March hasn’t been one of the better months for Kim Beazley, the former Hawke and Keating Government minister, leader of the federal ALP and governor of Western Australia and now chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial.
In the ABC’s recent 4 Corners program, he was cornered on the AWM’s acceptance of funding from arms manufacturers. To that he said, “I don’t feel the slightest embarrassment with arms manufacturers contributing… we have to defend ourselves.”
But the rightness or otherwise of the AWM getting money from Lockheed Martin and others should rest on something more solid than whether the chair of its Council is embarrassed or not. It should rely on the appropriateness of having the manufacturers of equipment designed for killing people sponsoring an organisation legislatively committed to commemorating those who have been killed by their like. Beazley’s embarrassment or lack thereof is neither here nor there, especially as through his political career he’s shown a notably high embarrassment threshold.
And what has the need to “defend ourselves” got to do with the contested sponsorship? That requires not so much a degree of immunity to embarrassment as it does a tolerance for non sequiturs.
To top it, the 4 Corners program got the former defence minister on the backfoot about his “employment” with Lockheed Martin and other arms manufacturers. He said, “What would not be appropriate is that if I didn’t declare it.” Well, Beazley’s biography on the AWM website doesn’t mention his longstanding connections with arms manufacturers nor, the ABC claims, has he included reference to these associations in his annual disclosure form for the AWM Council.
Undaunted, Beazley has then taken up bumptious advice from Elbridge Colby, Trump’s Undersecretary of Defence Policy and grandson of the controversial former CIA director William Colby, that Australia should lift its defence spending to more than 3% of GDP.
Self-respecting Australians should not be kowtowing to the likes of Colby. He and his ilk bring to mind the 1950s Burdick/Lederer novel The Ugly American that mocked the offensive crassness of America’s overseas officials in the 1950s. The difference now is that Trump’s officials are venting their ugliness towards others from the comfort of their home bases – a mockery of the traditionally generous domestic courtesy of Americans.
Beazley should be telling Colby to stick his advice into whatever crevice of his person he can find with one hand, rather than providing him with an echo chamber for his rudeness and presumption. Mind you, Colby wants Taiwan to increase its defence spending to 10% of its GDP, so perhaps there’s room in our toilet bowl for that small mercy.
Of course, the Murdoch press has gleefully picked up Beazley’s cringe, saying, “Labor’s revered former defence minister Kim Beazley has warned the Albanese Government needs to lift military spending to at least 3% of GDP in line with US demands.” “Revered” by whom? Well, there’s no time for that.
Anyway the “revered” one presses on to say, “We can’t afford to run our own game, people are full of piss and wind about that.”
It would seem that “people” are not the only ones “full of piss and wind”, and who has said we ever want to “run our own game” on defence without co-operation with friends and allies? Beazley’s indulgence in straw men and women seems about on a par with his capacity for non sequiturs.
More fundamentally, fixing defence spending on the basis of a percentage of GDP, arbitrarily plucked from thin air, is, to adopt Beazley’s fragrant turn of phrase, “a prime bit of ‘piss and wind’.”
Australian defence spending should be calculated on the basis of a careful definition of the kind of country we want to be, a clear-eyed analysis of our strategic circumstances and the risks it poses and an assessment of the extent to which those risks can be negated or satisfactorily minimised by military power used in concert with whatever reliable allies are prepared to associate themselves with us. If the spending ends up at one, three, five or whatever percentage of GDP, then so be it. But don’t for Christ’s sake reverse the logic, begin with a percentage of GDP and work backwards. If he had been born early enough, would Beazley and other like-minded souls have planned for Australia’s participation in World War II by first setting spending as a proportion of GDP? It’s just too silly to take seriously.
A rational calculation of Australia’s strategic risks may well warrant an increase in defence spending. And there may be no better place to start that a grand re-orientation of what we’ve presently signed up for by suspending the Gothic amounts dedicated to the AUKUS program pending a full review of it in consultation with the UK. In that, the US could be dealt with on the basis of its fickleness, rudeness and unreliability and one who is punishing, with tariffs, a steadfast ally with whom it has a trade surplus. That step could be usefully accompanied by a reminder of the defence facility assistance we’re providing that in some senses could be more significant to the Americans than to us. If Mike Pezzullo is saying it’s irresponsible to be talking about Pine Gap or Tyndall, then it probably isn’t.
Paddy Gourley is a superannuated Commonwealth public servant.