fox News strategic analyst, in the New York Post on the eve of Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia.

    While Saudi Arabia in its huff has been trying to go its own way, most U.S. commentators say there will be no fracture in the relationship. ‘Despite all the differences, Saudi Arabia and America are not getting divorced – we need each other’, said former White House adviser and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel, as quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald. They share intelligence, the Saudis rely on America for their security, their investments in each other’s country are too big to endanger and for American arms manufacturers there is no better customer.

    ‘As unpalatable as cooperation with the kingdom might be for some, cutting it adrift is worse,’ wrote Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. ‘Whatever the resentments, neither side has a realistic alternative to the other — something President Obama has clearly had difficulty reconciling himself to’.

    The Los Angeles Times noted that even when the two countries were closer, Saudi Arabia was never an ally. It was a partner. ‘Both countries still need each other, but less than before’, it said. ‘They’re still partners – but colder, more distant partners now’.

    FOOTNOTE. One aspect of the relationship which is booming is the PR industry. The Washington Post says the Saudis are spending millions on PR companies and lobbyists to help burnish their image and protect their interests in the U.S. ‘Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington’, said Josh Stewart, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money and influence in politics. ‘That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying’.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.    

  • Mungo MacCallum. So that was the week that wasn’t.

     

    We were promised drama and suspense, the start of a massive showdown in the senate over the Building and Construction Commission bill, a clash of egos leaving us wondering how and when it would end.

    And we were hoping for some action in the House of Representatives, too – the session might be rudely truncated, but both government and opposition would set the pre-election scene by belting each other with hyperbole over the atrocities of the unions and the banks respectively – and there might also have been some discussion of Arthur Sinodinos and his role in Liberal Party funding.

    But in fact the parliament collapsed with barely a whimper. The ABCC bill, so critical that the entire parliament had to be recalled to debate it, was rejected, done and dusted in just nine hours.

    The Australian’s indefatigable Editor at Large Paul Kelly, tried to make yet another comparison with the events of 1975: a recalcitrant senate determined to frustrate the government’s agenda. But of course 1975 was much more than that: it was an opposition, bolstered through the replacement of a dead Labor senator by an utterly unscrupulous state premier to secure the numbers to block supply and it succeeded by an unprecedented act of a pliant Governor-General, who dismissed the elected government.

    Last week’s anti-climax left the Prime Minister, after some dithering, in Opposition to announce that he had the grounds for a double dissolution. There was no political or constitutional crisis; all parties except perhaps the mindless Senator Steve Conroy whose comparison to the punctilious viceroy, Peter Cosgrove, to John Kerr completely misses the point: Cosgrove acted on the advice of his Prime Minister and Kerr defied it. It is hardly surprising that one of Conroy’s erstwhile colleagues, Simon Crean, once remarked: “Steve’s really not so bad – until you get to know him.”

    But on with the story, or rather the non-story. The government, in a panicky reaction to Bill Shorten’s widely welcomed call for a Royal Commission on the banks, replied with what it claimed was a ramping up of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which it said would allow it to undertake proactive investigations.

    It turned out that the money, which was to come from the banks themselves rather than funds that the government would previously cut, was not nearly as much as it looked: more than half of it was for capital grants to replace new equipment and the remainder, spread over three years, was woefully inadequate for what was needed for staff numbers and their foraging.

    But even before its money had been cut by the Abbott government, ASIC had proved itself to be a toothless tiger, especially where the banks were concerned; so it was entirely predictable that the banks applauded the decision, and that some of them defied the Treasurer, Scott Morrison, by refusing to rule out passing their additional costs on to the long-suffering customers. Somewhat belatedly, there was also a promise of more money for the Federal Police, who have so far been equally ineffective in the area.

    If we are going to have an election about whether the voters hate the unions or the banks worse, there is really no contest. However Malcolm Turnbull soldiered on, and announced that there would be more emphasis on cyber-security because some body had hacked the site of the Bureau of Meteorology – a move which Shorten immediately endorsed and which the public neither knew nor cared about. Then there was the dental scheme, which looked like a hastily contrived fix which the opposition branded a hoax. And the week ended with Turnbull confirming what we already knew: negative gearing is off the table. Turnbull said it would protect the value of the homes of mums and dads; but while there may, perhaps, be some mums and dads eager to sell off overpriced houses in order to purchase new overpriced houses, there are almost certainly more mums and dads who are keen to see prices fall so that their children can get into the market. At best, a dubious ploy at the start of an election.

    The impression was that the government, having embarked on the crash or crash through course to take the plunge for an election, was scrabbling for a convincing story for proroguing one parliament with unseemly haste, setting up a new one without an explanation for doing so (after all, it already had a double dissolution trigger – why all the fuss?) and then playing catch up to the opposition while it waits, in desperate hope, for a budget which will make it all plausible.

    And there is still a week to go. In the meantime the senate has done its work with the ABCC, but has planted a time bomb or two; an inquiry into electoral funding in NSW and the forced inquisition of Senator Arthur Sinodinos as part of the process – he may have escaped Mark Dreyfus but he will not be able to avoid Sam Dastyari.

    And some fairly elementary numerological research makes it clear that after all the angst over the electoral reform process, the new senate is likely to be as least as diverse as the old one, with the consequent bafflement of Malcolm Turnbull in his search for a mandate anyone will acknowledge.

    And as for the election itself –it is not looking the picnic it was looking a few months ago. On the current polls, even if the government sneaks back, it may not be able to gather the numbers to pass its cherished ABCC bill through a joint sitting of parliament. There will be independent candidates to deal with – the last thing Turnbull wants is a collection of the disenchanted heckling from a gaggle cross benchers, but he is likely to have to put up with a few of them and even to accommodate some.

    Turnbull may still have a master plan, but at the moment it is looking like a confusion turning into a cock-up. The budget just might be the game changer; but given the recent performances of both Turnbull and Morrison, you wouldn’t want to put your overpriced house on it.

    Mungo MacCallam is a political commentator and former senior correspondent in the Canberra Press Gallery.