A modern addition to the pantheon is a university professor and writer who also worked in America’s National Intelligence Council, State Department and Defense Department.

Step forward Joseph Nye, the man who invented the concepts of “soft power” and “smart power” and set them beside “hard power.” Described by one of his Washington contemporaries as “the Grandmaster of the study of power,” Nye coined soft power to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce. The United States could use culture and communications to influence the decisions and behaviour of others in ways that military force could not reach. Nye stands with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Military power can bully, economic power can buy, but soft power is blarney magic.

Ideas set international standards in the same way that American software set the standards for the world’s computers. Thus, the lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty of American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, backed by the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. Mickey Mouse stood with the Marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or cash — “the ability to change what others do.” Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in his 1990 book on the changing nature of American power, is “the ability to shape what others want” through attraction.

Millions of Google citations show the reach of soft power, Nye writes, but “the most surprising was in 2007 when the president of China declared soft power to be their national objective.” For Nye, the result was “countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.”

Nye has seen his idea become an instrument with practical effects: soft power shifts the way leaders talk and generals act. Attending a state dinner at the White House in 2015 (“the hall was filled with cherry blossom and a Marine band in scarlet jackets was playing”), Nye shakes hands with president Barack Obama to be told “everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.”

Nye’s recently published memoir muses about his “life in the American century,” the title taken from a famous 1941 editorial by Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life magazines. Nye, born in 1937, dates the American century from the moment the United States entered the second world war: “Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.”

The United States could still be the strongest power in 2045, he thinks; in which case the American century would, indeed, mark a hundred years. The caveats on that prediction are that “we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarisation of our society and politics.”

This leading member of the American foreign policy establishment offers his biography as illumination for fellow foreign policy wonks and tragics. Most memoirs look inward; the chapter headings of Nye’s book are organised around the administrations of US presidents and America’s international role.

Nye and his friend Robert Keohane are identified as cofounders of the school of analysis of international affairs known as “neoliberalism.” While not disavowing that role, Nye writes that he and Keohane regard neoliberalism as an “over-simplified label.”

Whether in government or university, Nye’s life is one of constant travel, constant conferences and constant writing. In the Defense Department in 1995, “alliance maintenance” sent him to fifty-three countries. The military parades became a blur but the banquets were the real ordeal: sent abroad to eat for his country, Nye jested he would go out “in a blaze of calories.”

Emerging from an “unofficial meeting” with Taiwan’s defence minister, Nye is told that his father has died: “On Friday, November 4, 1994, I had the odd experience of picking up the New York Times and finding myself quoted in a front-page story on Saudi Arabia, while my father’s obituary appeared on page thirty-three. I wept.”

The motto of the public intellectual is “I think, ergo I write” (my words, not his). Nye exemplifies the dictum. He is the author of thirty books and contributor to or editor of another forty-five; his textbook ran to ten editions and sold 100,000 copes. (Here’s the Inside Story review of his book on the foreign policy morality of US presidents from FDR to Trump.) He writes a column for Project Syndicate; topics so far this year: “Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?,” “American Greatness and Decline” and “What Killed US-China Engagement?”

Graduating from Princeton at the end of the Eisenhower years, Nye planned to become a Marine officer. (“All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge.”) Instead, one of his professors pushed him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he won:

One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took me thirty-five years before I saw service in the Department of Defense, and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.

Nye worked for two Democrat presidents. For Jimmy Carter, he was in charge of policy designed to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and then went to Defense to run the “Pentagon’s little State Department” as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

Professors who go to work in Washington can offer an anthropologist’s view of the tribes that serve the president and congress. Kissinger is good on this, but the best rules for working the swamp were penned by John Kenneth Galbraith: have the president behind you (or give that impression); adopt a modest aspect of menace — arrogance backed by substance can work; never threaten to resign because that tells your allies you might leave; but be ready to lose and leave town. Nye gets much outsider understanding into a paragraph:

In Washington, there was no shortage of bureaucrats and rival political appointees eager to take my job — or leave me with the title but empty it of substance. I had been issued a hunting licence, but there was no guarantee I would bag my game. My first instinct as an academic was to try to do things myself, but that was impossible… I realised I was drowning. I discovered that unlike academia, politics and bureaucracy comprise a team sport. The secret to success was to attract others to want to do the work for me. In that sense, I learned soft power the hard way.

Nye records two of the “major regrets” Bill Clinton offered about his presidency: “having an inexperienced White House staff and underestimating the bitterness of Washington politics.”

Because of his diaries, Nye’s memoir offers tone and temperature on how different the world felt as the cold war ended. Washington was optimistic about Russia and fearful of Japan: “economic friction was high, and many in both Tokyo and Washington regarded the military alliance as a historical relic now that the cold war was over.”

Japan debated the idea of relying on the United Nations rather than the United States for security. Nye argued against both the economic hawks in Washington and the security doves in Tokyo, pointing to the rise of China and problem of North Korea. “The logic was simple,” he writes. “In a three-country balance of power, it is better to be part of the two than the isolated one.”

During defence negotiations in Tokyo, Japanese officials took him out for evening drinks and cut to the fundamentals: “How much could they trust us? As the Chinese market grew larger, wouldn’t we abandon Japan for China? I answered no, because Japan was a democracy and was not a threat. It seemed to work.”

In 1995, with “moderates still in control in Moscow, there was a sense of optimism about the future of US–Russia relations.” That mood helped drive the expansion of NATO. At talks in Geneva, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev discussed the idea of a “new NATO” with a “collective security pact” and “partial membership in NATO” for Russia. Nye wrote in his diary that Russia would accept a bigger NATO “if it is done right — and if Russia doesn’t change.”

By 1999, the optimism was gone. The US now believed that “Russia would not collapse but would develop a form of corrupt state capitalism.” Talking to former colleagues in Washington, Nye is “struck that nobody seemed to know much about Putin or to have realised how important he would become.”

As the US century enters this century, China takes centre stage as the peer competitor. Asked by Xinhua News Agency whether he’s a China hawk or dove, Nye replies that he is an owl. At a dinner in Beijing in 2012 a member of the Communist Party central committee tells Nye: “We are Confucians in Marxist clothing.”

The following year, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi invites Nye to a private meal “to quiz me about how China could increase its soft power.” Nye replies that raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and celebrating a gorgeous traditional culture are “important sources of attraction for China. At the same time, as long as it had territorial disputes with its neighbours, and as long as its insistence on tight party control over civil society and human rights continued, China would face serious limits on its soft power in Asia and in the West.”

The US power equation has shifted significantly in two decades. In the early years of this century, as the United States invaded Iraq, Nye’s concern was about “unipolar hubris.” Today, he frets about a polarized America turning inward. He thinks the greatest danger the United States faces “is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done.”

In the final pages of his memoir, Nye assesses the balance of power between China and the US, and says America has five long-term advantages:

• Geography: the United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbours, while China “shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several.”

• Energy: China depends on energy imports far more than the United States.

• Finance: the United States gets power from the international role of the dollar and its large financial institutions. “A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks.”

• Demography: the United States is the only major developed country projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. “The US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014.”

• Technology: America is “at the forefront in key technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the number of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind American ones.”

Nye’s fear is that domestic change within the United States could endanger the American century. Even if its external power remains dominant, he writes, a country can lose its internal virtue:

All told, the US holds a strong hand in the great power competition, but if we succumb to hysteria about China’s rise or complacency about its “peak,” we could play our cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards — including strong alliances and influence in international institutions — would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the US unless we make it one by blundering into a major war. This historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.

Nye ends his memoir with the humility that befits an old man: “I cannot be fully sure how much of my optimism rests on my analysis or my genes.” In his final paragraph, he ruefully notes that “the more I learn, the less I know… Though I have spent a lifetime following my curiosity and trying to understand us, I do not leave many answers for my grandchildren. The best I can do is leave them my love and a faint ray of guarded optimism.” •

A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye | Polity Press | 254 pages | $51.95

The post The father of “soft power” appeared first on Inside Story.

Penny Wong is well-suited for all these roles, alternating between the higher-intensity Peking opera, the low-intensity Kabuki form, and the diplomatic shirtfront. Thus, she said she was disturbed by China’s confronting behaviour in the South China Sea, concerned about China’s human rights abuses and “shocked” by the suspended death sentence meted out to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun for allegedly spying.

Having got that off her chest, she was also pleased that relations between Australia and China had “stabilised” under the Albanese government, enabling the resumption of what diplomats call a high-level foreign and strategic dialogue. That process had fallen into disuse under the more combative and, as it turned out, less constructive approach taken by the previous Australian government.

As for Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister provided a relatively enigmatic foil in his public encounters with Australian leaders, including Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese. In private, he will no doubt have given as good as he got: as a long-serving foreign minister he is no stranger to difficult encounters triggered by China’s  assertiveness.

Wong and Wang won’t have neglected the implications of an extremely unstable global security environment for regional peace and stability. While they may not have dealt directly with a possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, it will have been part of their calculations about what lies ahead.

Offstage we had a staple of Peking opera, with a villain in the shape of Paul Keating, whose meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was portrayed in some excitable media quarters as treason. In a world of high-stakes diplomacy in which one of Beijing’s stocks-in-trade is divide and prevail, the meeting with a former prime minister who is a critic of Australia’s China policy will have served a symbolic purpose.

What was achieved by all this activity?

The answer is straightforward. The Wong–Wang meeting served both countries’ interests. For Australia, it demonstrated that relations with its cornerstone trading partner are in mutually beneficial shape. For China, it suggested Canberra had not moved irredeemably into Washington’s orbit.

The encounter was realpolitik writ large in preparation for a visit to Canberra later this year of Chinese premier Li Qiang. To use a phrase borrowed from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it had a win–win outcome for the two countries, though not for Australia’s China hawks.

Much of this movement, including an easing of restrictions on Australian exports to China, would have been off limits under Scott Morrison’s government — a time when Australia’s trade minister could not get his counterpart on the telephone.

In the eighteen months since Labor took office, bilateral encounters have occurred monthly at least, and with increasing frequency more recently. Contrast this with the paucity of meetings, invariably restricted to encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings, under Morrison.

Absent from Wong’s remarks about the relationship on this occasion was the bromide that Australia would disagree with China where it must, and agree where it can, or words to that effect. Increasingly, we now have Wong saying that Australian wants a “stable and constructive” relationship with China “in the interests of both countries.”

This might be bad news for those critics of China who have put us on a “red alert,” as a febrile newspaper series in Age and the Sydney Morning Herald described it last year. A “constructive” relationship would seem to be in Australia’s own interests, though it shouldn’t be at the expense of Australia’s treaty arrangements, its national interest or its values — a fact that shouldn’t need to be repeated ad nauseum.

In their quite lengthy talks Wong and Wang will have dwelled no doubt on a trading and people-to-people relationship that has rebounded since the Covid crisis subsided. Goods and services exports to China gained 13 per cent to A$203.5 billion in the 2022–23 financial year, with China accounting for a shade over a quarter of total exports. Service exports to China were up 27 per cent as a result of the return of students and tourists. The country is far and away Australia’s biggest export market.

If there is an impediment from China’s point of view, it is the obstacles facing Chinese enterprises attempting to gain a foothold in Australia’s investment market by the Foreign Investment Review Board. China’s investment stock in Australia stands at just A$44 billion, or 4 per cent of total foreign direct investment. It ranks sixth among foreign investors, far behind the United States, the European Union and Britain.

Among jarring aspects of Wang Yi’s visit, and one that raised questions about China’s willingness to engage more broadly, was the foreign minister’s unwillingness to avail himself of the opportunity to answer questions from the Australian media. Wang and his advisers won’t have overlooked the hostile tenor of some of the reporting ahead of his visit, and the near certainty that this hostility would have permeated an encounter with an Australian media loaded for game.

In all of this, participants in the diplomatic jousting will continue to play their roles for both a domestic and a wider audience. Senator Wong is proving quite good at it. The question, as always, is how much substance is there behind the shadow play. •

The post Shadow play appeared first on Inside Story.

It took a while for diplomats to realise they had a window into the mind of this reticent figure courtesy of a Westerner — an Australian, in fact —who had become part of Soeharto’s household a decade before these events and was to remain a key intermediary between the general and the West until Soeharto stepped down in 1998. In the words of an American diplomat in Jakarta at that time, Clive Williams was Soeharto’s “Australian whisperer.”

But as former Australian diplomat Shannon Smith writes in his intriguing biography, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher, Williams’s role was kept largely secret from the public for more than fifty years. “Those who knew him in an official capacity are confined to several dozen international diplomats, journalists and politicians, and they had national interest, and sometimes self-interest, in keeping his name, his position and his role out of the public spotlight,” says Smith. The man himself would divulge only that he came from Geelong. “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”

So who was Clive Williams? How did this cashiered Jehovah’s Witness missionary and self-trained chiropodist become attached to Soeharto? How important was he in the power transition and Soeharto’s long presidency? And what did he know about the manoeuvrings around the night of 30 September 1965? Thanks to exhaustive research, Smith has answers to the first three of these questions, but only a hint about the fourth.

Williams was born in Geelong in 1921 to a family on the edge of survival, his father shattered by two years as a German prisoner of war. His mother died when he was sixteen, robbing him of close emotional support just as he was coming to the realisation that he was homosexual.

Feeling “hunted” in Geelong, Smith conjectures, Williams needed somewhere to “hide in plain sight.” He found it as a Jehovah’s Witness. Though the sect had only about 2000 followers in Australia, it was well known thanks to its early adoption of new technologies. Sound vans cruising the streets, radio broadcasts, pamphlets and foot-in-the-door house calls — all these were used pushed its millenarian belief that Christ would soon return to Earth and replace all worldly governments with a paradise populated only by Witnesses.

The group was unpopular, of course, and as Australia entered the second world war it was also suspect for its pacifism. Its eventual banning in 1941 added to the attraction for Williams. “An ardent, proselytising Jehovah’s Witness must have felt a real adrenalin rush pitting themself against community standards, breaking laws, and actively seeking pushback or confrontation,” Smith thinks. “Living in a society where one felt pressure for being ‘other’ or ‘less,’ such as a homosexual, it would have been an ideal outlet for barely twenty-year-old Williams to fight back, especially where the attention was on one’s religious beliefs not sexuality.”

Having started out as a self-supporting “pioneer” roaming the towns in a sound-van, Williams graduated to a central role in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Sydney, got exempted from call-up as a religious minister even as the sect continued to operate semi-underground, and then, in 1950, gaining induction into the sect’s global training centre, Gilead, in upstate New York. The following year, when his class was dispatched as missionaries, he landed in Manado, the province in the north of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.

Williams lasted not quite three years in that role. Smith found a cryptic reference in the sect’s records for 1954 — “During the course of the year it became necessary to disfellowship a person from the congregation for unchristian conduct” — but Williams was otherwise expunged from the sect’s history books. He might have been expelled for attending more to charity than conversions, Smith generously observes, but his sexuality seems a more likely cause.

Aged thirty-six, Williams then moved to Semarang in Central Java, taking with him a younger Manadonese man. “It was also a good place to lose oneself or, indeed, hide from view. A place to shake off a religion and find some spirituality, to conceal sexuality, and to reset,” Smith writes. “Over the next few years, Williams delved into Javanese culture, became fluent in the local languages and established a series of lifelong friendships. Like many who enter witness protection, he emerged with a new identity.”

Despite his humble schooling, Williams had always been well spoken, had become a confident speaker from years as a missionary, and no longer had a mission to convert the local Muslims. He quickly tapped into the immense demand for English-language tuition in the new nation, particularly among upper-echelon Indonesians who could pay for classes and textbooks.

Word of Williams’s activities reached Tien Soeharto, wife of the rising army officer. The two struck up a rapport: “he delighted her with his demonstrations of Western etiquette and customs, he became the couples’ English tutor, and like most Australians, he was practical and handy at fixing things (including cutting her in-grown toenails).” Clive also followed international affairs: “he had travelled to London and New York! And his knowledge about the human condition, gained from travelling around the cities and isolated communities of Australia and his missionary work, was extremely broad. To the inward-looking Javanese couple, Williams was a revelation.”

It was during these years, the 1950s, that Soeharto rose to command the army’s crucial Central Java region, building a patronage style of leadership bolstered by commodity smuggling, protection rackets and other business activity. In the process he attracted life-long loyalty from army colleagues like Sudjono Humardhani, Ali Murtopo and Yoga Sugama and among Chinese-Indonesian compradore businessmen like The Kian Seng (known as Mohammed “Bob” Hassan) and Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim).

Eventually the business deals got too much for the puritanical army head, Abdul Haris Nasution, who transferred Soeharto to the new staff college in Bandung in 1959. But that didn’t stop Soeharto’s rise. He took command of a new Jakarta-based ready-reaction force called Kostrad that also had the job of regaining Western New Guinea from the Dutch. Tien stayed in Semarang through this period, with Williams becoming a trusted male presence while frequently flying to Jakarta to see Soeharto.

Smith takes us through much of the still-emerging history and analysis of the events of 1965, though he misses some parts of the story, notably the role of the double agent Sjam Kamaruzaman, an army intelligence asset inside a “special bureau” attached to the top leadership of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

What Smith’s research reinforces, though, is that neither the CIA nor other foreign intelligence agencies were masterminding events. Although Western powers quickly piled in with propaganda blaming the killing of six army generals on the PKI, they were taken completely by surprise by the nature of the military putsch and knew virtually nothing about Soeharto. A provincial figure, he had not been among the more cosmopolitan Indonesian officers given US army training.

As Soeharto moved to undercut Sukarno, first by facing down his attempt to appoint someone else army commander, then by forcing the handover of executive powers in the famous 11 March 1966 letter Sukarno was intimidated into signing, then by becoming acting president in 1967, foreign embassies were baffled by the opaque responses they were getting from the emerging leader. When he said “yes” it could mean yes, or maybe, or just “I have heard you,” or even a no.

Then, in mid 1966, Williams was discovered by American ambassador Marshall Green and soon became an indispensable intermediary for the embassy, and vice-versa. He would often turn up on the doorstep of an American diplomat’s house at the behest of the acting president, and the embassy also chose Williams for reciprocal approaches.

Williams was very different from other potential intermediaries including members of the ring of ex-Semarang army officers serving as “special advisors” to Soeharto, or foreign minister Adam Malik and other civilian politicians who sometimes had different political agendas. He was non-political, incorruptible and simply not interested in money. He understood “Soeharto’s nuances and communication style; he could read Soeharto’s mood and could tell whether he was angry or prevaricating or anxious, and he could anticipate Soeharto’s thinking and reaction to an issue.” He also spoke both English and Indonesian fluently, “ensuring there were no linguistic or cultural misunderstandings.”

By 1967, Soeharto was ensconced in the large house at Jalan Cendana in Menteng, the old inner suburb of Dutch officialdom. Williams took a small house, connected by gate, at the back. He would come in for meals, take Soeharto through what the foreign media were saying, coach the six children in English, and guide Tien through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The Australian embassy was two years behind Marshall Green in discovering Williams as the best conduit to Soeharto. Or at least its mainstream diplomatic staff were. An army attaché, Colonel Robert Hughes, met Williams in Central Java in 1966 and got a meeting with Soeharto, with Williams interpreting. Murray Clapham, a suave young officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, became friendly with Williams, as did his chief of station Kenneth Wells.

The ABC’s correspondent, Tim Bowden, also discovered Williams and persuaded him to give a radio interview in October 1966. While current politics were barred, the hour-long encounter went deeply into the kind of divination that Soeharto — like many Javanese — practised as they reached major decisions.

But these insights were disregarded by Australia’s ambassador from 1966 to 1969, Max Loveday, a rigid and self-important character who insisted on using conventional channels, notably the Indonesian foreign ministry and Malik, its minister, whom Soeharto distrusted. The Australian government consequently made a number of diplomat blunders by pushing proposals that Williams would have advised were bound to be refused. A visit by prime minister John Gorton in 1968 to cement reopened political contact was a near failure, redeemed mostly by the Indonesian-language fluency of Gorton’s wife Bettina.

It was not until Gordon Jockel — who knew about Williams from a memorandum the exasperated Ken Wells circulated in Canberra behind Loveday’s back — became ambassador in March 1969 that the embassy tapped into the Whisperer.

Smith’s biography ends about there, with the relationship from 1969 to Williams’s death in 2001 to be covered in a second volume. Those who met Williams over these decades know he remained fervently loyal, especially to Tien Soeharto (and her memory after she died in 1996). During the tension over East Timor he remained a vital channel for Canberra.

His house in Menteng remained a modest one, as did the former home and hobby farm of Soeharto himself by the standards of Marcos, Mobutu or Putin (or even Sydney’s harbourside mansions these days). Whether he exercised any restraint over Soeharto’s children in their business dealings would be interesting to discover. From the available evidence it would seem not. Any role he took in the nuptials of Soeharto’s daughter Titiek to the dashing special forces officer Prabowo Subianto would be of added interest now that Prabowo is president-elect.

On the last question — what did Williams know about 1965–66? — Smith has found only tantalising clues. When a German-born Jesuit, Franz Magnis-Suseno, met him just prior to the 30 September coup, he was surprised by Williams’s conviction that Soeharto was ready to act against the communists. “What was clear from Magnis-Suseno’s account of his conversation with Williams — and it wasn’t a [later] recollection, he recorded it in his diary — was that Soeharto was either planning his own initiative or preparing to respond to another scheme,” Smith writes.

But then Smith backs away. “The 30 September Movement  seems to have been no more than an old-fashioned army putsch by disgruntled middle-level officers using whatever support they could get,” he writes. “But it was a clumsy, poorly planned operation and probably didn’t expect Soeharto’s quick counter-reaction. It might also have been subverted by Soeharto; he certainly didn’t orchestrate the movement but it is very reasonable to assume he knew the plans in advance, and that he both infiltrated the putsch and then took action against it.”

So Smith, despite have read and cited much of the still-expanding literature about 1965, hangs back from the logical leap that other scholars are making, and that the Jesuit’s diary points towards. This is that Soeharto’s own spooks fired up impressionable middle-ranking officers to mount the 30 September putsch against pro-American generals allegedly about to overthrow Sukarno, in the hope of drawing the PKI into a power grab, thereby justifying an army counter-coup.

We live in hope that the second and third volumes of David Jenkins’s account of Soeharto’s rise to power will clarify further, and that Williams grew less discreet in his later years. So far, though, Soeharto’s Australian whisperer remains largely enigmatic. •

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher: The Enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume 1, 1921–1968
By Shannon Smith | Big Hill Publishing | 254 pages | $34.99

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Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.

While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

The post Spiky questions remain for AUKUS proponents appeared first on Inside Story.

Australian citizen Yang Hengjun’s arrest, imprisonment and suspended death sentence for espionage could draw comparison with the case of Francis James, the eccentric publisher of the Sydney church newspaper the Anglican, who Gough Whitlam managed to spring from a Chinese jail in 1973 after convincing Beijing he was a harmless prankster.

But the two cases are quite dissimilar, especially as the comparison doesn’t give Yang credit for his genuine efforts for liberal reform in China.

As recounted by Japan-based ex-diplomat Gregory Clark, who covered the Francis James case for the Australian, James had concocted an entirely fictitious account of travelling to the Chinese nuclear test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang and sold it to the London Sunday Times in 1969. After he was exposed by Derek Davies of the Far Eastern Economic Review as having skirted around rather than visited China, James invented another preposterous story and then went openly to China in November 1969. He was promptly arrested as a suspected spy.

Why so reckless? Getting arrested was deliberate, Clark conjectured. “Get into China via the Canton Fair, behave suspiciously, get arrested dramatically and mysteriously, and the world will have no choice but to believe that here indeed is a person who could once have roamed the secret nuclear installations of northwest China,” he wrote.

“True, being arrested by the Chinese police in those days was no joke,” Clark went on. “But he has a plan. Because he behaves outrageously and courts arrest, the Chinese will quickly realise he is a harmless eccentric playing games and throw him out of the country. Being expelled from China will add even more to the James legend.”

But things don’t quite work out that way. “The Chinese decide that he is not mad or playing games, that he really is on some secret spy mission. What James thought would be a short-term escapade ends up as incarceration and interrogation for four years. The joke very nearly ends up as a tragedy.”

Yang’s case could very well turn into a tragedy. His death sentence has been suspended for two years on condition he doesn’t re-offend. How he might spy from a prison cell is a mystery, but Chinese security would no doubt find some evidence if it wanted to. And Yang, fifty-eight, has a large lesion on one of his kidneys that could be renal cancer, treatable if operated on in time. In a previous high-profile case, that of detained Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Chinese authorities allowed liver cancer to develop beyond hope of treatment.

Despite five years of detention and hundreds of interrogation sessions, China’s Ministry of State Security could only come up with one plausible accusation of espionage. This involves an operation thirty years ago, in 1994–97, when Yang was working for the ministry itself as an undercover officer in Hong Kong as the territory’s handover from Britain to China was approaching. Back then, according to the limited summary of evidence released with the verdict, Yang passed on forty documents containing Chinese secrets to Taiwan’s intelligence service.

But Yang had long told confidants that his superiors in State Security gave him the job of opening contact with Taiwan operatives to help ensure a smooth transition and had been happy with his trading some low-level information to win confidences. So pleased with his performance had his superiors been that they let him go to Washington with his then wife for two years as a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, while still on the ministry’s books.

The resurrection of the Hong Kong episode suggests that Yang’s interrogators found no evidence of espionage in the decades since, unless it has been withheld. So the arrest must have been for something else. And the answer surely lies in the evolution of Yang’s career as an academic researcher, popular fiction writer and political blogger, and how State Security, as guardian of the Chinese dictatorship, saw his work as a challenge and threat.

Early on, Yang certainly teased the ministry: not something that should be done lightly given it is perhaps the largest intelligence agency in the world, with an estimated 110,000 staff encompassing foreign intelligence, domestic counter-intelligence and increasingly cyber and industrial espionage. It even has its own think tank, the Institute for Contemporary International Relations, to engage with foreign counterparts and release open-source assessments. At its favoured hotel in central Beijing, troublesome figures are invited in for a “cup of tea” as a warning.

Reflecting the ministry’s staid, bureaucratic character, its cadres are supposed to be pillars of communist rectitude. At the insistence of its former political master, premier Zhou Enlai (the leader Whitlam prevailed on to release James), it has forsworn “honey traps” (sexual entrapment) and doesn’t seem to go in for overseas “wet jobs” (assassinations), at least according to John Byron, the pseudonymous co-author of Claws of the Dragon, a book based on the personal papers of Kang Sheng, Mao Zedong’s spy chief and orchestrator of his purges.

Yang tried to liven up that dour image with a trilogy of spy novels published in Hong Kong and Taiwan around 2004–05. According to those who’ve read them, they contain the mix of sex and murder found in spy books about Western intelligence services. The hero, a Chinese named Yang, is a double-agent in a vicious war between the State Security and the CIA. Smuggled copies gained a wide readership in China.

Yang joined the ministry’s elite intake as a brilliant graduate of Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of the country’s best foreign-studies schools. He received the Hong Kong assignment after a posting to the foreign department of Hainan’s provincial government.

But his role ended with his Washington sojourn. In 1999 his then wife, a professional interpreter and translator, gained a skilled migration visa for Australia. Yang emigrated too, as her dependent. The move appears not to have been a “defection.”

In Australia, as well as writing his spy books, Yang plunged back into academic study, supported by his wife, first at the University of New South Wales and then at the University of Technology Sydney, where he gained a PhD in 2007 for a thesis on political messaging on the Chinese internet, then subject to tightening surveillance and blocking.

Research contacts enabled Yang to develop a huge following for his Chinese-language blogs discussing political reform, says his UTS doctoral supervisor, Feng Chongyi. The large following gained him some income but he also relied on hospitality from friends and contacts. At some point his marriage broke up.

Although his spy books had been “too sensitive for China,” Feng tells me, Yang continued to travel in and out of China, by then as an Australian citizen. One awkward moment came on a visit to Guangzhou in 2011, when local police officers detained him. Uprisings were then sweeping the Middle East in the Arab Spring and China’s security apparatus had been told to nip any local buds. With help from Julia Gillard’s government, Feng got Yang released after four days on the condition that his detention was not publicised.

At their peak, says Feng, Yang’s blogs were followed by about a hundred “Yang Groups” in some fifty Chinese cities. But with Xi Jinping’s ascension as Communist Party secretary in October 2012 the atmospherics started changing. Xi methodically purged all rival factions, including the Shanghai faction of former leader Jiang Zemin and the Communist Youth League faction of predecessor Hu Jintao (who was later frogmarched out of the 2022 party congress that gave the green light for Xi’s indefinite rule).

Xi also cracked down on civil society: lawyers, academics, media outlets, non-government organisations. With his blogging career faced with ever-tightening controls, Yang became noticeably more cautious in what his writing and speaking, according to a foreign correspondent he used to meet in Beijing. His high-level party contacts, including former vice-president Zeng Qinghong, a key lieutenant to Jiang Zemin, were themselves on the outer.

Yang had also embarked on a relationship that raised questions among his following. His new wife, Yuan Ruijuan (also known as Yuan Xiaoliang), had been labelled a “patriotic blogger” — or, more disparagingly, a wumao (fifty-cent warrior) for the half-yuan these bloggers were supposedly paid for each post supporting the official line. Her reputation sat uneasily with Yang’s long-time aim of political opening. Some wondered whether Yang had been playing both sides of China’s internal divide.

Nonetheless, Yang was in the sights of State Security. The contacts he had made with Zeng Qinghong, a former vice-premier who had been a key lieutenant of Jiang Zemin, would have been enough to ensure that. “The CCP reforming wing under Zeng embraced globalisation whole-heartedly and pushed for alliance with the West,” says Feng. “Zeng even went so far as to find an exit for the CCP.”

In March 2017 Feng Chongyi was himself detained during a research trip in Guangzhou. Before pressure from Canberra and his university secured his release, Feng says he was questioned intensively about Yang’s activities and connections. “They said: Women hui shoushi ta! We will get rid of him!” Feng recalls.

Feng then helped Yang get a two-year visiting fellowship at New York’s Colombia University, his income to be augmented by informal daigou trading of American luxuries to China. After the fellowship ended in January 2019, Yang and his second wife, heading back to Australia, made the fateful decision to visit relatives on the way. Unlike Francis James, it was not a showdown gesture: Yang must have thought the State Security officers in his intake, by then in senior ranks, would keep a lenient eye on him.

“I told him not to go back to China,” says Feng. “He said, if they want to take me, they would have done it long ago.”

Yang’s arrest may partly have been precautionary, aimed at silencing a potentially influential figure ahead of two big anniversaries coming up in 2019: the centenary of the 4 May 1919 student uprising over the foreign concession ports reaffirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

China’s relations with US-aligned nations were already spiralling downwards. A month earlier, Canada had arrested Huawei’s heiress-apparent Meng Wanzhou on a US warrant for breaking sanctions on Iran. In return, two Canadians working in China had been arrested, effectively as hostages. Members of the Five Eyes intelligence group, which includes Australia, were blocking Huawei from their 5G mobile networks on suspicion the technology could be used for Chinese espionage or sabotage. The party and State Security had added to the deteriorating atmosphere with a new intelligence law requiring all Chinese citizens and enterprises to cooperate with intelligence services when asked.

In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull’s government had enacted new laws on foreign influence while Yang was in New York. A month after his detention Canberra blocked the Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo, a permanent resident, from re-entering Australia because of payments to politicians allegedly to build pro-China sentiment.

Yang was in contact with Australian officials preparing the anti–foreign influence crackdown. In New York he appears to have engaged with Boxun, a US-based website and news aggregator that promotes democracy and human rights and exposes alleged corruption in China. Blocked in China itself, Boxun has been subject to cyber-attacks attributed to Beijing. Its founder, Meicun “Watson” Meng, has strongly defended Yang against his latest charges.

Yang’s harsh sentence has undermined the feeling in Canberra that relations with China, though never expected to be warm, were at least unlikely to deliver more shocks. The hope, no doubt, was that Yang would be released after sentencing for time served.

To Canberra’s China hawks, the sentence suggests that Beijing wants Australians to be a bit afraid. And the court’s two-year good behaviour: did that apply to the Australian government, they wonder, as well as Yang?

But Richard McGregor, the China specialist at Sydney’s Lowy Institute and author of widely praised book, The Party, plays down the idea that Beijing is sending a message to Australia. “It’s less about Australia and more about them,” he tells me. “On the one hand, the MSS [State Security] is likely largely indifferent to the deleterious impact Yang’s verdict will have on relations with Australia. But you could imagine that State Security deliberately demanded the harshest sentence possible as a warning to pro-democracy activists that they are risking their lives.”

For State Security, foreign relations are mere collateral damage. So is economic confidence. After a revised anti-espionage law introduced last July expanded the range of activities that can be considered espionage, raids targeted US-linked consultancy and due-diligence firms.

As the well-informed Hong Kong journalist and academic Wang Xiangwei has pointed out, State Security has gone public with its warnings, launching a WeChat account last August. “Since then, it has boldly asserted itself not only on espionage matters but also on national and international topical issues ranging from China–US relations to economic subjects, including one in which it warned against badmouthing China’s economic growth prospects,” Wang wrote.

Then, late last year, State Security put out posts blasting people who were bearish about China and “badmouthing” China’s economic growth prospects, Wang said. A few weeks later, in late January, it laid out ten conditions — mainly concerning national security, state secrets and anti-espionage law — that could lead to questioning by its agents.

State Security is unlikely to be doing this without Xi’s firm approval. Minister Chen Yixin is a longtime associate of Xi — so close that he is believed to be working on a new chapter of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the official ideology that ranks Xi with Mao. A “pillar” of state security seems likely to join existing pillars of the economy, diplomacy, military, environment, legal affairs and culture in the official document.

Without a signal from Xi, no one in Beijing is likely to resist the expanded ministry. “In any political system it’s difficult to push back against the internal security service,” says Lowy’s McGregor. “Eventually with wolf-warrior diplomacy there was a top-level political intervention and it largely stopped. So far, the MSS’s role seems very much in line with the direction Xi Jinping has set for the country. The only incentive in China is to exceed what you think the leader wants.”

In the meantime, Anthony Albanese is no Gough Whitlam, and Xi Jinping is no Zhou Enlai, and for the China of 2024, unlike in 1973, the Russians are its second fiddle and the Americans fearful of its rise. The best hope for Yang appears to be an effort to stress his precarious health and, unfairly as it may be, downplaying the seriousness of his challenge to the Party.

The MSS cadres are unlikely to know James Thurber’s 1939 story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” or the 1947 Danny Kaye movie, but they might have seen the 2013 remake with Ben Stiller. •

The post Collateral damage appeared first on Inside Story.

As it happens, I don’t think we did ever find a story the Rudd government could tell the Australian people. Nor do I recall hearing anything further about this grand mission afterwards. A year or so later, of course, Rudd was gone and, at the 2010 election, so — almost — was the government itself. Julia Gillard, who led Labor to minority government, called Rudd’s “a good government… losing its way.”

It has recently been hard not to wonder: is Albanese’s going the same way?

In many respects, the comparison is unfair. This Labor government has plainly learnt a great deal from the last and has gone out of its way not to repeat its errors. Many of its ministers were there, in more junior roles, last time. Albanese himself, as a rising figure during that era and leader of the House for almost the entire period before ending up as deputy prime minister, sometimes seemed traumatised by the infighting that more than anything wrecked Labor in government.

The differences matter. Rudd wanted to win the media every day. Albanese often seems more like Malcolm Fraser in his aspiration to keep politics off the front page. Rudd talked a big game in opposition about keeping government accountable but then failed to follow through by calling inquiries into the grand failures and scandals of the Howard era such as the Iraq war and the Australian Wheat Board affair. Albanese’s government, by contrast, has called one inquiry after another, most of them exposing the sheer badness of the Coalition on issues ranging from immigration policy through to robodebt.

Barely six months into the life of his government, Kevin Rudd was being called Captain Chaos by the Australian’s John Lyons. Albanese has gone out of his way to emphasise the careful, orderly and process-driven nature of his government. Albanese probably intends such remarks as a rebuke of Scott Morrison, but they often sound equally applicable to Rudd.

The Albanese government has a right to consider itself a good government, even allowing for the fairly low standards we have so often seen this century in Canberra. It has fulfilled many election promises. It has grappled effectively with key areas of Coalition failure and neglect, including stagnant wages and a shambolic immigration policy. It has responded to the general challenge of rising inflation and the particular one of spiralling energy costs. It has conducted that bewildering range of inquiries — not, seemingly, just to kick a can down the road but with the apparent aim of consulting widely and doing good policy — which gives substance to its commitment to evidence and process.

If good government receives its due reward, you might imagine that this is a government coasting to a comfortable election victory next time round. It is remarkable to consider that Labor won a resounding victory in the Aston by-election as recently as 1 April 2023; at the time, it seemed unassailable.

But politics is rarely so simple, and it tends not to be terribly fair either. Recent opinion polling has been discouraging for the government: Newspoll had the two-party-preferred vote at 50–50 in November, and then Labor at 52 to the Coalition’s 48 just before Christmas. That’s not disastrous — the middle of a term often looks grim for incumbents — but it would have given Labor Party strategists plenty to worry over.

Three issues have figured in the commentary. Almost everyone gives significant weight to the cost of living, which is hitting lower- and middle-income families hard. Pollsters and pundits argue that Labor’s support in the outer suburbs is fragile and it needs to do more to show it is on the side of struggling families. Peter Dutton and the Liberals, meanwhile, see these same voters as their only serious pathway back to government. November’s Victorian state election gave signs that Labor’s vote on Melbourne’s suburban frontiers might be a little more fragile than many assumed at the 2022 federal election. The forthcoming Dunkley by-election will test some of the claims made in recent months.

The second issue was the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Labor championed this cause: it became part of the government’s brand from the moment of Albanese’s victory speech on the evening of 21 May 2022. When, therefore, it went down, it was inevitable that the government’s reputation should go down with it. Governments have not historically been thrown out of office on the back of such a defeat, but failure at a referendum can wrong-foot a government struggling under other pressures — as the defeat of its attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1951 did to a Menzies government grappling with 20 per cent inflation.

Third, there is the Gaza war. The horrors that have occurred in Israeli border communities, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in Gaza will move anyone with a sense of humanity, but the political reality is that they have tended to move different groups of people in rather different ways. Labor’s problem here is that for large parts of the left, the Palestine issue is the defining cause of the age; for them, it divides pretend progressives from real ones.

There are parallels here with the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, which was also a divisive issue for a Labor Party that contained secular leftists and others who supported the Republican government, and Catholic right-wingers who leaned towards Franco and the Nationalist rebels. It was a part of John Curtin’s achievement as federal Labor leader that he was able to steer a course through these turbulent waters, largely by committing his party — then in opposition — to isolationism.

That kind of approach isn’t available to Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong. But they still must steer a course that takes into account Australia’s alliance commitments, its support for the so-called rules-based order and international law, the pressures of the domestic political scene and challenges of electoral politics, and its attachments to basic decency, humanitarianism and justice. The government’s hostility to Hamas is taken for granted everywhere except among the unhinged populist right, whose extremism nonetheless now often finds a platform in parts of the commercial media.

But we can be equally certain that it gives Australia’s Labor government no great pleasure to be seen as too close to the present government of Israel, a regime that is for very sound reasons deeply unpopular in Israel itself as well as among many Australian Jews. There is little doubt that in negotiating these pressures, which it has actually done with fair success, the government has nonetheless at times sounded windy and looked wobbly.

By Christmas, I would not have been alone in wondering if this government was going the way of Rudd’s and Gillard’s amid these pressures. A great part of the difficulty has seemed to me the particular combination of policy wonkery and electoral opportunism that has come to hold too much sway in the Labor Party this century. We all like good, evidence-based policy, and we all like electoral professionalism. Successful political parties need both to get anywhere.

But politics is also an aspect of culture. Otherwise highly intelligent Labor politicians can sometimes appear very naive about such matters. The Rudd and Gillard governments are a case in point: who in the Gillard government, for instance, came up with the idea of appointing a former Liberal Party leader, Brendan Nelson, as director of one of the country’s leading public institutions, the Australian War Memorial — in the lead-up to the centenary of the first world war, of all times? And under this government, which seems to support a new direction for the memorial on the issue of representing frontier warfare, it reappointed to the council a former Liberal prime minister, Tony Abbott. Such statesmanship!

These matters might seem trivial beside the problem of ensuring that millions of Australians can pay for their next power bill. But the political right has fewer illusions — Coalition governments stack boards as if their very existence depended on it. Labor shouldn’t follow that lead, but it should pay much closer attention than it does to the points of intersection between civil society, cultural authority and state power.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to explain how power and culture work in capitalist societies. The “common sense” of the ruling class — coinciding with its interests — comes to be seen as that of society as a whole — the “national interest,” to use some contemporary parlance. Conservatives apply Gramsci’s ideas faithfully in their relentless efforts to dominate culture. Their success in the recent Voice referendum was testament to such efforts. Labor governments imagine that so long as they can get that cost-of-living relief through the parliament next week, winners are grinners. That notion rests on a remarkably shallow understanding of how power operates in a society of any serious complexity.

This is why January has been a good month for the Albanese government. Two things happened almost at the very same time, one in “the economy,” the other in “the culture.” In the economy, it recast the stage three tax cuts to ensure that there was a redistribution of benefits towards low- and middle-income earners. Alan Kohler, so often a devastatingly astute commentator on such matters, was right to point out that this was somewhat of an argument over loose change: the tax system as a whole continues to favour those who are best-off. Yet it was something. Albanese, in a National Press Club speech and elsewhere, has framed the shift as a response to changed circumstances, and especially the cost-of-living crisis. A bolder leader would also have said that social democratic governments support progressive income tax and oppose massive hand-outs to those who already have enough.

At the same time as the upholders of national political integrity were launching philosophical disquisitions about Albanese’s “backflips,” “lies” and “betrayals” — often the same journalists and politicians who met far worse from Scott Morrison with vigorous shrugging or lavish praise — Labor was also attending to the culture. The appointment of Kim Williams as new chair of the ABC suggested a government that has an interest in ensuring that one of the country’s most influential public institutions is led by someone who has not only impeccable professional credentials but also sufficient commitment to public culture, the arts and the goals of excellence, independence and balance to align with values supposedly supported by the government itself.

The government can’t expect an easy run over the second half of its term. Media hostility has been increasingly uncompromising and will be relentless on the issue of tax cuts. The cost-of-living crisis, moreover, doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions.

On broader issues of policy, Labor’s Achilles heel seems to me to be housing. It has acted, but it has not done enough, and the Greens have made this one their own. It is ideally calculated to appeal to anyone under forty, and others too. The Coalition will also continue to pretend it has the solution, which involves allowing people with virtually no superannuation savings to use the little they have for a home deposit. The real estate industry will be delighted.

Labor would be well advised to craft a radical solution to housing in the spirit of the 1945 Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement — one that involves not only bold solutions to private provision but also a renewed emphasis on social housing. Even more than the “backflip” on taxes, a bold, evidence-based, well-costed housing policy could set Labor up for an extended period in office and a genuine opportunity to reinvigorate social democracy in this country. •

The post Gramsci’s message for Anthony Albanese appeared first on Inside Story.

Half a dozen members of Marape’s 105-strong multi-party coalition have already peeled off, blaming the government for poor handling of the pay dispute that sparked the police strike. But Marape says he is confident of withstanding any no-confidence motion likely to be proposed in the 118-member chamber.

What has been called a payroll glitch resulted in sharp cuts to many public servants’ fortnightly pay, including cuts of around half for low-ranking staff in the police, prison service and other agencies. Victims of the error in Port Moresby walked off the job on 10 January and besieged the national parliament.

After word spread by mobile phone, mobs took the opportunity to plunder shops and trading stores, some of which were set on fire. Extra police were flown in and a call-out of the battalion at Port Moresby’s Murray Army Barracks restored order that night, reinforced by a two-week state of emergency that has now expired. Damage is estimated at approaching one billion kina (A$406 million) and the bodies of twenty-two victims have been found, some presumed killed by store owners and their security guards, others trapped in buildings set on fire.

The belief that government bungling lay behind the strike is not much questioned. “The lack of dialogue by the police with their police association, let alone with management or other agencies over an issue that could be fixed in days, if not hours, was certainly strange,” says Paul Barker, director of the Port Moresby–based Institute of National Affairs.

Soon after the riot, conspiracy theories raced through social media. Why were some businesses targeted while others, including large adjoining businesses without heavy protection, were left untouched? What will the police and troops do with the stolen goods they seize in their house-to-house searches? Was the looting somehow instigated to rattle confidence in Marape ahead of the expiry of the grace period?

Former prime minister Peter O’Neill, ousted by Marape in a 2019 no-confidence vote and soundly defeated in the 2022 election, is among those calling from the opposition bench for Marape’s dismissal. With business interests including an electronics chain, a hotel and a brewery, O’Neill has ample resources to cultivate parliamentary backing.

Another possible contender is Belden Namah, who quit Marape’s Pangu Pati in mid January. A Duntroon-trained army officer convicted of mutiny over the hiring of British and African mercenaries to deal with the Bougainville rebellion, his parliamentary career has been stormy. As the representative of a constituency where Malaysian loggers are active, he appears not to lack resources either: he was once readmitted to Sydney’s Star Casino despite an allegation of sexual harassment because he was classified as a high roller.

Government leaders, meanwhile, are casting around for short-term remedies. Telecommunications minister Timothy Masiu has threatened to shut down social media platforms. Marape says he and National Capital District governor Powes Parkop will look at applying a vagrancy law to restrict “unnecessary” movement into Port Moresby. “People have proven they are not fit to live in the city,” he said.

This kind of response shows that politicians are refusing to recognise the changes in the capital that are making it more difficult to govern. Most of all, they are ignoring growing population pressures on government services and agencies.

Just over a year ago, Port Moresby’s main hospital was revealed to be storing the bodies of deceased patients in an open shed because the morgue was full. A hasty mass burial was organised, but the bodies have no doubt continued to overflow. As PNG doctors’ association head James Naipao pointed out, the hospital was designed for the capital’s official population figure of about 400,000, but in reality the population is more than three times that number.

The same goes for the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, as the police are named. Numbering about 7200, including civilian staff and reserve officers, it has grown by only about 2000 officers since independence in 1975, a period in which Papua New Guinea’s population has trebled to an estimated eleven million. The last census was in 2011, its findings flawed partly because thieves at one stage stole the central tally room’s computers. A census due in 2021 was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and is now planned for later this year.

Annual population growth is generally put at 3 per cent, meaning the present population will double in less than twenty-five years. The pressure of numbers heightens the likelihood of more explosions of opportunistic looting in Port Moresby and similar unrest in the crowded port city of Lae.

The population estimate means PNG has one police member for about 1500 citizens, a third of the widely recommended ratio of 1:450. Marape’s announcement last month that police numbers will be expanded to 10,000 within five years, backed by Anthony Albanese’s pledge of A$200 million for a new police college and specialist training, is a belated attempt to remedy the security problem.

Whether the PNG government can put up its share of the necessary funding remains to be seen. In 2020 the international consultancy Deloitte said the present force needed an additional 126 million kina annually to cover its funding gap and a one-off capital injection of about 3.9 billion kina to deliver its service mandate. Neither happened.

Despite recent panics in Australian and American defence circles over China’s offers of security aid to Pacific island nations — which Marape happily countered by signing defence pacts with Canberra and Washington — recent events in Port Moresby show that PNG’s main security problem is internal.

Meanwhile, life in Port Moresby divides into two classes. Well-off visitors and wealthy expatriates and local residents stay in hotels or live in apartment blocks barricaded against the city’s poor and its raskol gangs by razor wire, armed guards and Dobermans. These well-off people, institutions and commercial enterprises are protected by at least 30,000 private security guards, about three times the number of police and troops combined. A further unknown number of people work for unregistered security groups. Even so, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Port Moresby as the sixth “least liveable” city in the world.

Outside, many if not most locals live in settlements with uncertain land tenure rights and limited water, sanitation and electricity services. They journey to workplaces and markets constantly alert to possible theft and assault. Bags, phones and watches are snatched; sometimes the thieves use homemade pipe guns to relieve office workers of a few kina or even the shoes on their feet.

“If you need the police and you want them to come to your village or wherever, you’ve got a real problem,” says Sinclair Dinnen, a specialist on Pacific crime and security at the Australian National University. “The first thing they will ask for is a payment, ostensibly to pay for fuel, and they do need fuel, but there’s quite a lot of rent-seeking behaviour across the police force — given the fact they can get away with it and people expect to pay the police to assist them, particularly if it involves travelling.”

In urban settlements, local committees often provide their own security. “Most people do not rely on the uniformed police for their policing needs,” says Dinnen. “If something goes missing, you go to your local networks, the committees. Sometimes for a small fee, they will eventually find out who stole your radio and maybe arrange for it to be returned. The police would not be interested in that kind of stuff.”

This lack of support partly reflects a widespread feeling that living in a city is somehow un-Melanesian. Founding prime minister Michael Somare argued against urbanisation in the 1970s, and academics have written of “ambivalent townsmen.” But the “new generations of people who have grown up in towns and who are not familiar with the day-to-day rhythms of village life are now growing in number,” say contributors to Papua New Guinea: Government, Economy and Society, a recent book by ANU and University of PNG researchers. “These people have made cities their permanent homes,” they add, while feeling obliged to note that “in some ways, the legitimacy of Melanesian urbanism is yet to be established.”

Urban investment often worsens inequalities, say the researchers, because government funds are “co-opted by political patronage.” Funds are spent on iconic projects valued by the urban elite rather than on housing, water supply and sanitation, especially in the settlements.

The elite want to position Port Moresby as a global city and Papua New Guinea as a middle power in its region. Money goes into the international airport, new roads to the top hotels, facilities to host regional games, and a shorefront pavilion to host the 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (accompanied by the baffling purchase of forty luxury Maseratis and three Bentleys).

As well as the neglect of settlements, international events directed at global audiences have often entailed “intensified policing of marginal groups seen as undermining the modernist aesthetics of orderliness and prosperity,” say the researchers, and in some cases forcible relocation. The informal economy is also a target, notably the roadside betel-nut traders catering to the widespread fondness for this mild narcotic.

In 2022, newly re-elected prime minister Marape and capital governor Parkop turned up for the launch of a twenty-two-storey apartment building on reclaimed foreshore land obtained for ninety-three years by a Malaysian entrepreneur for an annual fee of just 8400 kina. Police evicted the previous squatters on adjacent Paga Hill and dumped them on unserviced land far on the city fringe.

Parkop thanked the developer for having trust in the capital city and ensuring modern facilities for accommodation. The city government had devised the “Amazing Port Moresby” global branding to promote it as a liveable city, he said, “but the government can’t do it alone.”

The governor has also announced several initiatives to improve the livelihoods of ordinary residents, including a Settlements into Suburbs project and a Yumi Lukautim Mosbi (Let’s Care for Moresby) community awareness drive. As Paga Hill shows, though, the wealthy tend to get the breaks while the poor risk being deported as vagrants. A reshuffle in parliament is unlikely to change this anytime soon. •

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The first Australian legation was a modest double-storey building on Goose Ridge Hill, in the heart of the city, not far from the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The building is still there today, dwarfed by the forest of high-rise towers of what claims to be the world’s biggest city, its dazzling skyline a bold rival to Manhattan’s.

Australia’s initial diplomatic engagement with China came to an abrupt end with the communist victory in 1949. It wouldn’t resume for another quarter-century after a revolution of sorts in Australia swept away a generation of conservatism under Sir Robert Menzies and his successors.

Gough Whitlam had advocated diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China as early as 1954. It became Labor policy the following year. But it wasn’t until Whitlam’s election victory in 1972 that his vision became a reality.

Fifty years ago this week, Whitlam became the first Australian prime minister to visit the People’s Republic. A few days later, an RAAF Hercules landed in Beijing carrying a novel gift to mark the historic occasion — Saber Bogong, a 567-kilogram Murray Grey stud bull. Australia’s Beijing embassy had opened in January 1973 and the first resident Australian journalists soon followed. It would be another five years before the Americans turned up.

Whitlam’s maverick diplomacy — at the same time as the Nixon administration was taking its first halting steps towards normalising relations with China — set Australia apart.  We had been a firm and unequivocal ally of the United States since the second world war but we were prepared to make our own way in the region and the world — a fact that impressed the Chinese leadership and helped secure the foundations of a flourishing trade relationship that has underwritten Australia’s prosperity for half a century.

When he arrives in Beijing next weekend prime minister Anthony Albanese will find a city and a country largely unrecognisable from those Whitlam visited and receive a welcome that’s likely to be far less effusive if not overtly constrained.

Relations between China and Australia are slowly improving after reaching a nadir under the former government. The Chinese were infuriated in April 2020 when Scott Morrison demanded an independent international investigation with “weapons inspector powers” to reveal the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. Soon after, they imposed a crippling raft of sanctions on Australian coal, barley, meat, cotton, lobster, timber and wine. The measures wiped out an estimated $20 billion in Australian exports.

The tensions worsened after ASIO agents staged early-morning raids in June 2020 on the Sydney homes of three Chinese journalists, including the bureau chief of the Xinhua news agency, alarming their families and seizing computers and documents — raids for which no official explanation has ever been given. A few weeks later, Cheng Lei, a Chinese-born Australian journalist working for Chinese television was detained and accused of illegally sending state secrets abroad. In early September, the ABC and Australian Financial Review correspondents sought diplomatic sanctuary, later fleeing the country after police warned they were to be interviewed regarding a “national security case.” A period of “wolf warrior diplomacy” during which Chinese critics were aggressively targeted and sometimes physically abused inflamed the hostility.

Since the Albanese government was elected early last year a gradual thaw in the relationship has seen the lifting or promised lifting of about three-quarters of the trade restrictions and a resumption of high-level government contacts. Cheng Lei was released and reunited with her family in Melbourne earlier this month, but no Australian journalists have yet returned to live in China. Australian writer and activist Yang Hengjun, who was arrested in August 2019 and accused of espionage, remains in prison with his health reported to be deteriorating.

While there are strong expectations of further improvement in the relationship as a consequence of Albanese’s visit to Beijing and Shanghai, it appears highly unlikely that it will return to anything resembling the détente of the 1970s and 1980s in the near future, if ever. And that is due mostly to a hardening of attitudes in Canberra.

The Australian government’s position, first enunciated by foreign minister Penny Wong, and still the script closely followed by senior Australian officials, is that while we seek to rebuild a cordial and constructive relationship with China it can’t be as close as it once was because of growing cybersecurity threats from Beijing, its more aggressive posture on Taiwan and the South China Sea and its efforts to expand its influence in the South Pacific.

During his state visit to the United States last week, Albanese went further in defining his government’s view of a growing divergence driven by China’s more assertive global posture. “China has been explicit: it does not see itself as a status quo power,” he told a gathering at the State Department attended by US vice-president Kamala Harris and secretary of state Antony Blinken. “It seeks a region and a world that is much more accommodating of its values and interests.”

A day earlier, an avuncular Joe Biden counselled his youngish guest that he needed to “trust but verify” the responses in his meeting next week with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Albanese responded to this somewhat patronising advice by insisting that he was “clear-eyed” about the challenge Australia faced: “We’re two nations with very different histories, values and political systems. Australia will always look to cooperate with China where we can, but we will disagree where we must, but continue to engage in our national interest. Our approach has been patient, calibrated and deliberate, and that will continue when I visit Beijing and Shanghai.”

It won’t be lost on the Chinese leadership that Albanese has chosen to visit them straight after a state visit to Washington. While the ANZUS alliance has been a fact of life in Australia–China relations since the beginning, it has never been as bluntly inserted into the bilateral equation as it has been since Australia ratified its new AUKUS partnership with the United States and Britain.

The timing of the Washington and Beijing visits will feed the Chinese view that Australia remains an unquestioning acolyte in America’s global reach, as it was in Vietnam and Iraq. “Australia’s political situation is not stable. They are influenced too much by the US and others,” Liu Zhiqin, a senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute, told a group of visiting Australian journalists in Beijing last week. “It sometimes shows that they don’t have their own independent ideas. Sometimes, in my opinion, Australians behave like a fellow following the big brother.”

For years Western leaders recited the mantra that their defence and economic policies were never designed to “contain” China or thwart its inevitable emergence as a global economic and military superpower. Now that pretence has been abandoned. America is energetically pursuing efforts to “decouple” its economy from interdependence with China and to thwart China’s efforts to become self-sufficient in strategically critical industries. The AUKUS pact — along with the nascent Quad partnership between the US, India, Japan and Australia — is seen in China as part of an escalating effort to deny the nation its hard-earned place in the front row on the global stage.

Any Australian pretence that buying long-range nuclear-powered submarines from the United States under AUKUS is anything but a challenge to China was laid bare when deputy prime minister Richard Marles told a security forum in South Korea last week that if a war broke out over China’s determination to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, Australia would be in it. While mouthing the usual lines about the need for a peaceful solution, Marles added: “The consequences of a US–China conflict over Taiwan are so grave that we cannot be passive bystanders.” It sounded like an echo of Peter Dutton, his belligerent predecessor as defence minister, who declared in 2021 that in a war over Taiwan it “would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action.”

Chinese analysts scoff at the view that China’s military build-up poses any kind of threat to Australia. “China harbours no ambition at all in anything remotely close to Australia,” Renmin University’s Gong Jiong told the Australian journalists. “Why is it that politicians in Australia are even talking about China representing a security risk to Australia? That is something hard to accept and understand.” He says China’s increased engagement in the South Pacific was designed to counter Taiwanese influence in the region rather than challenge Australia.

Prominent Chinese also note the absurdity at the heart of Australia’s decision to spend an eye-watering $365 billion to buy a few hulking American nuclear-powered submarines on the grounds that they are essential to protect international trade routes vital to our economy. When a third of all Australian exports are sold to China and 90 per cent of Australian merchandise imports come from China, what exactly is the danger that requires us to give American and British industry a mortgage over the Australian defence budget from here to eternity?

While Marles was war-gaming in Seoul last week, ASIO chief Mike Burgess was joining his “Five Eyes” intelligence colleagues at a gathering in California to denounce the escalating cybersecurity threat posed by China. “The Chinese government are engaged in the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess declared. Yet if the cyber-security threat from China is indeed far worse than ever before, is it perhaps simply that they are getting much better at strategic and commercial espionage and we are finding it harder to keep up with countermeasures? In the spying games that all nations play, are we struggling to keep up?

The more measured and less confrontational diplomacy pursued by the Albanese government has undoubtedly been crucial to stabilising the China–Australia relationship after years of upheaval, but China has good reasons of its own to seek a return to greater harmony.

The Chinese economy is facing a range of serious challenges that make continued friction with the West, and particularly with one of its most important trading partners, an unhelpful distraction. Chinese growth between July and September slowed to 4.9 per cent, compared with 6.3 per cent in the previous quarter. A crisis in its property sector has seen several major construction companies face collapse with hundreds of billions of dollars in debts. And China’s unemployment is rising, with the jobless rate for sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds climbing to more than 20 per cent.

Despite the recent economic turmoil, the Chinese economy is still expected to finish the year with growth of between 5 and 6 per cent — well below the boom years of the past but still a creditable performance. And despite the headwinds, China’s modernisation remains breathtaking. Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are bustling and glamorous modern cities, linked to the rest of the country by the world’s biggest fast rail network. In this month’s glorious autumn weather, restaurants, shopping malls and parks are thronged with well-dressed, well-fed and obviously happy people. If the Communist Party’s contract with the people was to end the abject poverty that blighted most of the country before the revolution, it has delivered in spades.

Last week China celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s signature global engagement policy which has driven US$1500 billion in new development projects around the world. While the BRI has been widely criticised outside China for saddling many developing nations with crippling debts, building excessively extravagant infrastructure and causing widespread environmental degradation, many of the 150 participating nations have embraced China’s global leadership, opened lucrative new markets for Chinese exports, and provided access to new sources of oil, gas and minerals for Beijing.

Washington’s mostly unspoken distaste for the BRI stems from a perception that it is a crude device to extend China’s political influence at the expense of the United States and its allies, not least in the South Pacific. At a joint media conference with Albanese at the White House last week, President Biden derided the BRI as a “debt noose” for most countries that had signed on — then offered Xi Jinping the flattery of imitation by declaring that the G7 nations were working on their own version of the scheme: “His Belt and Road Initiative, well, we’re going to compete on that.”

Among the guests of honour at the BRI celebrations in Beijing were Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whose warm embrace of Putin outraged his fellow European leaders. What escaped most media attention was the fact that among the other guests were president Joko Widodo of Indonesia and prime minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea. In a week when Australia was preoccupied with its American alliance, the leaders of the two countries that are our nearest neighbours were building stronger partnerships with China.

In recent days, Albanese has mused about the potential for Australia to build a role as an intermediary in the increasingly volatile relationship between Washington and Beijing. “I think both China and the United States probably see Australia as playing a role. We are a middle power,” he told journalists. “My concern with the relationship between the United States and China is that there has been good engagement at the diplomatic level… but military to military, there is still a lack of engagement. We need to build guardrails.”

That might also be an opportunity to rebuild some of the respect for Australia as an American ally with an independent worldview that prevailed through the years of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments. “China wants to see a very independent, strategic and autonomous Australia,” says Zhou Rong, another senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute. “You don’t need to depend on other countries. You are a European Asian country or you are a white Asian country, so you can function as a bridge between Asia and America — North America — and Europe.” •

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Often acerbic and sometimes irascible in public, Hayden had a fine sense of humour, a passion for political intrigue and a liking for journalists. As Geoff Kitney noted in a tribute in the Australian Financial Review, he loved to hear and trade gossip, preferably salacious.

After a tour of the private quarters of Ferdinand and Imelda that day in 1986, Hayden emerged to present us newshounds with a global scoop. Imelda might have been famous for her vast wardrobe of shoes, but she also had another collecting passion. Her rooms, he gleefully reported, contained a formidable stash of pornographic cassette tapes.

Hayden is mostly remembered as the Labor leader whose keys to The Lodge were snatched by Bob Hawke; as the fleeting but steadying treasurer in the last inglorious days of the Whitlam government; and as a principal architect of Medicare and the landmark economic reforms of the 1980s. He should also be celebrated as one of Australia’s most determined and effective foreign ministers.

When he fell on his sword, enabling Hawke’s unstoppable ascendancy to the Labor leadership to go unchallenged on the cusp of the 1983 federal election, Hayden had already anointed Paul Keating as the next treasurer and instead took foreign affairs as his consolation prize.

In his five years in the job, he would lay the groundwork for a peace settlement in Cambodia, strengthen the campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime during Australia’s tenure on the UN Security Council and weather a period of bruising conflict with France over nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll, the Rainbow Warrior scandal and Paris’s intransigence on self-determination for its Polynesian subjects. He worked hard to build closer and deeper ties between Australia and its Asian and Pacific neighbours.

Hayden brought a stubborn determination and moral clarity to a job that saw him open talks over Cambodia with Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong in defiance of the United States, face down French bullying, and oversee a sensitive review of the ANZUS treaty. Through it all, he consistently spoke out in defence of what he saw to be Australia’s best interests.

In the same year as his visit to Manila, Hayden embarked on a grand tour of the nations of the South Pacific — if a two-week island-hopping expedition aboard an ageing Royal Australian Air Force Hawker Siddeley turboprop aircraft can be considered grand. At Funafuti, the tiny main island of Tuvalu, I vividly remember the plane almost getting bogged on the short grassy runway.

I missed another of the ports of call. The night before departure, a greatly amused Bill Hayden announced to his entourage over drinks, “We’re all off to Tonga tomorrow, but not Mr Baker, who has been declared persona non grata!” This is the first I knew of a ban imposed after I had detailed the extravagant lifestyle of the feudal court in Nuku‘alofa during an earlier visit to Tonga.

I rejoined the caravan in time for Western Samoa. On a free day, the travellers set off with togs and towels to a beautiful but treacherous beach on the north of the main island. To the consternation of his retinue, Hayden ignored the warnings, dived straight into the surf and swam far out to sea. Mercifully, Harold Holt’s fate was not replicated.

During the trip there was some engagement between the travelling journalists and the locals that went beyond the conventional scope of diplomatic intercourse. Hayden revelled in the gossip. At his first press conference at Old Parliament House after returning to Canberra he began by serenading one of the journalists with a variation on “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Hayden was also notorious for collecting outsized souvenirs on his global travels, many of them of dubious artistic merit. It was said that the garden of his Ipswich home was a Disneyland of kitsch, many of the pieces acquired on his travels around the world.

During a visit to Papua New Guinea Hayden alarmed his advisers by taking a particular shine to a large garamut, a slit drum fashioned from a tree trunk, that he spotted in the garden of the Mount Hagen hotel where his party was staying. Such was his enthusiasm that the hotel owner appeared to feel compelled to offer it as a gift to his distinguished guest.

The minders and the media — and perhaps the hotelier — concluded there was little risk of the gift being accepted given its great size and weight. Not so. By early the next morning it had been loaded aboard the VIP jet and found its way back to Ipswich via RAAF Amberley.

Throughout the tribulations and triumphs of his long political career, Hayden’s devotion to Dallas, his wife of sixty-two years, was a constant. In 1987 he was poised to travel to the frontline states of southern Africa at the height of the campaign against apartheid. It was a trip at the heart of Hayden’s determination to see an end to the racist regime in Pretoria — with the bonus of some exotic sightseeing and the chance to augment the Ipswich artefact collection. Days before departure, Dallas suffered a mental health episode and without hesitation Hayden cancelled the trip to stay with her while she recovered.

Among many fine tributes paid to Hayden in recent days was one by Laurie Oakes, former doyen of the Canberra press gallery. “They don’t come much better than Bill Hayden,” Oakes tweeted. “He would have made a great PM. Inheriting Bill’s policies and the people he’d put in key roles gave Hawke a head start. A politician in the finest Labor tradition. Humble, decent, clever, game as they come, Bill’s contribution was immense.”

Prime minister Anthony Albanese singled out Hayden’s achievements as foreign minister for particular praise: “Without Bill Hayden’s instinctive grasp of the relationship between facing our nation to the world and securing our prosperity for the future, the government in which he served might not have achieved the same degree of engagement in our region that still benefits Australia today.”

Had that vision been embraced and effectively driven by all of those who followed Hayden as foreign minister, Australia might not be struggling with some of the formidable challenges it now faces with its neighbours, not least in the South Pacific. •

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Billionaire Foxconn founder and independent presidential candidate Terry Gou quickly came out in support of Ma, criticising the country’s leaders for their position on national identity. Ko Wen-je, presidential candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, demurred, arguing that National Day should be above party politics; but on the day itself he left the ceremony early to attend a demonstration.

In a country that has yet to declare its own independence — a country, moreover, claimed by another country — a “national day” is inherently problematic. Taiwan’s National Day is the anniversary of the 1911 uprising that led to the founding of the Republic of China, or ROC, the following year, at a time when Taiwan was a Japanese colony. After the People’s Republic was created by the Communist Party in 1949, the ROC survived in rump form in Taiwan. The island itself, governed by the Kuomintang under martial law until 1987, was technically nothing more than a province.

All this was a long time ago. The participants in the original conflict are mostly dead; martial law has given way to multi-party democracy. With every new generation, Taiwan’s connection to the Chinese past has become increasingly attenuated and “Republic of China” less meaningful to them as a name for their country. Identification with the People’s Republic is much weaker again.

Around two-thirds of people in Taiwan now think of themselves as Taiwanese without qualification — in other words, they don’t even describe themselves as Taiwanese-Chinese. Judging by the level of electoral support for President Tsai Ing-wen’s independence-oriented Democratic Progressive Party, they would have opted by now for independence if it were not for fears of triggering war with China.

In these circumstances, the question “Whose National Day is it, after all?” has become progressively sharper. At Taipei’s monumental East Gate, not far from the site of the annual ceremony, the tensions underpinning the day are openly expressed each year. Separated by a thin blue line of police, a unification-with-China group and an independence-for-Taiwan group hurl abuse at each other in what has become a National Day ritual.

Under President Tsai, in office since 2016, the response to this question has been to allow greater leeway for expressions of Taiwanese nationalism, which in turn has reduced the visibility of the name “Republic of China.” Passport covers have been one scene of action. Within a few months of Tsai’s election, increasing numbers of Taiwanese travellers were covering up the words “Republic of China” on passport covers with a sticker carrying the inflammatory words “Republic of Taiwan.” The current passport design, issued early in Tsai’s second term, altogether omits the English words Republic of China from the cover.

Another site for subversion of the island’s ROC status is the National Day logo. This is generally designed around the Double Tenth symbol “++” (the Chinese character for ten, repeated), which evokes the date of the 1911 uprising, 10 October. Since 2017, this symbol has by degrees become more abstract and the accompanying references to the Republic of China less clear, if they’re retained at all. “Better Taiwan,” “Taiwan Together” and “Taiwan Forward” are among the slogans used in logos issued during Tsai’s first term of office.

Since 2020 the designs have become more assertive again. The Kuomintang criticised the 2021 logo because it carried no mention of the Republic of China. The logo for 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, for the first time carried no reference to the Double Tenth. It instead featured a stylised sun — its blue and yellow rays read by some as a salute to Ukraine — accompanied by the words “Protect the Land, Guard the Country.”

The Double Tenth sign was resurrected for this year’s design. But the slogan of “democratic Taiwan,” resonating with the name of the Democratic Progressive Party, was provocative. In combination with the absence of any reference to the ROC, it was enough to prompt the Kuomintang’s boycott of the last National Day ceremony to be presided over by Tsai Ing-wen. In May next year, Tsai will hand over to whoever wins the presidential election in January.

The trend towards erasing references to the ROC can of course be reversed if the Kuomintang is returned to office, but at present that seems unlikely. The Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, vice-president Lai Ching-te, has been leading the polls since the race began. As long as none of his opponents join forces, Taiwan’s first-past-the-post voting system means he is likely to succeed Tsai Ing-wen next year.

Lai’s forward position on independence for Taiwan is well known but as vice-president and now presidential candidate he has had to juggle the fact of Taiwanese self-determination with the realities of cross-strait relations. In a recent interview he summed up the complexities of talking about a country that not everyone agrees is even a country in saying: “Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country called the Republic of China.”

And there’s the rub. As “Republic of China” under Kuomintang rule, Taiwan was a recognised enemy of the People’s Republic during the Mao Years, 1949–76. The 1992 consensus — entailing both sides recognising the core principle of “One China” — ushered in a period of neutrality. Hostility was replaced by pragmatism, trade and migration between the two places. As the Republic of China, Taiwan remained formally “Chinese” and paradoxically compliant with the One China principle.

Had the Chinese Communist Party been prepared at any stage to put One China ahead of One Party, Taiwan might have joined with China to form a reconfigured republic — neither the Kuomintang nor the Communist Party version, but something attuned to the briefly hopeful, democratising world of the late twentieth century.

This chance appears to have evaporated, and the very term “Republic of China” is again becoming anathema in China. In Hong Kong this year, commemoration of the Double Tenth was prohibited because of its association with Taiwan independence. Current affairs commentator Sang Pu, born and raised in Hong Kong, recalls that in his boyhood the largest number of Chinese flags displayed there each October were the Republic of China’s, in commemoration of the Double Tenth. This year, Hong Kong was a sea of mainland China’s “five-star red flags” — 70,000 of them, around sixty-three per square kilometre.

It was the prospect of a sea of five-star red flags on Taiwanese soil that brought voters out to return Tsai Ing-wen to office in 2020. In her final National Day address on Tuesday, Tsai mentioned Taiwan over fifty times and the Republic of China just seven. Occasionally the two terms were coupled, most notably in her reference to national defence and the “resolve to defend the Republic of China (Taiwan).”

Needless to say, this is a rather different ROC from the one that China’s leaders have imagined might voluntarily return to the ancestral fold. From a Taiwanese point of view, it is an open question whether it ever belonged to that fold at all. •

The post Taiwan’s double jeopardy appeared first on Inside Story.

As we walked across the village’s central playing field after church, Wea described the scene there just over thirty-five years ago: seven French military helicopters, two dozen army trucks, and some 300 French special forces and police sharpshooters ready for action. In the bush near Gossanah, nineteen Kanaks were holding twenty-three French police hostage. They had raided the island’s gendarmerie, met more resistance than expected and killed four police before decamping to a remote cave with seized weapons and their hostages.

The raid was intended to be part of a territory-wide show of force by the Melanesians in support of independence for the country they called Kanaky. Seven months earlier, in September 1987, a narrow majority of white and other settlers had voted in a referendum to remain with France. The Kanaks had boycotted the poll in the belief that the result had been preset by officially encouraged immigration in previous decades. Kanaks had occupied traditional lands in the north of the main island, a settler ambush had killed ten Kanaks, and in January 1988, a sharpshooter had killed a Kanak would-be guerilla leader holed up in a seized farmhouse.

Despite the planning, the Ouvéa rebels found themselves acting alone in April–May 1988 — and a tough reaction to the kidnapping offered France’s ambitious conservative prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a chance to boost his prospects in the looming national presidential elections.

Just three days before Chirac faced off with Socialist incumbent François Mitterrand in the second round of the election, and after half-hearted negotiations for a peaceful surrender, Chirac ordered an all-out assault on the cave. Sixteen Kanaks were killed during the attack, two executed after their capture, and their leader was allowed to die of wounds without medical attention. Two soldiers died, and all the hostages were freed.

As it turned out, Mitterrand prevailed in the election. Chirac was replaced as PM by a Socialist, Michel Rocard, who brought the shocked Kanak leader, former Catholic priest Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and the loyalist leader, businessman Jacques Lafleur, to Matignon near Paris, locked them in, and presented a plan. Putting off a vote on independence for ten years, it pledged more training and involvement for Kanaks, and more investment in rural and island lands.

Tjibaou made a unilateral decision and signed the deal. Lafleur did too. They shook hands for a photo. And so the Matignon Accord was born. A decade later, in 1998, the Nouméa Accord postponed the independence decision for another fifteen to twenty years, when it would be put to three spaced-out referendums to make sure every voter made a considered choice.

Many Kanaks — among them Charles Wea’s uncle, a former protestant pastor named Djubelly Wea — had misgivings. A strong believer in independence, Djubelly had been among Gossanah villagers detained and roughed up by French troops looking for the cave. After the troops’ assault, he and twenty-eight others were jailed for several months in Paris without trial.

When Tjibaou came to Ouvéa on the first anniversary of the cave attack to speak at the burial site of the nineteen Kanaks, Djubelly stepped forward, shouted, “Long live Kanaky! Long live independence!” then pulled out a pistol and shot dead the former priest and his deputy, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné. A bodyguard then fatally shot their assailant too.

Walking through Gossanah, Wea and I came to a small, tiered garden with walls of coral rock that turned out to be Djubelly’s grave. Back in Nouméa, his victim, Tjibaou, is venerated as a kind of Gandhi or Mandela of the Pacific, and an Oceanic cultural centre designed by Renzo Piano is named after him. I asked Charles how his uncle’s reputation stands now.

His answer shocked me. “A lot of people think he was right,” the Kanak diplomat said. “They are saying: after more than thirty years of talk, where have we got?” Shocking it might have been, but his answer chimed with the sense that the politics of New Caledonia have come in a grand circle since 1987, with an increasing risk of an explosion like the Ouvéa cave drama.

When the time came for the series of three independence referendums promised in the Nouméa Accord, the French government was back in the hands of a conservative president, Emmanuel Macron. Like his predecessors, left and right, Macron was against giving the Kanaks any more voting weight than other French citizens, though the accord had “frozen” the electoral roll at 1998 to keep out later immigrants.

In the first referendum, in 2018, the vote for independence was 43 per cent. By the second, in 2020, it had grown to 47 per cent. The third vote was looming as a close-run thing at the end of 2021. Then, in September that year, Covid-19’s Delta variant swept through New Caledonia, quickly infecting over 13,000 of its 270,000 people. More than 280 of them died, about 60 per cent of them Kanaks.

With its communities having embarked on the customary year of mourning, the Kanak parties begged for the referendum to be postponed for a year. Quarantine restrictions limited movement, adding to the disadvantages faced by Kanak parties campaigning with village meetings while the urbanised loyalists could rely on the internet.

Macron, for his part, was facing his first re-election test in April 2022. His competition came from the further right, notably Marine Le Pen. He needed a boost for French national pride, especially after Scott Morrison delivered his humiliating submarine decision in September 2021.

When he and territories minister Sébastien Lecornu insisted the New Caledonia vote go ahead, the Kanak parties decided on a boycott. Participation fell from around 86 per cent in the earlier two independence votes to 43.9 per cent, with the non-voters concentrated in Kanak regions. Of those who voted, 96.5 per cent chose No and only 3.5 per cent Yes.

The result was immediately declared “null and void” by the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a forum of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Islands Forum — a wider regional grouping that includes Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian states as well as Australia and New Zealand — was more diplomatic: the boycott needed to be considered in “the contextual consideration and analysis of the result.”

Unfazed, Macron declared that “France is more beautiful because New Caledonia decided to stay.” Local opponents of independence were also jubilant. “Tonight we are French and we will stay that way. It’s no longer negotiable,” said fervent loyalist Sonia Backès, president of the Southern Province region. To her, the Nouméa Accord was defunct, allowing the electoral rolls to be thrown open to more recent arrivals and special economic support for Kanak-dominated regions to be wound up.

Macron echoed these sentiments when he visited New Caledonia in July this year accompanied by a squadron of Rafale fighters and their air refuellers and transports designed to demonstrate France’s ability to swing military power into the Pacific. New Caledonia was French because it had chosen to be French in three referendums, he told a crowd of 10,000 tricolour-waving Europeans and Polynesians in Nouméa’s Place des Cocotiers.

Now the next stage of economic development could begin, he said, transforming locally mined nickel into a low-cost green-energy industry and expanding agriculture. The voice of France would resonate across the Indo-Pacific, boosted by a new military academy in the territory for the region’s armed forces. “If independence is to choose tomorrow to have a Chinese base, here, or be dependent on other fleets, good luck!” he declared.

On the political future, he invited loyalists and independence parties to a trilateral dialogue, mentioning more than once that the freeze on the electoral roll had always been “transitional” and had led to “exclusions and frustrations.” He had already inducted Backès into government as a junior minister, responsible for citizenship.

Macron then travelled on to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, where he declared France was an “enhancer of sovereignty” for Pacific island nations, helping protect them against a “new imperialism.” The ironies were not lost on his audiences.

Kanak and loyalist parties were back in Paris for those talks last month, and will continue negotiating in Nouméa later this month. In Paris, Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, now presiding over a minority government, put forward what was described, strangely, as a document martyr, a paper to be chewed over and torn apart before taking any final form.

On the critical question of electoral eligibility, the new external territories minister, Gérald Darmanin, revealed voters in territorial and regional elections would need to have been born in New Caledonia or resident for ten years. Whether or not the pro-independence alliance, FLNKS, agreed, the electoral roll would be “unfrozen” in this way before provincial elections due by May 2024.

Questions of self-determination, meanwhile, would be deferred for at least “two generations” from a new accord, Darmanin said — probably about sixty years. “There is no longer a sword of Damocles,” he added, although only the loyalists had felt thus threatened.

Aside from the backlash among Melanesian countries, Macron’s decision is seen as folly by some seasoned observers in New Caledonia, and appears likely to raise tensions and threaten unrest. Mathias Chauchat, a public law professor at the University of New Caledonia, says Macron is being likened to Bonaparte, who listened to no advice, even from his own ambassadors. “The French politicians are living in the past, in the 1960s,” he tells me. “I don’t understand it. It’s crazy. France is not a modern state like the other democracies.”

Others I spoke to wondered if the Kanak leadership would have the stomach to abandon their comfortable positions, as Macron is gambling they won’t. But being ousted after the electoral roll changes could harden their attitude. A return to violent protest was likely, and could happen without much warning. Chauchat shares those fears. “If you lose the majority, you have to go on the street, the terrain,” he says. “It would lead to unrest.”

I recount the remark Charles Wea had made at his uncle’s grave to Patrice Godin, a social anthropologist who has studied and lived among the Kanaks for decades. For Godin, Wea’s remark reinforces the risks of changing the electoral system to make any real decolonisation unimaginable for a long time.

“When political negotiations fail, it is not the most open and moderate leaders who prevail, but the most radical,” says Godin. “One wonders whether the French government is aware of this. I am currently sensing great concern among Kanak elected representatives and political decision-makers. If they fail to change the government’s policy, they know that their activists, their voters and the majority of the Kanak population will withdraw their support.”

These leaders are already facing a great deal of criticism, he adds. “If the government doesn’t listen to them, it will contribute to the rise of a new generation of Kanak politicians who will be less conciliatory than those they are discussing with today. This may take time, but it is inevitable. Kanak demands are too far advanced for the movement to die out.”

True, Godin says, the thirty-five years since the Matignon Accord have changed the Kanak people and their way of life, producing more graduates, managers and intellectuals. “But this evolution has in no way altered the Kanak desire for decolonisation. Quite the contrary, as shown by the results of the three referendum consultations on the way out of the Nouméa Accord. We might even say that this desire is more considered and it is a result of the changes that have taken place.”

The nationalist idea has matured to the point where the Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa and some other Kanak leaders are talking of “interdependence” with France following a transfer of sovereignty, an arrangement that recalls the pacts of free association the Cook Islands have with New Zealand or the Marianas with the United States.

While full independence was “false gold” for the Kanak parties, “it’s very difficult for them to ask for an associated state because they think France will lie to them,” Chauchat says. “There is no trust between the current French government and the Kanaks. If you want an agreement, you need trust first.”

Such an idea was proposed by Mitterrand’s high commissioner in Nouméa, Edgard Pisani, during the 1987–88 troubles, and would achieve decolonisation while maintaining French military bases. (The Kanak parties have no interest in building their own military.) But the option has since been studiously ignored by Paris, perhaps because it might win local support.

“There is no other solution, and definitely no solution in France,” says Chauchat, adding: “France never honours its words. It has always failed in its decolonisation processes… It will end in tragedy like everywhere.” The best option now for the Kanaks is to prevent the opening up of the electoral roll and keep the dream of independence alive, he says. “We have to wait.”

Macron still needs to persuade New Caledonia’s parties to agree to his new plan, and then his minority government must win a 60 per cent vote of approval from a joint sitting of the national assembly and senate to amend the French constitution, into which the Nouméa Accord is written. He is hoping his show of French force against China will win regional sympathy, which seems unlikely. The island states have no particular liking for China, but they will take its money and projects, and they will use its perceived threat to get more out of the other powers.

“If, as President Macron claims, France’s project is to contribute to the creation of an Indo-Pacific axis to stem Chinese expansion in the region, it will have to be admitted into the club of states of the region,” Godin says. “For the moment, this is proving difficult. The small island states see France as it is in the region, one of the last old-style colonial powers. All these countries are in favour of New Caledonian independence, and more or less openly support Kanak nationalist claims.”

France lacks the resources for a region-wide aid and development effort. And the United States and its allies need the support of the island states against Chinese coercion. “From this point of view, France is more of a pebble in their shoe than a reliable and legitimate ally,” says Godin. “By clinging to the last shreds of its colonial past, France is in fact a cumbersome ally.”

Still, Macron’s ambition, recalling Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, has its fans. Many Australians sympathise with Macron over the submarine affair and appreciate the way he called out Morrison as a liar. Richard Marles, the defence minister, is said to have struck a rapport with his French counterpart, Sébastien Lecornu, the same man who as territories minister helped push through the third referendum in New Caledonia. Marles is due in Nouméa in December for a gathering of Pacific defence ministers hosted by Lecornu.

Potentially complicating Australia’s approach was foreign minister Penny Wong’s appointment in March of Australia’s first ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed. The ambassador’s office, she said, “enables deep engagement with many of our closest partners including the Pacific family” and embeds Indigenous perspectives in Australian foreign policy.

Yet when she visited New Caledonia in April, Wong failed to acknowledge that the Kanaks — who were the first to settle its islands some 3000 years ago and now make up 42 per cent of the population (with Europeans accounting for 24 per cent, according to the most recent census, in 2019) — should be accorded a special right of decolonisation. “Institutional arrangements in New Caledonia are a matter for the people of New Caledonia and the French state,” was as far as she went, while repeatedly praising the French contribution to “security and prosperity in the Pacific.”

Of course, if Wong does want to raise the First Nations angle at some point — always difficult given Australia’s history — a No majority in our own referendum this month won’t help.

Meanwhile, though, pro-French loyalists are losing ground overall in the Pacific. In French Polynesia, the independence party led by veteran nuclear-testing opponent Oscar Temaru has won a majority in the assembly and now leads an autonomous government. In New Caledonia, a Kanak has just won a seat in the French senate for the first time after a vote-swapping deal with a dissident loyalist who beat Backès for the other seat. Every year recently, about 2000 white residents pack up and leave, gradually shifting the demographics, and métissage (intermarriage) between Kanaks and Polynesian migrants is on the rise.

Bonapartist or Gaullist, Macron is unheeding. His policies could well be driving New Caledonia back to the tense days of the 1980s, a condition of civil war. Younger Kanaks may see violence as a way of speeding up the French exodus. “Emmanuel Macron seems to be blinded by his ambitions for France and to understand nothing of what is happening today in New Caledonia and in the Pacific,” says Patrice Godin. “I still want to believe that it’s not too late to wake up.” •

The post France’s stubborn grip appeared first on Inside Story.

Now their voices can be heard, clearly and sometimes passionately, in journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City, published this year to coincide with the invasion’s twentieth anniversary. This is a compelling, challenging, disturbing and ultimately illuminating account of what happened to the people of Iraq and their homeland over the two decades after they were invaded and conquered. It exposes the ignorance and demolishes the myths and false assumptions of many Western policymakers, think-tank analysts, pundits and correspondents — myths that Howard clung to in his speech.

Abdul-Ahad grew up under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, an absurdly quintessential Third World tyrant. It was a time of futile and costly wars with Iran and Kuwait and the West, of repression, poverty and hardship exacerbated by foreign sanctions. It was a period that made many Iraqis optimistic that the Americans would bring change.

If Abdul-Ahad — an architect and army deserter at the time — shared that optimism, it quickly faded on the day American tanks rumbled into Baghdad in April 2003. He watched with dismay as US marines pulled down a statue of Saddam one of them had draped in the American flag. He had thought the facade of liberation would last at least a day, “but no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, [the marine] covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.”

The next day, after a chance meeting with a correspondent from the Guardian, Abdul-Ahad was hired as a fixer and translator and eventually a reporter — in which job he embarked on a journey through a country he increasingly couldn’t recognise, a devastated human and physical landscape of unspeakable brutality, destruction, indignity and corruption. He felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

Whatever optimism his fellow Iraqis felt when the Americans arrived soon dissolved, too, eroded by the occupiers’ sheer inefficiency and shattered by the first car bombing. Abdul-Ahad witnessed and reported on many such atrocities in the coming years, so many that “they are all welded in my head into one newsreel of charred human remains mixed with shreds of tyres and crumpled debris.”

Instead of peace, the US occupation unleashed something terrible, imposing a political system that gave power and the spoils of office, along sectarian and ethnic lines, to a “coalition of corrupt, imbecilic religious warlords to rule the country for the next twenty years and create one of the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Militias — “hundreds of cells with hundreds of motives” — emerged soon after the invasion. Many were criminal gangs; others sought simply to protect their neighbourhoods; still others were nationalists humiliated by foreign occupation. Later came Iraqi and foreign jihadis chasing fanatical dreams of a pure Islamic state. The occupation ultimately transformed what had been a fissure between Shias and Sunnis into an abyss.

In Baghdad and elsewhere, men with guns controlled every aspect of life, even as the United States and its allies deluded themselves they were bringing democratic progress. A year after the invasion, “people started uttering the unthinkable, that maybe life under Saddam was better.”

Abdul-Ahad takes his readers through the bomb-shattered suburbs, shrines and markets of Iraqi cities and towns, across barricades and streets awash with sewage, to meet ordinary Iraqis — teachers, doctors, soldiers, refugees. With a reporter’s eye for detail and ear for a telling quote, he brings us their faces and voices. His writing is wry at times, sometimes caustic, usually sensitive but not sentimental.

A bridegroom in a mixed Sunni–Shia marriage recounts his wedding day — a perilous military-style operation to get the wedding party across militia checkpoints — and describes “my bride and her relatives yellow with fear.”

We meet a schoolteacher, a man with a cheerful face struggling in a collapsed education system, who insists to his students that Iraq is not a sectarian country, and who limps to and from class, the result of having been shot three times because he spoke out against the clerics and urged his students not to join their militias.

We join a dreary queue at the passport office where fear and anxiety fill the air. A Christian man in his sixties, a teacher accompanied by his three daughters, insists the official writes his occupation in his passport. But there is no space for profession on the new passport form. The teacher insists his occupation be included because he wants a visa to go to Australia. Don’t worry, a man in the queue tells him, no country will give Iraqis a visa anyway. A big-bellied bureaucrat openly boasts that he takes bribes — “I only take $500” — to speed up the passport process.

In the cramped waiting room of a medical clinic, a gaunt psychiatrist with a soft reassuring voice describes how “the pressure, the war, the economic situation, fear, anxiety — all chip away at patients’ resistance.”

A Sunni militia commander, a middle-aged man with soft brown eyes, acknowledges having rejoiced when Saddam fell, but also having then joined the insurgency: “As time passed, and the occupation became more visible, patriotic feelings inside me grew greater and greater. Every time I saw the Americans patrolling our streets, I felt ashamed and humiliated.”

Abdul-Ahad takes us into the courtroom for Saddam’s trial, the former dictator slowly and deliberately entering the room, sighing and sitting down “with the air of one settling down to a day’s work.” We learn how, after his hanging, Saddam’s corpse was flown to the house where prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was celebrating his son’s wedding: “The grotesque pettiness of Iraq’s new masters ran rampant as the shroud was pulled back to allow guests to photograph the corpse.”

On a sweltering and humid day we go to a Baghdad morgue, where crowds of anxious relatives press against the fence to find and reclaim the bodies of family members. The morgue is stacked with corpses, mostly the victims of death squads, and there’s no room for the crowd to enter, so officials improvise a “hellish slideshow” on a computer monitor that families watch in silence as pictures of the mutilated dead flicker on the screen.

Two years after the invasion, Iraq was sliding towards civil war, a conflict more complex than the West’s binary narrative of Sunni versus Shia. As Abdul-Ahad points out, this war included “a wide range of localised schisms and fault lines, feuds based on class or geography or long-dormant tribal feuds.”

These rifts were exacerbated by the Americans, who, “like conquerors, aimed to simplify their occupation by breaking it into components,” using Shias to fight Sunni insurgents, and in the process entrenching and exacerbating sectarianism.

Six years after the invasion, Maliki had concentrated unaccountable power through patronage, shadowy intelligence services and all-encompassing corruption. Security officers took bribes from families to release their sons from detention and torture, and then sometimes killed them anyway.

By the invasion’s tenth anniversary, Islamist jihadis had entered this ghastly scene, seeking to impose an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam not only in Iraq but in Syria and across the Middle East. Abdul-Ahad travelled to Syria to meet the groups who called themselves ISIS and were consolidating their power. He met an ISIS commander who spoke of his dreams of a borderless Islamic state: “I can’t remember much else of what he said in the meeting because I was terrified and trembling with fear.”

By the middle of the following year, ISIS had swept into western Iraq and on to Mosul, Iraq’s second city, where Maliki’s “brave new army” collapsed, partly out of a justified fear of the ISIS fanatics and partly because all-pervading corruption had eaten out its heart. Recruits who had paid to be enlisted to escape lives of dismal poverty found their wages stolen by their officers. Non-existent “ghost soldiers” padded out the payroll.

When ISIS captured Mosul many welcomed their discipline, administrative efficiency and promise to restore basic services and end corruption. Instead, the extremists turned Mosul into a huge prison controlled with brutality and viciousness. “They brought terror into our hearts and inside our own homes,” said one resident. “I feared my neighbour, my brother and my son… They used to say Saddam’s regime was brutal. Well Saddam was a picnic compared to them.”

The brutality of ISIS prompted many men to join the army, which was supported by US air power. Abdul-Ahad joined these soldiers — young but old before their time; devoted to war yet cynical about their senior officers — as they fought to reclaim Mosul. They were brave and selfless, too, but also capable of the worst acts of barbaric cruelty.

Abdul-Ahad portrays them dispassionately, with gritty, graphic, courageous reporting. While his writing is clear and compelling, at times it is so confronting that it’s hard to read — as when he describes captured ISIS prisoners being tortured for no purpose “beyond the primordial imperative to exact pain and revenge and prove to the soldiers that they had defeated ISIS.”

Having humanised the people he encounters — victims and perpetrators alike — he then goes beyond his masterful on-the-ground reporting. Placing these human stories in a wider political and social context, he demolishes the myth that the quick military success of US forces was subsequently marred by ill-advised decisions and a lack of planning for the second phase of the US adventure — the occupation and handover. In his 2013 speech, Howard understated these failures as “problematic.”

That’s not how Abdul-Ahad sees it. He argues that the occupation was bound to fail not because of lack of planning but “because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.”

A Stranger in Your Own City also debunks another central tenet of the pro-invasion narrative — that Iraq’s main religious sects are monoliths that had either uniformly supported and benefited from Saddam (the Sunnis) or uniformly opposed and suffered under him (the Shias). It’s another element of the narrative that Howard endorsed in his retrospective speech, declaring in coldly passive language that “it was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted.”

Despite all that he has witnessed and Iraq has endured, Abdul-Ahad sees signs of hope in an outburst of popular dissent by euphoric young Iraqis in 2019, known as the Tishreen Uprising. While it failed to bring down the post-2003 system, it showed how young people led by secular activists recognised the US-bequeathed democracy to be a kleptocracy of fossilised hierarchies and archaic bureaucratic rules, with a security system of violence, torture and killings. The Tishreen protesters saw themselves as victims of a “terrible con perpetrated by those professing to defend them and their sect against the ‘other’.”

“Tishreen showed the power of the people when not cowed by sectarian fears,” Abdul-Ahad writes, “and indicates that the post-2003 state can no longer satisfy its own people.” He concludes that the failure of Iraq’s leaders to heed the warnings of Tishreen will lead to their demise. •

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | Hutchinson Heinemann | $59.99 | 480 pages

The post An invasion’s long shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps emboldened by the university’s assent, the embassy responded with a further request. On behalf of the Russian government, it also wished to confer on the university’s chancellor, Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans, “a medal for promoting international cooperation.”

This new offer struck us both as an ingenious ploy to have the university’s most senior figure preside over the unveiling of the bust. The embassy could then inform the foreign affairs ministry in Moscow, and presumably the anonymous philanthropist, that it had pulled off a public relations coup.

The offer of the bust was unremarkable. One of the jobs of an embassy is to build networks of contacts that might prove useful in acquiring and exercising influence in its host country; and one of the assets Russian embassies can draw on is Russian literature — which, as Ernest Hemingway remarked in A Moveable Feast, changes you as you read it.

But the context was important. Relations between Australia and Russia had been tense since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Since then the Russian president had been directing an “insurgency” by alleged separatists in eastern Ukraine, and Australia had responded with economic sanctions.

Australia strengthened the sanctions after the destruction of flight MH17 in July 2014, which it had concluded was Russia’s doing. Prime minister Tony Abbott had consequently expressed an intention to “shirtfront” Putin when he came to Australia for the looming G20 meeting in Brisbane. (Abbott’s verb captured media attention globally and baffled interpreters in both Russia and Australia.)

With its scope for building networks of influence in government and the public service much reduced by Russia’s actions, the embassy naturally focused its efforts on the media, the arts and academia. It seems a fair assumption that Russian embassies in other countries were also seeking to cultivate academic contacts and generate positive publicity for Russia by proffering busts of Pushkin and/or other Russian luminaries to universities, libraries and the like.

The acting dean asked me to draft some remarks for ANU’s chancellor to deliver at the handover ceremony. I had worked for Gareth Evans twice when he was foreign affairs minister: in 1991, as his interpreter on a visit to the Soviet Union in its last months; and later, in 1992–93, in a junior policy-advice role when he and the Keating government responded to the Soviet Union’s dissolution by Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.

This meant I was familiar with Evans’s exacting approach to public speaking, and his views on Russia in general, views influenced by his own circle of well-informed friends in Russia. (In this regard, with the possible exception of Kevin Rudd, Evans is probably unique among Australian politicians.) I drafted the remarks accordingly.

In the event, Evans left my work pretty much intact. But he polished it a little and gave it his own stamp — with, for instance, the following ironic flourish: “I am personally very honoured to receive this commemorative medal for contributions to consolidating international cultural cooperation, though a little embarrassed, because I’m not quite clear what I might have done to deserve it.”

He also strengthened a key paragraph regarding the destruction of flight MH17:

In Australia, the shooting down of MH17 just over four years ago continues to particularly burn in our collective memory. While it seems very likely that the militia member who pressed the button to fire the missile that caused so many Australian and other lives to be tragically lost did not intend to destroy a civilian airliner, unless and until that mistake is frankly acknowledged and redressed it is hard to see how any Australian government can invest our bilateral relationship with more substance.

He later told me that he’d found the ceremony “a very tricky occasion to navigate.”

My only cavil with Evans’s refining of my handiwork was his insertion of the words “the Russian soul” at one point in the speech. I could understand why a consummate diplomat chose to do so, but (as Vladimir Nabokov is said to have quipped) “as if a soul has nationality.” In my view, the expression supports the notion that Russians are somehow emotionally more profound than other peoples.

Exactly that claim was made a year after the ANU ceremony by one Valery Malinovsky, who, his Polish name notwithstanding, was a prominent figure in the pro-Putin claque in Australia. Russians, he said, “have deeper emotions; are more hardworking; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

In the same vein, here is Putin in 2014:

So, what are our particular traits? It seems to me that the Russian person thinks mainly about the highest moral truths. Western values are different, focused on oneself. Personal success is the measure of success in life: the more successful a man is, the better he is. This is not enough for us… we are less pragmatic, less calculating than other peoples, we have bigger hearts. Perhaps this reflects the grandeur of our country, its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.

I wasn’t at the ANU ceremony, but was given accounts by some who were. The bust itself, as I later saw, is a hefty bronze affair in the Roman and Russian martial tradition. It looks oddly extravagant in the cramped precinct that contains what remains of the university’s once proud tradition of the study of European languages.

In his own remarks for the occasion, Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov claimed that “international specialists in literature had established that Pushkin is the most universal and greatest poet of all time in any language.”

This assertion recalls a memorable passage in the unpublished memoirs of Andrzej Walicki, an authority on the history of Russian thought, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz, and for some years a professor at ANU. Walicki relates how, as a student at the University of Warsaw in 1951, he attended a series of lectures given by a visiting Soviet professor, one Fyodor Zhurko, who had set himself the task of demonstrating the impregnability of four postulates: that Pushkin was the world’s greatest poet; Tolstoy the world’s greatest novelist; Alexander Ostrovsky the world’s greatest playwright; and Vissarion Belinsky the world’s greatest literary critic.

At his first lecture Zhurko encountered unexpected resistance: most of the students knew that to engage in debate on this level was pointless, but one Tadzio, from a rural village, asked how it could be that Pushkin “ranked above such poets as Byron.” Somewhat flustered, Zhurko responded that he did not know foreign languages and had not read Byron, but Pushkin’s pre-eminence had been “proven by Soviet science.”

This response prompted Tadzio to retort that he “also does not know foreign languages” (Walicki writes that “the comic effect was unintentional”) but he did know Pushkin’s work, and in his view “Mickiewicz was no less of a poet.” Zhurko retorted that Polish literature undoubtedly was great, indeed possibly the third greatest after Russian and Ukrainian, but that Pushkin’s standing as the greatest poet of all time in any language was for Soviet science “axiomatic.”

Following this exchange, as Walicki relates, Zhurko said to his Polish hosts that he had no wish to proceed with the following lectures in the series, as “у вас национализм очень сильно развитый” (“nationalism is very deeply entrenched here”).

An inscription beneath the bust given to ANU records that it was donated not by a philanthropist but by the “International Charity Fund ‘Dialogue of Cultures — United World.’” A little research reveals that the partners of the “charity fund” include Russia’s foreign affairs and culture ministries. These ties suggest that, while purporting to be some manner of non-government organisation, the outfit is in fact an agency of the Russian state. The following excerpts, with their idiosyncratic English, are from a mission statement on the organisation’s website.

Since its establishment in 2005, «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» Fund has implemented more than 450 projects in different countries. The Fund works closely with international organizations, state authorities of the Russian Federation and Russian non-governmental organizations, educational institutions in the field of international cooperation, culture and education.

Each culture — a combination of unique traditions, customs and holidays, this age-old wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, this galaxy of outstanding writers, artists, musicians and scientists, this particular philosophy, vision and thinking — it’s what makes the beauty of the world around them depth and complexity, then, of which each of us draws inspiration daily. To preserve and develop national culture — the noble task of mankind.

Fund «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» retains and promotes the historical uniqueness of ethnic groups living in the modern world and to create a tool for cultural rapprochement of peoples, through the creation of worldwide sites for a living dialogue of cultures.

More exploration of the website reveals that in 2007 in Brisbane the fund established a monument to one K.E. Tsiolkovskiy, described by the site as “a Russian provincial teacher and scholar, founder of Soviet cosmonautics, who paved the way into space for all the mankind… The scientist was born in Russia, but his discoveries belong to the entire world.”

The website also reports that donated busts of Pushkin have been placed in Ulaanbaatar, Dhaka and Montevideo; and that the Mongolian bust was handed over in 2015 by the then minister counsellor of the Russian embassy, Igor Arzhaev. Arzhaev is currently Russia’s consul general in Sydney, and Russian-language publications in Australia suggest he devotes much time to liaising with those diaspora members in Sydney who support the current Russian leadership’s policies. Prominent among these is the self-styled “Aussie Cossack,” Simeon Boikov, with whom Arzhaev is pictured below in Russian diplomatic uniform.

More important, the fund’s website reveals ties between the fund and prominent members of Putin’s close entourage, including Sergei Naryshkin, a member of the National Security Council and head of SVR, Russia’s foreign espionage service, and Sergei Glaz’ev, “Advisor to the President for Eurasian Cooperation.” Glaz’ev, who is among the most energetic proponents of the forcible reabsorption of Ukraine into the Russian empire, also has ties to the Australian Citizens Party via the LaRouche movement, a longstanding far-right American activist group.

Middle man: Igor Arzhaev (third from right), Russia’s consul general in Sydney, with “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov (in green). Facebook

The tale of the ANU bust contains a dual irony. If any Australian politicians deserve formal recognition for their promotion of international cooperation, surely none is more worthy than Gareth Evans, for none has done more in support of the ideal of a “rules-based order.” Conversely, no one, not even Donald Trump, has been more conspicuous than Vladimir Putin in their efforts to undermine such a mechanism to manage the inevitable conflicts between nation-states and great powers.

But there’s a third irony, more piquant and profound. It’s hard to think of a state that has killed or been complicit in the deaths of more of its poets than Russia. An incomplete but well-verified list compiled by literary scholar Vera Sokolinskaya contains the names of hundreds of Russian writers, journalists and artists executed, imprisoned or forced into exile by Russia’s rulers.

For various reasons, Pushkin is on the list. From the age of twenty he was internally exiled several times for his verses; in 1826 Tsar Nikolai I appointed himself Pushkin’s censor (though in practice the role was carried out by the chief of the tsar’s secret police); and in 1829 his request to travel abroad was denied.

But two other decisions by Tsar Nikolai combined to prove fatal for Pushkin. In 1831 the poet married Natalya Goncharova, a legendary beauty and thereafter an adornment at court. Two years later Nikolai appointed Pushkin to the humiliatingly lowly position of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), which effectively entailed only one duty: his, and Natalya’s, regular appearances at court balls.

Probably sensing danger from would-be seducers among his wife’s jostling admirers, burdened heavily by debts and unable to afford life in St Petersburg, Pushkin sought royal permission to retire to his modest country estate — and was denied. In 1835 a young French officer of the Russian Horse Guards began provocatively wooing Natalya; by January 1837, according to the mores of the time and place, Pushkin felt compelled to provoke a duel. He was wounded fatally and died in extreme pain thirty-six hours later.

Had it not been for the tsar’s whims, Pushkin would probably have lived well beyond his thirty-seven years. (Pushkin’s final years and fate are an epic tragedy: see, among various accounts, Elaine Feinstein’s judicious biography.) Today, though, this victim of Russian autocracy is presented as a demigod whose writings prove the innate superiority of what Putin and his supporters claim is “Russian civilisation.” •

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Security and defence agencies in both countries seem determined to drain any warmth from a relationship founded on a high degree of economic complementarity. In the Pacific, China’s attempts to become the security partner of small island nations have set off alarm bells; on the mainland, a vague new anti-espionage law has rattled foreign businesses. In Australia, shrill warnings continue about China’s influence-building, spying and emerging military threat, and the federal police have charged an Australian IT specialist in Shanghai under the Turnbull government’s foreign interference law.

The international setting isn’t helping. The United States and China, the two contestants for hegemony in the Western Pacific, are in the midst of a profound re-evaluation of the economic paradigms of the past forty years and how their two economies should connect.

China’s longstanding economic model, which fuelled rapid growth out of Maoist poverty, has come to the end of its road. After a decade’s reliance on construction, its domestic economy is burdened by large-scale debt and enormous numbers of empty apartments. Hopes of graduating from simple manufactures into high-tech products are threatened by American, European, Japanese and South Korean moves to retain control of the advanced semiconductors that run them.

America is abandoning the neoliberal doctrines it has followed since the Reagan era, adopting industrial policies aimed at bringing key industries back to home territory or friendly allies, chiefly through the trillions of dollars of subsidies and spending in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Transfers of American intellectual property and advanced equipment to China and other adversaries are under greater scrutiny.

In Australia’s case, an announcement of a Beijing visit by prime minister Anthony Albanese sometime later this year will signal that the thaw is still on. In contrast to his willingness to visit countries aligned in suspicion of China, though, Albanese is not looking at all eager.

“He doesn’t seem to have a lot of enthusiasm for this trip,” says Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador to China who is now a trade and business consultant in Beijing. “I’m really not sure what’s going on.”

From late last year, all the signs were that China’s leadership wanted to back away from the trade sanctions and freeze on political contacts imposed in 2020 in response to the Morrison government’s claim that Beijing was hiding the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s sharp tariff increases and other restrictions on a swathe of Australian exports — coal, barley, lobsters, copper, wine and timber — added up to about $20 billion in lost sales. Though small compared with our major exports to China (especially iron ore, which actually grew in value) the sanctions hit particular industries and regions hard.

At around the same time, a domestic national security case in China saw Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei suddenly disappear from her job with Chinese state television in Beijing. She later underwent a closed-court trial for allegedly passing state secrets abroad, though no verdict or sentence has been announced. All China-based correspondents for Australian media were withdrawn by their employers for fear of arrest.

The defeat of Morrison’s government in May 2022 changed the atmosphere. Informal talks on the fringe of multilateral meetings — notably Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s encounter with Albanese at the G20 summit in Bali last November — led to foreign minister Penny Wong’s meeting with China’s senior foreign affairs minister, Wang Yi, in Beijing on 21 December. It was the first Australian ministerial visit to China in more than three years.

Steps to ease the trade sanctions soon followed. The ban on Australian coal lifted in January, with exports jumping to the point that Queensland’s budget had an unexpected surplus for the year just ending. China’s consul-general in Perth visited a major lobster fishing cooperative, suggesting that the ban would soon end. In Canberra, Chinese ambassador Xiao Qian expressed a hope that the two countries would come back to “a normal kind of relationship” and praised Albanese’s “pragmatic approach.”

Talks ensued between senior officials at Davos and elsewhere. Australia agreed to suspend its action at the World Trade Organization over the barley ban. Then, in early May, trade minister Don Farrell went to Beijing to meet his counterpart, commerce minister Wang Wentao.

A few days later, Beijing announced it would resume timber imports from Australia, with no mention of the pest infestations cited as the reason for the ban. The trade had previously been earning Australian exporters about $700 million a year.

Xiao, the ambassador, also expressed concern for the imprisoned Cheng Lei, who has not seen her children in “such a long time.” “Personally, as a Chinese ambassador to this country, I can share with you: I have my personal sympathy to her and to her family,” he said. “So based on humanitarian grounds, I have been trying, I will continue to try to do my utmost to facilitate more access, that she could have some kind of access granted to her partner and friends and families to let them know that she’s OK.”

Further steps are awaited. Australia’s ambassador in Beijing, Graham Fletcher, who was barred from attending Cheng Lei’s trial in early 2022, was able to visit her in prison recently, but detected no change in her situation. Punitive tariffs on Australian wine and the halt in the lobster trade remain. No date has been set for a visit to Australia, mooted for July, by China’s new foreign minister, Qin Gang. (Qin replaced the long-serving Wang Yi, who remains in a supervisory role as head of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign affairs department.)

“They’ve achieved stabilisation — that’s good. Cabinet ministers are all disciplined in what they say about China — all that’s good, but I think the whole thing’s stalled in the last couple of months,” says Raby. “There’s not a lot of activity at the moment. The foreign minister’s dates haven’t been announced and July’s on us now. And they’re dicking around over the prime minister’s visit.”

But James Laurenceson, head of the Australia–China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, sees improvement, with China’s share of Australia’s trade starting to rise again after a sharp dip in the last two years and new items — electric vehicles from China and lithium ore going the other way for their batteries — gaining importance.

A new Lowy Institute poll, meanwhile, shows the Australian public’s concern about a threat from China easing, though still high and (short of sending troops) in favour of helping Taiwan defend itself. As a major threat, China has been overtaken by worries about cyber attacks from various sources.

Even if there has been a pause in the thaw, Australia’s experience still makes for quite a contrast to the state of relations between the United States and China, which US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Beijing to talk with Qin have barely warmed. Blinken pushed the line that Washington sought a “de-risking” of economic ties with China rather than “decoupling” and assured Qin that Washington doesn’t support Taiwan’s independence from China.

China seems not to have been mollified — and president Joe Biden’s subsequent reference to Xi Jinping as a “dictator” hasn’t helped. Chinese warships and aircraft continue to cut across US patrols through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. In Washington, Congress members and senators on both sides of the aisle compete in tough talk about China. The Chinese defence minister is still refusing to talk to his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, or re-open a military-to-military hotline.

While not directly accusing China, Albanese has aligned his government with America’s assertive defence manoeuvres in the Western Pacific and its cultivation of closer strategic ties with Japan and India. But for Biden’s debt-ceiling negotiations with the Republicans, Australia would have hosted all four leaders of this Quad in Sydney immediately after the recent summit of the Group of Seven advanced economies in Hiroshima.

And, of course, Albanese has fervently adopted the AUKUS agreement forged by Morrison to equip the navy, one day, with nuclear-powered submarines capable of projecting power far from Australian shores. The agreement has drawn predictable condemnation from Beijing, though it hasn’t been an economic deal-breaker.

Perhaps China’s leaders anticipate the AUKUS deal eventually collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, as a Marxist would say. Its embassy will be keenly watching the groundswell against AUKUS in Labor branches ahead of the party’s national conference in August. More broadly, the Lowy Poll found the Australian public “somewhat” supportive of AUKUS but unsure about its rationale or benefits.

China’s willingness to overlook far-off defence postures by minor powers is evident in this week’s visit to Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin by NZ prime minister Chris Hipkins and a large business delegation. It’s only a few months since Qin, the Chinese foreign minister, blasted his NZ counterpart Nanaia Mahuta over former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s strong warning about China’s attempts to form security partnerships in the South Pacific.

More recently, a New Zealand frigate sailed through Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea and was challenged by Chinese warships. But Wellington’s diplomatic deftness in recent years — not thrusting itself forward on things like the Covid investigation or security risks in Chinese telecom systems — has enabled it to keep channels open.

Australia’s hesitancy may come from the American mood playing into Canberra, Raby believes. “I think the pressure comes from the security and intelligence area in the US, through Shearer [Andrew Shearer, head of the Office of National Intelligence] and the security and defence people in Australia,” he says. “We are hobbled by these people. They don’t care if the New Zealand prime minister goes and takes a trade delegation and gets some deals. That’s not their agenda at all. Their agenda is to stay as close to the US as possible.”

Meanwhile, outside the defence–intelligence camp, other departments are working to keep up the economic momentum. Raby says talks are going on privately to extract the best advantage from a prime ministerial visit. “There is a negotiation about a package of outcomes,” he said. “And while everyone probably knows where you land, for some reason it seems to be difficult — I think on our side — to get there.”

Albanese has indicated that a complete lifting of the 2020 trade restrictions is required. He would also be hoping for resolution of Cheng Lei’s case, and preferably her release. “It would be very hard for Albanese to go without getting some concession on Cheng Lei,” says one of Canberra’s leading China specialists, who asked not to be named.

Beijing would want assurances that discrimination against Chinese foreign investment on national security grounds would be eased back from the absurd paranoia that ruled under Morrison’s government, when treasurer Josh Frydenberg blocked a Chinese company from taking over a Japanese-owned milk depot in Victoria.

In return for a resolution of Cheng Lei’s case, China would also want a promise that Australia won’t oppose its bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement covering e-commerce and intellectual property as well as conventional goods. Taiwan’s parallel application to join the CPTPP complicates this issue.

Given the barely concealed message of much mainstream media commentary in recent years — that seeking business deals with China amounts almost to treason — Albanese won’t want to look too enthused. Despite the easing of public concern about China, the Lowy Institute poll also found that 70 per cent of respondents want Australia’s supply chains to run through friendly countries.

For economist John Edwards, this is at odds with how Australians actually behave. “Australian homes are chock-a-block with Chinese-made kitchen equipment, refrigerators and washing machines, their garden sheds with Chinese-made tools, their desks cluttered with Chinese-made phones, computers, printers and peripherals,” Edward wrote last week in the Australian Financial Review.

“We wear clothes made in China and are now beginning to buy cars made in China,” Edwards went on. “In a roundabout way, these imports are paid for with exports of iron ore, coal, lithium, and other metals and minerals, often to China. They are also paid for by revenue from Chinese students in Australia, and Chinese tourists in Australia, with China the predominant source of both.”

A vast number of imports also come from third countries like South Korea and Japan that use Chinese components for their products. Allies like Britain and the United States meanwhile account for a very small proportion of Australia’s trade. For all its talk of “friend-shoring,” the Biden administration’s main focus, subsidising semiconductor manufacture in the United States, will be at the expense of two friends, Taiwan and South Korea.

And it’s not just Australian households that are chock-a-block with Chinese goods. The difficulty of disconnecting from China was shown in an interview this month by the chief executive of the huge US defence and aerospace group Raytheon. “We can de-risk but not decouple,” Greg Hayes told the Financial Times. “Think about the US$500 billion of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative.”

If Raytheon were to withdraw from China it would spend many years rebuilding its supply chains either in the United States or friendly countries, Hayes said. “We are looking at de-risking, to take some of the most critical components and have second sources but we are not in a position to pull out of China the way we did out of Russia.”

Raytheon is deeply involved in Australia’s defence. It provides the combat system for the Collins-class submarines, air defence for the army and missiles for the air force, and it helps run the space warfare ground station at Exmouth, Western Australia. All, it seems, reliant on Chinese-made components — and paid for, in large part, by our exports to China. Trading with “frenemies” is the international norm. •

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Along with Honolulu, those were the only places the two visited outside Australia to seek views on the strategic picture. Not Tokyo, nor New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta or Port Moresby.

In their wake, many observers are mystified by the relationship between the Defence Strategic Review and Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, a decision sprung on voters in September 2021 by Scott Morrison and endorsed with less than a day’s study by then opposition leader Anthony Albanese.

The parts of the Smith–Houston review curated and released by defence minister Richard Marles confirm that it didn’t question the Australia–United Kingdom–United States agreement, known as AUKUS. If Smith and Houston discussed what role the extraordinarily expensive submarines will actually perform, they did so in the still-classified parts of their review.

Press gallery defence reporters have already started the game of trying to winkle out of anonymous sources the scenarios that might have been canvassed by the review, including the defence of Taiwan and the lodging of Chinese forces in the Solomon Islands. Presumably Smith and Houston looked at the possibility that China would strike at Australia in the event of a Taiwan conflict in order to disable Pine Gap, North West Cape and other US war-fighting installations.

Sydney University historian James Curran, newly appointed international editor of the Australian Financial Review, raises a scenario that probably wasn’t mooted: the cutting of Australian shipments of iron ore and other commodities to China. “Such a devastating blow to Australia’s economy is never mentioned in these strategic reviews — economics and national security remain in uncooperating silos,” Curran writes.

As for the text that was released, many commentators have detected unsupported assertions and logical leaps. Most glaring perhaps was the reference to an “AUKUS Treaty” when the tripartite agreement was simply a joint statement by the three leaders at the US navy’s San Diego base in March.

Neither Morrison nor Albanese has presented the agreement to parliament for explanation and debate, let alone set in motion the ratification required of a treaty. Nor have the other two governments to their legislatures. Both Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak face elections next year and could be gone — in America’s case, possibly replaced by Donald Trump.

Those elections aren’t the only stumbling blocks. Washington’s agreement to sell between three and five Virginia-class submarines to the Australian navy from the early 2030s could be contingent on its own navy managing to step up production of these hunter-killer vessels, known as SSNs.

The Americans currently have about fifty SSNs, well below their force level goal of sixty-six. They hope to increase production of new Virginia-class boats to two a year, but the current rate works out at about 1.3 boats per year. At the AUKUS ceremony, it was disclosed that Australia would be investing perhaps $3 billion in helping the two US submarine yards speed up work, but the impact is likely to be quite marginal.

As it is, the US navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan shows the SSN force reaching the sixty-six-boat target in 2049 at the earliest. So the sale to the RAN will subtract from the American fleet — unless, of course, the vessels effectively operate as part of the US navy’s Indo-Pacific fleet. Marles has denied any such agreement or condition; veteran defence-intelligence analyst Brian Toohey scoffs at such assurances.

The three to five Virginia-class subs provided to Australia will already be about halfway through their thirty-year reactor life, and are seen as a holding capability until a jointly designed successor to Britain’s current Astute-class SSNs can be built. The first of those future submarines will be laid down in the early 2030s and delivered — from Barrow-in-Furness in England for the British navy, and from Adelaide for the Australian navy — in the 2040s.

But not from the American yards, despite the promised US contribution to the design. The US navy doesn’t want them, and is instead persisting in developing its own successor to the Virginia-class, known as the SSN(X). This raises an obvious question: having inducted an American boat into its fleet, why wouldn’t the Australian navy stick with the Americans for its successor?

It also brings us to perhaps the most perplexing thing about AUKUS: the involvement of the United Kingdom. Why did Morrison need to get his British counterpart Boris Johnson involved in approaching the Americans? Even if the Australian navy was inclined to Britain’s Astute-class, an American sign-off was required for the transfer of its reactor technology, a closely held US secret.

The proposed joint AUKUS submarine thus hangs on Britain, a declining power in great economic disarray. The Tories must be quietly chortling at having roped in the Australians to subsidise their naval plans. Adding to the puzzle is the post-politics job Morrison is said to be negotiating with a British defence group.

Australia’s close strategic alliance with the United States is generally accepted in our region. Japan and South Korea have similar alliances, Singapore and Thailand more tacit ones, and India and Vietnam a growing closeness. To revive close strategic ties with Britain undercuts decades of diplomacy designed to project Australia as an authentic regional partner. Surely the Australian navy has moved on from pink gins?

Meanwhile, the Smith–Houston review has rearranged our defence capacity around the nuclear submarines and their projected $368 billion cost. From a “balanced” force with a bit of everything, it is to become “focused” on projecting power further from Australia.

Ships and aircraft are to be equipped with longer-range missiles, their stockpiles built up by local production rather than imports. The army will also be more of a missile force, with the US artillery–missile hybrid known as the HIMARS extending its strike range to 500 kilometres and a greater amphibious capacity to move forward against threats.

To pay for this, the army loses a second battery of heavy guns, and its planned new fleet of South Korean– or German- designed, locally built armoured personnel carriers will be cut from 450 to 139, enough for a single brigade. At a mooted cost of $27 billion — averaging $60 million per vehicle — the project did seem absurdly inflated, but Smith and Houston mentioned no other means for protecting soldiers.

Nor do they discuss the fate of the army’s heavy tanks — its fifty-nine M1 Abrams and the updated replacements ordered by Morrison’s government. Perhaps a contribution to Ukraine, to be announced by Albanese when he is a guest at the NATO summit in July?

Accompanying the partial publication of the defence review has been some spin-doctoring designed to create the impression that the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, which has prevailed since senior defence official Paul Dibb’s 1987 white paper, was designed to deal only with low-level threats and is consequently obsolete. Actually, under the earlier doctrine Australia possessed quite an extended punch using air-refuelled F-18 strike aircraft and the six Collins-class conventional submarines.

Former army chief Peter Leahy is one who believes that Smith and Houston’s “all new” doctrine is really Defence of Australia Extended. “Its authors boldly state that it is not ‘just another defence review,’ but that is exactly what it is,” writes former defence official Hugh White, who wrote a defence white paper in the Dibb tradition in 2000.

Members of the hawkish commentariat, meanwhile, are apoplectic at the government’s failure to back with big money the review’s dire warnings of rising threats and a defence force “not fit for purpose.” They point out that many of the proposed new capabilities had been announced over the past three years. Some of them point to the government’s post-review backpedalling on capabilities already in the works. A committee headed by a retired US admiral will see whether the navy’s surface fleet needs all of the nine Hunter-class large frigates to be built in Adelaide, or a larger number of smaller corvettes.

“The Defence Strategic Review is worthless unless Defence stops deliberately dragging the chain,” declared the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan. “Strategy without dollars is just noise.” For Peter Jennings, former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the review was “a collection of unfunded compromises and shocking policy gaps.”

The funding gaps are not just directly in the military domain of the “national defence” strategy propounded in the review. Referring to increasing calls on the defence forces to help out in natural disasters caused by climate change, Smith and Houston suggest a separate emergency agency. They point to Australia’s small reserves of fuel and dwindling refining capacity, declaring that the energy industry should be directed to come up with remedies.

A different criticism of the review comes from White. “The choice we face today is whether to build armed forces designed to help the US defend its strategic position in Asia against China’s challenge and preserve the old US-led order,” he writes, “or build forces that can keep us secure as American power in Asia fades and a new order dominated by China and India takes its place.”

We can’t do both, White adds, “because that pulls our force priorities in very different directions.” On the one hand, AUKUS was all about supporting the United States against China in Northeast Asia. On the other hand, the defence review — despite its emphasis on the US alliance — focuses on the defence of the Australian continent and its approaches.

At points, the review doesn’t seem sure which way to jump. As White observes, it argues that Australia’s forces must be able to deter “unilaterally” but then, in the same paragraph, it says this can only be achieved by working with the United States. “Australia’s nonchalance about this,” says White, “is typified by the reckless gamble of entrusting our future submarine capability to the impossibly protracted, complex and risky AUKUS nuclear program, when much faster and more cost-effective conventional options are available.”

The Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen sees “tension and ambiguity” between the review and the AUKUS plans. “If the navy should be ‘optimised for operating in our immediate region,’ why do we need submarines optimised for operating thousands of kilometres north of it?” he writes. “Why is the RAAF Tindal air base being modernised so the United States can operate long-range bombers from there?”

A deeper contradiction looms for Peter Varghese, the former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and director of ONA, Australia’s top intelligence assessment agency. Talking to James Curran for the AFR, Varghese agreed that Australia should stick with the United States as the most important player crafting a new balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Whether we can sustain this position without handcuffing ourselves to the maintenance of US strategic primacy is the big challenge for our strategic policy,” Varghese said. “A balance of power which favours our interests and adopting US strategic primacy as a vital Australian interest are not the same thing, and it would be a mistake to conflate them.” •

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That the two officials — diplomat Nick Warner and former army officer Paul Symon — had gone on to head the Australian Secret Intelligence Service was a twist Sogavare must have noticed. Warner and Symon might have had close knowledge of the Solomons, and of Sogavare himself, but their ASIS links were also a reminder that Canberra could act behind the scenes if it wanted.

Which is what it did. Australian intelligence leaked the text of the Solomons–China security pact to Sogavare’s most feared domestic rival, Daniel Suidani, premier of the populous island of Malaita. Suidani, who had fallen out with Sogavare when the latter switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, had continued to deal with Taipei and talked of possible secession.

Jawboning by Scott Morrison and Joe Biden’s administration had persuaded Sogavare to disavow any intent to allow Chinese military bases. Yet he went ahead and signed the security pact anyway.

In response to the leak, Sogavare’s critics in the national parliament moved a vote of no-confidence. It failed amid allegations that Chinese interests had bribed MPs to support the prime minister. Mobs opposed to the deal looted and burned large parts of Honiara, including its thriving Chinatown. Australia and New Zealand sent in police and soldiers. Australia and China then competed to supply weapons and vehicles to the Royal Solomon Islands Police. (The country of 700,000 has no military.)

Meanwhile, an attempt by Beijing to broaden its foothold turned into a debacle. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stormed a Pacific Islands Forum session in Fiji offering a broad security pact with the ten island states that recognise Beijing. He was rebuffed for trying to pre-empt the extensive consultation that such regional initiatives require.

The crisis was over. But strategic rivalry simmers. Last year, thirty-three Solomons police officers went to China for extended training. Just before Anthony Albanese visited Port Moresby in January to cajole PNG’s James Marape into a bilateral security treaty and announce expanded seasonal worker places, Beijing gave the PNG defence force a new hospital. The United States might have reopened its embassy in Honiara, but when Sogavare hosts the South Pacific Games in a new Chinese-built stadium this November, a VIP from Beijing will no doubt be guest of honour.

In Australia, meanwhile, the perceived Chinese threat in the Pacific has created a school of academic and think-tank study. As Michael Wesley observes in the superb first chapter of his new history of RAMSI, Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, Australia’s worries tap into an old seam. Denial of the Pacific to anti-Western interests is “arguably the foundational imperative of Australian international policy,” Wesley argues. Hence the “disproportional reactions” when Pacific states court deals with potentially hostile interests, which have included the Soviet Union, Gaddafi’s Libya and Chavez’s Venezuela.

At such moments, Canberra is wont to call on its imperial friends, the British and now the Americans, to do the heavy lifting in defence and aid. “Australia’s engagement with the Pacific is a story of passion outstripping actions, of ambitions outstripping abilities,” Wesley writes. “It is a record of long stretches of lassitude and inattention punctuated by intense periods of concern and engagement.”

If pieces like David Kilcullen’s essay in the latest edition of Australian Foreign Affairs can get a run then we are in one of those intense periods. Stepping outside his usual field of counterinsurgency, Kilcullen makes much of China’s vaunted but largely untested claims to have “carrier-busting” steerable ballistic missiles, and conjures up a Chinese thrust down through the Pacific like that of Japan in 1942, using island missile bases to cut us off from America.

Why it would want to do this is unfathomable. Unlike Japan at that time, China has all the petroleum and strategic minerals it wants from willing sellers like Australia. Its military focus is on securing the South China Sea for its ballistic missile submarine force and keeping up pressure on Taiwan. Forces projected into the South Pacific would be sitting ducks. But, says Kilcullen, don’t look at intent, look at capabilities. By this measure, I’d add, India is also a threat.

Rory Medcalf, who heads the spook school known as the National Security College at the Australian National University, accepts China’s “neo-colonial ambitions” in the Pacific as a given, but is more nuanced. A Chinese military base would be a direct threat, he says. “But even absent that scenario, the prospect of a Pacific island government turning to the guns and truncheons of a one-party nationalist megastate to supress domestic dissent is confronting.”

Again unconsciously tapping into the buck-passing tradition traced by Wesley, he sees Australia acting as a “guide and an informal coordinator” for powers in Europe, North America and Asia “poised to help the Pacific cope with China’s disruptive power.” But he also has to acknowledge that the “Indo-Pacific” perspective of which he has been a leading proponent can be seen by Pacific islanders as diluting their regional identity and demanding they take America’s side against China.

On that score, there have been no takers. As Wesley remarked at the launch of his book, the attitude of Pacific governments to Chinese aid and investment is “bring it on.” The region has never had so much aid from, and access to, Australia and other US-aligned powers.

Peter Connolly, a recently retired Australian army colonel who recently finished an ANU doctorate on China in Melanesia, shows in his Australian Foreign Affairs essay, “Grand Strategy,” just how flexible, resourced and patient China’s approach to the region is becoming. The last few years have seen a leap in the quality of its diplomats posted to Melanesian capitals: two senior colonels of the People’s Liberation Army intelligence branch became defence attachés in Port Moresby and Suva in 2020; elsewhere, in countries without militaries, senior police officers are posted as liaison officers.

Senior colonel Zhang Xiaojiang found the PNG defence force less open to cultivation, so he has concentrated on the under-resourced Royal PNG Constabulary, upgrading its CCTV surveillance in Port Moresby, funding a new medical clinic and sending in riot-control equipment ahead of last year’s elections. “By sensing gaps and enquiring about needs he gradually discovered ways to develop appreciation for the PRC” — the People’s Republic of China — “and appeared to learn from PNG’s traditional partners in the process,” Connolly writes.

Police forces across Melanesia certainly have plenty of resource gaps. By focusing on a Chinese military threat that seems quite improbable, our security watchdogs are barking up the wrong tree, ignoring the real security issues facing Pacific islanders, particularly in Melanesia.

Only in Fiji do the police have anything like the numbers widely seen as appropriate to population: some 3000 officers for 900,000 people. And it was there, during Frank Bainimarama’s recently ended prime ministership, that the police became an instrument of political repression without much Chinese assistance.

Solomon Islands has 1150 police for its 736,000 population, and PNG only 7300 (including reserves) for a population generally put somewhere around ten million. The PNG force has hardly grown since independence in 1975, while the population has trebled.

Few citizens rely on the PNG police for help. If they do, they must pay, ostensibly for fuel and other call-out expenses but also with an element of straight-out bribery. The police can be brutal, corrupt and under-trained. Often, they act as guns for hire used by loggers and other commercial interests to repress local communities. It’s for these reasons that citizens report crime and conflict to traditional elders, pastors in their church or neighbourhood committees in urban settlements.

A recent study for the PNG-Australia Policing Partnership, a forum for the police leadership in both countries, urged a doubling of PNG police numbers, an annual budget lift of around $51 million and a one-off injection of $1.6 billion to provide the resources the force needs to do its job.

Sinclair Dinnen, a long-term ANU-based scholar of the region’s crime and security, doubts this is the answer. “The police have to be better looked after,” he tells me after his recent field trip to PNG. “But in some ways there’s an argument for having a small, well looked after, professional force who have enough fuel and access to transport, who are skilled up in investigations and doing the policing kind of thing.”

At grassroots level, Dinnen sees another tier of security modelled on the “community auxiliary police” New Zealand has been funding in Bougainville since the end of the civil war there two decades ago. The island has only three police stations, often unmanned. The auxiliary police, drawn from communities, are often better educated than the regular police; in consultation with local chiefs, they deal with less serious crimes.

In some parts of PNG, Dinnen concedes, restoring law and order requires more than this hybrid model. He points to regions like Hela and Enga, where winners and losers emerge from large-scale resource projects and rivals fight it out with military-grade firearms. “You get what are low levels of insurgency, in fact,” he says. “And no police force should be expected to deal with that.”

Wesley’s book shows us that RAMSI strayed into this field of community policing for a while. After the initial success in restoring peace, “a cultural divide between modes of policing, which came to be seen as ‘Western’ versus ‘Pacific’ ways, began to open up,” he writes. Australian and New Zealand officers were seen as enforcement-oriented and aloof. Police from the Pacific islands invested time and effort in building links to local communities, taking care to respect cultural and religious values and acknowledge traditional leadership structures.

The islands police “understood the importance of sharing food, attending church, and working with traditional kastom processes to help resolve disputes,” writes Wesley. With police likely to be underfunded once RAMSI packed up, it was a good model. But for reasons Wesley doesn’t explain the pilot scheme’s funding ended after five years; presumably the scheme was beyond Canberra’s comprehension.

Wesley, who was deputy director of the Office of National Assessments at the time, sees an unusual confluence in the circumstances that gave birth to RAMSI. The Solomons government was on its knees and bankrupt; John Howard was flush with his accidental success in East Timor; and, with the disaster of Iraq still to become apparent, it was the high-water mark of muscular Western nation-rebuilding intervention.

It is hard now to think of any government that would allow large numbers of foreign police and finance officials — with legal immunity, investigative and arrest powers, and tax-free status — to handle a country’s security.

For all the diplomatic nuances used to gain regional cover for Australia’s intervention and the initial restoration of civil order, though, RAMSI gradually ran out of steam as local politicos reasserted their role as distributors of state resources. Within five years of RAMSI’s departure, Australia was again sending in riot police and soldiers to quell unrest and providing more lethal firearms to local police.

Now, Canberra’s focus is elsewhere, as it orders longer-range anti-ship and land-attack missiles to fend off the perceived threat of an attack by China. The Australian Federal Police has set up a new Pacific branch directed at border security and drug smuggling — our problems — rather than nurturing models of policing that suit Pacific communities. Dinnen, for one, suggests Canberra needs to cool it. “Sogavare is not going to be there forever, and in Honiara and PNG below the elite level there’s a lot of anti-Chinese racism that breaks out in urban areas.”

In her essay in the latest Australian Foreign Affairs, Solomons journalist Dorothy Wickham cites community-level fears of where the Chinese embrace might take the government. But she also points out that islanders’ everyday contact is less with Australians than with Chinese people: “Australians are here as aid workers, diplomats and police, but they are not mixing with local people.” With thousands of young islanders getting involved with the Pacific labour schemes in Australia and New Zealand, a new familiarity and affection is possible — as long as abuses are seen to be punished.

As for geopolitical rivalries, “the Solomon Islands government should try to get what it can from foreign powers,” Wickham writes. “But we need to choose those things with long-term benefits in mind. We should be careful what we wish for.” •

Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands
By Michael Wesley | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 310 pages

Girt by China: Power Play in the Pacific
Australian Foreign Affairs | Issue 17, February 2023 | $24.99 | 128 pages

The post Ambiguous embrace appeared first on Inside Story.

Let me start with the good stuff — the connections. Australia–India relations have had enthusiastic moments in the past, but the visit of prime minister Anthony Albanese this month, coinciding with a cricket tour, made the biggest splash by an Australian PM since Bob Hawke’s bromance with Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s.

Albanese’s Australian companions included leaders from education, business and government. The Quad — the strategic engagement between the United States, Australia, Japan and India — was tactfully discussed, and two Australian universities bravely proposed to set up campuses in India. Albanese rocked gracefully in the decorated golf cart that carried him and Modi around Ahmedabad’s vast cricket stadium for the Indian prime minister’s lap of honour on his home turf.

What was underplayed in the commentary was the third pillar of a dynamic relationship: people. The other two pillars — shared economic and strategic interests — are already there in burgeoning trade and the enthusiasm for the Quad.

But the permanent ingredient is people — people going back and forth between India and Australia every day for family, business and professional reasons. When Bob Hawke and Rajiv Gandhi were courting in the 1980s, fewer than 20,000 Australian residents had been born in India; today people of Indian origin number closer to a million. And that’s excluding people from India’s South Asian neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan.

The arrival of Indian-origin Australians in public life will gain enhanced national attention now Labor’s election in New South Wales has resulted in Daniel Mookhey’s becoming treasurer. Mookhey is the nephew of someone I taught in years 6 and 7 in the Boys’ Basic High School in Chandigarh. His uncle and late father came to Australia in the 1970s.

The list of recognised high achievers is growing rapidly. The NSW Australian of the Year in 2022 was Veena Sahajwalla, a professor of materials science. The Victorian Australian of the Year in 2023 is Angraj Khillan, a medical doctor, and the NSW Australian Local Hero is Amar Singh, founder of the charity Turbans 4 Australia. You’ll find similarly talented people throughout business, medicine, law, education and the public service, all of them in addition to the thousands of young people making a start in Australia by doing some of the tough jobs, most visibly in transport.

This growing presence brings assets Australia urgently needs: initiative, talent and youth. But the assets come with challenges. People from other places invariably bring beliefs and ideas that can prove a puzzle to the new country.

Prime minister Modi identified one such challenge when he admonished Albanese for not preventing hostile graffiti on Hindu places of worship in Melbourne and Brisbane.

The graffiti are part of an international attempt, made easier in a world of Twitter and its many cousins, to revive the fifteen-year Khalistan insurgency that subsided bloodily thirty years ago. “Khalistan” was the demand for a sovereign state for Sikhs, who form a majority in the Indian state of Punjab and are a large component of the Indian diaspora in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia.

The secessionist movement of forty years ago grew out of political upheaval in India and its neighbours in the late 1970s. It was compounded by a sense that Sikhs had long been taken for granted and by a lack of employment in Punjab, where green-revolution agriculture brought a margin of prosperity but a decline in the need for labour. The fact that some of those conditions are still noticeable helps to explain the recent aggressive Khalistan demonstrations in Britain, the United States and Canada.

The notion of Khalistan is likely to puzzle most Australians. Those bloody days in north India and overseas had largely disappeared from international media by the mid 1990s, but many wounds remain. Australia’s current high commissioner to India says he’d not encountered the term “Khalistan” until he arrived in India.

Modi’s Khalistan reprimand highlights the need for broader understanding within all Australian institutions of the pulls and pressures the diaspora may face.

Other issues also require recognition of both political sensitivity and enduring scars. An example is the different suppositions about marriage and family that prevail in India and Australia. The subtitle of Manjula O’Connor’s recent book, Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia, captures some of the strains faced by migrants, and by people who work with them.

A third issue is caste. Caste discrimination is illegal under the Indian constitution, but still widely encountered. Prejudice against Dalits (formerly disparaged as “untouchables”) now shows up sufficiently in Britain and the United States for Seattle’s city council to pass a motion banning it. A bill to ban such discrimination in California has also been introduced in that state’s senate.

Finally, Australian governments and institutions need to decide how they deal with Narendra Modi’s government. There would be much to admire in Modi’s life story and in the political and social apparatus he has helped to build. But the scaffolding rests on the founding principles of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the Hindu-supremacist organisation Modi joined as an adolescent and made his career in. The RSS was inspired by the racial-superiority movements of interwar Europe.

The leader of today’s RSS captured aspects of this outlook in an interview in January. “Hindu society has been at war for 1000 years,” he said, and “this fight has been going against foreign aggressions, foreign influences and foreign conspiracies… This war [today] is not against an enemy outside, but against an enemy within… Foreign invaders are no longer there, but foreign influences and foreign conspiracies have continued.”

Modi’s India steers towards a narrow authoritarianism, demanding conformity to an RSS vision of what it is to be a Hindu. International media organisations like the BBC are held up as examples of the “foreignness” that needs expunging. A BBC documentary reflecting poorly on Modi when he was chief minister of Gujarat during fearful riots in 2002 was banned in India earlier this year.

The ban was followed by “surveys” (not “raids,” the government said) of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai looking for financial violations, and outrage at George Soros’s suggestion a few weeks later that “Modi is no democrat.” Soros pointed out that Modi and business figure Gautam Adani, whose vast holdings have suffered since a critical report by a US-based short-selling specialist, have been close over twenty years and Modi “will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in parliament.”

Questions in parliament are looking less likely since the speakers of both houses have effectively closed off discussion. Rahul Gandhi, the most prominent of the opposition MPs, has been expelled from parliament and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on charges of “criminal defamation.” (If the same grounds for defamation prevailed in Australia, the prison system would need expanding.)

None of these internationally publicised incidents touches on the everyday harassment that many Muslims, Christians and even Dalits experience at the hands of grassroots zealots implicitly encouraged by their leaders.

Most Australians don’t share “values” such as these. In future, Australian speakers at bilateral occasions, when they feel the need to praise India, might choose to endorse the words written in capital letters in the prologue to India’s 1950 constitution: JUSTICE, LIBERTY, EQUALITYand FRATERNITY. Give “democracy” a rhetorical rest. •

The post The Quad couple: India and Australia appeared first on Inside Story.

The tripartite pact known as AUKUS grew out of a Morrison brainwave some six months after he won what seemed an unwinnable election virtually single-handedly. Under the agreement, Australia is to acquire — and even build — eight US- or British-designed nuclear-powered submarines, known as SSNs.

According to senior political correspondents Peter Hartcher and Paul Kelly, Morrison started asking his officials about possible alternatives to the contentious contract with France’s Naval Group to build twelve Shortfin Barracuda-class conventional submarines in Adelaide. Not long after, in March 2020, he asked defence secretary Greg Moriarty to prepare an options paper, which was delivered two weeks later. Then, in May of that year, he asked Moriarty and defence force chief Angus Campbell to form a group to weigh up the nuclear-power option. Headed by then navy chief Michael Noonan, the group worked in a tight security bubble.

Efforts continued to try to resolve differences with Naval Group over the cost and local content of the French submarines. No one seems to have considered asking the French about the nuclear option, yet the Shortfin Barracuda was a special conventionally powered version of the Barracuda nuclear-powered attack submarine and the Americans had agreed to fit it with their most advanced war-fighting electronics.

One problem was the fact that the reactors in the French submarines use low-enriched (around 5 per cent) uranium in their fuel rods, which require replacing every ten years. This means fewer problems with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but would have meant relying on a foreign power. Without a domestic nuclear industry capable of enriching uranium and fabricating rods, any Barracuda submarine bought by Australia would have to sail to France every decade or else somehow arrange transfer of fuel rods from France.

The Australian team and its political masters were seized by the revelation that current American and British nuclear submarines are fuelled by highly enriched (92 per cent) uranium rods that work for the entire life of the submarine, thirty years. Once built, it was claimed, they could be operated by the Australian navy without recourse to American support. Despite the US and British submarines having operated for many years, that news somehow came as a surprise in Canberra.

So, in February 2021, a visiting Australian naval delegation broached the idea of a British or US purchase with the sea lords of the Royal Navy, who gave it a cautious nod as long as the Americans could be brought on board. Britain’s US-derived reactor technology is the product of a unique transfer of know-how by the United States in 1958.

Next, the Americans were sounded out. The first approach was made by Morrison’s handpicked director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer, and Australian ambassador Arthur Sinodinos at the end of April 2021, in a meeting with the Biden administration’s senior adviser on Indo-Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell. Then, the following month, Morrison’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, met with Biden’s secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Another few weeks later, Morrison was a guest at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, where he felt able to broach the plan with Biden himself. Strangely, British prime minister Boris Johnson was also at the meeting with Biden. The American president clearly detests Johnson for his role in Brexit and potential reopening of conflict in Northern Ireland, but his presence didn’t queer Morrison’s pitch.

Although Biden stipulated that the nuclear transfer must be a bipartisan exercise on the Australian side, Morrison gave opposition leader Anthony Albanese and his deputy just twelve hours’ notice of the announcement of the tripartite agreement to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and collaborate on futuristic technology. The announcement came in September last year in a video hook-up with Biden and Johnson.

Labor endorsed what became known as the AUKUS pact, no doubt seeing it as an attempted political wedge on Morrison’s part but presumably also trusting it to be a well-thought-out response to China’s increasingly confrontational approach and an equally considered lift in Australia’s defence capabilities. After securing government in May last year, though, the Albanese government might have been expected to take a harder look at the AUKUS deal and the SSN component.

There were early signs of such scrutiny. In August, the government appointed former Labor defence and foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence forces chief Angus Houston to advise on what defence capability Australia needs to meet “the increasingly challenging geostrategic environment.” They were given until March this year to submit their findings (though speculation suggests they’ll report next month) and handed a secret preliminary report to Marles in November.

From hints thrown out by Albanese and Marles, the Smith–Houston review was encouraged to be iconoclastic. In particular, the army’s projected force of 127 heavy Abrams tanks for $2.5 billion and 450 new armoured fighting vehicles at a mooted $27 billion cost — or an average of around $60 million each — seems likely to come into question.

“Our defence assets need to not be about fighting a land war defending western Queensland because that is highly unlikely,” Albanese said in an end-of-year interview with the Nine newspapers, “but a lot of our assets are not really the ones that we necessarily need for this century and for the times — and also their location as well.”

Yet the SSN project seems off-limits. The review’s terms of reference don’t say that explicitly, but Smith and Houston are asked to recommend the “defence posture” needed in 2032–33 and beyond “in light of recently announced large-scale projects.”

This suggests that a parallel defence taskforce, given eighteen months in September 2021 by Morrison to find a pathway to acquiring the SSNs, has proceeded without any fear of being called off.

A defence briefing note describing how the Smith–Houston review relates to the AUKUS submarine project states that it “will help ensure we maximise the potential of this and other AUKUS partnership initiatives in Australia’s best strategic interests.” In other words, defence spending will be trimmed elsewhere if necessary to finance the SSNs, estimated to cost us $200 billion.

Meanwhile, Morrison’s submarine taskforce, with its staff of 360 defence and industry personnel, says it’s on schedule to report to the government in March. (Both it and the final Smith–Houston report are likely to be kept secret.) The SSN taskforce chief, Jonathan Mead, was giving little away in an interview with the Australian’s Cameron Stewart in December. The SSN, he said, would “deliver for Australia a potent war-fighting capability [and help] to deter anyone who may seek to do harm to Australia.”

Mead left a riddle about how the navy can avoid a “capability gap” between likely delivery of the SSNs in the 2040s and 2050s and the retirement of the existing six conventional Collins-class submarines between 2038 and 2046 — assuming that major refits can safely extend the operating life of the Collins boats. Mead said he is focusing only on nuclear submarines, not on stopgap acquisitions of conventional subs.

The capability gap could be even wider if, as British defence minister Ben Wallace and others have suggested, the three AUKUS partners work on a common design for a new generation SSN to replace both the current US Virginia-class and the British Astute-class, each designed in the 1990s and coming towards the end of their production runs.

Mead will also wrestle with the question of local production, which Marles still insists will happen. Ideas floated include building the submarine hulls in Adelaide and then barging them to the United States or Britain for the nuclear reactor to be inserted, or barging the nuclear reactor module with its bomb-grade uranium core to Adelaide. The latter prospect might unsettle some in the City of Churches: when the Astute submarines are fuelled up in Barrow-in-Furness on the west English coast, the local council hands out iodine tablets to residents.

Awaiting the two reports, a clamour of urgency has built up within Canberra’s defence commentariat. Even before last year’s election, Peter Dutton was expressing the hope that the Australian navy could lease one or two Virginia-class SSNs from the US navy to bridge the gap. Having ditched the French, and before them the Japanese, the then defence minister was ready to dump the British.

In November, shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie said Canberra should stop insisting the submarines be built here. Authoritarian powers are “on the move” and it would take too long to start with Australian domestic production, he said. We should try to order two submarines from US yards for delivery by the end of this decade.

But the two US naval yards that build submarines are flat out with orders from the US navy for more Virginia-class SSNs. A letter to Joe Biden in December from two senior US senators argued that adding orders from the Australian navy would stretch American industrial capacity to “breaking point.”

Purchased or leased, the Australian navy won’t have the engineering and command expertise to operate nuclear submarines for many years without importing talent from the US or British navies and arranging maintenance at American or British bases. The submarines will be Australian assets in name only. They will also spend a lot of time undergoing maintenance, and are likely to be available for six-month cruises only fifteen times in their thirty-three-year operational life.

Mixed in with this clamour has been the extension of another Morrison initiative, the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, with its goal of acquiring “more potent capabilities to hold adversary forces and infrastructure at risk further from Australia, including longer-range strike weapons, cyber capabilities and area denial systems.”

Compounding a sense of alarm during Morrison’s prime ministership was the abrupt deterioration in relations with China caused by his call in April 2020 for outside health inspectors to storm into China, invited or not, to find the origins of Covid-19, and the federal police raid on the homes of four journalists with Chinese official media two months later. China responded with trade sanctions to the tune of $20 billion a year and the arrest of Australian journalist Cheng Lei.

With Chinese leader Xi Jinping choosing to wear a military uniform to review huge parades of his armed forces, and Chinese ships and aircraft jostling US forces in nearby seas, it was not hard for defence hawks in Canberra to connect the military build-up and the relationship chill to produce the conclusion: China is a military threat to Australia.

Consequently, Morrison announced a $1 billion scheme to create a domestic missile manufacturing industry to build up ammunition stocks. This quest for greater lethality at longer range has continued under Labor with the planned acquisition of 800-kilometre-range US anti-ship missiles for the air force, 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and Norwegian anti-ship missiles for major navy surface ships and, just recently, twenty US 100- to 300-kilometre-range precision rocket artillery units for the army. The latter, known as HIMARS, have proved a devastatingly effective weapon for Ukraine.

It is unclear whether Canberra intends to acquire its own satellite reconnaissance and targeting systems to direct these missiles, or whether it will rely on American systems.

With multibillion-dollar arms purchases coming thick and fast, defence analysts have thrown off all restraint. A paper last month from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggested the air force acquire a squadron of the newly unveiled US air force B-21 bombers. This bat-winged stealth bomber, with its unrefuelled combat radius of 4000 kilometres, could plug the long-range strike capability gap until the SSNs arrive, according to the institute. Still a prototype and yet to be tested in the air, B-21s are likely to cost more than $2 billion each.

Though this thinking was initially presented as a means of hitting any enemy planning to hit Australian assets between 2000 and 3000 kilometres away, and could thus be seen as an extension of the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, it has morphed in some quarters into a strategy of deterrence: that is, if any enemy thinks it can land blows against Australia it must expect blows in return.

Hence the preference for the larger of the two contending SSNs, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest version is 10,200 tonnes and can carry up to sixty-five torpedoes, Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles or other long weapons. Britain’s smaller Astute-class (about 7500 tonnes) carries thirty-six long weapons.

This extra capacity shifts the submarine’s role from denying access to Australian waters to retaliating or attacking. It should be an unsettling thought. Until now, deterrence against a rival superpower was left to the Americans. Are we having doubts about that, just as the South Koreans and perhaps some Japanese are?

And, for China, what kind of deterrence would be offered by the prospect of a couple of submarines coming close to its coast and firing off conventional-explosive-tipped missiles at a score of land targets?

This line of thinking also betrays unease in Canberra about the American nuclear umbrella. In countries anxious about nuclear-armed strategic rivals but without a reliable superpower protector, deterrence thinking goes in one direction, towards an independent nuclear capability: ask India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel.

But the nuclear submarine push is unlikely to be thrown off course by questions about its feasibility — and certainly not by suggestions from defence analysts like Hugh White, Brian Toohey and Clinton Fernandes that smaller and less noisy conventional submarines are a greater threat to enemy navies than nuclear subs, are better suited to operations in the archipelagic waters of Australia’s approaches, and are better matched with our budgetary and industrial capacities.

Nor will the hawks be thrown off course by the equally forlorn thoughts of some in the international relations community, along with figures like Paul Keating, that getting closer to the anglophone powers is a retrograde step. Australian proponents of the American alliance have long claimed that Southeast Asians are secretly pleased by our closeness with the United States and are not fussed about our tightening “interoperability” and now “interchangeability” with US forces. There is not a lot of evidence for this.

Hawkish commentators are thrilled that the stepped-up “rotation” of American forces through northern Australia will make us somehow pivotal to the US posture against China in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea, instead of a rear base to disperse forces away from Chinese attack. Their worry is that things will blow up before we have the SSNs to join in.

Unless Admiral Mead produces a technological surprise out of his braided hat, though, the sheer impracticality of Morrison’s grand scheme may soon become apparent. This may give more scope for foreign minister Penny Wong to work on giving AUKUS a less dominant place in Australia’s strategic position.

Morrison’s AUKUS plan raised “valid questions about Australia’s sovereign capability,” Wong said in a speech to Sydney University’s US Studies Centre a week after the September 2021 announcement. But, she added, “with the prospect of a higher level of technological dependence on the US, how does the Morrison–Joyce government assure Australians that we can act alone when need be; that we have the autonomy to defend ourselves, however and whenever we need to.”

The new pact had to be “additional to” and not “instead of” Australia’s contribution to existing regional architecture, Wong said. “It doesn’t replace the ANZUS alliance, the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, APEC or the Quad.”

For Wong, Southeast Asia remains a prime focus of Australian national interest. “Our strategic ambitions must be matched by equally ambitious efforts to respond to the region’s needs. This of course requires a bigger investment in our diplomacy, including in our economic engagement and development program. Submarines might help protect the region, but on their own they won’t build the region we want — a region that is stable, prosperous, as well as respectful of sovereignty. And submarines can help our national defence, but won’t of themselves prevent efforts at economic coercion.”

Judging by her round of regional visits and the more low-key tone of dialogue with China, these are surely the kind of thoughts she is expressing within the government. But having so warmly embraced what Paul Kelly has tentatively called the “Morrison doctrine” it may take a while for Albanese and Marles to loosen their attachment to the Anglosphere, return strategic policy to the mainstream represented by the Defence of Australia doctrine, and extricate themselves from what is turning into another Morrison fiasco. •

The post Time to rethink the Morrison doctrine appeared first on Inside Story.

For most of the time I was working on the book, Wong and I — and most other observers — expected her to become foreign minister after the May 2019 election, which all the polls and most pundits were tipping Labor to win. She had been preparing for the job not only for the three-plus years she had held the shadow portfolio, but also during her previous term as shadow trade minister. She had always made clear that she didn’t seek to be prime minister; foreign minister was the job she wanted and the height of her ambition.

The plan was for Indonesia to be her first post-election stop-off as minister, followed by a made-for-media return to the city of her birth, Kota Kinabalu, in Malaysian Borneo. As a powerful illustration of her story and connections and an affirmation of Australia’s place in Asia, it was a public relations coup out of reach of any previous Australian foreign minister.

But then came the election defeat, and Wong had another three years to prepare. The pandemic set in, Donald Trump lost the American presidency and Xi Jinping’s grip tightened in Beijing. Among Australia’s Pacific neighbours, Chinese influence became even more apparent.

On 2 August this year Wong, now foreign minister, gave an unpublished address to staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Acknowledging that the department had lost influence under the previous government, she declared that Australia needed DFAT to be “more central and more persuasive” in an increasingly uncertain world. To do that, she said, required “frank advice, good decisions, courageous effort, focused advocacy, and me to do my job.”

She appealed to staff to “be ambitious for Australia,” to work with her to bring foreign affairs “back to the centre of the Australian government… We need to be creative; we need to be bold… to advance Australia’s interests and values.”

It was one of a series of speeches reflecting the new minister’s vision of what she had described in opposition as a “transformational” foreign policy. Australia can’t afford to be caught passively in the slipstream of the contest between the big powers, she argued, picking up a phrase used by foreign policy analyst Allan Gyngell. Rather, it is in the “influence game” and must use all available tools of statehood to negotiate the most uncertain time in recent history.

This means DFAT staff must lift their ambitions and the quality of their advice. “I think that starts with clarity of purpose,” she told them. “What is our purpose? To explain Australia to the world and the world to Australia. To clearly articulate our place in the world — as it is, as it should be — and deliver plans to bridge that gap… We’re not here to occupy the space. We’re not here to admire the complexity of problems we face. We’re not here to mollify. We are here to advocate.”

An urgent need to visit the Pacific and a succession of other overseas trips had stopped Wong from speaking to DFAT staff sooner. Her immediate focus had been the Solomon Islands government’s decision to sign a security pact with China — a development she described during the election campaign as “the worst Australian policy failure since the second world war.”

As it turned out, her first trip as minister was to the North Pacific rather than Indonesia. The day after she was sworn in, Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese were in Tokyo for the Quad leaders’ summit. Then, over the subsequent ninety-nine days, she made four trips to Pacific nations (to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, New Zealand and the Solomons, and July’s Pacific Islands Forum summit in Fiji) and three to Southeast Asia (to Vietnam and Malaysia, Singapore and, twice, Indonesia).

In speeches during those visits she signalled her ambition to change how Australia is seen in the world — and her view that this is the starting point for an ambitious foreign policy agenda in which Australians will become “more than just supporting players in a grand drama of global geopolitics.”

At the Pacific Islands Forum, she avoided telling island nations what to do, instead suggesting they act regionally, as a “family,” to decide matters for themselves. The speech appeared designed to encourage a kind of peer pressure, elevating the sometimes shaky forum (from which Kiribati had just withdrawn) as a venue where the concerns of Pacific Island nations could be brought to bear externally, on larger powers, and internally on the China-friendly Solomons prime minister Manasseh Sogavare and others.

Without explicitly mentioning China, Wong said that Australia was “a partner that won’t come with strings attached, nor impose unsustainable financial burdens. We are a partner that won’t erode Pacific priorities or institutions.” She acknowledged that Australia had “neglected its responsibility” on climate change, “disrespecting Pacific nations in their struggle to adapt to what is an existential threat.” That would change, she promised, with the creation of an Australia-Pacific Climate Infrastructure Partnership to support projects in Pacific countries and Timor-Leste. She also won the leaders’ support for a joint pitch to co-host the UN’s COP29 climate summit in 2024.

This is what Wong calls “listen first” diplomacy: meeting people where they are rather than where you want them to be. It is far from easy.

A blow-up with Sogavare came when he announced he would delay the Solomons’ 2023 election because the country didn’t have the funds to run the poll in the same year as it hosts the Pacific Games. Wong’s offer of Australia’s help to pay for the election wasn’t novel — similar assistance has been given before — but its timing while the relevant bill was before the Solomons parliament provoked a furious reaction. Wong was attempting to “directly interfere into our domestic affairs,” Sogavare thundered, though he went on to accept the funding and delay the election regardless.

The federal opposition portrayed the incident as a blunder on Wong’s part. But others in the foreign policy community point out that she rarely speaks without calculation and may well have wanted Solomon Islanders to know that Sogavare’s excuse for the delay had been removed.

More broadly, Wong wants to engage with other small and middle powers in the region to define and articulate a common interest in building a “peaceful, prosperous region in which sovereignty is respected.” She hopes this will ultimately help shape how the superpowers behave.

In dealing with the countries of Southeast Asia, Wong has emphasised the centrality of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — the body that Kevin Rudd has described as the “swing state” in the battle for regional dominance between China and the United States. As Wong said last November, “the countries of Southeast Asia have made clear they don’t want to choose between the great powers — but want to exercise their own agency in how the region is being reshaped.”

As Allan Gyngell wrote in his 2017 book Fear of Abandonment, Australian foreign policy has always assumed dependence on a great power — first Britain and then the United States. The fear in Gyngell’s title has never been more keenly felt than now. Australia watched as the United States under Barack Obama promised to “pivot” to Asia but then failed to deliver. It tried to decipher the chaos of the Trump administration, which seemed to be abandoning America’s global mission to defend an international order on which the security of middle powers like Australia depends.

These shifts underlined Gyngell’s view about the dangers of being caught in the great powers’ slipstreams. Australia’s historical preference for hunkering down in the company of allies no longer serves the times, he argues. Gyngell is one of the foreign policy analysts Wong most admires.

Has Australia in any sense punched above its weight in foreign policy over the decades? The answer would certainly have been “yes” in the 1970s and 80s, when prime minister Malcolm Fraser played a role in creating a post-apartheid future for South Africa by using the Commonwealth as a venue for the defence of human rights. Fraser’s government also brought a practical end to the White Australia policy, changing the face of the nation with migrants from Southeast Asia.

“Yes,” as well, under the succeeding Labor government of Bob Hawke, when the man generally regarded as Australia’s most successful foreign minister, Gareth Evans, increased Australia’s engagement with Asia and articulated the concept of Australia as a middle power. His achievements included initiating a UN peace plan for Cambodia and helping establish both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum.

But most observers would have answered “no” in recent years, as Australia became a laggard in climate policy and lost credibility in its natural sphere of influence, the Pacific. For island governments, rising sea levels are an existential issue.

Coming into this mix, Penny Wong is an extraordinary package. She is a self-conscious intellectual and policy wonk. As well as foreign minister she is the leader of the government in the Senate, and is generally regarded as the intellectual leader of Labor’s left, which is also Anthony Albanese’s faction. She is one of the prime minister’s closest allies and friends.

As she told Singapore’s International Institute for Strategic Studies in one of her first speeches after the election, she is far from the first Australian foreign minister to recognise the importance of relationships with Southeast Asia. “But I am the first to make these statements as an Australian foreign minister who is from Southeast Asia.”

Wong’s history binds together central themes in Australia’s development. On both sides of her family she is the product of British colonialism and its impact on the region. On her mother’s side, she is as deeply rooted in Australia as is possible for someone not of Aboriginal ancestry. Her great-great-great-grandparents migrated from Britain to what became the colony of South Australia in 1836, refugees from the exigencies of the industrial revolution. On her father’s side, she is the descendant of Cantonese Chinese recruited to labour on the vast tobacco and timber plantations and in the tin mines by the British North Borneo Company.

Wong’s most powerful understanding of her Chinese ancestry comes from the experiences of her Hakka grandmother, Lai Fung Shim, who singlehandedly ensured the survival of the family line during the brutal Japanese wartime occupation of Borneo in the early 1940s. Francis Yit Shing Wong, Penny Wong’s father, was Lai Fung Shim’s oldest child.

Francis Wong was a beneficiary of the postwar Colombo Plan, which sponsored academically able Asians to study in Australia. His decision to enrol in architecture at the University of Adelaide meant that — as Wong put it in a speech in Kuala Lumpur in late June — “a charming young Malaysian man could meet a bold young Australian woman.”

With the White Australia policy still in force, the newly married couple couldn’t stay in Australia. They settled in Francis’s hometown of Kota Kinabalu, where Penny Wong was born in 1968. North Borneo had been a British protectorate when Francis left for South Australia; by the time he returned it was part of the new nation of Malaysia.

After the marriage broke down, Wong’s mother took her and her brother back to Adelaide. They were the only Asian faces in their suburban primary school. The racism Wong suffered, and the strength she developed in surviving it, became a defining feature of her personality.

Only when prime minister Paul Keating declared in 1992 that the fall of Singapore was as important to the Australian story as Gallipoli, and the war casualties in Malaysia and Borneo as important as those in Europe, did Wong conclude that Australia was her home. When her plane touched down in Adelaide after a visit to her father that year, she thought to herself, “This is my country now. This is my place.”

It is this sense of the nation that Wong describes as central to an effective foreign policy. The time has come to stop championing the Anglosphere, she has said: “Foreign policy starts with who we are.” Australia, she told the Pacific Islands Forum, is a country with 270 ancestries, including the world’s oldest continuous culture. “This gives us the capacity to reach into every corner of the world and say, ‘we share common ground.’”

Wong has urged the leaders of Pacific Island nations and the countries of ASEAN to join Australia in attempting to shape a “settling point” between the United States, Australia’s most important ally, and China, its biggest trading partner. She has also referred approvingly to Kevin Rudd’s view that Australia and the countries of the region should seek “managed strategic competition” between China and the United States “within a set of minimum guardrails to reduce the risk of escalation, crisis, conflict and war.”

Wong has talked of moving Australia beyond reliance on the United States to a more activist role: unapologetic and robust in defending core democratic values, retaining the centrality of the alliance but seeking cooperation with China where possible. More than this, and although it is not explicitly stated, Wong clearly hopes to provide the United States with ideas about how to engage with the countries of the region without playing into Chinese narratives about arrogant, interfering white colonialists.

In Kuala Lumpur, she described ASEAN as “holding the centre of the Indo-Pacific.” Its strength, she said, “lies in its ability to speak for the region and to balance regional powers. All countries that seek to work with the region have a responsibility to engage constructively and respectfully with it.”

Wong first articulated the “settling point” concept during a speech to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta in September 2019, when she was still in opposition. US leadership would be most effective, she said, “when it is conceived in terms of leading a community of nations, with all that entails.” Beijing, too, should recognise that “most of us in the region are not comfortable with an authoritarian China becoming the predominant power.”

With Donald Trump still in the White House, she went on: “It’s fair to say that many countries in the region are unclear about what precisely it is that the United States is seeking to achieve… Absent that clarity, China will assume the worst… Great powers will do what great powers do to assert their interests. But the rest of us are not without our own agency.”

A “settling point” would mean the United States embracing a multipolar future for the region “with countries like Indonesia, India and Japan playing increasingly important leadership roles… Defining a realistic settling point will also help the United States recognise and accept that decisions relating to China will vary depending on the issues and interests at stake.” It would also remind Beijing that “when we make decisions that defend or assert our national interests in ways that may not reflect China’s views it is not due to a cold war mentality.” People who value the United States’ leadership, she said, “want the US to retain it by lifting its game, not spoiling China’s.”

She has repeated those ideas in several speeches, though since taking government the language has been more subtle. “Settling point” is still mentioned, but the emphasis has shifted to “strategic equilibrium.”

Another strand of Wong’s thinking, not yet fully articulated, is a promise to put the history of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at the centre of foreign policy. She has appointed a First Nations ambassador within her department, and when she was accompanied to the UN General Assembly in September by senator Pat Dodson, who hosted a roundtable on First Nations foreign policy involving Canada, New Zealand and other countries with Indigenous populations.

Wong has also indicated that Australia will be following a more active investment policy in Southeast Asia — with more detail clearly to come. This move recognises that China’s pitch for influence is overwhelmingly economic rather than military or cultural, and any response needs to be in kind.

China will continue to be a key challenge. Wong neither endorsed nor criticised US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, but she labelled China’s response as excessive and called for “restraint and de-escalation.” She described a new UN report on China’s detention of the Uighurs as “harrowing reading” and acknowledged it had found allegations of torture to be credible; but she also said that Australia’s response would be decided in consultation with other countries. Unlike the previous government, she is not putting Australia on the front line of conflict with China, but nor is she taking a backward step on key values.

Equally significant is what she doesn’t do, and doesn’t say. In the days after those comments, every serious current affairs program in Australia sought her out for an interview. That she declined them all might have created a background level of frustration, but it enabled her to duck the inevitable question about Taiwan. Would Australia, push comes to shove, join the United States in a military conflict with China?

The former government’s defence minister, opposition leader Peter Dutton, said last November that it was “inconceivable” Australia would not join in. But Wong has been keen to dial down the rhetorical heat. “More strategy, less politics” is her strategy. “Talk less, do more.”

With the Pacific dominating her first weeks in power, it was June before Wong made that long-planned return to Kota Kinabalu. The visit came complete with the perfect photo opportunity: the minister and her Chinese Malaysian half-siblings eating fish ball juk and noodles in the cafe she loved as a child. The message was explicit: this was her story, but it was also contemporary Australia’s.

Given that opinion polls suggest the Albanese government has increased its popularity since its election win, Wong is likely to have at least two three-year terms to enact and develop her foreign policy approach.

Will it work? Perhaps, in these bellicose times, it is optimistic to suppose that middle powers can have the agency Wong seeks. One strand in Australian foreign policy commentary doubts that the United States is really committed to the region — and believes Washington might well conclude its essential interests are not at stake there. Having accepted the Asia-Pacific would become a sphere of Chinese influence, it would then depart, leaving a friendless Australia carrying the can for the United States’ China containment policies.

In a recent Quarterly Essay Hugh White suggested the battle is already effectively over and China has won. Australia should tell the United States to surrender Taiwan to Beijing and then begin to talk to China about its role in the new hegemony.

On the other hand, foreign policy scholars and politicians agree that Australia does have influence in Washington. As the head of the US Studies Centre at Sydney University, Michael Green, put it in a response to White, “the strategic community on Asia policy in DC is pretty small and also very impressionable. If there are good ideas from trusted partners like Australia, they go right to the top.”

The good idea, from Wong and the thinkers she respects, is to listen first, shun binary thinking, and accept a multipolar region in a rules-based world. All this, and attempt to maintain mutual respect.

If Wong is successful in shifting the dial, Australia will once again have punched above its weight, claiming agency in the region, allied to but not necessarily always following the United States. It will have helped shape the behaviour of regional forums and the superpowers, and perhaps even contributed to avoiding war. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Making up for lost time appeared first on Inside Story.

I’m not so sure, given recurring anger at Facebook’s promotion or suppression of information, evident recently in the toxic row over whether it withheld news of the activities of Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the days before the 2020 election. Facebook may not pose the same kind of challenge as China does, but it seems wrong to assume so blithely that its behaviour doesn’t raise very serious questions.

Fears about China, on the other hand, are far from new. In 1955, having spent almost a decade in the People’s Republic before moving to Canberra, the political scientist Michael Lindsay berated the government in Beijing for what he regarded as its harsh and unfair response to Britain’s attempts to create some sort of pragmatic relationship. Hardly an apologist for the capitalist world, the left-leaning Lindsay argued that Britain had taken a big risk in January 1950 when it recognised the new regime despite American opposition. And yet, “again and again,” he wrote, “Chinese policy and Chinese publicity has done exactly what was required to strengthen the influence of the anti-Communist extremists [and] discredit the influence in British countries or America working for better relations.”

Almost seven decades later, it would be hard to express the current mess more succinctly. China’s worst diplomatic enemy, more often than not, is the Chinese government itself.

So it seems strange that Alex Joske — whose work has “shaped the thinking of governments and policymakers globally,” according to the publisher of his new book, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World — seems to believe China is blazingly successful in dealing with the outside world. The greatest achievement of China’s spies, he writes, has been “to convince influential foreigners that China would rise peacefully and gradually liberalise.”

Joske’s claim implies that suddenly, sometime in the 1980s, the United States, Europe, Australia and their political allies became docile parties onto which the cunning Chinese foisted the great fib of Chinese liberalisation. Among the people who fell under the spell of the Chinese propaganists, he argues, was billionaire George Soros, who worked with reformist author Liang Heng and others. During this period Soros’s Open Society Foundations made grants and offered technical support in an attempt to create civil society groups in China.

Joske doesn’t engage with the more complex possibility that, regardless of what the Chinese government was saying at the time, there were entirely logical reasons to think China might liberalise politically, along with evidence that significant interest in this different path existed deep within the government and across Chinese society.

Many factors helped block the hoped-for liberalism. But I would submit that clever pre-emptive scheming by the “hardliners” in the party elite, and their servants in China’s intelligence network, was not prime among them. Indeed, what is striking in the period up to 1989, when the dream of Chinese liberalism was perhaps at its strongest, is how open-ended and unpredictable the situation was, and how often the party elite seemed to have no clear idea of what it was aiming for.

Everyone agreed that political reform was necessary. But no clear consensus emerged, on either the destination or the best route to reach it. That confusion gave the most conservative wing of the leadership a strong advantage when the Tiananmen Square protests erupted in mid 1989. The dominant response within the party was simple: better the devil you know than the one you don’t, as long as it delivered order and stability.

Geopolitical trends reinforced this onset of cautiousness, the most important being the huge missteps by Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which created the worst sort of precedent for countries like China as they looked to liberalise their governance. China’s Ministry of State Security, Joske’s bastion of hardliners (though that too may be disputable), certainly took advantage of these crises, but the idea that it, and its allies in the hardline wing of the Communist Party, controlled an epic and successful misinformation strategy reads to me like history being bent to theory.

Joske does make the important point that we need to better understand what the Chinese party state, and some of its chief agents, are up to. His chapters on the strange case of Katrina Leung, who for many years was a Chinese agent within the FBI, provide useful insights. What is more fascinating, though, is the fact that she ended up marrying her handler on the American side, James J. Smith, years after conducting an affair with him and long after being exposed as an agent for China.

Whether this book, with its very clear and up-front convictions, will help much in conceptualising and handling Chinese covert influence campaigns is another matter. In his description of the latter career of soft-power proponent Zheng Bijian, and the China Reform Forum Zheng chaired in the years of Hu Jintao’s presidency, it’s clear Joske has a dim view of the gullibility, pliability and general cluelessness of many of those exposed to the language of “China’s peaceful rise.”

In his view, people like John Thornton, director of the Global Leadership Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke were purposely recruited to push out misleading statements about China’s intentions. Presumably Joske has met some of the figures he is so critical of and put his claims to them: that would have been fair and transparent. His point may have some merit: Hawke was a perennial attendee at the increasingly awful annual exercise in groupthink with Chinese characteristics, the Boao Forum for Asia, in the years before his death. But just how much help he and his ilk gave to China’s cause is a moot point.

Effectiveness, after all, is the one issue Joske seems unwilling to tackle. Can we truly say that Chinese efforts to hoodwink the West, even if they were as streamlined and strategic as he claims, have produced the intended outcome?

I can only speak from my own experience working on, and in, China over the past quarter of a century. I remember the chaotic influence campaigns in the first decade of the 2000s, and how clunky their messaging was. In my personal encounters during those years of economic plenty, Chinese figures looking to influence the outside world generally seemed unwilling to say much at all.

Joske doesn’t provide this context, but it is important: the “peaceful rise” endorsed by Zheng and his ilk received significant pushback from diplomats in the United States and elsewhere, and had to be changed to “peaceful development.” And it was the United States, through figures like Robert Zoellick, that was asking China to say more about what its intentions were. This left the Chinese in a quandary — maintain silence and be judged untrustworthy, or speak and attract claims that everything coming out of your mouth was insincere and misleading.

Under Xi Jinping, China’s general diplomatic and security work became more disciplined and streamlined. The Ministry of State Security was hit with the same “anti-corruption” cleansing as everyone else, losing a vice-minister and many lower operatives. How effective it is these days is hard to say, but it’s worth remembering that this mighty, well-resourced entity seems to have had no real clue about Vladimir Putin’s plans for Ukraine.

Joske would no doubt appreciate that one can be a good spy but a poor analyst. Had China really mounted an effective, well-run campaign along the lines he describes in this book, I’d argue that it would not be in its current position. Relations with the West are almost universally bad and — to give one small but telling example — a plenipotentiary in Britain is currently banned from visiting parliament.

That counter-evidence won’t stop this book gaining a decent audience. The ultimately comforting story it tells — of a world in which the good West faces the bad China — is well entrenched and recently re-energised. A significant piece of research has yet to be done on just how many financial and intellectual resources have been put into this narrative by think tanks, media and others. Joske himself works (or has worked — it is unclear if he still has an affiliation) for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has been accused of sometimes producing analysis that fulfils the hawkish requirements of its Canberra governmental funders.

Let’s be pragmatic: if most people accept this book’s somewhat terrifying account of Chinese government influence, there will be healthy commissions and streams of work for years to come for those who want to pursue the same line of thinking. I don’t for one minute deny the sincerity and conviction of Joske’s argument, or the quality of his data gathering and research, but I do wonder about his conceptualisation and interpretation. He describes a world my own observations don’t validate, and one I find hard to believe actually exists. •

Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World
By Alex Joske | Hardie Grant | $32.99 | 272 pages

The post China’s greatest enemy appeared first on Inside Story.

Their experience might be redeemed by patterns of sociability in the tight circles of similarly placed recent arrivals. Most of them — men and women — were relatively well educated. By circumstance they were exposed to a ferment of ideas, by necessity they were mobile, and they found in their own self-conscious informalities some of the elements of a new middle-class identity seen as desperately needed in mid-century Australia.

Commentators at the time defined that still-fragile emerging identity around concepts of the state and state intervention, secularism, self-expression, empathy and expertise. Some who knew the city well in those years saw such a status as one to which a large proportion of Australians might aspire but relatively few could really lay claim, even as many looked to their men in Canberra — politicians as well as public servants — to deliver the new agendas of the welfare state.

Those men gravitating to Canberra were there, after all, because they were a “type,” envisaged by the Public Service Board in 1948 as “the sort of youngster who, with right handling, great care and great patience” would adapt keen intelligence to “the gross air of everyday affairs.” They were making the place as much as it was making them.

For their wives, however, the everyday of personal relationships could seem dominated by masculine codes of (often alcohol-spiced) intellectual rivalry transposed in largely unmediated ways from offices (and probably before then from scholarship and prize lists and school hierarchies) into the cramped spaces of hasty, ration-limited suburban dinner parties, rangy young families and domestic roles assumed far from extended support.

Such experiences, of course, were far from peculiar to Canberra. But they did have a kind of precocity there. Stuart Macintyre noted the austere masculinism that was inherent in Labor’s reconstruction processes, however inclusionary its “new order” message. And given this association with groups who would go on to exercise significant national leadership, those processes might be seen to have had both a reflective and formative role in relation to longer-term transformations in Australian society.

Coombs’s wife stayed in Sydney. In a recent collection of essays written by the daughters and sons of other women who chose (if that is the right word) to move to Canberra, one recurrent if seemingly unanticipated question intrudes into the more familiar recollections of childhoods in the privileged, experimental city taking shape around them. “Were our mothers happy?” For some, a second question follows: what guilt or stress was carried by fathers whose often consuming work was the only reason for their families being there?

In these pressures, perhaps, the national capital was hardly a microcosm: its alienation had its own “ghastly” dimensions. But as Don Watson has also powerfully observed, Canberra “is like no other Australian town or city, yet no other Australian town or city is more Australian.”

Untangling that paradox can seem an indulgence. How can such a transitory “bubble” reflect more than fragments of the lives passing through it? An answer? Perhaps by broadening out our sense of what wider transitions Canberra, for all its idiosyncrasy, drew into focus in such moments of intensity.

John Burton was among those bright young men, and would become the most controversial. His father was a prominent Methodist minister, an inter-war “theological radical” whose missionary work informed advocacy for exploited Pacific islanders. The son left faith behind but carried forward a similarly vigorous reformist commitment. He joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1937, aged twenty-two, after graduating from the University of Sydney. His study of economics, and the power of a precious few mentors who led the way in seeking a synergy of academic and bureaucratic skills in Canberra, soon enabled his transfer from an uninspiring post office clerkship in Sydney to the Department of Commerce.

In 1938, in ranks still deeply ambivalent about the importance of a degree, and in a nation in which no university offered a doctorate, Burton secured the first public service scholarship for graduate study. With a PhD from the London School of Economics, he was back in the national capital by 1941, joining the Post-War Reconstruction division of the Department of Labour and National Service.

Fired with ideas of what planning could deliver, Burton was not easy to manage in small teams dealing as much with the immediate demands of mobilisation as with longer-term objectives. Moving to External Affairs, he gained more autonomy in framing an economic agenda that almost inevitably contended in influence and perspective with colleagues in other agencies.

His confident yet insinuating manner — as one of those peers most offended by it, Paul Hasluck, observed — “instantly commended itself” to his even more complex and ambitious minister, H.V. Evatt. Becoming Evatt’s private secretary, Burton entrenched the seemingly unassailable hold over policy formation his critics deplored, or envied. In 1947, Evatt edged Burton, aged thirty-two, past those with seniority, making him secretary of his department.

Burton’s diplomatic impact and achievements are familiar to students of Australian international affairs. He anchored Evatt’s internationalism, argued for recognition of Communist China, supported Indonesian nationalism as one core element of a “positive approach” to engagement with Asia, and urged disengagement from “great power” dependency and from the polarising scenarios favoured by the military and intelligence strategists he dismissed as the “gnomes of Melbourne.” This list could go on.

Evatt’s anchor: John Burton with external affairs minister H.V. Evatt at the San Francisco Conference in April 1945. Burton Family collection

He was, then, distinctly “frank and fearless,” in the terms of the model of bureaucratic leadership often associated with the transformation in the authority and professionalism of the Commonwealth Public Service from the 1940s onwards. But he was certainly not one of those who secured endurance, influence and reverence by deftly managing policy reform through the change of government from Labor’s “planning” into the long Menzies years after 1949.

While still secretary of External Affairs, Burton ran for Labor preselection for the new federal seat of Canberra in 1949, rather misjudging how far local politics would go in supporting an “intellectual.” He resigned from the department — and left his post as high commissioner to Ceylon — to run unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate against Billy McMahon for the Sydney seat  in the 1951 election.

The following year, even Evatt was discomforted when Burton insisted on attending a meeting organised by the Chinese Committee for Peace in the Pacific, as a private citizen but with a high public profile and a commitment to inform the nation of the cause. Taunted as Labor’s “pink eminence,” Burton was subject to intense surveillance by ASIO — the creation of which he opposed — and became a figure of official investigation, public suspicion and proven press defamation during the royal commission following the Petrov defection in 1954.

All of this might mark him out as an exception way beyond the pale of a Canberra rule. And yet. Through all this maelstrom some networks persisted; a place was accorded to Burton as the conscience — or perhaps wise fool — on the margins of a court of bureaucrats who played safer in public but still sought change, whatever the politicians said. Certain loyalties persisted from the informal networks of the 1940s into the 1950s, and maybe a few ideals.

At non-alignment conferences in the Asian region, Burton had a seat and status much closer to the stage than Australian officials, torpid in their instructions. At that other rising emblem of Canberra, the Australian National University, Burton, turning his energy to more considered reflections on foreign policy “alternatives,” might never have fully secured a place but was still accorded a standing that served its own purposes in testing or proving institutional tolerance.

A “ratbag” — as he was called — can be useful, as can a personality. Acquiring a series of farms on Canberra’s suburban outskirts where he adopted innovative practices; literally “shovelling shit” while in earnest conversation with visitors on the metaphorical equivalent in national and international affairs; offering hospitality to those needing a moment’s escape from the circus; or selling his own milk on university and public service doorsteps in intrepid self-employment — Burton became a singular, eccentric if somehow vital, integral figure in the “bush capital.”

Emphatic in defending “those with young families, those whose jobs, promotions and development were denied them unless they were untrue to themselves” under the pressures of cold war scrutiny — as he wrote in Meanjin in 1973 — he maintained that he himself, and his family, had risen above such “inconvenience,” given his capacity for reinvention, accepting “challenges as they came” and resiliently fighting for values others merely mouthed.

That “inconvenience,” however, rested heaviest on his wife. Pamela Burton and collaborator Meredith Edwards’s newly released biography of the couple, Persons of Interest: An Intimate Account of Cecily and John Burton, originated in their determination to rescue their father’s reputation from the easy, careless, calculated slurs on his “philo-communism” as a spy, traitor or dupe, which persisted well after his death in 2010. But it soon became obvious to these sisters that no defence could be complete, or just, if it did not take account of their mother, Cecily. Their work then had to become “an intimate account” of both parents, and most centrally of their marriage. And that marriage needed to be conveyed not as bedrock but as a site of strain, friction, demand and fragile emotional survival.

The questions — was Cecily happy? was John guilty? — might seem trite but are also insistent in this closely observed, intimate, candid book. What was being transacted in the tensions between these individuals, and in their broader historical context?

If John Burton was “a multifaceted, mission-driven man of extraordinary diversity” — familiar enough from more specialised studies of his career and commitments — Cecily was an introspective, enigmatic, loyal but increasingly hurt partner whose experience requires very different registers to comprehend. He sought “an accommodating wife” — a domestic anchor as his “inevitable” career and restless energy drove him forever outwards. Robert Parker, at first a friend of John, increasingly a comforter, then lover and second husband for Cecily, was blunt: Burton “doesn’t trouble to understand other people — I doubt if he’s really interested in them as individual human beings; what he wants is to save Humanity.”

Cecily also had a Methodist background, the first daughter of a medical doctor, and was a university contemporary of John. She admired his independence from afar, but how to connect, and what was the prospect of a shared life with him as he seemed to demand an exclusive loyalty? More inward in sensibility, vulnerable to exactly the kind of demands his energy would impose, she yearned for recognition in a marriage that drove her deeper into the isolation of housekeeping and mothering for which she was unprepared, feeling she “knew nothing, nothing” in a domain increasingly defined by experts.

Her friend from undergraduate years, the poet Judith Wright (who herself came to know something of the emotional demands made by Canberra), observed the Burtons’ struggle to find mutuality in their marriage: “in fact, of course they cannot possibly accept each other because if they did, it would mean giving up their precious egos.”

John sought disciples. Cecily had a harder path to chart, in itself part of a journey from the terms in which John would define a state-sanctioned redemption to those she would seek in more therapeutic modes of understanding the struggle for identity in us all.

It would be reductionist to see these deeply “unusual lives” as just a Canberra story of political intrigue, or as some kind of cipher for the evolution of middle-class personae through the trauma of the twentieth century.  The city is, however, more than simply a backdrop: it is a their landscape, an essential ingredient in their mix, and to some extent a simulacrum in exploring these transitions.

There is the sudden proximity of young men and women trying to make sense of new models of career, marriage, parenting and friendship, bicycling from nursery to cocktail party through frosty empty streets. There is the spiral of lives in tight neighbourhoods but with dislocated or remote supports. There is the public and the private in a tight and desperate exchange, mapped out in suburbs of social engineering and emotional tension. We have images of Evatt as a bold leader in one nearby address, then defiant amid political collapse in the Burtons’ living room, or later declining into imbecility over the back fence in a house chosen to be close to this chosen family, “sitting in a wheelchair, propped up by pillows, his legs covered by a thick rug.” Politics becomes arrestingly, often poignantly personal in this book.

Beyond the peculiarities Canberra inserts into the general pattern of Australian politics and policy are the specifics of a community seeking an appropriate sophistication to match its calling. There was, for example, the local appetite for ideas Burton met in running a bookshop (with the city’s first Gaggia espresso machine), in promoting amateur theatre (and launching a commercially successful touring musical production of The Sentimental Bloke), in driving an old bus up to the settlements of immigrant labour serving the Snowy Mountains scheme “with record racks full of joy… imported magazines and out-of-date foreign newspapers,” or in bidding for a local television licence in an effort to give Canberra the kind of informed media service appropriate for a capital.

Burton’s social entrepreneurialism was extraordinary, but little of it began in consultation with his wife, much brought financial insecurity to his family, and all perhaps expressed that abstract zeal for “Humanity,” with its inevitable (if suppressed) disappointments, which scarcely connected with household needs. Seeking her own connections but needing income, Cecily found work in other unfolding dimensions of the capital, including at the ANU (bringing her closer to Parker, a professor of political science) and as an administrator at the new Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

As their marriage strained, additional aspects of Canberra’s landscape came to the fore. There were the all-too-obvious black sedans of ASIO surveillance parked down the street; and there were the more effectively concealed if also rather obvious absences for intimacy in back rooms or cars in transit between dinners and babysitters, as clever, restless, searching people explored “loyalty and friendships, love triangles, infidelity and deceit.”

And, given that this is a study by daughters, there are the landscapes of children — teased at school, adjusting to sudden unexplained moves in housing, embarking on their own search for friendship and affirmation in the thin sophistication of the capital with the awkward fit between the outwardness demanded by educational aspirations, strained domestic situations and the generationally anchored paradigms of good and appropriate behaviour to which, at the end of the day or the term, they must return.

Burton struggled to impose a prudish control on his adolescent daughters (was this guilt?); Cecily lost respect from at least the youngest and most troubled, Clare, who perhaps blamed her “for allowing John to stray or for failing to protect her” in her own exposure to the reckless, predatory, desperate dynamics of a marriage under stress, a family in its public exposure and secret corners, a culture wrestling with some residual sense of innocence as well as opportunity.

Cecily’s distress comes to the fore in the second half of this study, as John’s career finds its own opportunities elsewhere. Central to her struggle to escape “the woods” of her marriage was a psychotic experience in 1951, when the unilateral impulses of Burton’s public life seemed to obliterate her own identity and needs almost completely. Cecily was seized for a transcending moment looking out over a loved, familiar vista of the Murrumbidgee valley by a luminosity that impelled her to see beyond alienation to the “oneness of everything.”

It is intriguing to note that on the slopes of the Mount Stromlo Observatory at around the same time, the younger, also lonely, newly married and mothering Rosalie Gascoigne grasped the possibility of finding her own existential place in the minute, the dislocated, eroded and broken remnants of Canberra landscapes. Persons of Interest does not make this connection, but it is part of the moment — in women’s experience, in the shaping of a gendered national consciousness, in Canberra’s peculiarity — that it insists we pause and understand. Emotion, relationships, place, marriage and the bargains of career suddenly, insistently, demand attention.

By the early 1960s, their marriage broken, John left Canberra to seek a third and “real” career in the study of peace, based in Britain, advocating the need for open exchange across all the dimensions of security (and especially economic needs) between nations. He returned happily remarried to Canberra, in active retirement and a new burst of hospitality for old friends and new disciples. Cecily stayed, finding a place in its own way central to many questions the Canberra community was asking in coming to terms with its privileges, its anguish and identity.

In self-directed reading, then tentative connections, Cecily embarked on a Jungian approach to psychiatry, dream therapy and marriage counselling, becoming a central, founding member of  a local society supporting such exploration and support. She worked in Canberra’s first, most experimental “alternative” public schools as a “non-counsellor,” but left disillusioned with the elements of conformity that remained within its approach.

If John’s journey — in public principle — is central to Persons of Interest’s account of the 1950s, Cecily takes up that place through the 1960s and beyond, seeking a path beyond the intractability of emotional invalidation and financial dependency within the most fundamental of relationships. As so often with this book, the power of the account lies not simply in raising the issues but in insisting they be seen in experience, as these bold partnerships, endurance, commitment and questioning, even as they finally narrow down to rooms in nursing homes and those implicit contracts of care where the most intractable burdens of love are weighed.

John Burton has yet to find his biographer: this book does not fill that need. It does, however, demand that any such study takes seriously the complexity of his relationships as well as his politics. In Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson insisted that it would be a “betrayal” if his parents’ relationship — dysfunctional in many ways — was not respected as a “marriage” in a fundamental sense. Persons of Interest makes a different point: Pamela Burton and Meredith Edwards — and perhaps Clare, who died in 1998 — would insist on a similar betrayal if this book was not read as taking into account the suffering at the core of their parents’ marriage.

Each sister has made her own outstanding contribution — in academic study, in family law, social policy reform and equal opportunity advocacy. Their achievements are a tribute to their parents, even (as Clare insisted) to their shared Methodist pursuit of good works. But the challenge Persons of Interest poses is not to gloss in sentiment such radical lives, but to insist on seeing the sometimes “ghastly” dimensions of such public crusades as they translate down to endurance and injury. •

Persons of Interest: An Intimate Account of Cecily and John Burton
By Pamela Burton with Meredith Edwards | ANU Press | $60 or free online | 394 pages

The post Scenes from a marriage appeared first on Inside Story.

“Premier Zhou Enlai asked me with a smile, ‘Where did you study Chinese?’

“‘In America,’ I replied, a little surprised the world-famous premier had even understood my poor Chinese, with its Australian accent, let alone showed an interest in my studies.

“Zhou Enlai said with spirit: ‘That is a fine thing, for you, an Australian, to learn Chinese in America!’”

So begins Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square, the story of a boy from country Victoria who falls in love with Asia’s giant and becomes a Harvard professor. This Australian, who “grew up in a society fearful of China, because of the Korean War,” found his “inspiration to be a writer in interaction with China.” Australia, China and the United States “were to be the three countries shaping my life.”

The bush for Terrill is Bruthen, in a valley 300 kilometres east of “far distant” Melbourne. “The sounds of a Bruthen night return as if I had just woken there,” Terrill says. “The mellow chime of bellbirds. A sighing wind in the eucalyptus trees.”

As a country child of the 1940s, shoes were for church on Sunday and everyone went barefoot to school. “This was not because of poverty, but closeness to nature,” Terrill writes. “Climate was benign. Paths of soft earth and green grass were gentle on our sunburnt toes. We learned to look out for the occasional snake.”

From studies at Melbourne University, he wangles his way into the People’s Republic of China. “Few Westerners set foot in the PRC then. Australians needed permission from their own government to go there. Some got a green light, but Beijing guarded visas for people from non-Communist countries like precious jewels. Australia, in step with the US, still had not recognised Mao’s government, which made getting a Beijing visa tougher.”

Hitchhiking Eastern Europe in the summer of 1964, Terrill knocks on the doors of China’s embassies in Prague, Budapest and Belgrade, feeling like he was “in a revolving door, with a Chinese visa always just out of my grasp.” At his last stop in Warsaw, almost out of money, the boy from the bush boldly asks to see the Chinese ambassador. “Two cups of tea appeared before us; I made my case, offering the dubious opinion that the youth of Australia’s opinion of New China hinged upon my visit.”

Next day he got that rare visa, and the adventure began. Flying via the Soviet Union, he begins exploring the “shimmering abstraction” of Mao’s revolution. “I was too young to buy an abstraction, and energetic enough to hunt down a few realities.”

Beijing offers him the curved tiles of the Forbidden City’s palaces, the nasal cries of hawkers and stone grinders, the smell of Chinese noodles and sauces, and the open-air, leisurely sightseeing of a pedicab (although it might be “unsocialist” to be pedalled around by a Chinese worker).

In Canton, the clip-clop of wooden sandals on the pavements had almost given way to the rustle of plastic shoes. “It makes Canton quieter than before Liberation,” a shopkeeper tells him. The Pearl River is alive with boats, “some were sampans, with boxes of chickens affixed to the back, home for families who refused to live ashore, despite government efforts to remove them as a pre-Liberation relic. The only (live) cat I saw in China was on the deck of one of those sampans.”

He writes a six-part series on the 1964 China trip for Rupert Murdoch’s newly created newspaper, the Australian. Murdoch himself edits Terrill’s pieces: “He pruned my articles with a blue pencil and wrote out the payment cheque with a fountain pen.”

Wanting to learn Chinese and study modern China, Terrill applies to universities in Europe and the United States. Harvard and the London School of Economics both offer a PhD fellowship. Harvard wins because of his “hunch that life in the US would suit me better than life in ‘Mother England,’ as my grandmother called Britain.”

Initially, the US consul in Melbourne denies a visa because Terrill favours diplomatic recognition of China and opposes the Vietnam war, making his “views are incompatible with American national purpose.” To reverse the verdict, the Labor leader, Arthur Calwell, writes to the American ambassador, arguing that Terrill “is a social democrat with no communist connections.” Terrill heads off in 1965, “one of the very few people at Harvard who had been in Mao’s China.”

A decade later, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, visiting Harvard, remarks how hard it is for Americans “peering through a peephole” to get a clear view of China. “We Westerners don’t really understand China,” Terrill replies. “We invent Chinese Communist society according to our wish.”

Terrill’s “inventing” of China is more subtle than most. After a dinner in Hong Kong, he reflects in his diary on the contrast between chopsticks and the knife and fork:

The fork is explicit, as is the knife; its purpose is to spear the food; it is shaped accordingly. The purpose of the knife is to cut the food, and it is shaped for that. However, the function of chopsticks is ambiguous. With them you can cut, lift, spear, and separate. Differentiation lies in the movement of the hand.

He muses on what this says about Chinese thought and Chinese foreign policy: “Differentiations on the Chinese side are not explicit, and are missed if one expects Western ways.”

The Chinese language becomes “tyrant, mistress and illusionist at the same time.” Terrill learned to speak hundreds of words that he couldn’t remember how to write: “I copied each damn ideograph onto a ‘flash card,’ and carried the pack of square white cards around Harvard campus, like a thief bearing the code of a safe he hoped to crack.”

Whitlam shared Terrill’s passion, respecting the traditions, rationality and humour of Chinese people. “In many years of association with him,” writes Terrill, “Chinese were the only living people I ever saw him in some awe of (he esteemed the ancient Greeks and Romans).”

Whitlam’s effort to go to China in 1971 was risky, as Terrill writes: “Whitlam announced his appeal to Beijing for a visit before he telephoned me to try to make the invitation occur! He seemed more confident than I was that I could pull a few strings.” When the Beijing invitation is issued, Whitlam sends a cable to Terrill that reads simply, “Eureka. We won.”

Whitlam, he observes, had the “rationality of a bright lawyer; he wanted a logical, solve-all-the-problems Australian foreign policy.” Terrill quotes a 1967 view that Australia was dependent on the United States for its defence, Europe for its culture, and Japan and China for its markets, observing, “Whitlam wanted to tie all three strands together into one package.”

Overall, Terrill says, Mao and Zhou saw Australia in the context of its British heritage and American links — not, as Whitlam did, as a country within Asia. He quotes this exchange between Mao and Whitlam:

Mao asked, “Would your Labor Party dare to make revolution?”

“We stand for evolution rather than revolution,” said Whitlam, using a formulation I had often heard from him.

Mao: “That sounds like the theories of Charles Darwin?”

“I feel Darwin’s ideas relate to fauna and flora rather than to social development,” suggested Whitlam.

Having been the right man for the moment for Whitlam, Terrill played some of the same role for his teacher at Harvard, Henry Kissinger.

Waiting in Beijing for Whitlam to arrive in 1971, Terrill is puzzled that the Chinese are so interested in quizzing him about Kissinger, who by this time was national security advisor to President Richard Nixon. At the same moment, Kissinger himself was about to arrive in Beijing for a secret visit. He would later comment on Zhou Enlai’s “stunning” knowledge of his background.

Terrill, a man of the left, admired the realist clarity of Kissinger’s focus on US interests:

I found a striking virtue in Kissinger’s open mind about China. “What should we talk to the Chinese about?” he would ask me, a totally different approach from the more usual, “When are the Chinese going to become worthy of our recognising them?” An understanding of balance of power politics also made Kissinger a refreshing force in American policy toward Asia. He saw that China and America had a mutual interest in drawing closer to each other as a way of countering Soviet power. He felt the breakthrough with the Chinese would come on broad grounds and he was correct.

Terrill saw in Nixon’s 1972 trip to China the American capacity for renewal and enthusiasm. Nixon’s shift turned a bipolar world into a triangle, he writes, ushering in the age of economics in East Asia. The American market was the catalyst and the Chinese economy was the beneficiary. As America had gone to the moon, Nixon had gone to Beijing.

“Nixon eventually said his trip added up to ‘a week that changed the world,’” he writes. “As summit meetings go, the trip did indeed change the world. China emerged with a half-reassuring smile from the Cultural Revolution, triangular diplomacy was born, the Russians were agitated like ants on a hot stove, and most of the domestic critics of both Zhou Enlai and Nixon were (for the moment) silenced.”

When Mao died in 1976, Terrill recorded some positive thoughts about the chairman in his diary: “His early idea of rooting thought in observed reality. Of a leader keeping his compass on ordinary people’s needs. Of taking the long view. Of holding to a poet’s whimsy amidst griding struggle.”

Terrill devotes a chapter to what Chinese friends later told him about the turmoil and suffering of the Cultural Revolution. His biography of Mao, published in 1980, describes Mao as “discontented, militant, whimsical and anti-Soviet,” responding to complexities by blaming class enemies.

Mao was in a race against time for the Chinese Revolution, and for himself, Terrill reflects:  “[H]e sought quick renewal at once political and personal. A semi-Daoist trait of questioning even his own successes seemed to surface within Mao. The ‘monkey’ in him got the better of the ‘tiger.’”

Terrill judges that Mao unified and strengthened China, but he did not change human nature, nor “cancel the sense of honour, taste for materialism, and family-mindedness of the Chinese people.”

When Terrill’s New York publisher gives a visiting delegation of Chinese publishers one of the first copies of Terrill’s Mao, “they handled it like a hand grenade.” Eventually, Mao “was published in the PRC in Chinese and, to the surprise of author, publisher, and a nervous but cooperative Chinese government” became a bestseller.

Much was made possible because of the “stunning recovery” of Deng Xiaoping, “the chain-smoke Cultural Revolution victim” whose return to power delivered huge changes in China’s policy. Terrill marks the consequent shift in the views expressed by a senior Chinese diplomat. In the mid 1970s, the diplomat praised turmoil and talked about international class struggle; after a lunch in 1981, Terrill noted, “He sounded like a blend of Bismarck and an overseas Chinese businessman.”

Under Deng, China “weighed the balance of power, counted its foreign aid pennies, and tackled the unmodernised condition of its own armies. China was buying time, coping cleverly with the gap between ambitions and capacity. Its top priority was economic development at home.”

Lee Kuan Yew tells Terrill that Deng had told him in a conversation, “Marxism has failed in China.” Tragic as the Cultural Revolution was, it became a springboard for Deng to leap without qualms towards fresh thinking, Terrill reflects:

Deng Xiaoping tried to save communism with one hand and bury it with the other. He built a China economically minded at home and nationalistic abroad. His way was to achieve a desired result without regard to image, theory, or elegance of method. He never was a diligent reader or given to philosophising, but he displayed a knack for knowing what to do and what not to say. He once described his political style: “I cross the river by touching my feet against the stones, this one and that one, to keep my balance and get to the other side.”

As China opened up for its own people in the 1980s, Terrill feels the dualism that will deliver tragedy in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Here, as in much of the book, the story is driven by conversations with Chinese friends and contacts who embrace new opportunities but are sceptical about China without the Communist Party at the helm. Their ambivalence isn’t hard to explain: “the revolution set in place a Leninist political system, while reform sought a commodity economy — the two don’t mix.”

Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square concludes with the Tiananmen bloodshed. Terrill heads that final chapter “Epilogue,” and it is an epilogue, too, for a moment of hope.

Terrill was on the streets of Beijing when the tanks crushed the democracy demonstrations on 4 June 1989. His account is that of a historian with the eye of an on-the-ground reporter:

That night, despite the horrors, my view of the capacities of Chinese people was enhanced. The courage, humour, practicality, and sense of history of youth whom I talked with intensified my faith in the Chinese. Yet I also felt that the courage of the crowd was almost suicidal, for Communists when their grip on power is threatened have a strong tendency to behave like Communists.

A life devoted to going deep into China has taught Terrill much about what the party will do to its own people. He records the words one woman cried to him near Tiananmen on June 4: “Tell the world our government has gone mad.”

The boy from Bruthen was drawn to the exotic, but he judges that China’s exoticism is breaking down before the universals of the human condition. “I do not think individualism and political pluralism will come to China from the West,” he writes. “The demand for them will burst out within China, not as a diktat from a father-figure from on high but as people express themselves politically, grabbed from below.”

As a man who has written much in his lifetime, Terrill doesn’t need to cram everything in to this elegant work. Much that has already been written can be omitted. That body of work has some standout pieces. His 1972 book 800,000,000: The Real China was one of the Asia works of the 1970s — a Penguin edition usually sat near a pile of the weekly edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

The Chinese-language edition of Mao has sold 1.5 million copies. Terrill’s 2003 book, The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the World, is a deep meditation on the meaning of China, wedded to an optimism that the country will eventually produce a modern democratic state.

The oeuvre of the boy from the bush also has some wattle and eucalyptus, particularly the 1987 The Australians, reworked in 2000 as The Australians: The Way We Live Now. For an Australian-flavoured dive into Terrill land, download (free) his 2006 paper Riding the Wave: The Rise of China and Options for Australian Policy and from 2013, Facing the dragon: China Policy In a New Era.

The personal summing up of the memoir comes in the penultimate chapter, before the Tiananmen epilogue. “Am I married to China?” Terrill asks at its conclusion. “Sometimes, I feel China has conquered me, and taken control of my days as a would-be expert on China. Of course, that would be nothing, compared with China taking control of the West. Momentous challenges and benefits beckoned for both sides as the fateful year of 1989 unfolded. Knowing the past did not guarantee knowing China’s future. Still, it was a stirring life experience for a boy from the Australian Bush.” •

The post Conquered by China appeared first on Inside Story.

The protests against the wall-of-death drift-netting, against plans to dispose of nuclear wastes in the ocean, the incineration of chemical weapons on Johnston Island, the 1995 resumption of nuclear tests on Moruroa, and, most ominously, the specter of our atoll islands and low-lying coastal regions disappearing under the rising sea level, are instances of a regional united front against threats to our environment.

Now we can add AUKUS to that list, and the new danger of nuclear proliferation in the Pacific.

Last month US president Joe Biden, British prime minister Boris Johnson and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS, “an enhanced trilateral security partnership” between the three countries. They professed “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

This strategic shift is much broader than the commitment to nuclear subs. The United States will deploy vessels, aircraft and US marines more often through Australia, and joint research efforts will focus on new frontiers, from the militarisation of space to “cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities.”

The brutal abandonment of the $90 billion submarine contract with France’s Naval Group, meanwhile, sent Australia’s strategic think tanks into overdrive, to analyse the implications for Indo-Pacific relationships. Amid the reams of commentary, however, little attention focused on the response to AUKUS in the Pacific islands.

Partly this reflects the initially measured response of most regional leaders, who refrained from directly criticising the new Anglosphere partnership. But any hope that Australia’s island neighbours will welcome further nuclearisation of the region is folly. Even as they face current security challenges — including the climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic — island leaders are again talking about nuclear weapons, nuclear waste dumping and their desire for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.

Scott Morrison likes to say that Australia has a vuvale relationship with its island neighbours. But vuvale, the Fijian word for “family,” carries deep cultural implications, involving bonds of reciprocity, respect and sharing. Respect towards island neighbours has been sorely lacking during climate negotiations, and regional anger over Canberra’s failed climate policy is likely to be exacerbated by the strategic shift under AUKUS.

Within days of the AUKUS announcement, a series of statements from Pacific leaders, community elders and media organisations highlighted the persistence of the deep antinuclear sentiment that Epeli Hau‘ofa identified as a central element of Pacific regionalism.

“Shame Australia, Shame,” tweeted the general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan. “How can you call us your ‘vuvale’ when you know your ‘family’ stands for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific?”

Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

Recalling British and US nuclear testing on Christmas Island, Kiribati president Taneti Maamau highlighted the trauma of i-Kiribati nuclear survivors: “With anything to do with nuclear, we thought it would be a courtesy to raise it, to discuss it with your neighbours… As small island states,” he added, “we thought we were part of the solution… we are in the Pacific family. We should be consulted.”

Newspapers like the Samoa Observer editorialised against Australia’s plans. “Signing up to a military pact behind the closet and then declaring we in the region will benefit from the peace and stability it would bring is not how friends treat each other,” declared Samoa’s leading newspaper.

In contrast to Canberra’s strategic shift, the New Zealand government quickly reaffirmed the longstanding, bipartisan legislation that has kept NZ ports free of nuclear visits since 1987. While avoiding any direct criticism of AUKUS and reiterating New Zealand’s commitment to ANZUS and the Five Eyes agreement, prime minister Jacinda Ardern pointedly reminded Australia that nuclear submarines are not welcome across the Tasman.

“Certainly they couldn’t come into our internal waters,” she said. “No vessels that are partially or fully powered by nuclear energy is able to enter our internal borders.”

Morrison claimed that under AUKUS “Australia is not seeking to establish nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability.” These claims were immediately undercut when the Minerals Council of Australia and leading members of his own government called for a domestic nuclear industry to help develop the skills needed to maintain and operate a nuclear-powered submarine fleet. Others are concerned that the AUKUS partnership will rekindle Australian efforts in the 1960s to acquire nuclear weapons, a debate already under way in Australian strategic think tanks.

Unlike Australia, New Zealand has joined nine Forum Island Countries to sign and ratify the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, which prohibits parties from “developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, acquiring, possessing, or stockpiling nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” As the Samoa Observer wrote, “It is a relief seeing Prime Minister Ardern continuing to maintain the tradition of her predecessors by promoting a nuclear-free Pacific; probably she is the only true friend of the Pacific Islands.”

For all of Scott Morrison’s talk of being a member of the “Pacific family,” he clearly doesn’t understand how many actual families were affected during the nuclear-testing era. The last of the more than 310 nuclear tests in the region was conducted twenty-five years ago, but outsiders often underestimate how deep the nuclear legacy is embedded in personal histories and oceanic culture.

Many past and present leaders have personal connections to the fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing in Marshall Islands, Australia, Kiribati and French Polynesia. Former French Polynesian president Oscar Temaru worked on Moruroa Atoll as a customs officer, suffered family tragedy from the early death of a child and is a supporter of Moruroa e Tatou, the association of former Maohi workers who staffed the test sites during France’s 193 nuclear tests.

As a child in the 1950s, former Kiribati president Anote Tong lived on Fanning Island, close to Christmas Island where the British government conducted hydrogen bomb tests, dubbed Operation Grapple, in 1957–58.

Fiji was a British colony at this time, sending members of the Fiji Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to support Britain’s H-bomb tests on Malden Island. The first contingent of Fijian sailors in 1957 was led by Ratu Inoke Bainimarama. Today, his son Josaia — known as Frank — is prime minister of Fiji. As a former rear-admiral and commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, the younger Bainimarama is an unlikely champion for nuclear disarmament. But the Fijian politician — who led the military coup in 2006 and now serves as chair of the Pacific Islands Forum — has long stood by Fijian nuclear veterans.

“My father was among those soldiers,” Bainimarama tweeted a fortnight after the AUKUS announcement. “The nature of their mission was not totally clear to any of them until the bombs were going off. To honour the sacrifice of all those who have suffered due to these weapons, Fiji will never stop working towards a global nuclear ban.”

The timing of the AUKUS announcement added complications for the British government, which will host the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow next month. Many leaders from the Small Island Developing States group watched in dismay as France and the AUKUS partners squabbled over arms contracts at a time when development and climate funding is desperately needed. As Bainimarama tartly noted, “If we can spend trillions on missiles, drones, and nuclear submarines, we can fund climate action.”

Even as he challenges the AUKUS partners to make more ambitious COP26 climate commitments, the Fijian PM has spent recent weeks speaking out about nuclear proliferation and the health and environmental legacies of nuclear testing. At the UN General Assembly he stressed that “the commitment of the Pacific Island nations to the elimination of nuclear weapons is not based on an abstraction. It is based on real experience with the consequences of nuclear fallout, and it is at the root of our sense of urgency.”

Announcing the AUKUS deal, Scott Morrison recklessly described the renewed ties to Britain and the United States as a “forever partnership” (no doubt raising eyebrows in Paris, after the Australia–France strategic partnership and a multibillion-dollar contract was sunk overnight by Anglo-American perfidy).

The range of issues contemplated under the AUKUS banner — from transfer of nuclear technology to cyberwarfare cooperation and logistics, transit and basing rights for American forces in Australia — highlights the potential for Australia to be even further integrated into US nuclear war–fighting strategies. Previous Coalition language about the need to “balance” economic ties with the People’s Republic of China and strategic ties with the United States has been abandoned.

Most of Australia’s Pacific island neighbours haven’t abandoned this balancing act, however. At a time of increasing US–Chinese strategic competition, many are wary of being forced into a choice between Washington and Beijing.

Like New Zealand, Vanuatu has declared its land and waters nuclear-free, and like Fiji it is a member of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Other states like Papua New Guinea explicitly base their foreign policy on the objective “friends to all and enemies to none.”

Although PNG prime minister James Marape didn’t directly criticise the AUKUS announcement, he did tell ABC correspondent Natalie Whiting that “we will make sure our sovereignty is not influenced by what happens in Australia and elsewhere. [O]ur waters and our sovereignty will be protected by our own specific bilaterals we have with all nations.”

This tension is evident even among some of the United States’ closest allies in the northern Pacific. Although they are contemplating withdrawal from the Pacific Islands Forum, the five members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit continue to manoeuvre around longstanding China–Taiwan disputes in the Pacific. Nauru, Palau and Marshall Islands have diplomatic relations with Taipei; Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia, or FSM, recognise Beijing. All, however, are wary of a neat “for and against” logic, despite criticism by Taiwan-aligned leaders like Nauru president Lionel Aingimea and Palau’s Surangel Whipps Jr of Chinese human rights violations and China’s strategic advance.

Even as FSM extends its historical connection with Washington, president David Panuelo continues to support ongoing diplomatic ties with Beijing. In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, Panuelo said that FSM needed support from “all friends, allies and development partners in the global community.”

Micronesia is “family to the United States and a friend to the People’s Republic of China,” he went on, “just as Micronesia is a friend to the Maldives and to the United Kingdom, to the Netherlands and to Spain, to Nicaragua and to Australia, to New Zealand and to South Africa, to Israel and to Norway, to Japan and to Korea.” Friends to all, enemies to none.

In a new book on FSM’s foreign policy, Micronesian scholar Gonzaga Puas says his country “is learning from other Pacific Island nations to better position itself in regard to relations with China without offending the US.” Puas says that island nations like FSM have long dealt successfully with the outside world by drawing on internal social stability and mutual support rather than succumbing to different waves of colonisation. The vast think tank literature on Chinese influence in the Pacific islands often underestimates this skill.

Even so, the three Freely Associated States can’t avoid current regional tensions. FSM, the Republic of Palau and the Republic of Marshall Islands are renegotiating Compacts of Free Association with Washington by 2023, agreements that give the US Indo-Pacific Command strategic denial against third parties. As the United States mobilises against China in the region, US officials are discussing possible military-basing rights with Palau and FSM, as well as new deployments in the US territory of Guahan (Guam), which already hosts major US naval and air force bases.

The AUKUS partners seek the status of “security partner of choice” for island nations. But if they try to force “forever partnerships” on members of the Pacific Islands Forum, the pushback will be significant. As PNG’s James Marape said after the AUKUS announcement, “We have a very peaceful part of planet Earth, we want to protect that peace and serenity… In as far as securing peace is concerned, we’ve got no problem, but if such activities bring disharmony in the region, then we have an issue.”

Nuclear testing has played a major if unintended role in shaping the region’s political development over the past half-century. As Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Henry Puna reminded participants in a recent Forum webinar to commemorate the UN International Day on Nuclear Tests, “nuclear testing was a key political driver for the establishment of our Pacific Islands Forum fifty years ago.”

For the former Cook Islands prime minister, the signing of the 1985 Rarotonga Treaty for a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, or SPNFZ, was a seminal moment for Pacific regionalism: “Despite thirty-six years of the Treaty of Rarotonga, and twenty-five years since the permanent cessation of nuclear testing in our region, the nuclear threat remains, exacerbated by the permanent, intergenerational consequences and impacts of nuclear weapons.”

Other veteran diplomats echo the importance of SPNFZ, which was developed in the midst of 1980s US–Soviet nuclear tensions. Samoa’s current high commissioner to Fiji, Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia, was a member of Samoa’s delegation at the August 1984 Forum meeting in Tuvalu that appointed the working group of officials to prepared the draft text of a Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. As I reported for Inside Story in 2013, declassified cabinet papers and leaked US diplomatic cables reveal the extent of the US–Australia collaboration at that time, to push back against island governments seeking to ban missile tests and visits or transit by nuclear-powered vessels.

Unlike China, Russia, Britain and France, the United States is the only major nuclear weapons state that still refuses to ratify the protocols of the SPNFZ treaty. Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia stresses that the next step is clear: “We don’t need to look far. The three Protocols of our own Rarotonga Treaty have yet to be ratified by the United States, despite some positive indications made earlier.”

Recent regional efforts have aimed to strengthen SPNFZ and other treaties. New Zealand and Vanuatu co-hosted a conference in December 2018, issuing the Auckland Statement on TPNW to encourage more island countries to sign and ratify the nuclear ban treaty. This push was echoed by the Fijian prime minister at last month’s General Assembly meeting, when Bainimarama urged “all Member States to join and ratify the new TPNW, to free the world of nuclear weapons.”

Signatories to the Rarotonga Treaty held their first-ever meeting of states parties in December last year, more than thirty-five years after the treaty was signed. The Forum has created a Nuclear Legacies Task Force to assist nuclear survivors in Marshall Islands and Kiribati. Since his election last February, secretary-general Puna has reached out to OPANAL — the Latin American secretariat that manages the 1967 Tlatelolco nuclear-weapon-free zone. In a speech to OPANAL on 1 October, Puna offered to host “a meeting of nuclear-weapon-free zones in the Blue Pacific” in 2022, bringing together governments that have created zones across the whole land area of the southern hemisphere.

Australian diplomats, by contrast, regard US extended nuclear deterrence as a central feature of Australian defence policy. They have campaigned against the TPNW and ensured that British nuclear testing at Monte Bello, Maralinga and Emu Field is not on the agenda of the regional Nuclear Legacies Task Force. Meanwhile, UK prime minister Boris Johnson has announced three major changes to Britain’s nuclear posture: to increase the upper limit on its nuclear warhead stockpile by 44 per cent, reduce transparency about the makeup of the arsenal and extend the strategic circumstances in which British nuclear weapons might be used. The United States continues to upgrade its nuclear arsenal, even as the number of nuclear warheads shrinks.

Scott Morrison now wants to go further. If they are ever built and crewed in coming decades (no small problem), the proposed AUKUS nuclear submarines will integrate the Royal Australian Navy more deeply into US nuclear war–fighting strategies, through potential missions such as undersea intelligence collection within China’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

The Rarotonga Treaty also bans the dumping of radioactive nuclear waste in the SPNFZ zone, as well as assisting or encouraging any nation to dump waste in the region. For Henry Puna, the treaty “distinctly ensures that we are a nuclear-free zone, and not just a nuclear-weapon-free zone… the intentional omission of ‘weapon’ from the title of our treaty reflects the desire of states parties to engage on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation in a holistic fashion.”

For this reason, the proposed ocean dumping of contaminated waste water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor is a major diplomatic setback for Japan in the islands. In recent years, Japan has joined other “Quad” members — Australia, India and the United States — to coordinate pushback against Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. But the Japanese government angered Pacific communities last April by announcing plans to discharge more than 1.2 million tonnes of treated radioactive waste water into the Pacific, starting in 2023. The unilateral proposal breaches previous commitments to consult with island leaders before any dumping is undertaken.

“Japan’s announcement to discharge treated water into the Pacific Ocean has sounded the alarm bells again,” says Samoa’s Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia. “We need independent and verifiable scientific assessment that this method of discharge is indeed safe-proof.” The final communiqué of the ninth Pacific Area Leaders Meeting, in July, highlighted “the priority of ensuring international consultation, international law, and independent and verifiable scientific assessments.” As Henry Puna said, “Only the disclosure of information based on science will satisfy and appease the members.”

The links between climate change, nuclear contaminants and human rights for indigenous peoples are highlighted by the energetic diplomacy of the Republic of Marshall Islands. Marshallese diplomats are active on many fronts: championing the successful effort at the UN Human Rights Council to create a special rapporteur on climate change and human rights; lobbying at the International Maritime Organization for climate levies on bunker fuel; and raising the call at COP26 for “1.5 to stay alive” through the Climate Vulnerable Forum and Higher Ambition Coalition. The Marshall Islands government has created a National Nuclear Commission to coordinate effective responses to the legacies of sixty-seven US nuclear tests in their lands and waters.

Successive Marshall Islands leaders have highlighted the connection between nuclear and climate threats. The poem “Anointed” by Marshallese writer and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner captures local concern that rising sea levels will leach radioactive isotopes into the marine environment from the Runit Dome on Enewetak Atoll — a relic of twentieth-century nuclear testing. Today, Jetnil-Kijiner is a climate envoy for her nation, contributing to a National Adaptation Plan that uniquely links climate and nuclear concerns. “It’s going to be one of the few National Adaptation Plans that takes into consideration the nuclear legacy,” she says, “and how the nuclear legacy can inform how we plan for climate change action.”

Marshall Islands president David Kabua has called on UN agencies to assist in dealing with these legacies within the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework. Kabua sees UN action as a small recompense for the betrayal of Micronesian rights when his nation was under UN Trusteeship after the second world war, “where — despite our warnings at the time — two Trusteeship Council resolutions remain the only instance in history where any UN organ ever specifically authorised nuclear detonations.” The legacy of these tests, he said, “remains a very contemporary threat, in our waters, our lands and our bodies.”

As Australians debate the costs and consequences of acquiring AUKUS nuclear submarines, David Kabua’s words ring out: “We tirelessly underscore that no people or nation should ever have to bear a burden such as ours, and that no effort should be spared to move towards a world free of nuclear weapons and nuclear risk.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post AUKUS disrupts “a very peaceful part of planet Earth” appeared first on Inside Story.

Let’s leave aside the doubts about US staying power after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or Narendra Modi’s latest subversion of democratic freedoms revealed by the discovery of Israeli spyware in the phones of 300 critics. Or even Scott Morrison’s spell in Washington’s doghouse because of foot-dragging on climate change.

Principally, the timing is bad because the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, will be in his last days in office when the meeting takes place in Washington on 24 September. He will step down less than a week later to hand over to a successor to be chosen by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on 29 September.

When Shinzo Abe stepped down as prime minister in August 2020, citing a recurrence of stomach ulcers, Suga, now seventy-two, looked like a safe choice as successor. As Abe’s chief cabinet secretary he appeared to have been the brains and safe hands of the government, steadily implementing Abe’s retro-nationalist agenda while protecting him from successive scandals over political favours.

That reputation, which drew a 70 per cent approval rating in opinion polls when he stepped up, has now dissipated, largely thanks to Suga’s handing of the Covid pandemic.

In a not-unfamiliar picture for Australians, his government was slow to grasp the urgency of the vaccine rollout. Its health ministry insisted that Pfizer retest its vaccine in Japan, losing several weeks, even though the US trials had included people of Japanese origin. (The ministry said this didn’t count, as they wouldn’t have been eating Japanese food.) The Japan Medical Association, a powerful political donor, convinced Suga that local doctors were the best placed to give jabs. Many older people couldn’t make appointments because the smartphone app was too complicated.

Then Suga took a gamble on holding the summer Olympics despite the Delta variant’s resurgence and, with Japan’s vaccination level then just 23 per cent, amid fears the athletes could set off new outbreaks. Watching on TV, the Japanese were told hospitals were reserved for Olympians while they would have to endure Covid at home, except in the most severe cases.

A belated vaccination effort, in which the doctors’ lobby was pushed aside and the Jieitai (military) brought in to set up mass vaccination centres, has pushed the double-dose level among adults above 50 per cent, but the political damage was done.

In August, backed by three centrist and left-wing opposition parties, a university professor with expertise in pandemic analysis beat the Liberal Democrat candidate in elections for mayor of Yokohama. The port city near Tokyo is capital of Kanazawa prefecture, Suga’s political home ground.

With his approval rating below 30 per cent, and with younger and less-established Liberal Democrat members of the Diet worried about the House of Representatives election due by 28 November, no one was taking up Suga’s idea of a snap election or a cabinet reshuffle. Suga announced he wouldn’t be running in the party leadership ballot due at the end of this month.

The contest — a mix of public campaigning and the kind of backroom brokerage among the party’s seven factions that Yukio Mishima portrayed in his novel After the Banquet — has a half-dozen declared and potential candidates.

Among them, and the most popular with the public, if not his colleagues, is former defence and foreign minister Taro Kono, who at fifty-eight rates as a youngster among Liberal Democrats. Most recently, as Suga’s minister for administrative reform, he famously suggested Japan’s civil service might move on from letters and fax machines to fully digital communications. Although he was also in charge of the vaccine rollout, he seems to have gained credit for the recent progress rather than the earlier delays, which have been sheeted home to Suga.

With 2.5 million in his Japanese-language Twitter circle, Kono is more skilled than most of his colleagues in reaching the public. He has vowed to press on with reforms, and has moderated his anti-nuclear position by conceding that power stations shut down after the Fukushima disaster might be used again while Japan phases out coal, oil and natural gas to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Asked about his volatile temperament, he said he would be a leader who “laughs and cries together” with the Japanese people.

He would also be a very presentable face for Japan in the Quad and in the wider world. He opted to study at Washington’s Georgetown University rather than one of the elite Japanese universities that prepare the young for top political, bureaucratic and business circles. He is versed in the big diplomatic and strategic issues from his previous portfolios, and as far as the Quad goes, supports closer military ties with the United States and its allies, even angling for Japanese membership of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing pact.

As importantly, he brings greater nuance and empathy to Japan’s troubled history with its East Asian neighbours. A third-generation Liberal Democrat, he is the son of Yohei Kono, who in 1993, as chief cabinet secretary, issued a statement officially recognising that so-called comfort women were put into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army in wartime.

The “Kono statement” was a step towards dealing with this historical abuse, but the contrition was wound back when Liberal Democrat politicians on Shinzo Abe’s side of the party claimed that army brothels were simply commercial businesses and their workers all volunteers. The controversy has given a bitter edge to relations between Japan and South Korea, the two most powerful US allies in the region.

As Daisuke Akimoto of Temple University, Japan writes in the Diplomat, “It is possible to theorise that Kono has long waited to become prime minister in order to follow his father’s diplomatic footsteps, with a view to promoting Japan’s reconciliation diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region.” But Kono, perhaps with an eye on his party colleagues, hasn’t played up this aspect of his legacy yet.

What he has said is that, as prime minister, he wouldn’t be visiting the Yasukuni shrine, the Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead. Because it pays homage to Pacific war leaders executed by the Allies for war crimes, as well as ordinary soldiery, and because its museum portrays Japan’s pre-1945 campaigns as well-intentioned, political visits to Yasukuni are seen elsewhere in Asia as excusing aggression.

All of which makes Kono somewhat suspect in the eyes of the party’s retro-nationalists, with terms like “maverick” expressing this sentiment.

Kono’s closest rivals look like being former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, sixty-two, a figure who has long hovered near the top of the party and who declared his candidacy early, and Shigeru Ishiba, sixty-four, a former defence minister who is yet to decide whether to run. Either would be a business-as-usual prime minister but hardly likely to jolt Japan out of its longstanding economic and social ennui.

The wildcard candidate is Sanae Takaichi, sixty, who would be Japan’s first female prime minister but hardly a standard-bearer for feminism. She has opposed steps to break down the nation’s patriarchies, including allowing married women to keep their own family name and introducing female succession to the imperial throne. “She belongs to a kind of Japanese woman who gets ahead by being more macho than her male colleagues,” says Andrew Horvat, a Canadian academic long resident in Tokyo.

Early in her career, Takaichi worked as an intern for a Democratic congressman in Washington and played drums in a rock band. Since then she’s marched to a different drum. Nurtured in her home city of Nara by a notorious war-guilt denialist, one-time justice minister Seisuke Okuno, Takaichi belongs to Nippon Kaigi and Jinja Honjo, organisations intent on returning Japan’s politics and society to their pre-1945 state and restoring the emperor’s semi-divine status. As a minister she has visited the Yasukuni shrine many times.

An ally of Shinzo Abe and his brother, defence minister Nobuo Kishi, Takaichi is among those in the Liberal Democrat camp who promote closer relations with Taiwan. Taken over by Japan in 1895 as part of the settlement of a war with imperial China, the island has long been seen in Japan as the success story of Japanese colonialism, in contrast to the later annexation of Korea. Supporting Taiwan is part of standing up to China, with US bases in Japan key to its defence. For the first time, Tokyo’s latest defence white paper declared “peace and security in the Taiwan Strait” as a priority, a warning to Beijing that also crept into the communiqué from this year’s Australia–Japan meeting of foreign affairs and defence ministers.

As she began her run for the leadership, Takaichi called for amendment of Japan’s post-1945 constitution to transform the Jieitai from its circumscribed role in defence of Japan to a “national defence force” able to strike out, including by launching pre-emptive attacks on missile bases in places like North Korea.

The puzzle about her candidacy is that it has been openly backed by Shinzo Abe himself. With only 4 per cent approval in the polls, Takaichi is a very long shot. If Abe is seeking cover against prosecution for his latest scandal — some ¥23 million (A$285,000) spent from covert funds during 2015–20 to bring constituents to the prime minister’s annual cherry-blossom viewing party — this surely could be obtained from a more popular candidate. Or possibly Takaichi is a stalking horse for an attempted return by Abe himself, who at sixty-six is aged midway between Suga and the present line-up.

A later date for the Quad meeting might have been advisable. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Some foreign ministers go on to be ennobled as governor-general: Richard Casey, Paul Hasluck and Hayden. But only one in living memory, William McMahon, sprang back from this political sidetrack into the prime ministership.

Present incumbent Marise Payne is notable for an absence of perceptible leadership ambition and what many say is an excessive aversion to the limelight. She is also part of a dwindling remnant of small-l liberals in the Liberal Party. Oddly, though, this has made her useful to Scott Morrison as he flounders around in gender and sexual violence issues. In March he made her chair of a new cabinet committee on the status of women, referring to her as “prime minister for women,” while making it clear he was still in charge.

Once, Payne had people wondering whether she had the makings of a prime minister. In 2001, four years into her first Senate term, clever, articulate and still only thirty-seven, she was asked by Radio National’s Terry Lane whether she would jump to the House of Representatives to advance her career. “The sort of Liberal Party that I would lead, I would hope would be a very inclusive Liberal Party,” she said, adding she was happy enough helping constituents sort out “issues and problems.” Just as well, for she was already on the outer in the Liberal Party.

She had been deputy to lawyer–financier Malcolm Turnbull during the Australian Republican Movement’s failed Yes campaign at the 1999 referendum, and had been upbraided by John Howard and Tony Abbott for this “conflict of interest.” As she observed ruefully at the Lowy Institute in 2018, “It may explain my extremely well-developed professional career as a backbencher in the Howard government.”

Further episodes didn’t endear her to Howard. As chair of the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee she declared one of his government’s proposed anti-terror laws “a very serious incursion into the way in which we currently expect to be able to live our lives in Australia.” Together with other Coalition moderates, she managed to have the legislation modified.

From her maiden speech in 1997 onwards she spoke of her concerns about refugees, the stolen generations, HIV sufferers and other minorities. Her foreign trips took her to places like Dili to observe the East Timorese independence referendum or Nepal to see Tibetans arriving across the Himalayas. As Norman Abjorensen noted in a 2008 profile for Inside Story, all of this meant her career under Howard was “a swim upstream.”

Howard embodied the hardline laissez-faire views of the Liberal Party’s NSW right, in the end going beyond the bounds of public acceptability with his WorkChoices legislation. Abjorensen contrasted this approach with Victoria’s Liberals, historically more secure and imbued with a certain noblesse oblige.

With members of the intolerant religious right stacking branches in New South Wales, Payne’s place on the Senate ticket was always under threat. She clung on in third place behind the right’s Helen Coonan and the top-ranked National. In a speech to the Sydney Institute in November 2008, the year after Howard’s defeat, she excoriated the party’s right for straying from the liberalism of Robert Menzies and showing “heartlessness” towards refugees.

Payne started to come in from the cold under opposition leaders Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull, both moderate NSW Liberals, who awarded her junior shadow portfolios in Indigenous affairs and foreign aid. Then, with experienced and talented women, or any women at all, in short supply in the Coalition, Abbott gave her the thankless human services portfolio. Later in 2015, following Abbott’s ousting by Turnbull, she became defence minister.

In that job, she gained accolades for her performance in question time and committees, and for her engagement across party lines. “I’ve always been quite impressed with her,” says crossbench senator Rex Patrick. “She never seems to be rattled by questions. She always seems to be well briefed and prepared.”

Momentous decisions were made  in the portfolio during her three years. Twelve French-designed submarines were ordered,  at a cost initially put at $50 billion (the troubled project is now expected to cost $90 billion), with an extra $10 billion to keep the six existing Collins-class submarines operating until they arrive. Nine British frigates, also still on the drawing board, were ordered at a cost of $35 billion, now blown out to $45 billion.

Few defence analysts believe Payne guided these decisions or questioned the advice leading to them. To critics like Patrick, a former submariner, it was a case of defence chiefs with little project experience selling a grand leap into the future to politicians with even less grasp of technology, warfare and industry. “I would say Payne presided over a number of decisions, particularly in naval shipbuilding, that will haunt Australia for years to come,” says Patrick, who adds that she should have picked up on very early signs that the French submarine deal was not going well.

In his memoir, A Bigger Picture, Turnbull mentions working with Payne on the 2016 defence white paper, though he details only his own interventions in the drafting. She was a “calm, knowledgeable and considered” minister, he writes. “But she lacked confidence in her own considerable ability and wouldn’t get out enough in the media to promote our Defence Industry Plan, which is why I later appointed Christopher Pyne minister for Defence Industry.”

Morrison’s dethroning of Turnbull in August 2018 saw Julie Bishop exit cabinet and later parliament. Needing another woman in his senior ranks, Morrison appointed Linda Reynolds, a major-general in the Army Reserve, as defence minister and made Payne foreign affairs minister.

Payne was hardly his cup of tea. Morrison had been the party’s NSW state director during the years she was stuck on the backbench and at risk of losing nomination. But she was a safe pair of hands who had kept any objections to refugee policy to herself since becoming a minister.

The contrast between Payne and her predecessor could hardly be greater. Bishop’s high-profile travels, lycra-clad early-morning jogs, daring haute couture and Paspaley pearls helped keep her in the public eye. Eight years older than Payne, she had once practised as a barrister (Payne had been a political staffer) and was well suited to the prosecutorial role she assumed after the downing of a Malaysian airliner by Russian-backed Ukrainian forces.

Far from the VIP tent, Payne remains a somewhat reclusive figure anchored in the middle and outer suburbs of Sydney, where she grew up as the daughter of an accountant. After attending Methodist Ladies College, she joined the Liberal Club at the University of NSW, aged seventeen, having just started her arts–law degrees. She has said the Liberals were the “natural choice” for her. These days, with her electorate office in Parramatta, she calls herself “senator for Western Sydney” rather than the constitutionally correct senator for New South Wales. Her home is in the Penrith state electorate of her partner since 2007, Stuart Ayres, a minister in Gladys Berejiklian’s state government.

From the outset, it was clear that a large part of her current job would involve cleaning up after her leader. During a by-election caused by Turnbull’s resignation from parliament, Morrison decided to try to appeal to the large Jewish population in the Wentworth electorate by announcing Australia would follow Donald Trump’s example and transfer its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Protests erupted in Indonesia and Malaysia, and farm exporters got worried. With backing from Payne’s department, the government called in senior foreign policy and trade figures — former ASIO and defence department head Dennis Richardson, former foreign affairs department head Michael L’Estrange, former defence force head Angus Houston, former prime minister’s department head Michael Thawley, and former Nationals leader John Anderson — to advise. All but Thawley said the move was a bad idea. In the end, a compromise statement said the move would be to “West Jerusalem,” not the united city claimed by Israel, and wouldn’t take place (except for a defence and trade office) until a settlement was reached with the Palestinians, who claim East Jerusalem as their capital. “We ended up with the extraordinary formula which is exactly the same as Vladimir Putin’s,” says one retired diplomat.

A year later, in October 2019, Morrison went down another Trumpian pathway. “We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia,” Morrison told a Lowy Institute dinner. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community and, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” He ordered Payne to do an “audit” of Australia’s membership of international bodies.

Her department complied according to the classic Yes, Prime Minister script. As Payne told ANU’s National Security College in June last year, it found that the hundred or so international agencies were “extremely important for Australia in terms of advancing our national interests and promoting and protecting our values.” She thanked Morrison for guiding her department to this conclusion. “We couldn’t have made that assessment without the multilateral audit.”

Beyond these defensive moves, Payne is not getting many plaudits. She is perceived by some as lacking energy and visibility, both in dealing with the world outside and in explaining the world to Australians. But figures in foreign policy circles are reluctant to talk about her on the record: they tend to admire her personally and think she has a hard row to hoe in this government, and they have contact with her in various forums.

“She does no harm, but she doesn’t do much good,” says one veteran of the Canberra political scene. “She has good instincts and a lot to offer but has she really pulled the government in a positive direction on very much?” asks an international relations academic influential in foreign policy circles. “Probably not.” The academic thinks that Penny Wong, her opposite number in Labor, would have made a bigger splash outside Australia and got the Australian public more engaged on international issues, had the 2019 election gone the other way.

As an example of actual harm, many point to Payne’s call in April last year for an “independent” inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. Under questioning from David Speers on ABC’s Insiders she suggested China had not been fully transparent and questioned whether the World Health Organization was the right body to carry out such an inquiry, given this would be “a bit poacher and gamekeeper.”

She was veering into Trumpland, and Morrison made it worse two days later by declaring the investigators would need “weapons inspector” powers.

Relations with Beijing were already heading south. As the eminent former Fairfax editor Max Suich wrote in a powerful analysis in the Australian Financial Review in May, two of Canberra’s most powerful figures, names undisclosed, told a closed-door Lowy panel in September 2017 that Chinese interference needed to be confronted. Turnbull was already preparing the foreign interference laws he would present to parliament that December with the declaration, in bad Mandarin, that Australia was “standing up” — a cheap take on Mao Zedong’s declaration of the People’s Republic in 1949. He soon announced that Huawei would be excluded from Australia’s 5G mobile network, and began urging other security partners to follow suit.

In other words, getting “out in front” of Australia’s allies, as Suich put it, in “calling out” and “pushing back” against Chinese interference and infiltration, began well before Morrison, though he continued and intensified it. The bill came in over the following months, with China blocking some $20 billion in imports from Australia on various pretexts. An international Covid inquiry did get launched in September, on European initiative and under WHO auspices, with both China and Australia voting in favour.

It was an own goal for Payne and Morrison. “She ended up holding the can for the Covid inquiry and I have no idea where it came from,” says the international relations scholar. “Was she ordered to do it, or did she actually want to do it? But that was a diplomacy fail from my perspective. We could have achieved the same objective without what became the consequences. That is what diplomacy is about: finding intelligent ways to negotiate or persuade, to get what you want, without the negative consequence.”

Three months after her inquiry call came Payne’s finest hour as foreign minister. More blunt than diplomatic, it recalled the Love Actually moment when Hugh Grant’s British prime minister rebuffs a sleazy US president. She was in the United States with defence minister Reynolds for the annual AUSMIN talks with their American counterparts, a week after US secretary of state Mike Pompeo had made a speech overturning decades of policy by declaring the Chinese Communist Party’s rule illegitimate.

Payne pointedly refused to back Pompeo’s call for allies to help roll back communism in China. “The secretary’s positions are his own,” she said at a joint press conference, standing beside Pompeo. “Australia’s position is our own.”

Back in Australia, Morrison continued to spring surprises. Anxious for a free-trade agreement with Britain post-Brexit, he agreed to Boris Johnson’s request that British working holiday-makers be exempted from the eighty-eight-day farm labour requirement to renew their visas. Then, to cover up the resulting fall in numbers in this highly exploitable group, he hastily agreed to a long-rejected push by the Nationals and the farm lobby for a new agricultural work visa for Southeast Asians, a recipe for future scandals affecting vital foreign relationships. As with the Jerusalem announcement, there was no sign of prior consultation with the foreign affairs minister.

If Payne has used her parliamentary seniority and rank in cabinet to push back on asylum seekers and other policies she finds too harsh, most outside observers can see little sign of it. The exception is an attempt, ahead of a feared Taliban return to power in Kabul, to persuade Home Affairs to grant asylum faster and less unwillingly to Afghans who worked with Australian forces and agencies. She was also said to be against the early withdrawal of Australia’s embassy.

Her efforts to support Australians in trouble are also noted. Freeing the Melbourne University academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert from jail in Iran last November required a complicated deal worked out by former ASIS chief Nick Warner, one-time ambassador in Tehran. He arranged for Moore-Gilbert to be exchanged for three convicted Iranian terrorists being held in jail in Bangkok, rewarding Thai prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha with a new “strategic partnership” with Australia — much-appreciated Western support for a military-backed leader who was vigorously suppressing anti-royalist demonstrators. Her concern for Sean Turnell, the jailed economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, is one reason she is holding off applying sanctions to the coup leaders in Myanmar.

On deeper policy, though, she is quite isolated, with Simon Birmingham the only other notable moderate in a cabinet stacked with punitive hard-right figures like former home affairs and now defence minister Peter Dutton and immigration minister Alex Hawke, who once worked for NSW religious-right powerbroker David Clarke.

This April she travelled to Wellington in a successful attempt to persuade her counterpart, Nanaia Mahuta, that New Zealand should stand closer to Australia in facing China. The NZ trade minister had earlier suggested Canberra try more “diplomacy,” and Mahuta questioned whether the Five Eyes intelligence pact was the right forum for a broader meeting of minds on the rise of China.

On this issue, Payne seems to have had little help from the punishers in the cabinet. The deportation of New Zealanders after even a one-year jail term has seen people raised from infancy in Australia (some of them steeped in Australian bikie culture and other criminal networks) dumped in their country of birth. Initiated by Morrison when he was immigration minister and ramped up by Dutton — who calls it “taking out the trash” — these “section 501” deportations have badly frayed the trans-Tasman relationship. To them have been added increasing numbers of “section 116” deportations, which require no criminal conviction at all but simply what one official calls the “I don’t like the look of you test.”

“To be fair, it’s a long-term problem, not Payne’s,” says the international relations academic. “Foreign ministers haven’t done enough to put their perspective strongly, to win the arguments in cabinet, to protect their department and make sure it’s funded properly. Foreign Affairs and Trade has continuously lost those arguments — the influence arguments, the funding. It just doesn’t have anything like the influence it used to have. You might ask: is that the minister’s fault or is the minister’s lack of influence a symptom of that?”

This is a shame, the academic adds, “because if you look at Marise’s parliamentary career there is just so much to like here. She is someone who genuinely believes in human rights and democratic processes, the machinery of good government. God, she stands out in the current government!”

Could anyone else have done any better? Probably not Julie Bishop. She was humiliated by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi early in her tenure, after Canberra protested against China’s declaration of an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea, and spent her last two and a half years as foreign minister frozen out of Beijing. By May 2018, Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador in Beijing, was writing that Turnbull “needs to replace the foreign minister with someone better equipped for the demands of the job.”

“If it was someone who had the most conceivable amount of heft in the cabinet, the domestic and international connections, would he or she have done better than Payne has done in the time she’s had?” the academic asks, providing the answer: probably not, under Morrison. “In which case she’s doing her best in a situation where there’s very little room for her to do more.”

The recent departure of her departmental secretary Frances Adamson for the SA governorship raises new questions. Will the loss of this career-long China specialist further weaken the department’s already diminished voice and further worsen relations with China? “I wonder how much of what’s happened in Foreign Affairs is a result of Frances Adamson,” says Rex Patrick. “We’ll only find that out as Kathryn Campbell takes over.”

Campbell, a major-general in the Army Reserve, is the new Foreign Affairs secretary. As secretary of Social Services, she carried the can for the robodebt scandal, but she has no discernible foreign experience beyond a brief attachment to a Middle East army base. Though Payne is said to have got on well with her as human services minister, it is unclear whose choice she is and what was Morrison’s purpose in appointing, or agreeing to appoint, her. Some have seen it as further “militarisation” of foreign policy. Conversely, Campbell might have the bureaucratic infighting skills to take on the security establishment.

Will Payne still be there to benefit? Many of the remaining moderates in the Liberal Party headed for the exit at the 2019 election, not attracted by the opposition benches or more time in a Morrison government. Sometime in the next ten months, Payne’s own place in the Senate will be up for election. She must be pondering whether to give up on the party she joined as a teenage girl or, as Menzies used to say, “keep kicking against the pricks.” •

The post Quiet Australian appeared first on Inside Story.

The towering figure of Labor leader Gough Whitlam led the way through echoing corridors flanked by Red Guards. When the visitors were finally ushered into the austere grandeur of the East Room, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai stepped forward and greeted each member of the delegation in English. To their astonishment, Zhou then invited the twenty Australian journalists and their Chinese counterparts to remain throughout the almost two hours of official talks “to bear witness to the fact that the people of China want to be friends with the people of Australia.”

Whitlam’s bold decision to embrace China while Australian troops were still fighting in Vietnam was widely regarded as a reckless adventure. Even allies of the opposition leader feared it would endanger the big gains Whitlam had made at the 1969 election towards ending two decades of conservative rule in Australia.

Prime minister William McMahon ridiculed the China visit as “instant coffee diplomacy” and denounced Whitlam for disloyalty to Australia’s alliance with the United States. “In no time at all,” he declared, “Zhou Enlai had Mr Whitlam on a hook and he played him as a fisherman plays a trout.”

Days later, it was McMahon who was beached and gasping for air when it was revealed that US presidential envoy Henry Kissinger had secretly visited Beijing on 9 July — four days after Whitlam’s meeting with Zhou Enlai — to pave the way for Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972. As Whitlam’s successor, Bill Hayden, would remark, that news transformed “a disaster in the making” into “a stroke of genius.”

The presence of the big media contingent in Whitlam’s entourage would be important in turning public opinion. As historian Billy Griffiths wrote in his book The China Breakthrough: Whitlam in the Middle Kingdom, 1971, “The journalists shared his sense of adventure and their presence proved crucial to the success of the visit. Importantly, the stories that filtered back to Australia gave the public rare insights into a forbidden and unknown land.”

After his landslide election victory in December 1972, one of Whitlam’s first foreign policy acts — as well as ending Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war — would be to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Along with the first Australian diplomats to arrive in Beijing in 1973 were three Australian correspondents establishing permanent bureaus — Margaret Jones of the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Raffaele of the ABC and Lachie Shaw of Australian Associated Press. It would be another five years before the first American journalists were accredited in China.

The importance of the Australian media’s engagement with China over the subsequent half century has been underscored by the publication this month of The Beijing Bureau, edited by former China correspondents Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts. The book carries firsthand accounts by them and twenty-one other Australian journalists of a half century of tumultuous events: the final years of the Cultural Revolution, the economic liberalisation through the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, the crushing of the democracy movement at Tiananmen and, most recently, the ascendancy of president Xi Jinping, the persecution of the Uighurs and the upheaval in Hong Kong.

While the book includes a surfeit of old ABC China hands, it reminds us of the high calibre of Australian journalists who have reported from Beijing through the decades for both domestic and international media outlets, particularly the likes of Richard McGregor (the Australian and the Financial Times), Stephen McDonell (ABC and BBC), and Jane Perlez and Chris Buckley of the New York Times.

Conspicuously absent from a line-up that boasts “Australia’s most acclaimed journalists” are Tony Walker of Fairfax and the Financial Times, who served longer — from 1978 to 1983 and from 1993 to 1998 — than any other newspaper correspondent; the Age’s Peter Ellingsen, the only one to win the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year award, for his outstanding coverage of the Tiananmen massacre; and Robert Thomson, initially posted to Beijing by the Sydney Morning Herald before becoming the first staff correspondent in China for the Financial Times. Thomson went on to edit the London Times and the Wall Street Journal before being appointed chief of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire.

But perhaps the most striking feature of the book is the contribution of Michael Smith of the Australian Financial Review. The expulsion of Smith and ABC correspondent Bill Birtles from China in September last year marked the first time since 1973 that no staff correspondents of mainstream Australian media organisations are reporting from China, a telling sign of the depth of the deterioration in the bilateral relationship over the past few years. As Smith writes in his own book-length account of those events, The Last Correspondent (published this month by Ultimo Press), describing his thoughts as he sheltered in the Australian consul-general’s residence in Shanghai before flying home to Sydney: “There was only one conclusion. Relations between Australia and China had become so bad that journalists were now political pawns in a wider diplomatic game.”

Just as the Australian media played a key role in Gough Whitlam’s reconciliation with China in the early 1970s, journalists have been reduced to bargaining chips in the alarming unravelling of that accord. And while the crisis in the relationship owes much to the increasingly assertive, if not aggressive, leadership of Xi Jinping, it has been brought to breaking point by the missteps of the Morrison government.

Scott Morrison is the bull in our China shop. His reckless mismanagement has driven Australia’s vital relationship with Beijing into a state of cold war, done nothing to advance the issues at the heart of the crisis, and along the way wiped out billions of dollars of export revenues via punitive retaliation by the Chinese.

How has it come to this? The government’s increasingly hardline approach towards Beijing has been driven by growing alarm at Xi Jinping’s actions at home and abroad, and emboldened by a souring of perceptions of China in the Australian community. But there is nothing new in much of China’s disturbing conduct. China’s minorities have been abused, patronised and politically sidelined since the People’s Republic enshrined Han Chinese chauvinism. Mainland China has remained in a state of restrained hostility towards Taiwan — and insisted on its return to the motherland, if necessary by force — since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled there in 1949. And Beijing’s ambitious claims over the waters and resources of the South China Sea have always challenged those of its neighbours. The only difference now is that a richer, more militarily powerful and more determined China under Xi has far greater ability to silence dissent at home and deliver on its threats abroad.

So what has changed in fifty years? Australia’s diplomatic recognition of China was forged at the height of the Cultural Revolution, during which millions of Chinese perished. The relationship endured the Tiananmen massacre and its brutal aftermath. Save perhaps for the brief interlude between those events in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping opened the country to the world and embraced economic liberalism, China has been synonymous with repression: a communist state that embraced capitalist economics but never democracy.

The appalling treatment of the Uighurs is essentially a sequel to the religious, cultural and economic subjugation of the Tibetans that gathered unstoppable momentum in the early 1980s. And while nothing can excuse the abuses committed in both Tibet and Xinjiang, they are partially explained by Chinese paranoia about security on its western frontiers. Tibet straddles the long-troubled frontier with rival India, and Xinjiang with its predominantly Muslim population is perceived as a potential gateway for separatist Islamic extremism.

And however shocking the trampling of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong has been over the past two years, it is not surprising that Beijing has torn up its agreement to respect the autonomy of its Special Administrative Region under the “one country, two systems” formula. The only real surprise is that it took so long to do so — and then only after sustained protests in the territory posed a fundamental challenge to its sovereignty.

When British prime minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Beijing in 1984 to toast with Deng Xiaoping the signing of Britain’s agreement to hand back control of its colony to the communist regime, it was window dressing for what at heart was a Faustian pact with illusory benefits for the bedevilled Iron Lady. The bottom line was that Hong Kong was real estate stolen from imperial China by the opium-peddling Victorian British, and the expiry of Britain’s ninety-nine-year lease over the New Territories in 1997 made its continued rule of the entrepot untenable beyond that date.

The West’s anguish and indignation over Beijing’s ruthless suppression of democracy in Hong Kong ignores or is ignorant of the inconvenient truth that the enclave was snatched by rapacious imperialists who governed by decree for most of their reign and showed racist disdain for the rights of their Cantonese subjects. The rule of British law might have enabled Hong Kong to flourish, but the prosperity of the colonial masters was always paramount.

The exhaustive Hong Kong negotiations in the early 1980s were essentially a game in which the Chinese held an unbeatable hand and the British knew they must ultimately fold. The Sino-British agreement that emerged was a fig leaf for Britain that was destined to wilt unless democracy took root on the Chinese mainland — a possibility crushed when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

In the face of the deteriorating security outlook in North Asia, the challenges for Australian diplomacy today are the same as they have always been: to stand up for our principles while recognising the limits of our ability to exert diplomatic pressure, to respond proportionately to perceived challenges, and to act in concert with our allies to maintain regional peace and stability. Above all, we need to understand that while the actions of the Chinese regime make it difficult, if not impossible, to be close friends, it is sheer folly to turn it into an enemy.

At a time when deft diplomacy is needed more than ever, though, the skills that have enabled Australia to navigate the tricky relationship with our most important trading partner appear largely to have deserted us. The Morrison government’s reckless decision early last year to jump ahead of its allies in demanding an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19 — with Morrison advocating that the World Health Organization have “weapons inspector powers” to investigate future outbreaks — infuriated Beijing with the still-unproven implication that it was covering up its culpability in the pandemic, or worse. The retaliation against Australian coal, barley and other exports was swift and devastating — and largely avoidable, had we taken the prudent step of acting in concert with our allies in reasonably seeking answers to the genesis of the pandemic.

Since that turning point, things have gone from bad to worse. The expulsion seven months ago of the last Australian journalists in China was at first interpreted as yet another heavy-handed provocation by Beijing, but it is now clear that it was in fact a tit-for-tat response to another apparent overreaction by Australian authorities.

In late June last year, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation officers conducted simultaneous early morning raids on the homes of four Chinese journalists based in Australia, as part of an investigation of alleged Chinese political interference. One of the journalists, believed to be Yang Jingzhong, the Australian bureau chief of the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said his daughter had been traumatised during the seven-hour dawn raid by ten ASIO agents, during which his mobile phone, computer, iPad and work documents were seized. The four journalists, who have since left Australia, insisted they had done nothing wrong and, almost a year after the raids, no specific allegations against them have been made public.

At almost every turn, Scott Morrison’s interventions on China-related issues have been clumsy, uninformed and counterproductive. His recent pronouncements about Taiwan (confusing its status with that of Hong Kong and then doubling down on the blunder when called out) have revealed a man out of his depth in managing a relationship that requires diplomatic finesse. And recent public speculation by Morrison’s new defence minister, Peter Dutton, and others in the government about the possibility of armed conflict across the Taiwan Strait has broken a fundamental diplomatic taboo and reportedly raised alarm in Washington, Tokyo and Taipei itself. As former prime minister Kevin Rudd has rightly, if self-servingly, observed, “This government lacks the temperament to manage the profoundly complex national security challenges that lie ahead.”

The loss of experienced Australian journalists reporting from China — and the loss of Chinese journalists reporting from Australia — has made a volatile situation even more dangerous. Those Australian journalists, and the many other foreign journalists evicted from China in recent years, were the ones best equipped to report with expertise and balance, the ones who often spoke the language, the ones with Chinese contacts and friendships who understood that China is a far more complex, sophisticated and diverse society than its monolithic leadership implies.

In this vacuum of informed reporting and analysis it is harder to temper the fearmongering, and sometimes warmongering, of lightweight partisan journalists peddling conspiracy theories in the mainstream Australian media. We risk a situation in which the media — and its social media echo chamber — serves to worsen the bilateral crisis. The journalism that drove us closer to China could become the journalism that drives us further apart. •

The post Beijing blackout appeared first on Inside Story.

The numbered paragraphs of the communiqué of that twenty-second ministerial meeting ranged over refugees, drugs, southern Africa, Afghanistan, Asia-Pacific cooperation, disarmament, the search for a settlement in Kampuchea… on and on it ran. By the time I got to the end of the eighty-seven-paragraph document my puzzlement had turned to astonishment. That 4 July statement said nothing at all about what had happened in Tiananmen a month earlier.

The word “China” wasn’t used, although paragraph 12 welcomed the Sino-Soviet summit that had been held during Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May. Not a word, though, about the bloody crushing of the democracy movement in June, which will always be the grim counterpoint to that November’s fall of the Berlin wall.

With document in hand, I wandered over to one of the senior correspondents gathered in Bandar Seri Begawan. His ranking as an old Asia hand had been established at breakfast when he’d piled sliced chilli on his plate. The advice he offered was similarly astringent: “You’re not in Canberra any more, mate. This is ASEAN. The silences say as much as the statements.”

ASEAN had only six member countries in those days, so the next time the foreign ministers gathered in Brunei was in 1995. By then, the ASEAN Regional Forum had been established, so this was a much larger jamboree, with foreign ministers coming from all over the Asia-Pacific.

China was a presence as well as a factor. My most vivid memory of the gathering was the ceremony to enrol Vietnam as the seventh member of ASEAN. That country’s foreign minister, Nguyen Manh Cam, walked on stage to be greeted by the other ASEAN foreign ministers. Sitting impassively in the front row of the audience was his Chinese counterpart, Qian Qichen.

As the Vietnamese minister turned to face the audience his eyes went directly to the Chinese minister. Vietnamese grin met icy Chinese stare. Here was a moment with a Sino-Vietnamese prehistory of thousands of years. Here, too, was a triumph of Southeast Asian regionalism: a grouping born amid fear of communism during Vietnam’s war was welcoming communist Vietnam into its midst.

In my notebook, I scribbled “China–Vietnam eyes lock.” Below that I wrote some commentary (which never made it to air) conjuring a version of Nguyen beaming out a message in incongruous Cockney-speak: “Hey, me old China, look at me with all my new mates.” Qian’s stony response I imagined as: “You’ll keep, and so will they.”

Journalists often start with a great headline, and two fine journalists have hit on the same defining image — China’s “shadow” — to frame what Southeast Asia faces. Murray Hiebert and Sebastian Strangio confront the same quandary: how does Southeast Asia embrace all that China offers without being crushed by its embrace? Each of them describes how China is flooding all aspects of Southeast Asia’s existence — how, in dealing with the push and the pull, the ASEAN countries are infinitely careful in talking to the giant, much less touching it.

The scale of China’s economic impact can be seen in Chinese tourism: twenty-eight million Chinese citizens travelled to ASEAN countries in 2017, Strangio reports, up from 2.2 million in 2000, making China the region’s number one source of foreign arrivals. And he gives that figure an Australian dimension: “In addition to Thailand, mainland Chinese are the top visitors to Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore, and recently surpassed Australians to become the number one nationality visiting the Indonesian island of Bali.”

In Bali, China now matters more than Australia. That’s a long shadow.

China is the largest trading partner of every country in Southeast Asia, Hiebert writes, and policymakers “see their economic destinies hitched to China.” But while China’s “economic miracle” helped propel growth to its south, he adds, Southeast Asia “is determined never to let itself be dominated,” viewing China with a mixture of “expectation and fear, aspiration and frustration.” How to navigate a destiny hitched to China without being dominated?

China is resurgent and assertive, says Hiebert:

China’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia prompts a blend of anticipation and uneasiness among its smaller neighbours as Beijing mounts its drive south with an assortment of tools. China’s toolbox is loaded with diverse instruments from “soft power” — economic, cultural, and education diplomacy — to “hard power,” ranging from threats of military force in the South China Sea to arms sales and military exchanges. Some of Beijing’s tactics verge on “sharp power” when it aims at distraction and manipulation in the political and information space.

Strangio writes of Southeast Asia’s “fraught” attitude to China’s rise as their most important economic partner, making it “their thorniest foreign policy challenge.” The region needs China, but respect for China’s power is flavoured by distrust:

Its wooing of the region was based not on natural attraction, nor on appeals to its rich and fascinating history. These various initiatives rather involved variations on China’s predominant theme: its economic strength. True to the Chinese Communist Party’s materialist roots, many Chinese strategists have assumed that China’s economic weight would exert an inevitable and irresistible pull on the small nations along its periphery… if a foreign country’s policy ran counter to its interests, China could cut off trade or employ other forms of economic coercion. Buried in China’s talk of mutual prosperity was a stark choice: flourish within a Chinese orbit, or languish outside of it.

China has a “tin ear” for public opinion, says Strangio. It is adroit at dealing with states and governments but “congenitally clumsy at its dealings with people.” Thus, Beijing rages that any opposition it encounters must be caused by “recalcitrance, ill-intention, or the malign influence of outside powers.”

China’s missteps, writes Hiebert, must be set against the huge advances it has made by using its “physical proximity, its mountains of cash, and the fact that it does not hector countries on democracy and human rights.” For Strangio, the ten countries of Southeast Asia have all been “promiscuous in tilting, balancing and hedging their bets.” Collectively, ASEAN has tried “to bind the Chinese Gulliver with a thousand multilateral threads,” to socialise it to the ASEAN way of “glacial consensus-based diplomacy.”

While ASEAN tries to mediate and socialise, China looms as the great change agent. “As China’s power increases,” Strangio writes, “it thus poses fundamental challenges to ASEAN’s cohesion, and perhaps, in time to the very idea of ‘Southeast Asia’ itself.”

In the Dragon’s Shadow and Under Beijing’s Shadow are ambitious books on the same big theme. Two fine reporters from different generations, both beguiled by Southeast Asia, apply all the tools of the trade to try to capture this cornucopia of countries.

Sebastian Strangio plunged in as a reporter on the Phnom Penh Post in 2008, after being “initiated into the journalism racket” as co-editor of the student magazine Farrago while doing his BA and master’s degree in international politics at Melbourne University. He’s now Southeast Asia editor of the Diplomat.

Murray Hiebert’s enchantment began when he was an aid worker in Vietnam in the closing days of the war. A career as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review included postings in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. He’s now with the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Strangio and Hiebert follow in the tracks of other journalists who have tried to cram modern Southeast Asia between covers. Reporters have been heading to the region for headlines since it was declared Britain’s “South East Asia Command” during the second world war. (The sardonic American view was that the initials SEAC stood for Saving England’s Asia Colonies.)

It takes journalistic brio and brashness — plus skill fuelled by stamina — to find unifying themes in this exhilarating contrast of countries. As Strangio comments, the term “Southeast Asia” suggests a “misleading degree of unity” for a region of bewildering diversity: Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic and Confucian-Taoist.

The tradition that Hiebert and Strangio are updating got going during the Vietnam war with two books — The Last Confucian: Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and the West (1964), by Denis Warner of the Melbourne Herald, and South-east Asia in Turmoil (1965), by Brian Crozier of the Economist. The London Observer’s Far East correspondent for a quarter of a century, Dennis Bloodworth, wove the magic twice, with An Eye for the Dragon: Southeast Asia Observed, published in 1970, and a revised edition in 1987.

Then, in the decade after the United States departed, Nayan Chanda from the Far Eastern Economic Review explained the third Indo-China war in Brother Enemy: The War After the War (1986). The Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett was already churning out books from the communist side (giving what he called the “anti-imperialist” view), including Grasshoppers and Elephants: Why Vietnam Fell (1977), The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle (1981), and his memoir At the Barricades: The Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist (1980).

Michael Vatikiotis (initially with the BBC, then correspondent and eventually editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review) produced two impressive efforts in different periods, with Political Change in Southeast Asia: Trimming the Banyan Tree (1996) and Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia (2017). (Inside Story’s review of Blood and Silk headlined ASEAN as a “bloody miracle.”)

After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Victor Mallet of the Financial Times weighed in with The Trouble with Tigers: The Rise and Fall of Southeast Asia. The journalist-turned-historian Martin Stuart-Fox makes the list with his 2003 book, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade and Influence. That sits on my bookshelf alongside Milton Osborne’s Southeast Asia: An Introductory History, which has gone through eleven editions since 1979, and The Paramount Power: China and the Countries of Southeast Asia (2006).

In this century, the books see the region as a cockpit for great-power contest and potential clash: Robert Kaplan with Asia’s Cauldron: the South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (2014), Humphrey Hawksley’s Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion (2018), and Richard Javad Heydarian’s The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery (2019).

Strangio and Hiebert follow the journo’s tradition with vivid headlines and a mix of on-the-spot observation, travel tales and big-picture geopolitics. Writing about Southeast Asian countries as a group takes you only a little way along the understanding track, so Strangio and Hiebert trek the country-by-country trail, delivering much of the meat in separate chapters on each of the diverse cast of ASEAN.

Strangio argues that Vietnam’s fate reflects “in highly concentrated form” that of the region: “Today’s Vietnam stands at the confluence of the various strategic challenges pressing in on Southeast Asia. It faces China’s expanding power both on land and on water, and is impacted by its stranglehold on the upper Mekong River and its actions in the South China Sea.” Some superpower tensions work to Vietnam’s advantage, he says, and Hanoi’s greatest hedge against China is its former wartime enemy, the United States.

Hiebert starts his chapter on that country with a 2015 quote from China’s leader, Xi Jinping: “China and Vietnam have the same political system, share the same [ideals] and belief[s], have common strategic interests, we should be good comrades [with] mutual trust and mutual assistance.”

Vietnam might be China’s largest trading partner in Southeast Asia, Hiebert notes, yet this is an intimacy beset by constant strains:

China’s relations with Vietnam are more fraught than with any other Southeast Asian nation, given the more than two millennia of history between the countries. This history also colors the perceptions of Vietnamese people about China, even though Vietnam has more traits in common with China than any of its neighbours. More than two-thirds of Vietnamese words are borrowed from Chinese, and both countries are heavily influenced by Confucianism.

Both authors note the advances China has made in Thailand since the 2014 military coup. “Thailand today has the deepest and most longstanding military ties with China of any country in Southeast Asia,” Hiebert writes, “even though Thailand is one of five US treaty allies in Asia.” US–Thai relations began to rebound under Donald Trump, writes Strangio, because his administration downgraded the promotion of liberal values in favour of a transactional approach: “Thailand’s improving ties with Washington demonstrated how a cultivated flexibility and ambivalence could act as a reliable bulwark of Thai sovereignty.”

Like Thailand and Vietnam, says Strangio, Myanmar seeks balance, an “update of its older neutralism” for a new era of superpower competition:

Unlike many Western governments, [China] is willing to engage Burma’s troubled realities in order to push forward vital strategic interests. As long as they persist, Burma’s dynamics of ethnic conflict and division will therefore continue to exert a steady pressure in China’s direction. All this puts the Burmese government in a liminal bind. Apprehensive about China’s intentions, yet unable to escape its magnetic power, it remains stuck partway between the poles of fear and attraction, moving only so far in one direction before events send it sliding back.

Hiebert notes that China has worked hard on its “prickly” connections with Myanmar’s military. Despite decades of dependence on China for aid, trade and investment, he says, Myanmar’s “fiercely nationalist population” is wary and distrustful of Beijing’s intentions. “As the numbers of Chinese migrants in northern Myanmar soars,” he writes, “locals wonder why China does not do more to stem the flow and are anxious that the growing Chinese population will transform the country’s ethnic makeup and social dynamics in the decades to come. In Myanmar (like in Vietnam), China has its work cut out in overcoming the deep anti-Chinese sentiment and distrust of Beijing.”

China’s closest ally in ASEAN is Cambodia. But it wasn’t always so. As Hiebert writes, Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen called China “the root of everything that is evil” in 1988. By 2006, though, Hun Sen was describing China as Cambodia’s “most trusted friend.” “Fear of Vietnam and Thailand may have been a factor pushing Hun Sen into the arms of Beijing early on,” writes Hiebert, “but more recently he appears to be seeking China’s help to serve as a counterweight to the West. He is looking to China to prop up his rule and, from his point of view, hopefully keep his family in power for the long term — and with the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.” Having ruled for three decades, Hun Sen is grooming his son Hun Manet to take over.

Strangio says Cambodia embraces China because it is more worried about its immediate neighbours. For most of Cambodia’s history, he notes, the greatest threats to its survival were from Thailand and Vietnam, not the more distant China:

Although Cambodia presents an extreme case compared to the other Southeast Asian countries, it showcases China’s main appeals to the region’s governments: its deep pockets and broad adherence to the norms of national sovereignty and “non-interference.” This is especially the case for small developing nations, which often fail to command much attention in far-off Western capitals. The Sino-Cambodian relationship also highlights the divergent ways in which ASEAN states see China. What for one is a threatening presence is for another a protective giant from the distant north. For small countries like Cambodia, for which dependency has been an historical norm, choosing the form of one’s dependency — one’s patron — was one way of exercising agency in a dangerous world. With some notable differences, much the same is also true for Laos, the other small satellite being drawn into close orbit around the red planet.

For Laos, says Strangio, China’s technical prowess is expressed in the railway due to be completed this year. The link from the Chinese town of Boten to Vientiane is 417 kilometres long, including 198 kilometres of tunnels and sixty-one kilometres of bridges: “These engineering challenges have done much to contribute to its controversial $6.2 billion price tag, equivalent to around 37 percent of Laos’s GDP in 2016 — or around $15 million per kilometer.”

The standard-gauge single-track line (carrying trains with a top speed of 160 kilometres an hour) serves China’s plan for an Indo-China railway running all the way to Singapore. Along with China’s Mekong dams, it is part of what Hiebert calls “the dramatic transformation” of the Lao landscape. Chinese companies are investing in plantations near the border, where “giant swathes of farmland are covered with rubber trees, bananas, pumpkins, and other crops for export to China.” Laos is “sacrificing sovereignty for prosperity,” Hiebert observes, although Laos has a bit more political space than Cambodia because of its deep ties with Vietnam.

The money–sovereignty equation has gyrated in Malaysia, where China’s role reached new heights under the now-disgraced leader, Najib Razak. In betting on Najib, Strangio observes, Beijing took “a long position on an over-leveraged asset.” As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, though, “Malaysia’s cronyism and patronage could not simply be put down to Chinese influence”; its leaders have always operated “a tight nexus between politics and business and the distribution of patronage.” Chinese money is only one element of the amazing political rollercoaster of recent Malaysian politics.

Across the causeway, meanwhile, Singapore struggles with how Beijing views the only country in Southeast Asia with a majority ethnic Chinese population. Hiebert quotes the warning of Singapore’s former top diplomat, Bilahari Kausikan, that multiracial Singapore must resist having a “Chinese identity” imposed by a China that “does not just want you to comply with its wishes” but “more fundamentally… wants to shape your thinking so that you will do [what] it wants without having to be told what to do.”

In 1979, Strangio notes, Singapore adopted Mandarin Chinese as one of its official languages in place of regional Chinese dialects like Hokkien and Teochew, with the aim of creating a unified Chinese community “from the country’s myriad dialect and clan allegiances.” The Speak Mandarin campaign built a linguistic bridge, Strangio writes, increasing the reach and penetration of Chinese broadcasting networks. Add to this the arrival over the past two decades of hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese who have settled in Singapore as part of a migration drive to boost the birthrate.

Hiebert labels the Philippines’ approach to China as “bipolar,” not least because of the way the country swings between the poles of the United States and China. The deep emotion in these swings is directed at the United States: the former colony is Asia’s flamboyant American replica, a nation shaped by Catholic beliefs and Hollywood habits. President Rodrigo Duterte’s election in 2016 signalled a major turn away from the United States, highlighted when Duterte declared that he’d “set aside” Manila’s victory in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which judged China’s claims in the South China Sea to have no legal basis.

Beijing’s disregard for The Hague ruling is matched by the lack of much regard or reward for Manila, Hiebert writes. “Despite Duterte’s pivot towards China, Beijing has given him anything but an easy ride in the South China Sea. The list of China’s continuing encroachment against the Philippines is long and almost nonstop.”

While Duterte has smashed a taboo with his rough treatment of Washington, says Strangio, that doesn’t mean the Philippines will drift fully into China’s orbit. Filipinos will elect a new president in May next year, and the dance will start anew: “The very things that granted Beijing its opening — the nation’s weak institutions and idiosyncratic, personalised political culture — would limit its ability to maintain influence over the long term. The same political structures that gave Duterte the power to wrench foreign policy in the direction of China would give his successors the power to reverse course.”

Characteristically, neighbouring Brunei is the quietest of the claimants in the South China Sea, showing what Hiebert calls “a high level of equivalence to the reclamation activities of all parties in the dispute.” ASEAN’s smallest member (population 430,000) was the last to normalise diplomatic relations with China, in 1991. Economic ties were slow to take off, Hiebert writes, but by 2018 China was Brunei’s largest trading partner, its largest foreign investor and its most important source of tourists.

But signs indicate China’s attempts at behind-the-scenes influence. Brunei’s ruler, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, offered no explanation for an abrupt cabinet reshuffle in 2018 that replaced six top ministers. “But Brunei-based diplomats attributed the move to allegations of corruption,” writes Hiebert, “including senior officials granting family members contracts linked to Chinese-backed projects.”

From ASEAN’s smallest to largest member, the need is the same — to juggle and balance. As Hiebert writes, “Indonesia has managed in recent years to do what its neighbours bordering the South China Sea have had trouble doing: stand up to an increasingly assertive China without incurring the full wrath of Beijing and while still keeping the Chinese investment pipeline open.” Like previous investors in Indonesia, China is frustrated “by how slow it has been to get projects off the ground,” while President Joko Widodo “has been surprised at how much blowback he got at home for becoming so friendly with China.”

Because Indonesia is a G20 member that controls almost half of Southeast Asia’s economy, says Hiebert, it has enough strategic heft to hold both the United States and China at arm’s length. Lingering Indonesian distrust holds back military ties, he adds, and China’s crackdown against Muslim Uighurs hinders any attempt at “courting hearts and minds” in the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population.

As the quintessential “Indo-Pacific” nation, Strangio says, Indonesia has led ASEAN’s effort to formulate a response to the new construct of the Indo-Pacific. The US policy pushback at China is built on its call for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Indonesia took the lead in drafting ASEAN’s “Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” steering a middle course between the giants.

Strangio says Indonesia’s “sometimes toothless multilateralism has given rise to the perennial claim that Indonesia has failed to evolve into the regional power that its geographic and demographic size might suggest. To many outside observers — particularly in the US — it has long been conventional wisdom that Indonesia ‘punches below its weight.’”

But Indonesia’s very mildness — its reluctance to throw its weight around — is at the heart of what has made ASEAN a success. “Indonesia’s approach to the mounting regional tensions is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future,” writes Strangio. “Despite its maritime geography, the orientation of the Indonesian state remains overwhelmingly inward-looking, consumed with the challenge of unifying its fissiparous regions and delivering prosperity to its 267 million citizens.” In the end, he says, “it may well be decisions made in Beijing and Washington, rather than in Jakarta, that determine whether Indonesia holds to its middle path, or runs aground on the reefs.”

Whether we face a “new cold war” or a “new hot peace,” Southeast Asia is a vital arena for the great US–China contest that is just getting started. The era of engagement fades; superpower rivalry returns. Great power challenges great power. The world’s biggest economy faces off against the second-biggest. And now a pandemic accelerates history. “If power corrupts, then crisis reveals” is an aphorism for our times from Southeast Asia analyst Huong Le Thu, who says the region sees that it can’t rely on either the United States or China as the “external protector.” If non-alignment is the answer, it will need a lot of work, not just words.

Strangio judges that Covid-19 will not alter China’s central role, based on the fundamentals of size and proximity: “Southeast Asian nations would find themselves in the same conflicted position as before, in which apprehension about China’s power was balanced by a strong stake in its continued stability and growth.”

Hiebert may be based in Washington, but he’s clear on the size of the challenge to the United States and the limits to Washington’s power: “Because of their proximity to China and their dependence on its mammoth economy, no country in Southeast Asia would back a US effort to try to push China off its recently constructed outposts in the South China Sea. Many regional countries also have lingering doubt over the US longterm security commitment to the region.”

Strangio says the “erratic nature of American engagement has been compounded by the increasingly zero-sum language with which some US officials were framing American competition with China.”

Where Hiebert describes a region not willing to back the United States in the South China Sea, Strangio casts that in wider terms, arguing that “Southeast Asia is too economically intertwined with China to enlist in a US-led coalition aimed at curbing its rise.”

Strangio writes of Southeast Asia’s understanding of the flaws of the two giants as much as their power. The sharp turn in American policy towards China, he says, “stems as much from American anxieties and self-perceptions as it does from Chinese actions.” China’s relationship with Southeast Asia is based on “an increasingly tense contradiction between the Chinese Communist Party’s self-image as an aggrieved victim of Western designs and the reality of its own burgeoning imperial potential.”

China’s primary challenge to the status quo in the Indo-Pacific, Strangio writes, is not military or ideological but economic. Understanding that core fact, he says, should shape Washington’s response: “An effective American approach will be one that addresses the region’s development challenges and increases its ability both to avoid an unhealthy overdependence on China and to stand up to Beijing when necessary.”

The hot peace in Southeast Asia will be more about dollars than democracy. That reality rests on the values and interests of the ten governments (if not their peoples), as Strangio says:

If governments in Southeast Asia happen to be corrupt, illiberal, or non-democratic, that says less about China than about the particular conditions — political, economic, and social — of the countries in question. The region’s authoritarianism might be a worrying phenomenon, but it is an overwhelmingly Southeast Asian one. Instead, the Chinese government presents itself as a conservative defender of national sovereignty and self-determination: two ideas with deep resonance in postcolonial Southeast Asia. Unlike the US and many Western powers, China seldom lectures ASEAN governments on how to run their societies, and asserts the right of every nation to choose its own political path.

Choosing their own path now involves constant calculations about when and where to follow China. The shifting calculus of power means that Southeast Asia, as always, wants the United States to help play a balancing role.

Both books illustrate the region’s reluctance to line up too forcefully with America to set the balance. ASEAN’s constant, loud refrain is that it must not be forced to choose between Washington and Beijing. Beneath the not-choosing language, though, Southeast Asia has an expanding area of no-go zones. Implicit choices are being made, as much by a refusal to act as by any ability to act.

China’s gravitational and magnetic effects — to push and pull simultaneously — play differently on each nation of Southeast Asia. But China puts new meaning into an old line for ASEAN: hang together, or hang separately.

So powerful has China become, it draws a diverse region together with a common cause and a united interest: the need to embrace China without being crushed, to navigate a destiny hitched to China without being dominated. •

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So far, the response of rich-country governments to Covid-19 has contrasted starkly with the response of their counterparts in poor countries. Rich-country governments have increased spending and cut taxes by an average of 10 per cent of GDP since Covid-19 began, and extended similar amounts as loans and guarantees. Poor-country governments have increased spending and cut taxes by just 1.7 per cent of GDP — less than one-fifth that of their rich counterparts — and increased loans and guarantees by a mere 0.25 per cent of GDP — one-fortieth that of rich countries.

Why can’t poor countries spend as much as rich ones? The obvious answer is that they have less money. But remember that most of the extra spending in the rich world is covered by deficit financing: they don’t have the money either. It’s true that poor countries struggle to raise as much tax revenue as rich countries: households and businesses have less income for the government to tax, and the fact that much of their economic activity is more informal means it’s harder to collect and police taxpaying in the first place. But there is another vital reason why poor countries can’t spend as much as rich ones: they are treated fundamentally differently by international financial markets.

Governments that spend more than they receive in taxes usually borrow the shortfall from the public by issuing bonds. But when the public doesn’t have much saved to begin with (as is the case in most developing countries), governments need to borrow from overseas.

This is not unusual. Australia has done it for decades. Because of our strong institutions, foreign investors are happy to lend our governments, banks, businesses and households lots of money, for long periods, at low interest rates, denominated in our own currency. For developing countries, however, it’s often the opposite. When they want to borrow from overseas, they often find they can only borrow small amounts, for short periods, denominated in someone else’s currency (usually US dollars) unless they are willing to pay exorbitant interest rates.

This creates financial risks. The first is called a currency mismatch. If you borrow in a currency that’s different from the one in which you get your income, there’s a risk that, if the exchange rate falls (due to a global pandemic, for example), your foreign debts get bigger while the income you use to service them gets smaller. Investors, fearing default, withdraw their money from the developing country, pushing the exchange rate down even further, causing even more debt and triggering the very default they feared.

The other financial risk is called a maturity mismatch. This happens when a country borrows short-term to undertake long-term investment or spending. Because these short-term debts must be refinanced regularly, the country risks being unable to access international financial markets (due to a global pandemic, for example) to roll over its debt. It either defaults on its loans or is forced to repay the full amount, which may or may not be possible.

Both these factors act as a handbrake on how much developing-country governments can spend in a global pandemic, placing them in an impossible situation. If they don’t increase spending, their people suffer, their economy suffers and then their people suffer even more. But if they take on too much debt, they risk spooking investors and causing a self-fulfilling panic that leads to an inability to repay their debts and, ultimately, a debt and/or currency crisis.

Almost half of the world’s low-income countries are opting for the former: they are projected to cut total government spending in 2020 compared with 2019 levels. This is a shockingly bad thing to do in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But many governments have little choice. Half of the world’s developing countries are already spending more than 20 per cent of all their government revenues servicing debt and have been deemed by the IMF to be in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress, as of September 2020.

What to do? With too many developing countries too close to their debt limits, two things need to happen: their governments need to get their current debt levels further below their limit, and then they need to work on ways to increase that limit so that, like rich countries, they can rely on debt to support their populations during these difficult times.

Reducing the existing amount of debt means rich countries need to suspend, reduce or (ideally) forgive the debts of poor countries. The G20’s debt suspension initiative is a good start, but it’s too small and it only kicks the can down the road. The sheer size of the Covid-19 challenge means that the only sustainable solution is debt forgiveness, not debt suspension.

Second, rich countries can help ease the international financial pressures on developing countries to allow them to spend more. The way to stop the vicious cycle — investors panic, withdraw their money, push down the exchange rate, inflate foreign-denominated debts, and then panic more — is to ensure developing countries have access to the foreign currencies they need to service those external debts.

A series of virtually cost-free measures — expanded lending by the Asian Development Bank and its international counterparts; bilateral stand-by loans like Australia’s facility for Indonesia; expanded currency swap lines, which allow a developing country’s central bank to temporarily swap its currency for that of a developed country’s central bank — can be facilitated by rich-country governments. They would reassure international financial markets that a given country will be able to service its debts, thus killing off the self-fulfilling cycle and changing the way international financial markets treat that country. And they would reduce the cost of developing countries’ debts and let them do what the rest of the world is doing: spend more to fight Covid-19.

The fight against Covid-19 will be won or lost in the world’s developing countries. As rich countries like Australia get on top of the pandemic, they need to start focusing more on what’s happening in the rest of the world. The progress in reducing global poverty has been too important for it to be lost now. •

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One example came in Crikey last week, when Canberra columnist Bernard Keane wrote that “Porter’s authorisation of the prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Collaery for revealing ASIS’s crime is intended to punish them for exposing Downer and the Howard government. Porter’s conduct in the prosecution, however, is designed to cover up Downer’s role.”

If that has been the motive, it has been an abject failure. Nearly every article about the case repeats the assumption that the bugging operation was not only authorised by Downer but also probably approved by Howard. And oblique support for that supposition came in an interview just given by the present director-general of ASIS, Paul Symon, to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and posted on ASPI’s website. The interviewer, former senior ABC journalist Graeme Dobell (an Inside Story contributor) didn’t specifically ask about the Dili operation.

Symon told Dobell that ASIS has three functions: collecting intelligence, liaising with foreign intelligence services, and what he called “disruptions or activities that are probably going to be enabled by good intelligence.” It could be “disrupting a terrorist or some type of activity where there is an action that occurs,” he said, but it required high-level authorisation. “Those activities I can’t authorise, they have to be authorised by the [foreign] minister,” who “also needs to consult other ministers, including the prime minister, who may be affected or impacted by those activities that we do.”

The Dili operation involved ASIS technicians purporting to be an Australian aid team refurbishing Timor-Leste’s cabinet room and other senior ministerial offices. There, they planted listening devices capable of transmitting audio to a nearby listening post in a floating hotel, for recording and transmission to Canberra.

The assumption has been that Timor-Leste’s tactics in the maritime boundary negotiations were the main target. Those talks were extremely heated, with Downer eventually pressuring the country’s then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, into signing a deal that split revenue from the Great Sunrise offshore gas field fifty–fifty between Australia and Timor-Leste and deferred settlement of a permanent maritime boundary.

Given the risk to Australia’s international standing and bargaining position, is it likely to have been a routine intelligence-gathering operation authorised by then ASIS chief David Irvine off his own bat? Or was it a major “disruption” operation requiring Downer’s ministerial approval and possibly a referral to the prime minister and other members of the cabinet’s national security committee? (Its members at that time were treasurer Peter Costello, defence minister Robert Hill, attorney-general Philip Ruddock and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone.)

The widespread assumption is that the buck went at least as far as Downer. As Spencer Zifcak, professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, wrote in the Conversation, for example: “The prosecutions arose from the disclosure of information related to a covert ASIS spying operation — the bugging of the cabinet offices of Timor-Leste. The operation was authorised by Alexander Downer, then foreign minister, in 2004.”

Many commentaries have drawn an invidious line from the bugging to the fact that Downer’s department head, the late Ashton Calvert, joined the board of Woodside Petroleum, heading the Greater Sunrise development consortium, soon after retiring in 2005, and that Downer himself became a consultant to Woodside after he left politics in 2007.

Disclosure of the ASIS operation occurred after the officer directing it, Witness K, protested internally in 2008 and was guided, first, to the inspector-general of intelligence and security, and thence to Bernard Collaery, a former ACT attorney-general entrusted to handle official secrets.

The last step in that chain involved one of the intelligence community’s more bizarre failures to connect dots. Collaery was also a long-time legal adviser to Timor-Leste’s founding president, Xanana Gusmão. When the Dili bugging was leaked to the media — it is unclear by whom — it became a wedge for the Timorese to reopen the maritime treaty on the grounds of Australia’s “bad faith” negotiations.

Despite an ASIO raid on Collaery’s office in 2013, and despite the seizure of Witness K’s passport to prevent him from testifying, Timor-Leste managed to drag Australia into formal conciliation proceedings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Australia eventually caved in, conceding a new deal giving Timor-Leste 70 to 80 per cent of Greater Sunrise revenues. The deal was signed in March 2018 and ratified in August last year.

While this was going on, Commonwealth prosecutors working on evidence collected about Collaery and Witness K drew up charges under intelligence secrecy laws. But George Brandis, federal attorney-general until he departed for London as Australian high commissioner in December 2017, refused to give the necessary authorisation to prosecute.

Possibly he thought that such a prosecution would be seen to confirm the bugging. Perhaps he felt it was a bad look in front of the eminent judges at The Hague to be prosecuting a lawyer and a key witness for the opposing side in an ongoing case. Or perhaps he realised a prosecution would only give more attention to a sorry example of dirty tricks.

But his successor seems to have had no such qualms. In June 2018, six months after taking over as attorney-general, Christian Porter gave the green light to the director of public prosecutions to charge Collaery and Witness K with conspiracy to communicate secrets to Timor-Leste between 2008 and 2013. More than two years later, the pre-trial proceedings are still dragging on, with an ACT Supreme Court judge agreeing to Porter’s contention that much of the trial itself will have to be held in camera to avoid damaging the national interest.

Collaery is appealing this requirement. Should he be successful, Porter will undoubtedly have to weigh whether the case is worth pursuing in public. As it is, his department’s bill for outside legal advice had exceeded $3 million by early October.

If his aim is to protect Downer’s reputation, the egg is already all over the former foreign minister’s face. If it’s to protect Downer or any official from criminal offences, the ASIS legislation seems to indemnify everything short of murder as long as it’s committed outside Australia’s jurisdiction. If it’s simply a punitive move to deter others from leaking, a better solution might be to strengthen supervision of intelligence operations to make them accord with Australian values.

In his ASPI interviews, Symon indicated that better supervision had been attempted within ASIS after Witness K raised his objections internally. Asked about the “tensions” experienced by ASIS officers being told to “go overseas and break the rules,” he responded: “It is true that we have in the last ten years or so strengthened ethics. We have an ethics counsellor inside the organisation. We have a number of avenues that if an officer at any point in time feels the sort of tension that you’re describing and wants to opt out, they can.”

If they don’t want to opt out, he went on, they might simply “want to sit down and have a conversation and want to be clear in their own mind about that relationship between ethics, morals and what they’re being asked to do with an agent. So, we’ve embedded that in the organisation and it works very well.”

If this is an admission that Witness K’s misgivings weren’t handled well, and if the system has been fixed, then why pursue exemplary punishment?

The director of public prosecutions, Sarah McNaughton, is not obliged to proceed with any case, but must weigh the prospect of conviction against other factors including the broader public interest. Last month she decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute ABC journalist Dan Oakes over his revelation of war crimes allegedly committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

It’s hard to see the public interest being served by bringing this case to trial. Having the bugging dragged up repeatedly for conjecture and perhaps further disclosures certainly isn’t in the interests of his Coalition colleagues, present and retired, or of ASIS. With the maritime boundary settled, the incident could have been allowed to recede, only half-revealed and not admitted, into history. •

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The ONI chief briefs the prime minister daily, drawing on the agency’s analysis of human intelligence from ASIO and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, signals and cyber intelligence from the Australian Signals Directorate, military intelligence from the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and input from the burgeoning intelligence arms of the federal police, border protection and other federal bodies.

Upgraded from the smaller Office of National Assessments in 2018, the ONI was given an enhanced coordination role after an intelligence review by former foreign affairs department head Michael L’Estrange and former Signals Directorate chief Stephen Merchant. Where the heads of the other agencies report to their ministers (though ASIO’s director-general does traditionally have a direct line to the prime minister on urgent matters), the ONI chief’s daily contact with the PM provides an unusual degree of influence over crucial matters of state.

So should we be alarmed that the newest occupant has been described by the federal opposition as too “partisan”? This is what happened last Friday when Scott Morrison’s office named Andrew Shearer, currently cabinet secretary, as the ONI’s new director-general, replacing veteran diplomat and intelligence official Nick Warner, who is retiring at seventy. Shearer’s five-year term will begin next month.

“Labor has indicated to the prime minister that it does not have confidence in his choice to head the Office of National Intelligence,” an unnamed Labor staffer told journalists, describing Shearer as a “partisan operative.” “He is not an appropriate choice and Mr Morrison should reconsider in the national interest,” she went on. “This position requires public confidence in independent, contested and apolitical assessments of our security.” Beyond that statement, the office of Labor’s shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong says it has no further comment.

While no one doubts Shearer’s abilities, he has certainly cleaved to one side of politics — and one side of that side — in his rapid climb up the Canberra national security pyramid, much more so than his predecessors at the ONA, including Warner, Peter Varghese, Allan Gyngell and Richard Maude, each of whom also had earlier stints on a prime minister’s staff. “There is no doubt that Andrew is a more political appointment, a person who has a deeper background in politics than any of his predecessors,” says a former senior foreign policy official who asked not to be named.

An honours graduate in arts and law from Melbourne University, Shearer’s public service career accelerated after he was transferred from Immigration to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the wake of the Tampa incident in August 2001, after DFAT decided it need more expertise in migration and refugee matters. “He displayed enormous ambition as soon as he arrived,” one former colleague recalls.

Then followed a rapid shuttle around DFAT, the ONA and the office of Coalition defence minister Robert Hill. A Chevening Scholarship from the British foreign office (an anointment later given to Alexander Downer’s daughter Georgina) funded a master degree at Cambridge, and was followed by a posting as minister-counsellor to Australia’s embassy in Washington. There he gained a key mentor, ambassador Michael Thawley, a notably hardline defender of the US alliance.

On returning to Canberra, Shearer joined prime minister John Howard’s staff as an adviser. When Labor took power, he moved to the Lowy Institute, helping add conservative political balance, and then to the Coalition-held Victorian state government as a deputy secretary in charge of further international relations. Rather ironically, in view of current depictions of Daniel Andrews as a Beijing captive, Shearer was behind the opening of representative offices in China.

Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013 brought him back to Canberra as a national security adviser in the prime minister’s office, where Abbott had already appointed Thawley as secretary of his department. Shearer joined Abbott in cultivating Australia’s relationship with Japan, including trying to persuade the navy to buy its new submarines from there. He is thought to be the author of Abbott’s extraordinary speech welcoming the return to office of retro-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe, in which the naval funeral given to the Japanese submariners killed in the 1942 raid on Sydney Harbour was cited as an example of the “chivalry” underlying wartime hostility.

In opposing his appointment, Labor has blamed Shearer for inspiring some of Abbott’s more quixotic proposals — which included sending an Australian army battalion to secure the site of the downed Malaysian airliner in the Ukraine, despatching an army brigade to Syria against Islamic State, and sending the SAS to Nigeria to rescue the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram — though it’s more likely he helped talk Abbott out of these forays.

Abbott lasted two years, and Shearer was out again in Malcolm Turnbull’s clean sweep of staff. He waited things out as a senior adviser on Asia-Pacific security at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, a well-heeled think tank that exchanges personnel with the Pentagon and US foreign policy and security agencies.

From there, Shearer frequently urged the United States, Japan, Australia and India to firm up their strategic ties in the long-mooted “Quadrilateral” arrangement. His articles were published here by the Lowy Institute and the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, of which he has been a fellow for many years.

After it was Turnbull’s turn to be ousted by his colleagues, Shearer returned to Canberra, first as deputy director in the ONI, then as cabinet secretary under Scott Morrison, and now as ONI chief, just as Canberra gets to grip with the result of the US presidential election.

In many ways Shearer’s beliefs are an open book. He remains a strong supporter of tightening the US alliance. He wants to expand the trilateral strategic partnership with Japan. And he would like to draw India more closely into the “Quad,” having castigated Labor for holding back so long over India’s nuclear program and worrying about perceptions Australia was trying to “contain” China. Foreign policy experts tend to agree he is a straight-up-and-down hawkish conservative. (ONI did not respond to a request for an interview with him.)

In his writings from Washington, Shearer tried to put the best light on Donald Trump’s offhand dealings with allies and erratic closeness to strategic opponents. But he is unlikely to be fazed by Biden’s win. Before the election, some seventy former Republican-aligned US security officials, including Shearer’s Center for Strategic and International Studies colleague Michael Green, signed an open letter supporting Biden over Trump.

A Democrat administration would pick up the thread of the post-1945 security order in Asia as best it can in the face of rising Chinese power, but without Trump’s gratuitous insults. When Japan looked like breaking out of this order with the election of Yukio Hatoyama’s “Asia for the Asians” government in 2009, secretary of state Hillary Clinton left it to the Pentagon to freeze him back into line. Nor did Australia under prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard give Hatoyama any encouragement. Gillard eagerly signed the deal with Barack Obama for US marines to be “rotated” every year through Darwin.

In the back of everyone’s minds is the controversy that erupted after it was revealed that the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction — was unfounded. Critics alleged that the ONA had joined its US and British counterparts in either fabricating or “sexing up” evidence of the weapons. In his official inquiry report, Philip Flood, a former head of the ONA and DFAT, cleared Howard of having put “direct or implied pressure [on intelligence agencies] to come to a particular judgment on Iraq for policy reasons, or to bolster the case for war.” But he did conclude that ONA had got it wrong, if not as badly as the US and British agencies.

As Labor says, the ONI’s advice to the government is supposed to be strictly analytical. Under its charter act, the organisation must stand clear of policy and politics, and the director-general can’t be told by the prime minister or anyone else what to write and report.

“The person who is in charge there, to do his job, needs to be completely independent of the policy process, to have no policy preconceptions,” says the former foreign policy official. “That’s the analytical side of ONI, to ensure that always within the government there is a voice looking at the evidence objectively and telling truth to power.”

This was the intention of Justice Robert Hope, who led the royal commission on intelligence and security that recommended the formation of the ONA in 1977. “There were examples of governments which tended to see the world in terms of the prescriptions they had written,” the former official says.

Some other Canberra insiders think the noble, disinterested role has already been vitiated, and the heads of the intelligence agencies are now “players” in setting policy. “The intelligence jobs have become more central and powerful in recent years,” concedes the former official.

But Shearer’s short period as an ONI deputy director didn’t lead to complaints that he was exceeding his brief, the former official added. Nevertheless, the question, and the one that worries Labor, is whether, in his daily briefings of a prime minister not so experienced in world affairs, he can resist steering in certain directions. •

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“If the US doesn’t come to the defence of Taiwan then that will mark the end of the US alliance system in the Asia-Pacific region,” says the Australian National University’s Paul Dibb, who developed the groundbreaking “defence of Australia” doctrine as deputy secretary of the defence department in the 1980s. “Japan and South Korea would be likely to reconsider the option of acquiring their own nuclear weapons.” But if the United States defends Taiwan and Australia refuses to join in, adds Dibb, “that may well threaten the raison d’être for the ANZUS treaty.”

A Chinese victory would end American hegemony in the Western Pacific, breaking the “First Island Chain” from Japan through the Philippines to Indonesia, a series of channels wired by the United States to detect Chinese submarines heading into the Pacific. For Japan, it would bring Chinese power right up against the Okinawa Islands, a tributary state that played off Japan and China until it was annexed by a modernising Japan in the nineteenth century.

A defeat for Beijing, on the other hand, would have unpredictable consequences for China itself, shaking Xi Jinping’s leadership and the Communist Party’s mystique, and creating domestic (as well as global) economic shockwaves — so much so that Beijing could even resort to nuclear weapons to stave off the possibility, a scenario some hawkish Chinese colonels paint in supposedly unofficial writings.

Speculation about the possible scenarios has been feverish in strategic policy circles, where analysts have noted the rising urgency of Xi’s calls for “reunification” of the island, a goal he says can no longer be passed “from generation to generation.” The qualification “peaceful” has been dropped, and Xi has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for war.

In the United States, meanwhile, next Tuesday’s vote won’t necessarily end the political distraction. As Gideon Rachman wrote last week in the Financial Times, “Beijing’s window of opportunity could look even more tempting after the US has voted on November 3 — particularly if the election result is disputed and the country is plunged into a political and constitutional crisis.”

Despite the risks, it almost seems as if Donald Trump has been trying to provoke Beijing into a military gambit. An “October surprise” of this kind might have provided a pretext to claw back his voting base with a show of arms. The recent official visits to Taiwan by his health secretary and a State Department under-secretary were the highest-level — and most provocative — engagements in decades, and this month Washington announced the sale to Taiwan of US$1.8 billion in precision missiles capable of hitting targets on the mainland side of the Taiwan Strait.

So far, a week out from the US vote, Xi has not risen to that bait. Nor do reports suggest a mobilisation of People’s Liberation Army troops of the size necessary to launch an invasion across the 120 kilometre–wide Taiwan Strait. But that doesn’t preclude other more symbolic shows of force against the small islands held by Taiwan along the mainland coast or in the South China Sea, or naval and air probes to wear down Taipei’s forces.

Is defending Taiwan worth the risks? In the early 1980s — a decade after Richard Nixon met Chinese premier Mao Zedong as part of the American president’s grand play against the Soviet Union, and a few years after Washington moved its embassy from Taipei to Beijing — it didn’t seem so. A moribund dictatorship of the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, ruled the island, having regrouped there in 1949 after defeat by the communists on the mainland. Its secret police and underworld friends murdered dissidents at home and overseas.

Mao’s death in 1976 and the rise to power of the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping had begun opening up China. Hu Yaobang, Zhang Zemin and other younger leaders began experimenting with free enterprise. Neither side of the strait was politically liberal or democratic, but the economies, at least, were converging. And hadn’t Taiwan been part of China since 1683?

But then the Taiwanese president Chiang Ching-Kuo began easing the government’s tight grip. He appointed Taiwan-born, US-educated Lee Teng-hui as his vice-president, allowed the opposition Democratic Progressive Party to form in 1986, and lifted martial law, after thirty-eight years, in 1987.

When Chiang died in 1988, Lee became president and pursued political reforms, kicking the members purporting to represent mainland electorates out of the legislature and filling it with Taiwan-elected members. In 1996, when Lee became the first directly elected president in Chinese history, Beijing fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait to express its disapproval. The Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang have alternated in power since Lee retired in 2000.

Mainland China, by contrast, ended the 1980s with the crushing of hopes of political evolution in Tiananmen Square. Since then, it has pursued its version of mixed capitalism under rigid party control with a resolve that has only intensified since Xi took power at the end of 2012. Where Taiwan’s president is limited to two four-year terms, Xi has removed the Communist Party’s previously unwritten limit of two five-year terms.

Any hope of Beijing’s winning over Taiwan’s people with a “one country, two systems” formula has foundered with the clampdown on Hong Kong over the past two years, along with the frequent threats of last-resort military force if Taiwan tries to formalise its de facto independence. Resistance to this pressure helped the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen win a second term as president in January this year with a record margin of the vote. As well as electing its first female leader, Taiwan showed its social liberalisation by legalising same-sex marriage last year, a first in Asia.

Tsai presides over advanced living standards and a semiconductor and computer industry at the commanding heights of technology. Her country is also one of the largest outside investors in the People’s Republic of China, which is also its biggest trading partner.

Taiwanese authorities detected the seriousness of January’s Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan before Beijing did. Its public health measures limited its own case numbers to 571 and deaths to seven. Well-targeted support for domestic consumption is forecast to yield 1.6 per cent economic growth this year, making it one of only two major economies not to contract because of the pandemic (the other being mainland China).

Taiwan, in short, has transformed itself over the last four decades. And certainly as long as Xi Jinping is in charge in Beijing, it is only going to move further away from identifying as primarily Chinese.

America’s ambiguous attitude to Taiwan is evident in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. Strong enough to deter any Chinese military moves — not that Beijing had much power-projection capability back then — it isn’t so strong as to make Taiwan think the United States will let it get away with a move as drastic as declaring independence.

Australia’s attitude is more explicit. Having transferred its embassy to Beijing in 1973, Canberra has long hoped that economic and political reform on the mainland will win over popular opinion in Taiwan and smooth the way for reunification. While it kept open a trade office in Taipei, it has taken the view that the island belonged ultimately to China.

During a period of cross-strait tension in 2004, I asked foreign minister Alexander Downer if the ANZUS treaty would oblige Australia to support US forces in a conflict over Taiwan. The treaty applied only to an attack on one or the other treaty partner, he replied, and was only an obligation to consult. His prime minister, John Howard, side-stepped the same question by declaring the issue “hypothetical.” The curtain of ambiguity came down again.

But some American figures made it clear that Australia would be expected to step up in the event of an armed clash. Much to Howard’s alarm, former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage frequently said that Australians should be “fighting and dying” alongside Americans. When I spoke to academics close to the US Pacific Command in Hawaii after questioning Downer, they said that the Americans would expect both Japan and Australia to lend support, though in a back-up role more than at the forefront of any conflict.

It will be harder for Canberra to hide in the background if conflict erupts now. Australia’s armed forces have been equipped and configured to integrate with the Americans and operate in high-intensity conflicts. Australian officers are embedded in US command structures in the Pacific. Ships, submarines and aircraft are increasingly networked to US commanders. Our room for manoeuvre is sharply diminished.

The same is true for Japan. Its defence forces are also increasingly networked with the Americans, and its recent “reinterpretation” of its constitution allows Japanese forces to join collective security operations outside its own waters. Taiwan, which Japan took from China in the 1895 Sino-Japanese war and ruled until 1945, also has nostalgic appeal among Japanese conservatives. Japan’s new defence minister, Nobuo Kishi, is close to Taiwan, and attended the recent funeral of the former president Lee Teng-hui along with other MPs from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Like recently resigned prime minister Shinzo Abe, he is a grandson of wartime armaments minister and postwar prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.

A win by Joe Biden next week would not lessen American appreciation of Taiwan. “We’re a Pacific power, and we’ll stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values in the Asia-Pacific region,” Biden wrote last week in World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. “That includes deepening our ties with Taiwan,” he added, “a leading democracy, major economy, technology powerhouse — and a shining example of how an open society can effectively contain Covid-19.”

In Australia, only those retired from office are taking forthright positions. Tony Abbott wrote in the Australian in July that it was hard to see Australia standing aside from helping a “fellow liberal democracy.” On the other side, figures such as former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr tend to see Taiwan’s situation in the context of drawing back from Washington. In academia, the strategic “realists” accept as inevitable that China will get the Americans to back off, and don’t dwell on the likely consequences of a Taiwan conquered by the People’s Liberation Army: the purges of “traitors,” the mass “re-education” of millions of others, and the torrent of refugees to Okinawa and the Philippines.

But one analyst who doesn’t accept that inevitability is Paul Dibb. “It is in our interests to stand up for the defence of a successful democracy of twenty-four million people living on an island,” he argued recently. “Does that geography sound familiar to you? If Taiwan is not worth defending, why would anyone come to Australia’s defence?”

While in office, though, our politicians keep behind a thinning smokescreen of ambiguity, as Chinese military capability grows and America tires of foreign wars. •

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Pulled out of line, I was made to wait, then instructed by a guard using a clipped imperial accent to open my suitcases and each of the smaller bags within. I care as much as anyone about security, but I was also nearly eighty years old, blessed with a benign, albeit wrinkled countenance, and late for a meeting. Under my breath, I muttered, “Why me?” More minutes elapsed with the guards just standing around and onlookers whispering among themselves, pointing, and imagining what I must have done to deserve such treatment. Made shameless by frustration, I finally confronted my officious tormenters by pulling rank: “Do you know who I am?” There, I thought, that should do it. “No,” came the sympathetic reply, “but we have doctors here who can help you to figure that out.”

Albright offers a wryly sharp account of how an ex–power player stays in the game, seeking to beat the affliction former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans dubbed “relevance deprivation syndrome.” Her first chapter on being a “former somebody” is titled “Afterlife.”

Another version of the afterlife effect comes when she is rushed to a Washington hospital after falling over and gashing her head. With no identification documents, the emergency room paperwork stalls:

To get things moving again, I said to the woman who had stopped filling out forms, “Perhaps you recognise me. I’m Madeleine Albright, and I used to be secretary of state.” The woman gazed at me with a blank expression, taking in my ragged, bloodstained blouse with leaves sticking to it, ripped stockings, and mud-spattered shoes. “No,” she announced. “Colin Powell is secretary of state.”

I replied, “Yes, you’re right, Colin Powell. But I had the job before him.” A spark of comprehension flickered in the woman’s eyes, “So,” she said, “that means you’re unemployed.”

Not so much unemployed as no longer holding power, the foreign affairs wonk must find other ways to prod at policy — to pronounce, protest and preach. In office, she writes, the player can make waves and create headlines with a few words that merely recycle an old idea. Out of the office, the same player can perform cartwheels in the Champs-Élysées without causing a stir.

Albright brings an outsider’s sensibility to the inner workings of the power game. The child of refugees from Czechoslovakia who fled war and then communism, she arrived in the United States when she was eleven. America’s first female secretary of state writes from her lived experience of how a woman pushes her way to the top table in Washington.

The coffee chain, Starbucks, put one of her declarations on its cups: “There’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women.” That motto, and her afterlife decision to say “Hell, yes” to everything, deliver the title of her twenty-first-century memoir.

Because this is America, the former secretary of state gets to play herself on television. Appearing on the drama Madam Secretary, she is allowed to add a line of her own to the script: “There is plenty of room in the world for mediocre men, but there is no room for mediocre women.” This is a woman superbly qualified to pronounce that the administration of George W. Bush was a “bonfire of male vanities.”

As America’s top diplomat (“my job is to go everywhere and eat for my country”) and as a professor, Albright has honed her message to women: argue and interrupt:

I would spend many hours urging the women in my classes to unlearn everything they had been taught about the virtues of humility and waiting one’s turn. “Silence may be golden,” I said, “but it won’t win many arguments. If you have something to say, don’t keep your ideas locked up; unclench your jaws and set those thoughts free. And don’t be afraid to interrupt, because that may be the only way you are going to be heard.”

Having attended a girls high school and a women’s college, Albright has often made the point that a world run by women would be very different. But anyone who thinks it’d be better, she says, has forgotten high school.

Making lots of money on the afterlife speaking circuit, she has honed her lines. “Barely five feet” tall, she carries around a wooden block to get her head above the lectern and reach the microphone. The movie characters she identifies with, she jests, are the seven dwarfs.

The laugh lines serve a serious purpose in her discussion of how policy and politics get done in this roiling century. But they also deserve savouring because they’re good. Here’s Albright describing the fun of her favourite think tank: “Only at Aspen could a former secretary of state be observed singing ‘Hello Dalai!’ to commemorate a visit by the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.”

The sharp eye keeps circling back to Washington, quoting a favourite saying from a friend, the Republican senator John McCain, on the difference between a caucus and a cactus: “With the cactus, the pricks are on the outside.” The kinder version from Albright is that most elected politicians are “earnest, hardworking, well-intentioned and exhausted.”

Surveying the wonk milieu, she describes how professional subspecies approach the same subject. Lawyers start with a thesis and then list the main points for and against a proposition. Professors emphasise history and culture, and “want to put as much data as possible into the pot.” The military seek what’s practical: “for them, doable is an adjective of merit and ‘if only’ a phrase that wastes time.” Media specialists focus on how to present ideas: choose a catchy name and pick the right moment to announce the initiative. Experts on Congress know “how politics influences everything.”

On how politics is operating these days, Albright laments what she calls an undeniable crisis of confidence in democracy as “a way of life that both trusts human nature and makes demands on it.” Most people haven’t given up on democracy, she concludes, they just want better results.

Finding connections across differences is how democracies must work, but “the talking points developed during almost any political campaign can sully one’s soul.” And too often in the United States, she thinks, noise is defeating reason: “There used to be boundaries beyond which partisanship was inherently self-defeating. A politician who was overly strident would be shunned. That is no longer the case, and the blame falls on both parties.”

Albright confronts the crisis of confidence from a player’s perspective: “Ancient Greek dramatists employed a chorus to comment on folly. In our age, we have social media.” The player facing a tough interview must be able “to dodge the question and tell jokes.” Debating foreign policy on a weekly TV show from 1989 to 1991, she quickly grasped the basic rules:

Speak crisply, stick to the point, eschew hand or arm gestures, strive to have the last word, and be sure of your makeup. When someone else is talking, don’t react, just sit like a mannequin and listen. Though the television lights may be hot, you should not be: harsh words are magnified by the medium, and in that era, civility was still deemed a virtue.

It’s still good advice; even Donald Trump stopped shouting by the time of the final debate with Joe Biden.

Trump arrives at the end of Albright’s memoir, because she’s already delivered a comprehensive denunciation in her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning (“I dipped my pen in sulphur and began to write.”) On the tour to promote that book, Albright found Americans bewildered and cranky. The major political parties are at war and Republicans, under Trump, had “undergone a metamorphosis worthy of Kafka.” In this memoir, Albright sums it up:

Is Donald Trump a fascist? During my book tour, this was the question I was asked most often. To me it was a trap. I could not in good conscience defend the president, but it would have been ridiculous to put him in the same category as such mass murderers as Hitler or Stalin. I replied, “I do not call him a fascist. I do say that he has the most antidemocratic instincts of any president in modern American history.” Why? Not merely because Trump berates the media, is often at loggerheads with Congress, complains about court decisions, and fired the director of the FBI. Other presidents have done all of those things. Some, too, have been excessively self-absorbed and throwers of ear-splitting tantrums. What separates this president from his predecessors is a matter of degree. No other president has so thoroughly combined a boorish personality with an incapacity to accept criticism, an utter disregard for the responsibilities of his office, and a tendency to make stuff up worthy of both Guinness’s book and Ripley’s. There are those who point to Trump’s atrocious spelling and reliance on short words as evidence that he lacks brainpower. I am not so sure. The man has a multitude of blind spots, but he also has an instinct that he has relied on throughout his career: to go on the offensive and claim at the same time to be under attack. Politically, this approach energises supporters and channels their outrage in whatever direction Trump is pointing his finger. The tactic is deliberate, reflects cunning, and often leaves opponents floundering about in the mud that seems to be the president’s favoured terrain. The effect on society is correspondingly bog-like.

Albright dismisses Trump by quoting the observation that “rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.” She can’t decide whether the harm Trump has caused America’s international reputation and interests will be temporary or lasting.

The harm that is clear is the polarisation of US politics, which is “causing grave damage to the foundations of our democracy.” When she was ambassador to the United Nations, Albright declared that the United States was “the indispensable nation.” Now she worries that a society that still claims to lead the free world is prey to a torrent of angry passions that could “carry us towards fascism.”

As an “optimist who worries a lot,” this spirited eighty-three-year-old agrees on the need to “stop and smell the roses — before stooping to pull weeds.” Grab time, she advises, and shake it hard:

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that. Sadly, I see no evidence that enlightenment comes with age. A four-year-old slurping ice cream knows as much about contentment as any elder.

Madeleine Albright’s memoir isn’t a summation or conclusion. It’s a stimulating situation report. “I am greedy for more,” she writes. “Sum up my life? Not yet: I am still counting. Until I am carried out, I will carry on.” •

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I had made a written submission to the inquiry in July, focusing on Australia’s foreign interference laws and the under-representation of Chinese Australians in policymaking roles. I imagined the hearing would be an opportunity to tell senators more about how the foreign interference debate is affecting diaspora communities, and about how interference can be countered without eroding Australia’s democratic values and putting undue suspicion on Chinese Australians.

My opening statement, which highlighted the toxic environment faced by Chinese Australians who engage in public debates, had been circulated to the senators beforehand. One particular reason why some Chinese Australians are choosing to remain silent, I said, is that they don’t want their loyalty to be questioned constantly in the public arena. “It is not fair that their loyalties are questioned for having a certain political view,” I concluded. “And it is not fair to force them to take positions or political actions, such as critiquing Beijing, when similar requests are not made to other Australians.”

This made senator Eric Abetz’s subsequent behaviour all the more shocking. He proceeded to interrogate each of the three Chinese-Australian witnesses about whether we would “unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.” It later emerged that he only subjected Chinese-Australian witnesses to this treatment during hearings that examined diaspora communities in general.

Let’s be clear, the issue is not about whether or not the Chinese Communist Party should be condemned. In a democracy, we are all free to make up our minds and express our opinions. No one should be forced to condemn anyone or any political organisation simply to be accepted. No Australian, regardless of ethnicity, should be subject to political loyalty tests. We are all Australians first and foremost.

In the few days since that ugly encounter, I have often wondered why I was invited to appear at the hearing in the first place. My views on countering foreign interference and on Chinese-Australian participation in public life appeared less important to the senators than my views about the Chinese Communist Party.

Members of the committee certainly made a clear political point, one that I’m sure many Chinese Australians would have noted. Some are already reluctant to speak out publicly — having already been accused of questionable loyalties, suspected of being an agent of foreign influence and dismissed as brainwashed. It seems we must pass a test of loyalty before our views can be heard or taken seriously, and that test is often whether we are sufficiently critical of Beijing. Other Australians are not asked questions of this kind. They have the luxury of not having to justify their participation in political life by condemning foreign governments.

Before I was subjected to this line of questioning, I had already spoken extensively at the hearing about China’s human rights records, at one point noting that “China is one of the top violators of human rights in the world.” I have also talked about the intimidation and harassment experienced by individuals and their families for criticising the party.

Evidently this was not enough. The cynic in me thinks that what I say or do will only be enough for some people when I accept the role assigned to me. It doesn’t matter that I have served in the Australian public service for eight years across three departments, working on a range of domestic and international policy issues to advance the national interest. It doesn’t matter that I regularly critique the Chinese government over its foreign and domestic policies. It doesn’t matter that I might have endangered my family in China by speaking publicly about these issues, including at the public hearing. For some, it seems anything short of a full-throated public condemnation of Beijing will not satisfy them.

A part of me thinks that in today’s environment, the loyalty of Chinese Australians will be questioned no matter what our achievements or records. And any “acceptability” we do achieve could be taken away and suspicion reinstated if we state the “wrong” political view. No Australians should be subject to this.

If I had still been working in the Australian public service and I had appeared at the public hearing in my official capacity, I could have answered Senator Abetz’s question by saying that “the Australia–China bilateral relationship is based on strong economic and trade complementarities, and covers a wide range of mutual interests. In 2014, the Australian prime minister and Chinese president agreed to describe the relationship as a comprehensive strategic partnership.” But imagine the reaction if I had trotted out the official line at the inquiry last week.

Have the prime minister, his cabinet colleagues and the secretaries of their departments also been asked to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship?

Senator Abetz said that members of the Chinese-Australian community had privately described their reluctance to speak out “because of reprisals within their community and the possibility of family members back home being targeted by the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship,” a point I also made in my opening statement. But that makes the senator’s line of questioning even more disturbing. If he truly cared about the safety of members of the Chinese Australian community, he wouldn’t have persisted in asking them to publicly denounce the Chinese government.

Interestingly, the behaviour at the hearing mirrored what the Chinese Communist Party does in its numerous political campaigns, including, most famously, the Cultural Revolution. During these campaigns, the Chinese people are forced to declare their positions publicly. They are not even afforded the dignity of having the right to stay silent. Forcing everyone to declare a public view is a tool of authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, Senator Abetz is not the only one holding these views. I was also disappointed that the committee chair, Labor senator Kimberley Kitching, didn’t intervene to stop this show trial. In their eagerness to counter threats and challenges posed by Beijing, they appeared to have forgotten what democracy and pluralist society is all about.

“The very serious function of racism is distraction,” the American writer Toni Morrison once said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” In a better world, I would not need to write this article. I could have spent my time differently.

Indeed, amid the controversy, issues that actually are important are left unaddressed. How can we counter the threats and challenges posed by China while not erecting barriers that stop Chinese Australians from participating in politics and policy debates? This is what I had hoped to speak about at the public hearing. I especially wanted to warn the committee about the risk that we may, in our effort to counter China, go down an illiberal road and end up becoming more like China.

I don’t see this issue going away any time soon. As bilateral relations continue to deteriorate with no change of direction in sight, Chinese Australians will come under even more pressure and undue suspicion. •

The post Senator Abetz’s loyalty test appeared first on Inside Story.

For some years now Beijing has been telling Canberra that Australia has got the relationship wrong. Australians engaged in business, government, community, media, think tanks and universities have been debating what went awry and what can be done to set things right.

Emerging from this debate, I believe, is a widespread recognition that it is China that has changed and not Australia. Adjusting our policies to meet a changing China does not mean rejecting trade or engagement on other fronts, but it does mean rethinking relations with that country from the bottom up.

This year we have an additional complicating factor, Covid-19, which has thrown travel, business and public trust into disarray. Alan Dupont is not alone in arguing that the virus “has exposed the fragility of just-in-time supply chains and the folly of relying on a single country for critical goods and infrastructure. Some economic separation is unavoidable and necessary.”

For the past four years a further complicating factor has been president Donald Trump. Making sense of the Trump factor in Australia–China relations is no simple matter.

For Australia, the big-picture challenge is this. We are partly dependent on China for our prosperity and largely dependent on the United States for our military security. But we are more dependent than either of them on the norms and institutions of a stable international order for managing our trade, international relations and security. Neither China under Xi Jinping nor the United States under Donald Trump is committed to upholding the old order. Where does this leave Australia?

This question could lead in many directions, but here I propose to answer by isolating the Trump factor in trilateral relations along three separate bilateral vectors — Australia–China relations, US–China relations and Australia–US relations — and to say a little about a changing China under president Xi Jinping, and where we might go from here.

What went wrong, and when: Australia–China relations

Since the last US presidential election, a number of prominent public figures in Australia have maintained that relations with China have been skewed by Canberra’s efforts to appease Donald Trump. In 2017, the year President Trump took office, eminent economist Peter Drysdale and business leader John Denton wrote in the Australian Financial Review that the Australian government and media were “demonising China” out of anxiety about the US alliance under Trump. Around the same time, former NSW premier Bob Carr made similar claims here and in China. “Some silly people have got it into their heads that Australia impresses Washington by beating up on the Chinese,” he told TV audiences in China. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was simply “trying to impress Donald Trump’s America.”

China’s state media and diplomats have come to echo these claims by charging that Australia is a “loyal US attack dog” barking away at China, in the colourful language of the Global Times, or “dancing to the tune of a certain country,” in the more cautious phrasing of China’s foreign ministry.

If we want to isolate the Trump factor in Australia–China relations we need to ask whether Australia’s problems with China arise from excessive toadying to President Trump, as some claim, or spring from other sources. This question can be approached historically, by asking when relations turned sour, and forensically, by asking what appears to have curdled the relationship. Let’s take each approach in turn.

In trying to plot a plausible timeline for souring relations between Australia and China it becomes clear that the later people came to the problem, the more recently they tend to identify the trigger, attribute the cause and lay the blame. This year we’ve heard local radio commentators in Melbourne tracing problems in the relationship to foreign minister Marise Payne’s call five months ago for an international inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. Last year we were told it was because Australia banned Huawei from the national 5G build. In 2018 it seemed the problem stemmed from legislation introduced to underpin the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme in 2017.

Back further, in 2015 and 2016, deteriorating relations were attributed to a “China panic” in the media over political donations and other shenanigans involving the NSW Labor right. Before that again, in 2014, the chill in relations was attributed to the Abbott government’s expression of concern over China’s declaration of an Air Defence Identification Zone in the East China Sea. It is worth remembering that in December 2013 Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi publicly humiliated foreign minister Julie Bishop on this issue, declaring that Canberra’s position on China’s declaration jeopardised mutual trust. A senior Australian foreign affairs official candidly characterised Wang Yi’s public comments as the rudest public rebuke of an Australian minister he had encountered in thirty years of foreign service. That was 2013.

Between times, we have been told the chill turned to freeze when Canberra spoke out about Beijing’s rejection of the international arbitral decision on China’s claims over the South China Sea in 2016. Australia’s public position on the claims led to speculation in China that Australia was growing increasingly “anti-China” — even racist — and to a strident call in Chinese media for Beijing to exact “revenge.” Something was clearly amiss in bilateral relations before Trump took office in January 2017.

Clarifying this timeline helps us to identify not just when relations turned sour but also what exactly went wrong and why. In my assessment, formal relations started to deteriorate when China declared the Air Defence Identification Zone in 2013 and then progressively occupied and militarised contested islands in the South China Sea and laid claim to waters within its fabulous “nine-dash line.”

It is worth recalling that Beijing’s attempts to infiltrate Australia’s political system and communities were initially directed to the same purpose, supporting its actions in the South China Sea. It was a news conference on that issue that tripped up senator Sam Dastyari. Similarly, disgraced businessman Huang Xiangmo’s threat to withhold a major political donation to Labor hinged on whether Labor changed its public pitch on China’s conduct in the South China Sea. And some of the earliest public alerts over the party’s clandestine United Front operations in Australian community organisations were raised when community associations linked to China’s consulates began pressuring the prime minister, ministers and local politicians over the same issue, and coordinated street protests in support of China’s occupation of the maritime territories.

Some in the media and in independent community organisations raised their concerns. So did the Australian government. This was enough to trigger accusations from Beijing that Canberra was undermining the relationship. The rest arguably flowed from there — public debates in the media, the foreign interference legislation and Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, the Huawei decision, China’s threatened trade retaliations, and the precipitous decline in Australian popular trust in China revealed in successive Lowy Institute and Pew Research Center surveys. Events cascaded one onto the other, flowing from China’s initial territorial intrusions and its efforts to interfere in Australian domestic politics and silence community and government concern.

From Australia’s perspective, this was textbook independent foreign policy. Most of the apparent triggers for deteriorating relations over the past six or seven years have involved Australian governments acting without external prompting in defence of international order, social cohesion and national sovereignty. Leaving the Covid-19 pandemic aside — an important outlier — each of these initiatives was generated in Australia, by Australians, to deal with a domestic or regional issue affecting Australia’s regional position, domestic security or social cohesion.

Foreign affairs and trade department secretary Frances Adamson explains it this way: “We’ve seen China seeking to assert itself in this region, in the Indo-Pacific and globally, in ways that suit its interests but don’t suit the interests of countries like Australia. We want a peaceful, stable, prosperous region… but when influence builds into interference, that is something we don’t want to see, our government won’t tolerate [it] and I think most Australians are broadly supportive of that.”

In sum, the relationship was heading into troubled waters years before Donald Trump took office because Canberra’s defence of Australian interests and sovereignty in response to Beijing’s assertive behaviour was not welcomed in Beijing.

A proliferation of flashpoints: US–China relations

During President Trump’s term, relations between China and the United States have moved from great-power competition to great-power rivalry and possibly confrontation. This move possibly reflects a long-term shift in the balance of power, but it undoubtedly reflects a new consensus in Washington — reaching well beyond the Trump White House to business, think tanks, universities and media — that the days of partnership and engagement with China are over. In the words of senior Obama administration official Kurt Campbell and co-author Jake Sullivan, “While Washington remains bitterly divided on most issues, there is a growing consensus that the era of engagement with China has come to an unceremonious close. The debate now is over what comes next.”

Significant differences are emerging in this debate. Team Trump is calling for strategic competition. On 20 May, President Trump signed a new document on China policy, “United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” signalling “all-out strategic competition.”

In July, Trump’s executive team spelled out what this means in a series of coordinated speeches on relations with China. These involved major statements by secretary of state Mike Pompeo, attorney-general Bill Barr, defence secretary Mark Esper, FBI director Christopher Wray and national security adviser Robert O’Brien. Following this “full-court press,” China and the world were left in little doubt that the Trump administration regarded China as a strategic and ideological rival.

On the Democratic side we hear a different line of argument emerging, less ideological and more finely attuned to discrete aspects of US–China relations. Samantha Power, a Security Council member in the first Obama administration, told a Lowy Institute seminar in August that a Biden administration could pursue China policy on a number of distinct tracks, with confrontation on one track (over intellectual property, cyber security, the South China Sea and so on), competition on another (around competing national economic interests and leadership of international organisations), and cooperation on a third (on climate change, global health and nuclear non-proliferation). This approach, combining elements of competition and cooperation, marks an emerging consensus on the Democratic side of politics over the past year.

Beyond Washington debating circles, the real-world US–China relationship is not improving. In the judgement of American political scientist Jude Blanchette, the deterioration in US–China relations is more than incremental and amounts to a new paradigm “defined by the proliferation of flashpoints, the downward spiral of hostility, the rise in zero-sum thinking, and the breakdown of mediating and mitigating institutions.”

Managed differences: Australia–US relations

Many Australians appear to have been surprised on reading foreign minister Marise Payne’s blunt remarks, following the AUSMIN bilateral meeting in Washington in July this year, clearly distancing Australia from the United States on relations with China. Minister Payne declined to endorse Secretary Pompeo’s frankly ideological position and distinguished clearly between Australian and US interests and perspectives on China. “The Secretary’s speeches are his own,” she said. “Australia’s positions are our own.” We do share values, she continued, “but most importantly from our perspective, we make our own decisions, our own judgements in the Australian national interest and about upholding our security, our prosperity, and our values… [W]e deal with China in the same way.”

There should have been little cause for surprise. Canberra has been distancing itself from Washington on a range of issues over the term of the Trump presidency. Canberra’s differences with Washington are not just about China policy. They arise from the systemic problem of Australia’s standing as a middle power dependent on international trade and predictable rules. Middle powers fear disruption, and Donald Trump is a disrupter.

Maintaining a rules-based order is recognised as one of the three foreign policy imperatives that all governments assume when they take responsibility for Australia’s international relations. In Allan Gyngell’s account, these are sustaining and developing an international, rules-based order; allying with a strong global partner; and finding a constructive place in the neighbourhood.

With the arrival of Trump the Disrupter, Australia finds itself thrown into a particle accelerator in which these three fundamental principles are colliding with each other — here maintaining a close alliance partnership, there pushing back against disruption to global trade and international organisations, and, back in the neighbourhood, trying to find a welcoming place in a region in which China and America are competing fiercely for influence. Australia is not alone in this tangle. Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong put the problem succinctly: “The troubled US–Chinese relationship raises profound questions about Asia’s future and the shape of the emerging international order.”

For President Trump the big game is to Make America Great Again. In practice this has come to involve open hostility towards international organisations (the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization most obviously), indifference towards multilateral frameworks for trade or conflict resolution (including the Trans Pacific Partnership), a disheartening lack of commitment to longstanding alliance partners (including Japan and South Korea in our region and NATO generally), and a propensity to impose tariffs and other arbitrary measures without regard to existing understandings or long-established partnerships.

The Australian government has made its differences with the United States clear on each of these issues. Marise Payne was doing no more than that.

Alliance politics is another matter again. To deal with President Trump, Australian officials have developed a diplomacy suited to his personal style, tailored to avoid an open clash with a petulant president without giving too much away. This is what Australian editor-at-large Paul Kelly calls the new diplomacy that nobody really wants to talk about. It involves pulling all available levers to secure the support of the Trump administration, as an alliance partner, while distancing Canberra from Washington on important issues over which the two sides disagree.

In an interview on his retirement, Australia’s ambassador in Washington, Joe Hockey, offered a few insights into how this new diplomacy works. First, he said, government-to-government relations need to be personalised. Forget about values, principles and institutions. To get through to the president, call Greg Norman.

A second feature of the new diplomacy has been a consistent focus on the two countries’ longstanding military ties with a view to distinguishing Australia from the rest of the pack. The embassy devised a public relations campaign around the theme “100 Years of Mateship” that underscored Australia’s record in military combat alongside US forces in every major war since the Battle of Hamel a century earlier. “The more we spoke with the president and the White House,” Hockey told his interviewer, “the more they realised that Australia was different.”

The new bilateral diplomacy carries a number of risks, including the risk of focusing exclusively on alliance politics when relations are far broader than that. If defence agreements are not supported by public respect in Australia for the United States, its leadership and its people, they will turn out to be worth very little.

Where to from here?

During Donald Trump’s term as president Australia has managed to retain close defence and security ties with the United States while distancing itself from Washington on important issues ranging from multilateral trade to climate change and the role of the WTO, the WHO and other international institutions. This balancing act has involved highlighting the similarities that bind us in order to press home the many policy differences that separate us. Marise Payne made this clear at the 2020 AUSMIN meeting when she said we should be able to articulate “in a mature and sensible way” the points on which we disagree in order to “advance our interests and our values.”

Australia’s actions tend to bring to the surface the differences that divide us from China and then leave us scrambling to find points of similarity. The differences are not trivial and go beyond policy gulfs to values, systems of government, understandings of the rule of law, and cultural differences such as Beijing’s extraordinary sensitivity to public criticism of its foreign and security policies. While the similarities are less obvious, we do have many interests in common and we could, at times, have articulated our differences in a more sensitive way. But relations are unlikely to improve so long as Beijing fails to acknowledge that the source of disagreements lies not in Canberra’s choice of words but in China’s policies of maritime territorial expansion and its covert interference in Australian domestic affairs.

Despite substantial policy differences between Australia and the United States, and despite Australia’s making these differences clear, relations with China appear to be deteriorating at roughly the same pace as US–China relations. Perhaps encouraged by distinguished public figures in Australia who attribute everything to Canberra’s determination to please Trump, authorities in China interpret Australian government conduct as a pale reflection of US government intentions. This is a misunderstanding.

Australian governments do not see Australia as engaged in strategic competition with China. There was a time, before Xi Jinping, when both sides even imagined there was scope for strategic alignment. As recently as 2014, Australia and China agreed to move the relationship forward towards a “comprehensive strategic partnership” that would include an annual leaders’ meeting between the prime minister and the Chinese premier. Existing dialogues were brought together under the new comprehensive strategic partnership.

This was on the cusp of Xi Jinping’s announcing the arrival of his “New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” He has since shown what his vision for the New Era holds for China and the world, and Australian governments and communities want little part of it. Ambitious bilateral programs designed to bring the two together in an earlier era are not suited to the present one. In light of these changes in China, former foreign affairs and trade department head Peter Varghese now advises Australia to “quietly abandon the notion that we can have a comprehensive strategic partnership with China for as long as it remains a one-party authoritarian state.”

Still, we would do well to preserve some of those earlier dialogues that were brought under the bilateral umbrella, including dialogues on trade, international security, law enforcement, development cooperation, and climate change. As flashpoints in the relationship proliferate, the two countries will need to maintain a number of mediating talks and institutions to sustain a mutually beneficial relationship.

Whether China’s authorities recognise the value of these high-level dialogues is difficult to gauge. Seen from Beijing, Australia has been a constant irritant since Xi Jinping took office and, judging on past experience, Canberra is likely to continue pushing back on matters affecting its values and interests. Irritating as this may be for Beijing, Australia has never said no to building a mutually beneficial relationship based on a realistic understanding of common interests and differences. Australia is not proposing to follow Trump’s America and engage in all-round strategic competition.

Where does this leave Australia? Early in 2019 Macquarie University’s Bates Gill put forward a new approach to the relationship that he termed “bounded engagement.” This approach assumes that the challenges China presents to Australia’s values and interests are real and pressing, but concedes that Australia has every reason to continue engaging closely with China on many fronts. Almost all areas of Australia–China interaction would become more constrained but not all would be constrained to the same degree.

In September last year a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Charlie Lyons Jones, put forward a similar model for broader application among liberal democracies. He suggested they should approach China not in cold war fashion — as a stark adversary — nor in the style of the past three decades — as a strategic partner in security and development — but rather through a combination of approaches (as adversary, as competitor and as partner) in discrete areas of engagement.

This idea has since gained currency in North America. China specialist Paul Evans, a foremost proponent of Canada’s earlier engagement strategy, wrote in the ANU’s East Asia Forum in July this year that Canada’s engagement with China is now teetering to the point of toppling. Ottawa needs “to come forward with an approach that frames Xi Jinping’s China as some combination of adversary, rival, competitor and partner.” As noted earlier, similar ideas have taken hold this year in Democratic Party circles in the United States. If this emerges as a growing liberal consensus for managing relations with an increasingly authoritarian China, I would like to think that Australian analysts were among the first to come up with the idea — and with Australia in mind rather than Ottawa or Washington. •

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Before Australia finally shrugged off the White Australia policy in 1973, South Asians were a small minority — a little over 5000 at their peak in the 1890s, as against 29,000 or so Chinese. In scattered numbers on the margins of settlement, they incurred less of the resentment that sometimes erupted into murderous anti-Chinese riots.

Many of these South Asians were here because they had been invited: recruited by colonial authorities and businessmen from the 1860s to build and operate the networks of camel transport that serviced remote mines and grazing runs. They also had the advantage of being British subjects, if second-class ones.

In asserting this imperial identity, according to historian Kama Maclean, Indian Australians separated themselves from “Asiatics” and “Orientials” with some lasting effect. “It is curious that in Britain, many Indian communities have come to identify and be identified as ‘Asian,’” she writes. “In Australia, Indians have largely been thought of as an entirely separate category, not necessarily Asian at all.”

But they suffered calumnies and bureaucratic obstruction enough, as historian Samia Khatun shows in her case studies. And the official exclusion after Federation, when they were lumped in with “Asiatics” under the Immigration Act, was an immense and long-lasting insult to the educated classes of the entire subcontinent, even those who never thought to come here.

White nationalism in the settler colonies was the fly in the ointment London was using to try to soothe India from the mid nineteenth century on. After suppressing the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Queen Victoria had proclaimed that all subjects of the empire would be treated equally. Colonial secretaries chided premiers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa over racial exclusion, but the admonishments were generally batted off as humbug on the part of an empire that embodied a deep racial hierarchy.

Among Australians, images of the subcontinent derived from the writings of Rudyard Kipling, who visited Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart in 1891, and from romantic writings about fabulously wealthy maharajas and sultans, the mystical yearnings of Theosophists, and the opinions of resident “old India hands.” The term “Hindoo” was used synonymously with Indian, emphasising “otherness” and “heathen rituals.” Even the few senior politicians with a deeper knowledge of India, among them Alfred Deakin, upheld the White Australia policy.

But some softening of the policy did occur quite early. Persuaded by a new governor-general, Lord Northcote, who had come straight from governing Bombay, the Watson government amended the Immigration Restriction Act in 1904 to let Indian merchants, students and tourist travellers enter for up to twelve months.

Not many took advantage, and deportations of Indian traders like Mool Chand (in his case for having entered Australia under false pretences) raised periodic outcries in India. Meanwhile Deakin, as external affairs minister, was trying to get more Australians into the elite Indian Civil Service, arguing that hardy Australians were just the thing India needed to get organised and open up new fields of development. “In this, Deakin seemed to be imagining an India of mutiny novels and Boy’s Own adventures,” observes Maclean. Indian newspapers saw it as a double standard: let us in, but you stay out.

After diggers fought alongside Indian soldiers in Gallipoli, Palestine and France during the Great War, postwar Australian views moderated a little. Norman Lindsay’s South Asian character “Chunder Loo,” who featured in advertisements for Cobra Boot Polish, was transformed into an amiable, subservient comic figure present at great events. Australian prime minister Billy Hughes and his British counterpart David Lloyd George might have cursed each other in Welsh at times, but at the 1921 Imperial Conference Lloyd George pressed Hughes to agree on a compromise — keep your external barriers, but remove discrimination for those inside — acceptable to the Indians.

As much as Hughes had fought at Versailles against a racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter, he also worried about the growing power of the United States, which was drawing Canada closer, and the unrest in Ireland, Egypt and India. It all threatened to break up the empire and threaten Australia’s “lifeline” to Europe.

So imperial duty saw British-Indian residents of Australia — now about 2000 in number — given the vote and the pension. The remnant of the earlier, larger population most widely recalled are the itinerant turban-wearing pedlars who roamed inland settlements in horse-drawn carts, bringing haberdashery and household implements along with a touch of exotic colour to isolated households.

As nationalism deepened in British India, writes Maclean, settler colonies like Australia “inadvertently presented a third front against which the British in India and in London could imagine and claim to be championing Indian causes.” The Balfour Declaration of 1925, which gave equal status to all Britain’s dominions — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa and the Irish Free State — let London off the hook: it could say it had no control over their immigration policies.

Continuing discrimination through the 1930s and 1940s also had the unintended effect of encouraging India’s leaders to reject British offers of eventual dominion status. India would always be a second-class member of the empire, said Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who would be India’s first prime minister. The Bank of England had brought Australia to near bankruptcy in the Great Depression; imagine what it might have done to an Indian dominion.

With the fall of Singapore, India became even more of a lifeline for Australia, and the Indian nationalists had Churchill over a barrel. Eventually, two years after Japan’s surrender, London agreed to India’s independence. Prescient Australians had seen this coming. In September 1942, external affairs minister H.V. Evatt had said that Australia “looked forward to the people of India becoming a truly self-governing nation,” with the rider that it should still be loyal to the King. Canberra and New Delhi exchanged high commissioners during 1943–44.

The appointment of R.G. Casey as governor of Bengal in December 1943 put an Australian at the centre of one of the second world war’s most tragic episodes, the famine that gripped this frontline state during 1943–44 and killed some three million people. Maclean shows us how Australians became aware of the famine through church, business and personal correspondence that got around wartime censorship, and pressured Canberra to release its stockpiles of wheat. The government was prepared to do so if the War Cabinet in London would release the necessary ships. Only in February 1944 did large shipments begin belatedly flowing.

Somehow the glamorous couple, Casey and his wife Maie, floated above this misery. After Casey resigned as governor in June 1945 in order to return to Australia and enter politics, he wrote An Australian in India, a book that took a relatively sympathetic view of Indian nationalism, and distanced himself from the British administration. As an Australian, he claimed, he had gone to India “with no imperial past.”

Casey argued that once it was explained that the White Australia policy was based on economic, not racial, grounds it was “generally accepted” in India. But when the departing British asked Australia to take in some “Anglo-Indians” — the mixed-race and generally well-educated and prosperous children of empire — Canberra agreed only to those who were “predominantly of European blood.”

As external affairs minister for most of the 1950s, Casey shared with his prime minister, Robert Menzies, a somewhat distant relationship with Prime Minister Nehru. According to Maclean, Casey was arguably closer to Pakistan, which was drawn to the Western side as the cold war set in. He continued to play down the White Australia policy rather than try to change it, and urged the Australian press to stop using the term.

And so it went on — and so, to some extent, it continues. Our leaders are puzzled why Indians are so “hypersensitive” about race; they tend to assume all experiences of empire are the same. Multiculturalism has comfortably located racism in the past; events like the Cronulla riot of 2005 and the attacks on Indian students in 2010 are seen as aberrations.

“Many note that Australian attempts to engage with India have gone unrequited,” Maclean says. “Few have tried to appreciate why this might be the case.” Still, the Indian population in Australia grew 30 per cent over 2016–18. Whether Australia can overcome its past is still an open question, she says, but “it is clear that a redefinition of ‘Australian’ is under way.”

Samia Khatun isn’t so sure. She sees cant in how we welcome well-off and highly skilled South Asians, patting ourselves on the back for our openness, while treating undocumented arrivals by boat, many from the same region, so shamefully.

Khatun’s book focuses on the South Asians (having been born in Bangladesh, she is careful to use that term) who came to Australia during that early half-century window. This is an important, eye-opening exploration of their world and its connections, bringing into vivid centrality the “Afghan” cameleers who are auxiliary figures on the periphery of events in mainstream history.

Her “Book of Australia,” as the title translates, began as a doctoral thesis in history at the University of Sydney, and still reads like that in places. But between the thickets of Foucauldian and other theoretical analysis of the “epistemic arrogance of modernist paradigms of thought” is a fascinating detective story.

It began when she read of “an old Quran” found by local historians in the corrugated-iron mosque in Broken Hill. She travelled there, and found the book was actually a compendium of eight books of Sufi poetic legend titled Kasasol Ambia (Stories of the Prophets). How did a book of poetry in Bengali published in 1895, written to be read aloud, come to Broken Hill, when most of the cameleers were from the northwest of undivided India and Afghanistan?

Her quest to find out took her to Calcutta and its busy publishing hubs, to encounters with an irascible scholar of old texts, and to the stories of the men and women who might have picked up the book in Calcutta on their way to Australia.

We learn about characters like Khawajah Muhammad Bux, who became a wealthy Perth-based trader before retiring to Lahore in the 1920s, where he built a mosque and a girl’s school in what became known as Australia Chowk (Australia Bazaar); Bux’s son later founded the one hundred–branch Australasia Bank, now part of Pakistan’s big Allied Bank.

And Hasan Musakhan, a brilliant scholar from Karachi who won a scholarship to Bombay University and then joined a big camel operator in Australia. A follower of the Ahmadi branch of Islam (later declared heretic by the mainstream), he married Sophia Blitz from a German-Jewish family in Adelaide and became active in court cases contesting discriminatory application of the law and a writer of letters to newspapers.

Khatun recounts marriages and other encounters between South Asian men and white and Aboriginal women; brides and wives brought out from India, some in purdah, some not; and jealous shootings and elopements. This richly detailed account culminates in her journeys with descendants of the Aborigines who mixed with the Abigana (Afghans) along the camel routes and railway lines that penetrated inland to places like Marree and Oodnadatta. In this sandy country, she coaxes out the background to some of the perplexing incidents in the written record.

Khatun is not very forgiving of settler Australians and “monolingual” historians attracted to facts and progressive narratives rather than the imagined worlds and dreams she taps into. She has a wonderful ability to capture the landscapes of inland Australia and make its “marginal” people central. In showing us what has been under our noses, Australianama is as good as Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, if not better. •

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Now a new middle way seems to be in contention: minilateralism. The word has been uttered recently by the two federal ministers most concerned with world power — foreign minister Marise Payne and defence minister Linda Reynolds. They used it to describe the welter of video calls they and prime minister Scott Morrison have made to their foreign counterparts since the Covid-19 pandemic shut down physical meetings nearly five months ago.

The debate started when Morrison gave a speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney last October. It was his first major foreign policy statement since being returned to office in his own right, and he prefaced it by saying he’d never been much interested in international affairs.

That didn’t stop him from taking a big stab. The nub of the speech was a rejection of what he called “negative globalism” and a call for Australia to resist being dictated to by an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” Canberra, he announced, would undertake an “audit” of its membership of international bodies.

As Jonathan Pearlman, editor of Australian Foreign Affairs, summed it up:

Morrison’s pre-pandemic instinct was to view the faults with international bodies such as the United Nations and its agencies — they can be bloated, or lack transparency, or subject to undue influence — as evidence that Australia should be ready to abandon them. This was never a good option, but it seemed viable when the alternative to consensus-based decision-making was to firmly back US leadership.

Morrison’s stance created much dismay among foreign policy experts. They quickly pointed out that multilateral arrangements tend to protect small and middle powers against coercion by big and powerful states, especially when the alternative — hitched to a United States under an embarrassing leader — seemed much less enticing.

Come the pandemic, the international agencies were being given the tick by Canberra’s auditors. “Covid-19 has shown that our international order is as important as ever,” Marise Payne told the ANU’s National Security College. “There is need for reform in several areas, but the pandemic has brought into stark relief the major role of international institutions in addressing and coordinating a global response to a global problem.”

Former Coalition frontbencher Mitch Fifield amplified the point on 1 July in his capacity as ambassador to the United Nations. The United Nations was far from perfect, he told the Asia Society Australasia, but it was an indispensable partner both during the Covid-19 response and, beyond that, through its development, humanitarian, and peace and security work. The choice between being “a muscular and realistic bilateralist or a starry-eyed multilateralist” was a false one; governments needed to walk both paths to achieve their goals.

Despite concerns about the World Health Organization, he went on, the pandemic had also “brought into relief, the benefits to Australia’s interests through the international rules and norms set by these institutions, and the consequences of stepping away and leaving others to shape the international system in ways that may contradict our interests.” The government’s recent audit of Australia’s engagement in multilateral institutions had concluded, he said, that “the rules and norms developed through the UN and the services it delivers are vital to Australia’s interests, values, security and prosperity.”

So where does “minilateralism” fit into this picture? The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade didn’t immediately respond to this question, but Allan Gyngell, now heading the Australian Institute of International Affairs, says the term had been around for some years.

“It gained traction as the problems in the larger multilateral institutions, with more members and divergent agendas, were making it harder to reach outcomes,” he tells me. “The idea was that you could work with smaller like-minded groups to make progress. You’ll remember ‘coalitions of the willing.’” Multilateralism in smaller groups, in other words?

“I’ve always found it a rather ugly neologism myself,” says Gyngell. “It has been most closely associated with institutions like the Quads” — the putative grouping of the United States, Japan, India and Australia, designed to balance China — “but it would equally apply, I guess, to groups like ASEAN plus 3.”

The list of video calls made by government figures does indeed suggest that minilateralism involves the like-minded and the friendly.

Since March, as Australian Financial Review political correspondent Andrew Tillett detailed recently, Scott Morrison has spoken, mostly one-on-one, to the leaders of thirty-nine countries: seven times with Jacinda Ardern, three times each with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and twice each with Angela Merkel, Joko Widodo, Justin Trudeau, Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape.

Morrison has also spoken to Shinzo Abe twice. During a “virtual summit” on 9 July the two of them reached a status-of-forces agreement on military exchanges and cooperation in space. Morrison also held a “virtual summit” with India’s Narendra Modi, following on from a phone call between Canberra and New Delhi. Calls have also been made to the leaders of South Korea, Israel, France and Vietnam, as well as those of smaller neighbours: the Cook Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Timor-Leste.

Canberra has few arguments with any of these countries, and much familiarity with most. If he raised anything contentious, such as the question of territorial annexation with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, it has not been disclosed.

Moving into less familiar territory, Morrison has also spoken to Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, and Belgium’s Sophie Wilmès, both of whom lead countries badly hit by the virus, and to the heads of the European Union and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.

But a virtual summit of the G20 on 30 April was the only close on-screen encounter with wielders of rival power like China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and then only as part of a mosaic of images on a very large screen. The summit was all about cooperation against the virus.

On the multilateralism front, Australia has many disagreements with the Trump administration: its withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade and investment pact, its hobbling of the World Trade Organization by refusing to endorse new dispute resolution judges, its use of tariffs to force trade concessions, its announcement of withdrawal from the World Health Organization, and its threats to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court if they investigated US personnel.

None of this seems to have surfaced in Morrison’s latest talk with Trump, just three days ago, which was portrayed as a sunny thirty minutes in which Covid-19 setbacks were played down, economic reopening foreshadowed, and compliments paid to Australia’s new defence plans. But they did touch on “approaches to multilateral organisations” and “commitment to open markets,” according to an official statement, which suggests Morrison nudged into areas sensitive for the president.

On the same day, Malcolm Turnbull told a Lowy Institute audience that Morrison never had strong feelings about negative globalism anyway. “I think early in his time as PM he was unduly influenced by people on the right of politics, both in his own circle and in the media, to whom this sort of UN-bashing, anti-globalist thing is bread and butter,” Turnbull said. “It’s the same sort of thing that Trump goes on with.”

Still, the adviser that Turnbull suspects was behind the speech, China hawk Andrew Shearer, has moved even closer to the centre of Morrison’s circle. Formerly deputy director of the Office of National Intelligence, he is now cabinet secretary.

Australia’s multilateral diplomacy, post the DFAT audit, is geared up to battle for improved performance by UN agencies and getting more of their leadership positions filled by Australians or people from democratic nations. No doubt Morrison is also being advised to help coax Trump away from more damaging actions in the global arena, pending the November presidential elections.

But minilateralism continues. Canberra is encouraging the Five Eyes group of Anglophone nations to broaden its ambit from signals intelligence to cybercrime, transnational crime and infrastructure security. It desperately wants to be included in war games with Japan, India and the United States. And it hopes to guide the newly named South Pacific vuvale (family).

To Cavan Hogue, former ambassador to Moscow and other important capitals, it looks like Morrison is trying to get close to what are perceived as reliable allies. “He’s not Zooming to anyone in China,” he says. “Is he really trying to find an alternative to the USA? Or does he still cling to the security blanket of benevolent Uncle Sam in the belief that Trump will go away after the election and the nightmare will be over?”

Despite the talk of a post-pandemic world, “there has been no public suggestion that the Alliance is to be abandoned,” says Hogue. “On the contrary, its importance has been reinforced.” But his could be harder than Morrison might imagine. “I see that [PNG prime minister] Marape was one of those who voted to support China over Hong Kong in the Human Rights Commission,” he says. “A warning?”

Under Morrison, Canberra still seems to be zooming in, rather than zooming out. •

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In a nutshell, the documents see a region rendered more turbulent and uncertain not only by strategic competition between China and the United States but also by Covid-19 and its consequences, and rendered more threatening by increases in advanced military capability across the region. They propose a tighter focus on defending Australia by dominating our immediate surrounds, recovering our technological edge, and being able to project serious force at greater range. And there are nods in the direction of strengthening our independent war-fighting capability. So far, so good.

While experts will debate whether the documents are an adequate response to these challenging circumstances, any attempt to judge the totality of the government’s response must also look at the context in which they are written. The department’s civilian and military experts are constrained by the government’s worldview and can only devise those parts of the solution that involve the use of military force.

An important problem with the government’s worldview — admittedly shared widely in the defence community — is that the solution to every military problem is to strengthen what prime minister Scott Morrison referred to yesterday as “our ever-closer alliance with the United States.” There are several problems with being, as Malcolm Turnbull put it, “joined at the hip” with the United States.

The first of these is that the formal obligations created by the ANZUS treaty are quite weak, reflecting the lack of enthusiasm with which the United States came to the party in 1951. The treaty partners — Australia, New Zealand and the United States — have no more than an obligation to “consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific,” and then, having done so, to “act to meet the common danger in accordance with [their] constitutional processes.”

And while we in Australia tend to regard ANZUS as extending a “nuclear umbrella,” one would have to wonder why any nuclear power, confronting a nuclear adversary, would use or threaten to use nuclear weapons in circumstances other than countering a direct threat to its own homeland.

Nevertheless, our political leaders have elevated the treaty to such a point that, rather than serving the national interests of Australia, it is used to determine where Australia’s national interests lie. And that means we must participate in all American-initiated conflicts to show we are a good ally.

This attachment to ANZUS as the linchpin of our defence collides with the government’s direction to focus our defence preparedness on our own region. Old habits die hard. While the prospect of operations further afield will not be permitted to shape the ADF’s force structure (something Kevin Rudd said in his 2009 white paper), the prime minister couldn’t refrain from affirming the old thinking: “We remain prepared to make military contributions outside of our immediate region where it is in our national interest to do so, including in support of US-led coalitions.”

Given the regional uncertainties described by the government, why on earth would we commit forces to military conflict outside our immediate area of interest? Dominating the approaches to Australia will be challenging enough without getting military assets stuck on the very sticky flypaper of avoidable military conflict. We committed troops to Afghanistan in 2001 and we are still there. The navy started conducting “maritime security” operations in the Middle East in 1990, and we’re still there too, and we also have aircraft and hundreds of support personnel engaged in operations in that region.

A deeper problem with the alliance relationship is a technological dependence on the United States that can leave us subject to American coercion when we choose new technology. We are not only dependent on the United States for maintenance and resupply of sensitive components of our advanced hardware, we also need access to US systems for the very operation of aircraft like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control Aircraft. As a parliamentary research paper observed as long ago as 2001, “it is almost literally true that Australia cannot go to war without the consent and support of the United States. This represents a substantial sacrifice of national freedom of action, and must be counted as a significant cost.”

Consistent with the close relationship, Australia long ago agreed to host American or joint facilities on our soil, including at Pine Gap and Nurrungar. These facilities might have contributed to the strategic balance during the cold war, but in his significantly named book, Dangerous Allies (2014), former prime minister Malcolm Fraser expressed concern that new technologies now permitted Pine Gap’s capabilities “to be used in new and aggressive ways” — namely, to facilitate drone assassinations and targeted killings by pinpointing targets in real time.

As Fraser stressed, Australia’s longstanding insistence that everything Pine Gap does happens with our “full knowledge and concurrence” means we can be taken to approve of America’s use of drones to kill the citizens of friendly countries with which we are not at war. Pakistan — a fellow member of the Commonwealth and a country for which we budgeted $32.2 million in development assistance in 2019–20 — is a case in point. So are Yemen and Somalia.

Implicitly supporting Fraser’s critique were papers published in 2015 by strategic analyst Desmond Ball and his colleagues, which recounted in detail the militarisation of the personnel and administration at Pine Gap, and changes to its higher management structure. After more than two decades in which there were no serving US military personnel at Pine Gap, their numbers steadily increased after 1990 to the point where, by 2015, serving military personnel constituted two-thirds of US government employees, excluding contractors. In parallel with and reflecting this militarisation, the higher management of Pine Gap, always an American affair, passed in the early 1990s from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology to the National Reconnaissance Office, and Pine Gap became more oriented to direct support of combat operations.

These changes, along with the evolution of technology and the changing geopolitical situation, suggest that Pine Gap has changed Australia’s political and military stance. We have gone from supporting the strategic balance during the cold war to collaborating, virtually automatically, in US wars of choice anywhere in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

Malcolm Fraser was a staunch cold warrior in his day, and no bleeding heart leftie. When a former prime minister of his stamp (and with his insider knowledge) says that Pine Gap has been transformed into “a critical part of an offensive weapons system” and that “Australia should not be a part of it,” any Australian government should take heed. The prudent course would be to undertake a fundamental review of whether, to what extent and under what circumstances the facility continues to serve Australia’s national security interests. But this question is never asked.

Beyond the defence domain, government policy is at odds with an appropriately wide concept of how to manage national security in a threatening and rapidly changing world. Diplomacy is our frontline means of influencing world events, and hence means of defence: much better to manage our relationships so that we don’t come under threat than to park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to pick up the pieces when things don’t go as we hope.

For as long as I can remember, though, governments have seen the Australian diplomatic service and the department that supports it as a suitable targets for savings, to the point where a parliamentary subcommittee, citing a 2011 Lowy Institute report, could note in a 2012 report:

Australia has the smallest diplomatic network of all G20 nations, and only nine of the thirty-four OECD countries (all far smaller than Australia) have fewer diplomatic missions… The average number of posts for an OECD nation is 133. Australia has only ninety-five, and sits at twenty-fifth of thirty-four nations in the OECD league table of diplomatic representation — numbers which are wholly incompatible with Australia’s standing in the world.

The subcommittee’s report cited evidence that countries with much smaller economies but larger overseas networks had gained significant traction in the principal organs of the global governance framework: the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Court of Justice, the UN Development Programme, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Economic and Social Council.

We need to recognise that soft power — the ability to persuade rather than coerce — is an important part of our armoury. Accordingly, we need to strike a better balance between it and our hard (military) power by dramatically strengthening our diplomatic capabilities, including our representation in foreign capitals.

Other policies are at odds with the strategic picture painted by the government. The prime minister spoke of “Defence forming even deeper links and trust with regional armed forces and a further expansion in our defence, diplomacy, cooperation, and capability and capacity building.” Yet the government’s war on the universities, and on the humanities in particular, seems at odds with this approach. Where are we going to find the personnel with the deep linguistic capability and cultural understanding needed to engage with our complex region?

Similarly, the government’s war on science — exemplified again by its attacks on the universities, and by its savage cuts to research funding — is at odds with its high-tech goals for the ADF. This tendency plumbed the depths of absurdity when, in 2014, prime minister Tony Abbott both promised Defence increased funding and directed it to spend less on science.

I have long believed that the way we go to war — with the government alone making the decision, as the inheritor of the traditional powers of the monarch — is both an anachronism and an anomaly. In a modern state, with power supposedly flowing from the people to the government rather than the other way around, the decision to commit the ADF to armed international conflict should be made by our elected representatives in parliament. The uncertainties that lie ahead only serve to strengthen the case.

“We’re all in this together,” said Scott Morrison in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis. We are certainly all in it together when we go to war, and accordingly we, or at least our elected representatives on our behalf, should all have a say in when we go to war, alongside whom, and for what reason. •

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In those ten years or so, “Indo-Pacific” shifted from a way of looking at the map to an arena for a mounting contest — and a label for a US strategy (the “free and open Indo-Pacific”). From mental map to military map, the journey has been short and sharp.

“Asia-Pacific” had dominated for thirty years, from 1980 to 2010. In a swift remaking, Indo-Pacific became its replacement for the United States, Japan, India, Australia, the ten ASEAN states of Southeast Asia, and Europe.

The crucial absence from the convert list is China. Beijing charges that the Indo-Pacific is a device to contain and constrain its ambitions. That’s true. An equal truth, though, is that China reaps what it sows; its behaviour made pushback inevitable.

The Indo-Pacific is pushback aimed at achieving balance. Uniting the two oceans is ambitious and driven by power. Much meaning crowds onto the new map:

• the rise of China and its ambition to dominate Asia

• India’s arrival as a major player

• the relative decline of US power

• the need to achieve balance in a multipolar system (or avoid war)

• the geoeconomics and geostrategy of the two joined oceans, webbed by the shipping lanes that are the Indo-Pacific’s arteries

Rory Medcalf, an Australian apostle of the Indo-Pacific, says that the idea’s rise has heralded a new era of power rivalry, a world away from the optimism of globalisation. The Indo-Pacific became the “global centre of gravity, in wealth and population, but also the heartland of military might and latent conflict,” he writes. “Confrontation was trumping cooperation. From the Gulf of Aden to Papua New Guinea, the board was uncomfortably set for a great game with many layers and many players.”

Medcalf’s book expresses his hope that the Indo-Pacific will become a metaphor for collective action. If diplomacy fails, he fears, it will be the theatre of the first general war since 1945.

One of Medcalf’s many strengths is that he’s an intellectual who writes like a journalist; he started in hackdom, getting a Walkley commendation in 1991 for his reporting for the Northern Star newspaper in Lismore. From journalism, he became an Australian intelligence analyst and diplomat (postings to New Delhi, Tokyo and, as a truce monitor, Bougainville), then took think-tank duty at the Lowy Institute. Now he’s the professor heading the National Security College at the Australian National University.

Many moons ago, introducing him as a speaker, I listed his CV and asked if he’d ever had a real job. It’s the jibe of one journalist to another, because all hacks are plagued by the question of what they’ll do when they grow up (happily, after forty-nine years of hackdom, I’m still to decide). In Rory’s case, the jest is a tribute to someone from that nebulous place where strategists and analysts try to pin down what’s happening and imagine what’ll happen next. It’s a job you hold in your head, not your hands.

Medcalf has helped redefine the way Australia thinks of its region, bringing into being the geographic realm in which the hard-edged realists will do duty seeking balance or fighting the battle. “Words shape the world,” he writes. “An imagined space on a map both reflects and influences real and palpable things like military deployments, patterns of prosperity, and calculations of risk among the world’s most powerful leaders.”

His book offers an origin story for today’s Indo-Pacific, and some fine thinkers step forward. The first modern academic article to mention the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical term, by the Canadian naval scholar James Boutilier (a bon vivant who savours all the joys of strategy jousts), appeared in 2004.

The following year, the term was used by the New Zealand strategist Peter Cozens (who also champions Kiwi wine as “liquid sunshine”). Catching an idea arriving with the times, a great Australian journalist in Asia, Michael Richardson (late of the Age and the International Herald Tribune), wrote in the Australian Journal of International Affairs in 2005 about what Australia should aim for as a founding member of the East Asia Summit:

The economic and geopolitical landscape of Asia has changed dramatically in recent years, providing Australia with an unprecedented opportunity to become an integral and significant player in a wider Indo-Pacific region as it charts its future and seeks to manage tensions while shaping a new architecture of cooperation.

By then, having served as an Australian diplomat in New Delhi from 2000 to 2003, Medcalf was back in Canberra as an intelligence analyst, and he was an early adopter:

The logic that Australia’s region was changing to a two-ocean system, with China turning south and west and India turning east, accorded both with the evidence and the need to define Australia’s place in the world.

That word “logic” is at the heart of Medcalf’s Indo-Pacific explanation. The logic is driven by those key factors — China up, America down, India in — and by the geostrategic and geoeconomic drives of a multipolar system.

In the Medcalf telling, this logic sweeps aside other important constructs, such as the Asia-Pacific and the “Asian century.” The logic case he builds is strong, but logic doesn’t explain everything. It’s not to deny Medcalf’s argument to note that other factors were in play. As a former secretary of Australia’s defence department, Tony Ayers, used to chide his minions: “You’re being logical again, stupid, I’ve warned you about that!” Ayers was a supremely logical operator, but his jest was tough and true.

Logic can crash against personality and power and history and happenstance and pride and… (please add your pick). As Medcalf says, “Mistakes happen and accidents matter.”

Beyond logic, why were Japan and Australia among the first countries to place the Indo-Pacific atop their foreign policy? The question has weight because Japan and Australia were crucial players in the creation and embrace of the Asia-Pacific, especially in forming the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, or APEC, back in 1989.

Medcalf argues that the Asia-Pacific was overthrown by history and geography and the shifting balance of power, whereas an integrated two-ocean perspective has an ancient pedigree:

It is a more enduring way of understanding Asia than twentieth-century notions like the Asia-Pacific… [T]he precursors of the Indo-Pacific in this geopolitical sense also go back thousands of years, to a proto-economy of regional maritime trade and migration beyond recorded history.

The two-ocean view is a frame, rather than explanation, for the surprisingly rapid shift by Japan, a conservative, bureaucratic state that mirrors the consensus culture of its society. The change agent wasn’t just logic, but the character and drive of a single leader, Abe Shinzo. (One Abe-era change: Japan drops Western name order and turns back to Asian tradition, putting the surname first.)

In fact, Medcalf begins his book with a meeting between Abe and India’s Narendra Modi on a Japanese bullet train in 2016. He gives much credit to Abe for the creation of what he calls the Indo-Pacific “fever” that has since swept governments.

Adopting the new geographic vision feeds into the effort by Abe to remake how his nation acts in the world. A more conventional Japanese leader (or leaders) wouldn’t have overturned the Asia-Pacific consensus. Japan still puzzles about whether Abe, its longest-serving prime minister, is a one-off outlier or the model for future leaders.

Australia’s abandonment of the Asia-Pacific identity it had done so much to create wasn’t achieved by the push of a strong leader. The shift emerged from strong cross-currents within a Canberra wavering between the sunny optimism of the Asian century and the darker forebodings of the “Indo-Pacific.” The two terms describe the same set of players and forces, but arrange them in different orders with different weightings.

Asian-century usage blends liberal internationalism with an optimistic view of Asia entering a new phase of deeper and broader engagement, privileging geoeconomics over geopolitics. The Indo-Pacific gives more weight to geopolitics, shifting the focus from economic bonanza to surging strategic rivalry. Little wonder ASEAN’s new Indo-Pacific Outlook seeks “dialogue and cooperation instead of rivalry.” Cooperation is what we desire, rivalry is what we’ve got.

“Asian century” versus “Indo-Pacific” is also a way to describe a Canberra debate among diplomats, econocrats and defenceniks. The econocrats bleat that the security agencies are today running the show. Or as the ever-vivid former prime minister Paul Keating puts it, “the nutters are in charge.”

The econocrats describe Medcalf’s book as “the American alliance framework resuscitated and reimagined with Indian heft.” The Indo-Pacific is seen as a maritime security construct trying to tie together the four democracies, Australia, Japan, India and the United States, in the Quad security dialogue: “It’s sure in its distrust of China but unsure of whether and how to build a coalition to counter it.”

The Asian century hit its Canberra high point in 2012 with the Gillard government’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper, which opened this way:

Asia’s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the 21st century — the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia’s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment… The Asian century is an Australian opportunity. As the global centre of gravity shifts to our region, the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity. Australia is located in the right place at the right time — in the Asian region in the Asian century.

Whatever truths the white paper delivered, Gillard also served political and personal interests — she had to create foreign policy not owned by the man she’d toppled, Kevin Rudd. The Asian century was Gillard making her own big-P policy.

The Asian-century language came from Treasury, and the quintessential Treasury man of his generation, Ken Henry, got to write the policy (although as Henry’s draft blew out towards 500 pages, the head of the Office of National Assessments, Allan Gyngell, was drafted to slash it to 300 pages and add a pinch of foreign policy coherence).

While Gillard had most of Canberra doing Asian-century duty, the defence department defected to the Indo-Pacific. Although it takes only a few minutes’ drive from the Russell Hill defence complex to the other side of the lake where parliament, the PM’s department and Foreign Affairs reside, sometimes the Kings Avenue bridge marks a major conceptual chasm.

Defence hated the Asian century tag because the headline dropped the United States from the equation. That’s conceptual poison for a department that sees anchoring America in Asia as a fundamental interest.

The 2013 defence white paper gave minimal linguistic obeisance rather than conceptual obedience to Gillard’s vision, citing the Indo-Pacific fifty-eight times and the Asian century white paper just ten times.

When the Liberal–National coalition won the 2013 election, the Asian-century usage became Canberra cactus — too prickly to touch and quickly discarded. Change the government, change the language. As Ken Henry laments, his paper has had “no impact on policy, not even on the tenor of public policy debate in Australia.”

Political cleansing was delivered as policy vandalism when the prime minister’s department deleted the Asian century white paper from its digital record (the polite term is archived). Savour the irony that the Asian century paper is still available on the defence web site. Defence understands the need to record the history of your victories; and it’s a major win when your department hands Canberra the new construct for the region.

Indo-Pacific has become Canberra’s uniform usage. The 2013 defence white paper marked the jump-off point, with further restatements in the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

Medcalf reports that when the Indo-Pacific map was promoted by the official in charge of writing the 2013 defence white paper, Brendan Sargeant, “it was initially controversial within parts of the Australian defence establishment and reportedly met bewilderment among American officials still focused on the Middle East.”

Medcalf dismisses as “rather conspiratorial” the view that “Australian defence officials promoted the Indo-Pacific to gain ascendancy over economic agencies that had pushed the Asian Century idea — but this overlooks that the Indo-Pacific had already been aired in the Asian Century white paper and was being taken seriously in foreign policy circles too.”

Australia doesn’t get too many masterworks on foreign policy, but we are in a fertile period, as tough times summon books to define the era. Three important books in three years — each distinctly different — have responded to an age that ponders US resolve, China’s purpose and possible paths for Australia.

Medcalf sits beside Allan Gyngell’s Fear of Abandonment on the fearfully pragmatic heart of Oz diplomacy, both offering magisterial views that highlight and explain.

With them on this literary peak is Hugh White’s How to Defend Australia, calling for a massive remaking of Australia’s defence force and an equally dramatic rethink of strategy. White presents Australia with a binary choice, while Medcalf sees a multipolar solution (“a many-sided world with no nation especially in charge”). White thinks that without the United States we’re on our own. Medcalf says many partners are available.

White says Medcalf portrays a vast region stretching from Hollywood to Bollywood that “will stand united and work together to contain China.” White’s riposte is that India is more likely to cut a deal with China to divide the region between them. India, White writes, won’t save Australia:

The Indo-Pacific concept is so popular in Canberra and elsewhere precisely because it is so reassuring. It is an invitation and an excuse to assume that Australia’s worries about its future in Asia will be solved by other countries, especially India, without much effort of its own. It is the old, familiar story of Australians expecting a “great and powerful friend” to look after it. Australia should be so lucky.

Medcalf argues that New Delhi won’t accept a deal on Beijing’s terms, relegating India to the role of a permanent second-tier power, restricted to South Asia. “Ultimately, India fears China’s superior economic and strategic weight,” Medcalf writes, and will resist by tilting away from its habit of strategic autonomy. “India is getting serious about cooperating with Indo-Pacific democracies to slow and moderate China’s expansion in the Indian Ocean.” He sets out what the newly imagined region must achieve by describing the dangers it faces.

China is joining a race to establish military bases to do dual-use duty with the networks of trade, investment and infrastructure. The bases are “less mighty bastions of territorial dominance and more lightly fortified lily pads” yet the race feeds the fears of a region “under the nuclear shadow of mutually assured destruction, and the cyber cloud of mutually assured disruption.”

This is not yet a region gripped by the prospect of total war, says Medcalf, but neither is it business as usual in the military balance. The Indo-Pacific has become “the vast ground zero for nuclear deterrence and risk: it is the epicentre of a ‘second nuclear age.’”

A plausible security future for the region is “a state of permanent coercion,” where the shadow of nuclear war doesn’t discourage conflict but exacerbates it at a lower but still dangerous level: “If nuclear weapons become the lone pillar for deterring China in the ocean of ambiguity between peace and Armageddon, then the contest is lost.” Nukes won’t deliver peace in a shifting system, “especially when the new geopolitical motorway is being built faster than drivers can learn the rules of the road.”

The potential crash points proliferate. What’s crucial, and far more contestable, is Medcalf’s contention that time isn’t automatically on Beijing’s side.

Widen the equation beyond the relative decline of the United States and China’s rise. Judged against the dynamic Indo-Pacific, Medcalf says, there’s good reason to think Chinese power “has already peaked.” He offers four factors limiting China’s ability to dominate or map the future:

• China’s Indo-Pacific and Eurasian ambitions along the Belt and Road have a perilous momentum: “pushback is happening and more is inevitable.”

• The rest of the Indo-Pacific is becoming wealthier and stronger too: “China’s power relative to its region may never be so great again.”

• America may be down but it’s far from out. Rather than having to dominate, the United States can work with others to balance China’s power.

• China’s internal problems — debt, demographics, environmental stress, discontent and now the Covid-19 crisis — could compound the external challenges to China’s “imperial over-stretch.”

If fully fledged cooperation with China is unrealistic for the foreseeable future, Medcalf writes, try to discourage confrontation and move the dial towards “competitive coexistence.”

Medcalf’s instruments to construct an Indo-Pacific to “absorb or deflect” China will be development, deterrence and diplomacy. The qualities underpinning the instruments will be solidarity and resilience.

The United States is vital — for investment, trade, alliances, technology and security — even if it can’t or won’t lead. Just as important will be the ambition and action of “the middle”: Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea and Australia. By the 2040s, he writes, “the combination of Japan, India and Indonesia is projected to outweigh China in GDP, military spending and population. Add just one or two more nations and this would be a hefty coalition, especially given the natural advantages of geography, namely its combined oversight of much of the strategic waterways of the Indo-Pacific.”

Dealing with China will require a fresh, if fraught, regional order. The task will be to stop China ruling or writing all the rules. Medcalf ends with an upbeat flourish, rendered in dark colours:

A path can be charted between conflict and capitulation. The future is not solely in the hands of an authoritarian China or an unpredictable, self-centred America. In the end, the Indo-Pacific is both a region and an idea: a metaphor for collective action, self-help combined with mutual help. If things go badly awry, it could be the place of the first general and catastrophic war since 1945. But if its future can be secured, it can flourish as a shared space at the heart of a reconnected world, in ways its early voyagers could have scarcely imagined.

The new Indo-Pacific will be built by pushback against China, the rise and strength of the rest, and American endurance.

The recipe is for what Medcalf calls “a kind of full-spectrum staring contest.” The vision is of a multipolar Indo-Pacific where lots of the poles line up together. The great staring contest will have myriad players. Protect the wealth, avoid the war. Lots of staring mediated by lots of sharing.

Hang together or hang separately. Hang tough or go hang. •

The post The heart of a reconnected world appeared first on Inside Story.

But seven out of eight Indonesians are Muslims. This time, the exit polls tell us, they divided almost evenly — 49 per cent for Jokowi and 51 per cent for Prabowo, a Trumpish former general who won overwhelming endorsement from Muslim conservatives, just as Trump’s support base is among Christian conservatives.

That 49–51 split hid deep divisions. The Javanese heartland in East and Central Java gave Jokowi a massive 71 per cent, after its dominant Muslim organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars), which promotes a pluralist “Indonesian” Islam, formed a de facto alliance with the president — a relationship cemented when Jokowi chose a veteran NU cleric, Ma’ruf Amin, as his vice-president.

Yet on the other side of the island, the Sundanese heartland of West Java, which more reflects the Saudi version of Islam, gave 60 per cent of its votes to Prabowo. The challenger — as implausible a role model for Islam as Trump is for Christianity — also won 57 per cent of votes on Indonesia’s second island, Sumatra. That figure rose to 86 per cent in the deeply conservative provinces of West Sumatra and Aceh.

A conference of Indonesia experts in Canberra last weekend heard that Indonesia is now more polarised — and its democracy weaker — than at any time in twenty years of democratic rule. And it’s not clear if Jokowi’s second five-year term will heal that polarisation, or see it grow even more confronting, forcing Indonesia’s leaders to redefine what kind of country it is.

The annual Indonesia Update at the Australian National University shone its spotlight on the social divisions left by the election, and by years of increasing tension between supporters of Indonesia’s traditional pluralism and those who want to impose conservative Islamic values. At the extreme, some conservatives would like to see sharia law enforced and Indonesia declared an Islamic country.

The conference also focused on what its organisers see as the “regression” of Indonesian democracy towards authoritarianism, after Islamic militants succeeded in having the former mayor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjohojo Purnama, a Chinese Christian known as Ahok, jailed on a charge of blasphemy against Islam. Speakers accused Jokowi of retaliating by using the powers of government to suppress opposition and conduct the election on a playing field sloping his way.

The past three years of social conflict have threatened hopes that Indonesia is becoming a “normal” middle-income democracy. The momentum is now with those who want it to be a less diverse, less tolerant, more authoritarian state reflecting traditional Islamic values.

If the conflict of values between Indonesia’s traditional religious pluralism and conservative Islam intensifies further in Jokowi’s second term, the tolerant, open Indonesia we know could become a very different country.

To Australians, Jokowi seems one of the most attractive leaders on the world stage: a smiling, politically skilful man of the people; an honest entrepreneur-turned-politician building the infrastructure Indonesia sorely needs. But Indonesia watchers in Australia’s universities have been concerned for some time that his government has slid towards authoritarianism in trying to suppress the rising conflict over Indonesia’s national identity.

The ANU’s Marcus Mietzner and Ed Aspinall opened the conference with a bleak overview: Mietzner declared that Indonesia’s democracy is now in its worst shape since 2000. The former army commander in East Timor, General Wiranto, has been put in charge of the government’s response to the rise of Islamic militancy, with results Mietzner summed up as “executive illiberalism.”

Rock star Ahmad Dhani, a prominent critic of the government, has been jailed for two and a half years for a series of inflammatory tweets. In all, eighty-two Prabowo supporters have been prosecuted for insulting Jokowi, although only sixteen have been convicted. The government leant on the TV channels during the election campaign to ensure that most supported Jokowi. Police and public servants were told to go out and sell the government’s achievements.

Along with the usual Indonesian custom of “envelope campaigning” — one government candidate was arrested with eight billion rupiah (about A$800,000) in envelopes intended for voters — the message went out to moderates: “They came for Ahok. Next they will come for us, unless we support Jokowi.”

Aspinall added that it was no better on the other side: Prabowo’s team told voters that Jokowi was not a true Muslim and would, if re-elected, ban prayers and legalise same-sex marriage. And it is no secret that, having forced Ahok from Jakarta’s mayoral office and into jail, the Islamic militants’ next target is Jokowi.

Conference co-convenor Eve Warburton argued that Jokowi himself used smears to try to polarise Indonesians; his supporters are now urging him to purge the civil service of Islamists. She cited surveys showing that the polarising campaign rhetoric was matched by “rising intolerance at grassroots level” towards anyone with different views.

But perhaps this needs to be seen in context. In his keynote speech, University of Michigan political scientist Allen Hicken, a pioneer of measuring the quality of democracies, emphasised that the tide of liberalisation has been receding the world over since about 2012, including in the West; Indonesia is no exception.

Hicken has to live in Trump’s United States, and specialises in the Philippines, the den of Duterte, and Thailand, the land of coups. Yes, Indonesia has lost some democratic ground, he said, but along with East Timor it remains streets ahead of the other countries in Southeast Asia — even Malaysia and Singapore — for the depth and spread of its democratic culture.

Indeed, on any reasonable measure, Indonesia is a stand-out success among the world’s newer democracies. It has seen election after election at which power has passed peacefully between elected rulers at all levels of government. The media is uncensored, political parties operate freely and the courts are independent, if at times corrupt.

Hicken argued that its recent experience reflects a global zeitgeist in which leaders and citizens are turning away from the liberal ideals of “being able to see others’ point of view, and being able to disagree without being disagreeable.”

This is exacerbated, he said, when elections lead to a winner-takes-all outcome, when candidates who might build bridges to unite the country are blocked from standing by extremists in their parties, and when governments use rule by law rather than the rule of law to punish groups opposed to them.

He did not speculate on what has made the world turn more authoritarian. In Indonesia’s case, “executive illiberalism” was clearly driven by the rise of militant Islam in the streets, and the fear of this fuelling a resurgence of the terrorist bombings of the previous decade. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any country, and the most to lose if Islamic radicalism grows out of control.

Back to the election. The defining event of Jokowi’s first term was the toppling of Jakarta’s mayor, largely because Ahok was a Chinese Christian. And, in turn, Jokowi’s defensive response to this — forming a de facto alliance with the Islamic moderates of the Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU — was the decisive factor in his re-election.

NU’s Javanese heartland (East Java, Central Java and Yogyakarta) contains almost a third of Indonesia’s voters. In 2014, they gave Jokowi a healthy 59–41 victory over Prabowo, a majority of eight million votes. In the other two-thirds of Indonesia, by contrast, his margin over Prabowo was a slender 300,000 votes.

This time the rest of Indonesia, taken together, swung to the challenger: Prabowo won that two-thirds of the country by 3.6 million votes. But in the Javanese heartland, with almost fifty million voters, Jokowi won a stunning 12 per cent swing to win 71 per cent to Prabowo’s 29 per cent. This time, his majority there was more than twenty million votes. Sure, it’s his part of the country — his political career began as Mayor of Surakarta (Solo) — but what gave him such a massive swing there when West Java held firmly with Prabowo and the three other big islands — Sumatra, Sulawesi and Kalimantan (Borneo) — swung strongly towards the challenger?

The decisive factor was NU’s role. Nava Nuraniyah of Jakarta’s Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict gave the conference a fascinating account of how NU set about organising its millions of mostly moderate members and supporters to become militant campaigners defending Indonesia’s traditional pluralism.

As Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation, NU largely focuses on welfare. It is best known in Australia for its former long-time leader Abdurrahman Wahid (aka Gus Dur), the courageous, almost-blind cleric who was a rare voice of opposition in the Suharto years. Gus Dur became president himself in 1999, but found day-to-day politics beyond him, and was dumped for PDIP leader Megawati Sukarnoputri.

Confronted with the rise of radical Islam on the streets, NU turned itself into the army of “militant pluralism,” Nuraniyah said. It trained its cadres to be campaigners armed with techniques and arguments, including martial arts training. And Jokowi returned the favour by choosing senior NU cleric Ma’ruf Amin as his running mate, despite the crucial role Amin had played in 2016 in issuing a fatwa against Ahok, one of Jokowi’s allies.

On the streets, NU’s young militants confronted the radical Islamists with similar tactics: burning opponents’ flags, holding big prayer rallies and trying to recruit those on the sidelines. There was no serious violence during the campaign, but Nuraniyah warns that violent clashes between the two groups could happen in the future.

Jokowi’s five-year term will finally start in October. What role will the NU and his new vice-president play in it? So far, their hand has not been visible in the issues he has nominated as his priorities: ensuring that “no one [is] left behind,” pushing through reforms to attract more business investment — including lower company tax and investment in infrastructure and education — and building a new capital city (of which, more in a moment).

But Jokowi has yet to announce his new ministry, and he is a pragmatist. If Islam’s influence in Indonesia continues to expand, his decisions are likely to reflect it. Moderate Islam saved him at this election; he now owes it some favours. What will the NU seek?

The role of Islam in society is not the only difficult issue facing Indonesia’s leaders. It is a land with both widespread corruption and a powerful, committed anti-corruption commission, the KPK. That’s a lethal cocktail. According to the Jakarta Post, the commission is currently investigating 255 MPs, six political party leaders, 130 regional leaders, and twenty-seven heads of departments and agencies under suspicion of graft. Not surprisingly, the MPs don’t like it, and they are fighting back.

The outgoing House of Representatives has unanimously put forward a draft law which would see it appoint a council to oversee the KPK’s operations, issue or deny approval for any use of telephone surveillance, and remove its freedom to hire. Anyone who has read Elizabeth Pisani’s wonderful analysis of Indonesia by travelogue, Indonesia Etc., will understand the MPs’ point of view. After all, our constituents expect us as MPs to keep handing them cash-filled envelopes and other goodies. How can we afford to do that if we don’t take bribes?

At issue, however, is Indonesia’s ability to progress to becoming a modern, high-income economy. Even in 2007, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Indonesia at a disappointing 143rd of 180 countries on corruption, with an average mark of just twenty-three out of one hundred. But by 2018, Indonesia’s ranking had jumped to eighty-ninth, and its average mark to thirty-eight — and few would dispute that that is largely due to the work of the KPK, which has already sent powerful figures such as former Golkar party chairman and speaker of the House, Setyo Novanto, to jail for fifteen years.

Jokowi, typically, has remained silent so far. But he has told party leaders he plans to appoint a non-politician as attorney-general, and have only a minority of politicians in his ministry. His finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, is one of Indonesia’s most highly regarded economists and has spearheaded a range of reforms, including measures to tackle corruption in the bureaucracy. One can imagine what advice she will give Jokowi on the House’s draft bill.

With the conference program decided long ago, there was only cursory reference to the recent riots in Papua, whose Melanesian people resent being an outlying province of a largely Javanese country. As they see it, they are viewed by other Indonesians through a prism of condescending racism; even in Papua, government and commercial activities are dominated by outsiders, and their land remains cut off from the world. (Even under Jokowi, foreign journalists are effectively banned from Papua.)

Ed Aspinall touched on the conflict only to warn that Papuan separatists have embarked on “an unwinnable war,” given Jakarta’s military muscle and determination to retain control. Some of us remember the same phrase being used a generation ago to dismiss the East Timorese resistance.

A different slant was put by Charlotte Setijadi of the National University of Singapore. While Jokowi has visited Papua more often and invested more in its development than any previous president — including building a trans-Papua highway — she said solving Papua’s complaints “needs more than a development approach. Papua must have political reform.”

The issue that has sprung out of left field since the election is Jokowi’s snap decision to build a new national capital — and not on Java, but in the sparsely populated jungle of East Kalimantan.

He timed it well, to chime with alarm over Jakarta’s toxic air pollution, and what is now seen as the inevitable sinking of northern Jakarta under the ocean as a result of the long, reckless depletion of its groundwater resources. Greater Jakarta now has roughly thirty million people, more than all of Australia. It has to be Indonesia’s commercial capital; it doesn’t have to be the national capital.

But as the ANU’s Paul Burke argued in a searing critique, a developing country with so many infrastructure needs could do without the added cost of building a new capital. He dismissed the official cost estimate of 466 trillion rupiah (roughly A$50 billion) as an underestimate that ignored the extra operating costs imposed by having a Brasilia-like capital far from where most people live.

“Indonesia has a long list of more compelling priorities than a new capital,” Burke said. “Jakarta is not going away. It will still be Indonesia’s biggest city… Investments and policies will be needed to tackle groundwater management and air pollution, to build an outer sea dike, and implement its own (A$60 billion) regeneration project.”

A new capital will inevitably be funded partly from the resources that would otherwise be deployed in meeting infrastructure needs in the cities and regions where Indonesians are already living, he said. The opportunity cost of giving the new city priority will be significant.

If a new capital were needed, it would be far cheaper to build it on Java, where almost half of Indonesia’s people live, and road, rail and air links are concentrated. But Burke said the reality is that Jakarta is already the hub to which all of Indonesia connects, and changing that will be expensive.

It does seem a premature decision, even for an economy that has done as well as Indonesia has. In its twenty years as a democracy, gross domestic product has almost trebled, averaging growth of 5.25 per cent a year. Indonesia’s GDP per head has more than doubled — and in the past decade has grown four times as fast as Australia’s.

Indonesia is now a middle-income country in real terms (using purchasing power parity to measure the volume of output rather than its price), making it the seventh-biggest economy in the world. In this decade it has overtaken Brazil, Britain and France. Within another decade, if it can sustain its current growth rate, it will overtake Russia, Germany and Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

Its most serious economic weakness is that the gains from growth have gone disproportionately to those at the top. The ANU’s Christopher Hoy said reforms in Jokowi’s first term have gone some way towards reducing income disparities, but the richest 20 per cent of Indonesians hold 85 per cent of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 60 per cent hold just 5 per cent between them. Jokowi’s team has made some headway in reducing income disparities, but there is a long way to go.

Few Australians think of Indonesia as a success story. The Lowy Institute’s annual poll reveals that two-thirds of Australians don’t even realise that it’s a democracy. Nor have they grasped that Indonesia’s military and police have succeeded in more or less shutting down one of the world’s most lethal terrorist networks since the 2002 Bali bombing — and that, in the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Indonesia could have done a lot worse, on many fronts. As its neighbour, we should be grateful to have a thriving, democratic success story on our doorstep.

The question is whether it will remain that way. That’s one question the conference could not answer. •

The post The wrong kind of momentum in Indonesia? appeared first on Inside Story.

How to Defend Australia is an attempt to explode the fragile bipartisan consensus that has removed defence from the political debate. By launching a direct assault not just on the three services but also on the defence industry and enormous vested interests, White is challenging the fundamentals of our defence and foreign policy settings. That’s why his book is important.

This doesn’t mean, however, that people who share his disillusionment with the current situation will embrace his proposed solution.

To understand exactly what the controversy is all about you need to realise that the person who has written this radical jeremiad is not merely the ANU’s professor of strategic studies but also a former deputy secretary (strategy) of defence and the person who established the (now) conservative Australian Strategic Policy Institute. This isn’t some kind of left-wing critique urging us to warm to China’s embrace. It’s by an insider, familiar with both the office layout at Russell Hill and the long, empty corridors of Parliament House, urging that the whole system be completely reworked.

The book itself is an elegantly written, straightforward recipe designed to answer the question posed in the title. Its meat comes from a detailed analysis of Australia’s strategic geography; a dash of spice is added with a review of how the changing world scene has transformed our geopolitics. But what really counts is the heat — a thorough and relentless analysis of the consequences of our current strategic settings. White has cooked up a witches’ brew that will upset (almost) everyone involved in the defence debate in Australia.

To understand why, we need to start at the beginning. Less than a month after a surprise Japanese air assault on Pearl Harbor destroyed the US Pacific Fleet in late 1941, readers of the Melbourne Herald opened their newspapers to find Labor prime minister John Curtin prophesying “immense change.” Then he added a crucial sentence: “Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” These words set the new parameters of the defence arrangements that White has set out to change.

Most of those who circle around the strategic debate come to it with personal military experience. White, however, spent his youth at Oxford (winning the enormously challenging John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy, awarded for an essay tackling questions like “why?” or “why not?”). Later he worked as a journalist and as an adviser to defence minister Kim Beazley and prime minister Bob Hawke, before becoming the principal author of the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper, which set in place the force structure and strategy that still prevails.

It’s this background that allows White to make his controversial case so persuasively. He doesn’t come to the issue having handed hostages to any of the usual participants in the debate: the military, politicians or other interest groups. Instead, he uses that single philosophical tool, logic, to shear through the conventional shibboleths and attempt to understand both what we are trying to achieve (security) and how this can best be accomplished (through self-reliance and abandoning the US alliance).

This isn’t a book that’s been quickly dashed off. More than a decade ago, I sat in on White’s compressed course on Australian defence policy at ANU. He began speaking, lucidly and smoothly, at 9am on Monday, finishing a fortnight later. As he spoke, words coalesced into sentences, which then formed themselves into carefully structured paragraphs in the air around him. Even at the time a book seemed an obvious next step, although not to White. “I’m still not quite finished yet,” he said. “It’s not quite ready.”

Since that time White has become identified as part of the “China lobby,” having published a number of essays on the need for Washington to offer Beijing strategic space and the potential for a collision between the two superpowers. In this book, however, he focuses his attention on Australia, mounting a strong and persuasive case that our current policy settings (and the alliance more generally) are no longer protecting the country.

How to Defend Australia is the product of a keen mind frustrated at our refusal to recognise (or rather our wanton disregard of) the consequences of our actions. White is not challenging the myriad benefits that have resulted from the US alliance: “Sustaining the status quo would be the best outcome for us,” he has written elsewhere. “But how far should we be prepared to go, and at what cost? These are awkward questions that we’ve avoided for too long.”

White poses a real challenge to the enormous mass of woolly, circular reasoning that surrounds the debate about how we would defend Australia. He simply, and explicitly, forges a link between policy and force structure; between illusory security rhetoric and the reality of boots on the ground.

In doing so, he performs the huge service of opening up a subject that has effectively been closed and placed off limits for debate since the late 1980s, when the Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities, written by another ANU professor, Paul Dibb, first traversed the idea of independently defending our continent.

There’s already been serious pushback from those immersed in defence’s culture, and even fans of White may question some of his prescriptions. Take one example, his proposal for a deterrence posture relying on a fleet of twenty-four submarines. Such a strategy makes a great deal of sense today, when these vessels can remain undetected running silent and deep. But that could change dramatically if technological breakthroughs expose them to tracking by enemy forces, outflanking the book’s strategy. Alternatives could easily be constructed, but the questions linger.

More critically, it’s a policy premised on almost doubling defence spending to nearly 4 per cent of GDP. Reaching that figure would require steely determination — not something currently apparent on either side of politics. As for the big splash, the ambit claim that’s grabbed media attention — an indigenous Australian nuclear capability — well, that will alienate many of those on the left who might, perhaps, be attracted to other elements of White’s argument. By placing these questions at the forefront of debate, White draws attention to fundamental issues the country urgently needs to address.

For decades the strategic situation has been changing around us. Over the past few years this picture has shifted dramatically, and that’s why How to Defend Australia is much more than just a book about defence. It represents a fundamental attempt to rewire the strategic debate in this country, and it will reach out well beyond the usual suspects in the field. •

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Around six months earlier, Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Joe Hockey, had initiated a cultural diplomacy campaign in Washington under the title “Celebrating a Centenary of Mateship.” The embassy launched a dedicated website and announced a calendar of events, including a military tattoo, a religious service in Washington National Cathedral, and centenary commemorations involving prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and president Donald Trump.

The occasion being marked was certainly deserving of commemoration. One hundred years earlier, on 4 July 1918, Australian and American troops under the command of General Sir John Monash conducted a successful offensive against German forces in the French town of Hamel, helping to turn the tide against German forces on the Western Front. This was the first time American and Australian troops had fought side by side, and the first occasion on which American troops fought offensively under a non-American commander. General Monash had chosen 4 July as the date of the battle.

And so, the embassy website continues, “Since that day, Australian and American soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and women have served alongside one another in every major conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our military alliance endures today, as our armed forces work together in Iraq and Syria to combat the threat of terrorism.”

No sooner was the schedule of centenary events under way than an Australian journalist, Meggie Palmer, detonated a digital depth charge, pointing out in her online newsletter that all fifteen Centenary of Mateship ambassadors were male and white. That may not have concerned Ambassador Hockey, who had long been engaged, alongside former prime minister Tony Abbott, in a domestic culture war celebrating national values such as mateship and treating concerns about gender equity and cultural diversity as self-indulgent identity politics. But the Australians had misread their mates, even in Donald Trump’s America-first America. An apology was issued — Hockey accepted the blame — and nothing more was heard of the Centenary of Mateship.

To be fair, men on both sides of Australian politics are prone to nostalgia about old-fashioned Australian values and tempted to translate their homespun folklore into diplomacy. Labor may be less inclined than the Coalition parties to trumpet “national values” in its foreign policy statements, or enact them in bilateral relations in office, but it has a similar weakness for working men’s values.

In July 2012, for example, speaking in Beijing on the fortieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China, deputy Labor prime minister Wayne Swan evoked a powerful image of mateship among working men to stamp Labor’s brand on the Australia–China relationship. He drew a graphic mental picture of his mentor, Mick Young, accompanying then opposition leader Gough Whitlam on his breakthrough visit to China in 1971. A lot happened on that visit but Swan chose to recall one episode in particular involving Mick Young:

Mick was a sheep shearer — a good one, too — before he become a union official and then a political leader. He had the big hands of a professional shearer. It would have given him great pleasure to firmly shake the hand of Zhou Enlai when the premier greeted the Australian delegation.

There is no doubting that it was a privilege to shake the hand of Premier Zhou Enlai (Chinese premier 1949–76). And yet this nostalgic evocation of mateship among the workers of the world — an Australian shearer shaking hands with a leader of proletarian China — was not reciprocated on the Chinese side. Premier Zhou hailed from one of the elite imperial families that successfully migrated, after the fall of the empire, to the peak of the Communist Party hierarchy. He could trace a pedigree of successful imperial examination candidates and imperial magistrates through both his maternal and paternal lines.

Nor is the Communist Party a working men’s party. It was and remains a closed and self-appointed post-imperial elite, whose historical mission is to keep common people out of public life and politics in China. It’s a privilege to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai because Zhou’s is the hand of privilege.

Enough of stories. My point in resorting to metaphors of scuttled fleets and shorn fleeces is to highlight a shift in the place of values in Australian public diplomacy today. Even before mateship went down in DC, a new suite of values had been commissioned by the Turnbull government. They appeared in its 2017 foreign policy white paper, which repositioned Australian values diplomacy from the old and familiar territory of white Australian male folklore to the global commons of liberal values. Mateship and the fair go made way for freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

How did it come to this? And where do we go from here?

The place of values in foreign and defence policy has been thrown into sharp relief by the disruptive times in which we live. Shifting power relations in the region, challenges to the postwar international order, and the rise of populist nationalism around the globe all present ethical challenges as well as policy ones.

At the popular level, movements targeting religious and ethnic difference test the commitment of all immigrant countries to inclusion, equality and diversity. Among state actors, a dynamic and increasingly powerful China is driving structural and strategic changes in the region while showing little sympathy for the values underpinning democracy, the rule of law, or the liberal rules-based order on which regional stability and prosperity have been based since the second world war. The Trump administration’s response to the China challenge brings the long-term viability of that order into question.

For Australia, the question arises of whether the values by which Australians live their lives can help governments to negotiate safe passage through these complex ethical and policy issues.

Recent Australian governments appear to think so. Comparing the place of values across foreign policy white papers published in 1997, 2003 and 2017 is a reasonably reliable measure of continuity and change: each was produced by a Coalition government and through a single department, Foreign Affairs and Trade. Given these shared sources, the difference between the earliest and latest white papers is revealing.

The first two white papers, issued under John Howard (prime minister 1996–2007) made a number of unequivocal statements about values but also reflected that government’s preference for describing values in colloquial folkloric terms, such as mateship and the fair go. Values so described were subordinated to the pursuit of jobs and security as the 1997 white paper’s “basic test” of the national interest. In practice, the effect was often to exclude values diplomacy altogether from the Australian foreign policy toolbox — as was reflected in the convention governing bilateral relations with China, under which the two sides agreed to leave their values at the door in meetings and negotiations.

This subordination of values to interests (and specifically to prosperity and security) was facilitated by the Howard government’s ethnocultural approach to national identity and values. The first of the white papers projected a national identity rooted in a distinctively European, if not British, social and cultural heritage. “The values which Australia brings to its foreign policy,” the paper stated, “… reflect a predominantly European intellectual and cultural heritage.” The second identified Australia as a cultural outlier, again with a “predominantly European heritage,” in an otherwise alien region. Translated into diplomacy, this approach implied that Australia had one set of values, Asians another, and all parties should respect the values associated with the others’ ethnocultural traditions by remaining silent on values altogether

China was quite comfortable with this arrangement. It confirmed the view in Beijing that Australia was still at heart White Australia, which isolated it from other major countries in the region. Australia’s stance precluded values advocacy (Australia was certainly not proposing to insert mateship into a UN convention) and, by implying that all values were based on national cultures and traditions rather than universal principles, effectively endorsed the authoritarian values of the communist government as authentic expressions of China’s national culture. For Beijing, what was not to like about that?

In Australia, however, these foreign policy statements reflected highly partisan political positions on identity and values, and were consequently unsustainable. National values, as they were known at the time, featured in a wide-ranging public debate in the 1990s on the “Asianisation” of Australia associated with Paul Keating’s term as prime minister — a debate that merged into a wider series of discursive battles that came to be known as the culture wars and the history wars. Conservatives who favoured the idea that values were rooted in cultural traditions — whether defined as anglophone, Western civilisation or Judaeo-Christian — swore they would never surrender Australia’s identity or values to the imperatives of Asian engagement. Progressives, including Keating and the Labor side of politics, who favoured a culturally agnostic mix of identity and values saw little risk to Australian identity or values in closer engagement with Asia.

These domestic tensions played out in the two strategic foreign policy statements produced under the direction of Howard’s government in the wake of Keating’s electoral defeat in 1996. In particular, the second white paper’s choice of “tolerance, perseverance and mateship” as distinctively Australian values can be traced to divisive domestic policy debates taking place around education, culture and immigration. In an Australia Day address in 1998, almost two years into his first term, Howard made a pointed reference to the “values that are particularly important to all of us as Australians,” listing tolerance, perseverance and mateship among them. Later, marking the centenary of Federation, he identified “four distinct and enduring Australian values,” which he termed “self-reliance, a fair go, pulling together, and having a go.”

The Howard government consistently framed values in foreign policy documents in a language that precluded international values advocacy and alienated the Labor side of politics, which perhaps explains why so very little attention was paid to values in the Labor government’s major policy statement of the period, Australia in the Asian Century (2012). There, the reason for Labor’s silence on values can be found in a revealing reference to the “values” of an earlier generation of Australians who were “oriented mainly towards the British Empire and Europe” and whose conduct and beliefs reflected “the values and attitudes of a time when many Australians defined themselves as distant and separate from Asia.” But the paper’s authors opted not to update the values of an earlier time, instead treading lightly around the issue. Better, in their judgement, to ignore values altogether than risk stirring the old beast in the basement.

In time, the lack of bipartisan support for the values statements in the first two white papers presented problems for managing Australia’s most important relationship in the region — with China — which called for a new commitment to values diplomacy on both sides of the house.

The 2017 white paper issued under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull sidestepped the ethnocultural approach by describing values in terms of universal liberal principles. “Australia does not define its national identity by race or religion,” it asserted, elevating values in foreign policy by shifting the locus of national identity from one based on ethnocultural heritage to one grounded in values themselves.

The folksy colloquialism of earlier statements gave way to the universal language of democratic liberalism in describing such values as “political, economic and religious freedom, liberal democracy, the rule of law, racial and gender equality and mutual respect.” Values were elevated in Australian foreign policy thinking from secondary attributes of a particular ethnic heritage to primary markers of national identity expressed in universal terms.

But what of Labor? In government it has never produced a foreign policy white paper, although it has published two defence white papers, one in 2009 and the other in 2013. Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 2009 defence white paper was the first formal statement by an Australian government to take account of the impact of China’s growing wealth and power on Australia’s shifting strategic environment (for which it earned a stern rebuke from Beijing). Australia in the Asian Century, Labor’s all-encompassing statement on Australia’s place in the region, largely ignored the changing strategic environment attendant on the rise of China, which had informed the same government’s defence white paper. Little effort was made to reconcile security concerns on the one side with diplomatic and trade issues on the other within the framework of a single strategy document.

And yet, consistent with the tone of the Turnbull government’s white paper, Labor’s foreign affairs spokesperson senator Penny Wong gave a hard-hitting talk on the place of values in Labor foreign policy at the Griffith Asia Institute in August 2017 that was no less important for the progressive side of politics than the 2017 white paper was for the conservatives. Senator Wong shunted aside earlier Labor concerns about values in foreign policy: “There are, of course, those who dismiss values as a ‘trap’ that only encourages contention and conflict.” She was presumably addressing those on her own side of politics who felt intimidated by the terms of a debate designed to ensnare unwary critics of homegrown values, such as “mateship” and the “fair go,” in a series of traps laid out by their conservative opponents.

Senator Wong was emboldened to break the Labor mould for reasons similar to those that compelled Turnbull’s government to break with conservative tradition on national values. Those reasons include growing threats to the “rules-based order,” signs of growing racial and national intolerance, and evidence that countries such as China were acting to undermine the postwar security regime.

Senator Wong began with a personal anecdote and ended with a clear affirmation of the place of values in Australian foreign policy, dismissing both the “Asian values” and “Western values” schools of thought along the way, and positing in their place an international order founded on the principle of equal human dignity and secured by the rule of law. “One can be born lucky,” she said:

It was my good fortune to have been born into a family having two “values” traditions — those of China and what we loosely term “the West.” So it will not surprise you that I do not accept the view that some former Asian leaders have propounded that “values” are an artefact of Western imperialism. Values are not some kind of stalking horse behind which “the West” — and many people see that as code for the US — seeks to assert and defend a form of political dominance. Nor are they simply the legacy of what some describe as the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Senator Wong highlighted the rule of law as a foundation both for democratic societies and for an international rules-based order, and she concluded her discussion of the rule of law with the observation that “values, as a core element in the construction of a foreign policy, are not just desirable but necessary.”

Whether the recent affirmation of liberal universal values on both sides of politics will translate into effective foreign policy practice is a question on which foreign policy experts are divided. Some see the shift, from particular national values to common or universal ones, as signalling closer alignment with the United States and greater distancing from China. Writing in this vein, Deakin University’s Pan Chengxin argues that the emphasis on universal values in the 2017 white paper was a misguided attempt to differentiate Australia from China and align it more closely with the US-led “rules-based order.”

Other analysts see very different risks in values diplomacy, including possible challenges to the US alliance, which is based on realpolitik no less than values. Former diplomat Alan Dupont of the Cognoscenti Group argues that a values-based foreign policy could “see the end of bipartisanship on the [US] alliance” and, on the Labor side, put an end to what Keating has called a “tag-along foreign policy” that allegedly subordinates Australian national interests to policies laid down in Washington. To be sure, Senator Wong did initially respond to Donald Trump’s election in November 2016 with a statement about values that suggested Trump’s victory placed the American alliance on Labor’s watchlist. Dupont described her comments at that time as “virtue signalling disguised as foreign policy.” And yet, speaking of the United States in her later Griffith Asia Institute address, Senator Wong referred not to the present incumbent in the White House but to “that extraordinary enterprise which is the USA,” which “has, as its wellspring, a sense of human value… that underpins what we term ‘the rule of law.’”

In my judgement, to suggest that the 2017 white paper’s assertion of universal values and a values-based identity inevitably pits values against realpolitik is misleading. Together, the 2017 white paper and Labor’s support for its basic principles mark a shift, not from a realist to a values-based diplomacy, but from one set of values to another in Australia’s generally pragmatic foreign policy culture — a shift from a partisan, folkloric suite of values, unique to Australia, to a code of universal values that enjoys bipartisan support and is universally understood beyond Australia. That this shift was long overdue was indicated by the fate of mateship in Washington a year ago; and it is especially timely in a period of heightened uncertainty and risk in relation to China.

Further, the earlier approach to national values left Australia disarmed in dealing with foreign interference on Australian soil — primarily interference by China in our mainstream media, in community media and community organisations, in Australian higher education, and in relation to our parliamentary sovereignty. Well might we say to Beijing, “Fair go, mate!” But mateship does not translate readily across cultures — and it was not intended to. As a national value, mateship offers little guidance for dealing with foreign interference from any country, which involves matters of high principle that underpin the integrity of our institutions and the sovereignty of our parliaments.

Finally, we misled our friends in China by signalling in earlier foreign policy statements that Australians care less for human dignity, freedom and the rule of law than we do for jobs and growth. Leaving values at the door was always a values statement in itself — it falsely signalled that Australians don’t value values. This is how it was read by China’s leading Australia-watchers, one of whom told me during John Howard’s term in office that he was reporting to authorities in Beijing that Australia, unlike the United States, was highly pragmatic and placed little store in principles or values.

Historically, Australian foreign policy does tend towards the pragmatic, but this does not imply that Australians are willing to sacrifice core values and principles. A useful historical example of Australian principled pragmatism is former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans’s take on liberal internationalism — in his case termed “constructive internationalism” — which was motivated by high principle and yet was applied to specific cases, such as Cambodia, where it could make a real difference.

For Australia–China relations we have comparable models of principled and pragmatic foreign policy already under development. Macquarie University professor Bates Gill offers one model, which he terms bounded engagement, that affirms liberal humanist values while preserving much that is mutually beneficial in the relationship. Australia has every reason to continue engaging closely with China across as many fronts as possible, partly to sustain trade, investment and people-to-people ties but also to keep lines of communication open so as to signal positive engagement and to facilitate pushback when China’s actions impinge on Australian values and interests.

Many areas of Australia–China interaction could become more constrained, but not all need be constrained to the same degree. Some areas of cooperation, like philanthropy and law-enforcement cooperation, could well expand. While pushing forward in new areas of cooperation, Australian relations with China would nevertheless be attuned to deflecting the challenges that China may present to Australian security, prosperity and social cohesion.

For all that, the question “where to form here?” remains an open one. Whatever the answers may be, placing the fundamental principles that Australians value and share onto the national foreign policy agenda, in a language that all sides can embrace and other countries can understand, brings greater clarity to differences between Australia and China that are patently in need of protection in President Xi Jinping’s new era. If values matter, then getting them right is a sound foundation for a pragmatic and principled foreign policy. •

This is an edited version of a lecture given by John Fitzgerald at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art last night. He wishes to thank Caitlin Byrne of the Griffith Asia Institute and Gilbert Rozman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies for their comments and assistance, and the Griffith Asia Institute and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art for hosting the presentation.

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Chifley assembled an astute, forward-looking set of foreign policies amid the global transformations following the second world war. As Suares recounts, he supported the new international architecture of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods economic institutions. He encouraged a transition from European colonialist rule to independence in Asia — aggressively so in the dispute between the Dutch and the Indonesians after the latter proclaimed an independent republic — and developed warm relations with Jawaharlal Nehru’s newly independent India. On the reconstruction of Japan he sought social reforms, including land reform and creation of trade unions, intended to entrench liberal democracy and repress militarism.

Chifley also believed America and Britain were moving towards a level of cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union that was unwise and avoidable, and told them so with a frankness unmatched by any Australian PM besides Whitlam. He was sceptical of, and refused to join, Western military interventions to thwart communist insurgencies, most prominently in Malaya. “I do not think that some persons… fully realise the changed order in the world today,” he said. “We have a proud history but we must not live in the past. The methods of twenty years ago are no good today.”

What turned a former train driver and trade unionist into such a committed internationalist? Suares thinks Chifley’s upbringing in regional New South Wales, where he saw how agricultural commodities were sold into world markets, impressed on him the importance of global events for Australia. Two world wars and a Great Depression tragically confirmed that interconnectedness.

As prime minister, like many postwar leaders, Chifley would justify policies of international cooperation by evoking memories of horrors: of young soldiers becoming “gun-fodder” and of “2000 men outside a factory… to secure… one job.” These things had happened because of international hostility and isolationism, and it was why he committed himself to their opposites. Suares quotes from speeches Chifley gave to Bathurst local forums in the 1930s, where he mourned the failure of international conferences to agree to coordinate economic action, dismantle protectionist barriers, disarm, and revise Germany’s punitive war reparations. But the international scene in these years also offered him sources of hope, not least in the form of US president Franklin Roosevelt, “the most courageous statesman in the world.”

In government, serving Scullin and Curtin and then in the top job himself, he was known for working closely with senior public servants, particularly the talented generation of H.C. “Nugget” Coombs and his peers. He was immersed in a Keynesian-influenced reformist milieu that strengthened his internationalist convictions. Explaining how he developed an interest in Asia — which was “very uncommon,” as Suares points out, among Australian politicians and labourites at the time — is less clear. He visited Asia as a tourist in the 1930s, but it’s difficult to know if this was cause or effect.

Chifley’s decision to sign Australia up to the Bretton Woods Agreement required him to confront a frequently xenophobic suspicion of “Money Power” even among some in his own Labor caucus and cabinet. His thwarting of this opposition, which Suares recounts in detail, offers a masterclass in how to defeat such movements. He challenged their arguments directly and comprehensively in clear, simple language, his trademark straight talk setting out “to dispel some of [the] confusion and allay some of [the] fears.” Nonsense he calmly refuted, stressing that the International Monetary Fund would be controlled by signatory governments rather than by Washington or private financiers, and was “expressly forbidden to interfere with our domestic social and economic policies.” He also directed some caustic jabs at his opponents: for all his folksiness, he could be withering. There were “pitfalls enough in international affairs,” he declared, “without inventing any out of our own imaginations.”

Chifley also believed that participation in Bretton Woods institutions would give Australia a chance to shape the world to its liking. Australia would stamp its own values and priorities on Bretton Woods, he said, “doing our utmost to influence its policies.” To stay out would be self-defeating: “there is nothing… which could happen to us within Bretton Woods that could not happen to us in worse degree outside it.” Using statesmanlike rhetoric, arguing that joining the institutions was about “the welfare of not only Australia and its people, but also the people of the whole world, for generations to come,” he made his opponents look small. Australia ratified Bretton Woods.

Building foundations for close relations with Asia, especially the two emergent powers of India and Indonesia, was perhaps Chifley’s most significant international achievement. By encouraging a diplomatic solution in Indonesia favouring Sukarno’s republic — Indonesia’s “nationalist aspirations,” he said, were “real and strong” and needed to “be met more than halfway” — he created significant goodwill for Australia in the archipelago. India had Chifley’s attention, too: he thought it “the linchpin of Asia” and worked well with Nehru.

Chifley’s support for these states contrasted with his successor Robert Menzies’s suspicion of their refusal to take sides in the cold war and act as pliant Western allies. He played an important role in finding a formula to allow India to remain in the Commonwealth despite becoming a republic, which facilitated Delhi’s retaining political, strategic and economic ties with Western nations. While other Western politicians implored India not to discard the British king and crown as symbols, Suares records, Chifley deftly avoided such cultural missteps. For him, an Asia whose nationalist aspirations were fulfilled was more likely to be politically stable, denying oxygen to communism or militarism.

Suares calls Chifley an “economic internationalist” and argues he “would probably have been very much at home with the present-day dominance of the ‘economic dimension’ in Australia’s international affairs.” I wonder if this comparison obscures some of the significance and distinctiveness of Chifley’s foreign policy. He certainly wanted more trade between Australia and Asia. But he also had an interest in Asian peoples’ living conditions — he called Asian workers “grossly exploited” and believed that freedom in Asia could not simply mean “freedom to starve” — which cannot be explained solely by a desire to boost exports. He believed that “full employment and rising living standards” in the region were “important… both for our own sake and the sake of a peaceful and thriving world.” Chifley’s pointed criticisms of autocratic regimes also suggest an internationalist sensibility distinct from the present-day focus of Asian engagement on pursuing free-trade agreements.

How did a man obviously sympathetic to Asian peoples’ aspirations support the White Australia policy? In her brief treatment of the policy Suares quotes Chifley declaring White Australia was “economic not racial” and that Australia “does not feel superior” to “nations of non-European people.” Can this really have been so, given his government’s brutal deportations of Asians from Australia? Chifley said he believed, as was common at the time, that migrants from Asia would threaten Australia’s high wages and living standards — a “pool of cheap labour” was the main “threat” to Australia’s social arrangements, Suares quotes him saying, and Asian countries were the “likely sources.”

Proponents of this line of argument often inferred, or said outright, that Asian people had this effect because they were inherently servile — they would naturally accept lower wages and living standards rather than fight for a fairer deal. Did Chifley — who greatly admired Nehru’s intellect and was monitoring a revolution in Indonesia partly fuelled by intolerable colonial working and living conditions — believe that this stereotype had some plausible basis?

The idea that wages and conditions for white working classes depend on excluding non-white immigrants now seems less era-specific than we once thought. An analysis of how Chifley formed and held to such thinking — even as he discarded other shibboleths — would be of considerable contemporary relevance. Admittedly sources are a limitation: Chifley’s preference for the telephone and habit of periodically burning his correspondence means he left behind little evidence that might clarify the issue.

Appropriating Paul Keating’s phrase, Suares argues the Chifley government “looked for security within its region, but not from its region.” This seems an overstatement. Japan worried Chifley, as did the prospect of Maoist China and various Asian communist insurgencies, even if he opposed Western intervention. And a government that saw the accelerated expulsion from Australia of an Indonesian mother and her children as a pressing national security issue was most certainly, at some level, seeking security “from” Asia.

Suares also argues that British race patriotism shouldn’t be “an overarching categorisation” for the Chifley government. Yes: but nor can it be minimised. Chifley’s generation was motivated by a mix of new hopes and old fears. With the old British Empire dramatically weakened and the United States, pre–Korean war, unwilling to make new security commitments in Asia, and with the ANZUS agreement not yet on the horizon, they felt acutely vulnerable — and this vulnerability instilled an urgency that explains much of their foreign policy boldness.

Yet by seeking regional security in cooperative relations with the vociferously independent new Asian states India and Indonesia, Chifley did take a highly significant step away from the old model of a British-guarded Fortress Australia and towards the model of security “in” Asia that Keating described. One of this book’s most intriguing details is Chifley’s interest in, and approval of, India’s non-alignment doctrine: he “urged Nehru to remain neutral — India could ‘do a great service to the world… by showing the way to preserving peace.’”

Suares has provided a useful corrective to the commonly held view of Chifley as domestically focused. His term in office offers an instructive case study of a forward-looking Australian foreign policy at a time of rapid change: with deepened ties to Indonesia and India intended to strengthen Australian security, an emphasis on Asian socioeconomic welfare as a prerequisite for durable stability and prosperity, a widening set of bilateral relationships, and “ardent” membership of international organisations in which distinctive Australian perspectives and values were conveyed. I was left wanting to hear Chifley’s voice applied to the world of today. “No one can live alone,” he said in the 1940s. “[W]e are all dependent on each other.” •

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Whether the region’s plan to take greater control of its fate will be squeezed or helped by the two much larger narratives rising up at its edges — the Washington-led Indo-Pacific partnerships and Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative — is largely up to the Pacific Islanders themselves. At least that’s the message from Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Dame Meg Taylor and Vanuatu’s foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu.

The pair, whom I interviewed for the latest Little Red Podcast, believe that the Pacific is up for the challenge, though the two big-power narratives will need some tweaking to fit with the concerns and hopes of Pacific Islanders, particularly about climate change and jobs.

Awkwardly for the current US and Australian administrations, neither leader sees security for the Blue Pacific as a matter of building military bases on Manus Island or dealing with skulduggery around the Luganville Wharf. Climate change is the leading security concern, as Dame Meg explained.

“If you look at the Pacific Rim countries,” she said, “you’ve got to ask yourself, who is really committed to the one issue, the most important issue that faces this region: climate change? It’s not just the sea-level rise. Sea surges, tsunamis, cyclones. But you’ve also got drought, water. And it’s very, very real. It’s not as if a country [such as China] can come in and do something physical. What they have to do is make sure their emissions are down to 1.5 or even lower so that we can survive.”

Beyond resilience and survival come Pacific livelihoods. Here the hopes of the Pacific are clear: access to labour markets (including Australia’s, of course), training for Pacific youth, and meaningful opportunities after graduation. Here, China runs into a problem not so much with the Belt and Road narrative as with the reality on the ground created by its companies and its migrants.

Vanuatu’s foreign minister outlines the dilemma for Pacific leaders — they know pragmatically that nations can’t afford to forgo the roads, ports and hospitals built by Chinese aid. But the experience of many Pacific Islanders is that Chinese nationals, if not the Chinese government, are taking their jobs.

“There’s a lot of concern about the new retail shops being opened, all being controlled by Chinese and owned by Chinese,” says Regenvanu. “There’s lots of concerns about Chinese labourers being used on construction sites to do jobs that ni-Vanuatu feel they can do… There are high levels of unemployment, kids graduating who can’t find jobs. And you see people who you perceive as foreigners having jobs, having businesses. And you think, you’re a local and you can’t have that access. That obviously becomes a problem.”

Riots targeting Chinese shopkeepers have a long and less-than-glorious history in the Pacific, complicating the Belt and Road’s emphasis on people-to-people connections. Vanuatu’s neighbours — Papua New Guinea, Tonga and the Solomon Islands — have all seen serious violence directed at “new” Chinese communities.

As yet, Vanuatu has seen no hint of violence, but a rise in the number of Chinese nationals there — from 500 or so a decade ago to around 4000 today — has seen online rumblings. Discontented locals, whose views are reflected in Facebook groups such as Yumi Toktok Stret, divide the blame between the new arrivals and the government for failing to act.

A recent post, reacting to last year’s 60 Minutes episode The China Syndrome: Is China Taking Over the South Pacific?, contrasted China’s infrastructure loans with those of other countries, arguing the “main condition is ONLY Chinese engineering or construction companies are to be employ to do the Job. Blame your leaders not Chinese. Money istap lo China [the money stays in China].”

Ironically, the Chinese shopkeepers themselves put the sudden rise in Port Vila’s Chinese population down to migration from less-safe Pacific countries, as well as a growing middle-class group that has come to Vanuatu for health or lifestyle reasons. As one restaurant owner put it, “When I first arrived, I was shocked. I thought I’d been tricked. The airport was falling apart. The capital city doesn’t even have a set of traffic lights. But then I came to see how happy people were. When they smile, it’s not like people in China, they smile with their whole body.”

Vanuatu also holds appeal because of its proximity to Australia and New Zealand, offering the prospect of short, sharp periods of under-the-table work for Chinese nationals on tourist visas.

On the Indo-Pacific side, both sides of Australian politics are waking to the realisation that Pacific nations really do care about labour mobility, and that domestic politics may have to be put to one side.

One area where the Belt and Road appears to be stealing a march on the Indo-Pacific is the ramping up of scholarship and training opportunities. As Dame Meg explained, “We’ve raised this with other large powers that want to come back into the region about giving scholarships to our students. And the response I got was, ‘That’d be a really hard thing to sell right now.’ So there you are… they’re not prepared to really look at the needs of the region and our young people, then I’d be questioning, ‘Well why come back?’”

It’s a fair question. •

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Julia Moore (1925–86), diplomat

Part of our collection of articles on Australian history’s missing women, in collaboration with the Australian Dictionary of Biography

Julia Moore learnt young about the limits of “leaning in.” Six decades before Sheryl Sandberg sold the illusion that chutzpah could smash glass ceilings, Moore discovered through painful experience that talent, hard work and ambition were no match for a system designed to keep women down. Her encounter with this grim reality began in 1943, when she was among the first women allowed into Australia’s diplomatic service. By 1946, aged only twenty-one, she was a voice of Australia at the United Nations. Just months later, though, her diplomatic career stuttered and died when, as a newlywed, she fell victim to the public service’s long-running “marriage bar.”

Moore began life with considerable advantages. She was born into the Drake-Brockman clan, one of Western Australia’s most prominent families, in the midst of the “men, money and markets” boom of the 1920s. Her father Geoffrey was a decorated former Anzac and eminent engineer, and her mother Henrietta an esteemed novelist and playwright. Alongside her younger brother Paris, Moore was raised in Perth, where her father worked in the Public Works Department. Feminism was an early influence thanks to her maternal grandmother, Roberta Jull, a leading women’s rights campaigner and one of Australia’s first female doctors.

After matriculating from St Hilda’s Church of England Girls’ School, Julia began an arts degree at the University of Western Australia. But life changed dramatically in 1941, when her father was called up for war service and the family moved with him to Melbourne. At their new home in South Yarra, the family entertained Miles Franklin, Ernestine Hill, Nettie and Vance Palmer, Paul Hasluck and other literary and political luminaries. Julia, who had transferred to the University of Melbourne, soon left formal study to work as an assistant librarian at the ABC.

Meanwhile, the wartime labour shortage had induced the Department of External Affairs to make an unprecedented concession: in response to urgings from feminist Jessie Street, it agreed to recruit women into the diplomatic service. When the Diplomatic Cadet Scheme was established in 1943, three of the initial twelve places were reserved for women. In total, 1500 people applied — among them many of the nation’s best and brightest women, who had scant other opportunities for a professional career.

In April 1943 came the much-anticipated announcement: Australia’s first female diplomats were to be Sydney University graduate Diana Hodgkinson, Melbourne MA student Bronnie Taylor and — youngest of all — eighteen-year-old Julia Drake-Brockman. Overnight, the trio became minor celebrities. The Australian Women’s Weekly profiled them; Miles Franklin telegrammed her congratulations; young admirers sent fan mail.

Pages from Julia Moore’s scrapbook. National Library of Australia, Moore Papers, MS 7459

Julia and her fellow cadets were sent first to Sydney, where they completed an intensive training program at the university. Then, in January 1944, the cohort joined the Department of External Affairs in Canberra. What followed, though, was a period of boredom and frustration: the wartime bush capital had few excitements, and Moore was assigned dull clerical work. Although she’d been promised an immediate overseas posting, her male superiors now prevaricated — a delay she attributed to sexism. Within six months, Moore was “fed up,” she told her parents, and threatening to resign.

After two long years, Moore was appointed third secretary to the Australian delegation to the United Nations. She travelled to New York in April 1946 and settled into a new office on the forty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building. At this point, she should have been exultant. Not only was she finally overseas, but she had also won a plum post in a storied metropolis that was the antithesis of white-bread Canberra. Yet a complication was lurking in the wings.

Back in February, she had become engaged to John Moore, a fellow Australian diplomat also bound for New York. Although deeply in love, the couple feared what their nuptials would mean for Julia’s career. As was standard at the time, her appointment was subject to the Public Service Act, which stipulated that “every female officer shall be deemed to have retired from the Commonwealth Service upon her marriage” unless an exception was granted by the Public Service Board.

In an attempt to dodge the issue, Julia and John concealed their engagement. Only in mid 1946, with both of them safely in New York, did they make the relationship public. After a quiet wedding attended by colleagues, they briefly honeymooned in New Jersey and then settled into a small apartment on West 187th Street. Determined to combine love and career, Julia threw herself into what she described as a “strenuous” schedule of office work, committee meetings, official social engagements and weekend overtime — all alongside unassisted housekeeping.

She began “waging a war” with authorities back in Canberra. As predicted, once she had become Mrs Moore the Public Service Board insisted she resign and be re-engaged as local staff, without diplomatic rank and on a lower salary. With the support of her husband, she petitioned external affairs minister H.V. Evatt and head of mission Paul Hasluck to take up her cause. In making her case, she insisted that she had joined the department on “the specific understanding that there would be no discrimination against the women cadets.” While Evatt, at least, was privately sympathetic, neither man proved willing to defend her position.

As this conflict dragged on, Moore began to make headlines for her work on women’s issues at the United Nations. In November 1946, she represented Australia on the UN Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee, where her impressive speech helped secure the resolution that all member nations should grant women equal rights. Later she worked alongside Jessie Street on the Commission on the Status of Women. The irony here was rich: just as Moore became the international face of Australian support for gender equality, her own career was on the brink of oblivion because of institutionalised sex discrimination.

In the end, the Public Service Board allowed Moore to retain her position as long as she remained in New York. But she and her husband were able to endure the gruelling workload for barely a year. Back in Australia in late 1947, Moore accepted that her career was “sunk,” and exchanged UN meetings for family life in Sydney’s North Shore.

By this point, Diana Hodgkinson and Bronnie Taylor had also married and been forced to resign. Within less than five years, all three of Australia’s first female diplomats found themselves pushed back into the home. And nor were other women encouraged to step into their shoes. Across the entire 1950s only three female cadets were admitted to the diplomatic service, and it was not until 1974 that Ruth Dobson became Australia’s first female ambassador. The marriage bar, meanwhile, lingered until 1966.

In Sydney, Julia raised four children and was employed as a social worker. John joined the NSW Bar in 1947, and in 1973 was appointed president of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. He was knighted in 1976 and appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia a decade later. Julia — now Lady Moore — died that year, and John followed in 1988. Later, the Julia Moore Prize in Industrial Relations was established in her honour at the University of New South Wales.

The family tradition of professional excellence continued into the next generation. The couple’s son Timothy served as a NSW Liberal MP (1976–92) and later a jurist, and his brother Michael became a judge of the Federal Court. Yet their mother’s career is almost forgotten, confined to a brief line or two in little-read histories. Only a cache of letters at the National Library preserves her fierce ambition and equally fiery struggle against the marriage bar. •

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Over the past couple of years the ABC’s coverage of two sensitive topics, Australia–China relations and the Chinese influence debate, has been uneven and lacklustre and has certainly fallen short of what would expected of a national broadcaster. While this latest appointment to Beijing raises hopes of improvement, much of what needs to be done lies outside Ferguson’s responsibility.

It’s important to emphasise that the low score for the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage doesn’t generalise to some of the myriad magazine-style programs that populate Radio National. In-depth discussions and debates about China and Australia–China relations can be found on RN programs such as Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra and Paul Barclay’s Big Ideas. In August last year, RN’s China in Focus series offered a stunning array of nuanced discussions of various aspects of China. It is ABC programs such as this that carry on the best of the ABC’s journalistic legacy and do most of the broadcaster’s heavy lifting in informing the public about a wide range of issues.

Over the past few years, the “China influence” narrative, which manifests in a multitude of political, social and cultural issues, has grown to dominate the Australian news media’s coverage of China. In this context, the ABC has conspicuously failed to set a broader agenda — a role it played in the Australian media landscape until relatively recently. Instead, it has mainly responded to and followed the agenda set by the commercial media.

Some may object to this claim, citing the Four Corners report “Power and Influence,” which screened in September 2016, as an example of a highly influential investigation — in this case, into political donations by Chinese nationals and Chinese Australians. Indeed, the program provided a timely and much-needed exposé of an area that is ripe for reform, and not just in relation to donations from foreign nationals. But the program’s framing of these issues also featured journalistic practices that continue to afflict the China-influence narrative, including what I call “insinuative journalism” and what ex-ABC reporter Peter Manning calls “access journalism” and what might be called “suggestive reporting,” mostly free of hard evidence.

If you asked a range of defence, security and intelligence policy thinkers in this country to rate that Four Corners episode, it would receive ten out of ten. But if you asked the diplomatic community, the university sector and, not least, the business community, the score would be much lower. Not to mention the fact that the program inflicted collateral damage on the 204,000 or so Chinese students and around 1.2 million people of Chinese ancestry living in Australia, many of whom have been scratching their heads wondering why they should be distrusted based on the dealings of a couple of billionaires.

As a joint production of the ABC and Fairfax, “Power and Influence” also embodies another serious problem that has plagued the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage of the Chinese influence debate and Australia–China relations: it seems to have allowed itself to be influenced by the news values and news-making practices of commercial outlets.

Of course, the ABC doesn’t resort to rampant sensationalism, as some of the local Chinese-language news websites do; nor can it be accused of blatant fear-mongering, unlike some of the major commercial media outlets. But it is increasingly failing to play the leadership role we should expect from the national public broadcaster. Some of the ABC’s current affairs programs, such as RN Breakfast with Fran Kelly, do make an effort to ask fair questions and reflect a range of different views and opinions, but its topics mostly seem to be chosen in response to what has already been reported about the Chinese influence or Australia–China relations elsewhere.

The ABC is aware that it needs to do better in crossing the language divide. Its Chinese Service, for instance, now offers a selection of the ABC’s news translated into simplified Chinese. Judging by how this China-related content is circulated among Chinese Australians via the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat, though, it seems that this initiative is something of a double-edged sword. It does make ABC content more accessible to Mandarin-speaking Chinese-Australian audiences, but it also brings home to these communities the fact that the mainstream media’s viewpoint on China is mostly indeed just that — mainstream — and seldom reflects these communities’ perspectives and interests. Indeed, this mainstream viewpoint often borders on being somewhat irrelevant to their lives, and as a consequence is potentially alienating.

It is also significant that the ABC’s online news and current affairs content now includes contributions from a few Mandarin-speaking reporters with Chinese cultural backgrounds. This can only be a good thing: hiring linguistically and ethnically diverse staff has frequently been recommended by reports on the challenges facing Australia’s media. But it would be naive to assume that diversity in perspectives and framing can be achieved simply by hiring reporters with an ethnic background.

Judging by the online news content produced by the ABC over the past year or so, though, junior reporters with a Chinese background seem to be demonstrating their professional chops by selecting and framing stories that don’t upset the views of the senior editors who will be reviewing their work, rather than breaking stories that go beyond or challenge those perspectives.

Achieving diversity in terms of names and appearance is easy, but attaining diversity in viewpoint and narrative framework is a hard slog, especially in a nation that still lives largely within a monocultural mindset, despite being one of the most multicultural countries on the planet. So far, there is little evidence that the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage of Australia–China relations and issues related to China’s influence has broken new ground.

For China-based foreign correspondents, the task of reporting is riddled with difficulties, perhaps the most obvious of which is dealing with suspicious and uncooperative Chinese officials. Too often these journalists’ attempts to get closer to the action are thwarted by local officials set on censoring or at least closely scrutinising their investigative processes. The original story is frequently derailed, and we end up reading more about the correspondent’s heroic battle than about the story itself. While ABC’s foreign correspondents mostly do a reasonably good job in covering China, there is a need to broaden its coverage of censorship and human rights to present a more complex picture of the challenges and opportunities that a rising China brings to Australians.

We need more stories about the impact of economic reforms within China, and how they have led to unprecedented social inequality, economic injustice and environmental degradation, and adversely affected the vast number of ordinary Chinese people who are doing what most Australians are doing: trying to get on with leading a decent life.

One excellent example of such reporting is the coverage by ABC China correspondent Bill Birtles — both in an episode of Foreign Correspondent and in his news reports — of China’s egregious environmental practices, which came in the wake of its decision to ban the import of garbage from Australia.

It has also become increasingly clear that reporting by the ABC’s foreign correspondents represents only a small proportion of the ABC’s entire reporting efforts in relation to China — as is also the case in other media outlets. The exponentially increasing significance of China to Australia means that Australia-based journalists — many of whom have no intimate knowledge of China and no language competence — produce the bulk of the content that is related to both Australia-China relations and issues within the Chinese influence narrative. So far, there has not been much China literacy on display in this reporting, including any knowledge of whom to approach for expert analysis.

In spite of funding cuts, the ABC continues to deliver high-quality content that deserves the money and support of taxpayers. But it’s time for the national broadcaster to lift its game in reporting on China and Australia–China relations. There, it needs to adopt a calmer, more rational and evidence-based approach and move beyond a narrow security and intelligence focus — much of which is informed by Australian perceptions of the US position on China.

China is too important to us to get it wrong. Australians deserve more reporting with depth and from a wider perspective than one we currently have to make do with. •

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Two years later, every shred of reputational capital China gained that day has long since dissipated. Trump’s disruption of international trade had the unwitting side effect of forcing a reluctant China into a spotlight it was probably not prepared to deal with for another decade, and underlined a host of awkward issues, including the country’s internal security measures, the behaviour of its high-tech firms, and the purpose of the Belt and Road Initiative. As a result, China seems more isolated and more at odds with much of the world than ever before.

This is not a good situation to be in. The world’s second-largest economy has shown itself to be defensive, incapable of taking criticism, and often opaque and secretive in its diplomacy. During Hu Jintao’s presidency (2003–13), billions were spent on promoting China’s soft power and conveying a new image to the outside world. Today, that money seems to have been wasted. Never has the world been more in need of a constructive and positive China, and an open-minded attitude towards it. Even for those who have invested time and effort for many years in trying to explain the nuances and subtleties of its position, the last twelve months have been a searing experience.

The worsening crackdown in Xinjiang is among the most serious expressions of the problem. The government’s use of almost ubiquitous security measures to eradicate not just any political opposition, but also, much more worryingly, any expression of religious identity that worries the leadership (and that seems to cover most varieties) has been both a human and a PR catastrophe. Even the most hawkish China-watchers would have found it hard to devise this dystopian scenario. As a response to security issues — some of which have validity (sporadic attacks linked with radical Islam have been taking place in China since 2013) — these measures will almost certainly create decades of resentment and fuel the very disharmony and radicalisation they are meant to damp down.

Compounding Chinas problems are its response to the US pushback and the escalating problems over Huawei and other technology companies. Increasingly international in their operations, these companies are key targets for US displeasure over intellectual property theft and cyber-espionage. Canada’s recent detention of Huawei’s chief finance officer, Meng Wanzhou, at the request of the United States — which alleges she arranged breaches of sanctions on Iran — appears to have led to the arrest of at least two Canadian nationals in China. On the face of it, the legal process in Canada appears transparent, whereas China has imposed a near-complete blackout on its arrests: no bail, no proper indictment, and an almost comically defensive and confusing response to Western journalists’ questions.

All of this has been supplemented by crude and bullying diplomatic behaviour. During last year’s Pacific Islands Forum, at which China is merely an observer, the country’s representatives were accused of shouting down delegates in an open session, and then trying to gain access, uninvited, to the host’s office in order to change the final communiqué. Then, on New Year’s Day, President Xi issued a declaration on Taiwan that restated standard policy positions in such a threatening tone that the approval rating of Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, rose by over 10 per cent following her measured response. The Belt and Road Initiative, meanwhile, continues to attract intensive press interest, partly because Beijing stipulates that some of its most prominent projects must be built by Chinese rather than local labour, and partly because some projects are believed to be generating unsustainable host-country debt.

Under Xi, China had an opportunity to reach out and explain what the world would look like if it played a bigger role. After a decade of the travails associated with the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of populism, more people than ever were willing to listen to anything fresh that China could contribute. While there are plenty in Beijing who seem to believe that the spate of bad news stories about the country is part of a conspiracy to contain and humiliate it, that is unfair and disingenuous. Some commentators might want to see nothing but bad in China’s behaviour, but the majority are neutral, and there are also many who see positive relations and good-quality cooperation as key. China is making that constructive and moderate position increasingly difficult to advance.

It is a tragedy that China is in this position, not just for China itself but also for the rest of the world. Things need to change radically, and quickly, before the country settles into the role of outsider and becomes an object of constant suspicion and criticism — and before we all have to contemplate a future in which one of the world’s most important powers exercises influence through force and fear. •

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The descriptor of the moment is “new cold war” (or cold war 2.0). As a label, it’s sharp and vivid. As analysis, it’s wrong. The “new” bit is right, but it’s the newness of much of the contest that should caution against the old label.

Today’s struggle is as significant as the cold war. And it’ll run for decades. Badly bungled and dumbly driven, it could create two opposed blocs that would resemble a cold war line-up. But it’s going to need a lot more bad policy and economic stupidity to reach cold war 2.0.

What China and the United States are fighting about today is a system they share and each wants to dominate. The competition will be defined by connections and closeness. Both countries want to sit atop the system, not overthrow it.

Washington’s new fear of China was announced in US vice-president Mike Pence’s 4 October speech, which — as seen from Canberra — “sets out the most dramatic shift in relations with Beijing since Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘opening’ of relations in the early 1970s.”

Pence rails against China for its interference in everything from media to movies to markets. His description of the struggle offers an implicit rebuttal of the cold war 2.0 idea. In version 1.0, America never accused the Soviet Union of causing the US trade deficit by gaming the World Trade Organization.

Consider some other then-and-now differences.

Ideology: The cold war was a contest of ideas and values: communism fighting capitalism, Marxism versus democracy.

Today, the ideological content is almost non-existent. China isn’t offering any big new idea: it wants to expand its international power, not export its political system. The United States has a binary president, visceral in rejecting the friends, values and international institutions central to US conduct during the cold war.

The America First leader confronts the China Dream leader. The images play to the domestic audience. Neither side has much in its ideological armoury to enlist others and create a new, frigid division.

Economics and trade: The Soviet Union wanted to overthrow the economic system championed by the United States. It was Comecon versus capitalism. Bloc against bloc. Economic sphere facing economic sphere.

China merely wants to beat America at its own game. China loves what America has created; now Beijing wants to own it. From the WTO to the World Bank, China embraces the system.

Savour the irony that China, the new superpower, is following the same protectionist/mercantilist policies the United States used in the nineteenth century to match Europe. (The US civil war between the industrial north and slave-owning south was a fight between protectionists and free-traders, and the protectionists won.)

Today’s struggle between the United States and China has free-traders and protectionists on both sides. Many other nations are conflicted by this choice; Australia, more than most, wants the free-traders to win.

So, another irony: China’s leader chants the free-trade-globalisation mantra in confronting a protectionist US president.

Alliances and proxy wars: Militarily, the cold war was waged by opposed alliance systems, a hair-trigger nuclear stand-off and proxy wars.

The nukes remain, but the rest of the equation is gone. The proxy wars — Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and more — were disastrous conflicts, wounds bleeding across the second half of the twentieth century. We’re still dealing with what that did to Korea and Afghanistan. A pox on proxy wars.

The United States has allies. China doesn’t. Another irony: China understands the value of the US alliance system better than Donald Trump does.

The United States is clearly the world’s greatest military power, and US alliance dominance is a formidable bulwark against a new cold war. Yet China is coming and the equation is shifting. Robert Kaplan ponders what this means for America and its Asian allies:

The United States must face up to an important fact: the western Pacific is no longer a unipolar American naval lake, as it was for decades after World War II. The return of China to the status of great power ensures a more complicated multipolar situation. The United States must make at least some room for Chinese air and naval power in the Indo-Pacific region. How much room is the key question.

Australia and Asia need the United States as a balancer, not a new cold war belligerent.

As both the French and Chinese say in different ways, the naming of things is vital. It determines where you start and has much to do with where you go.

The trouble with the new cold war is that it’s a binary label for a networked world. The binary question last time was simple: which side of the Berlin Wall are you on? The network question is about the functions and connections of the nodes, and the protocols in use. Myriad networks, many uses. Analogue wall then; digital web now.

How will nations, acting as nodes, view the competition and the connections as well as the confrontation? No single, simple choice is possible because so many different choices crowd and call.

Strategically, the United States has enjoyed unipolar privileges since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, apparently, we’re to revert to bipolar business as usual, with China as the new foe. But the settings are all wrong for such a simple move. The ground today looks so different, ideologically, economically and in alliance structures.

Along with all the other disparities, today’s America is not the America of the cold war. Today’s occupant of the White House doesn’t have the intellect or worldview of an FDR or Truman or… just name your president, really. Donald Trump doesn’t do systems and structure; he does disruption and deals.

If we’re picking history analogies, look more at the long nineteenth century — from the French revolution to the first world war — than at the frigid stand-off that followed the second world war. Great power competition is back. The questions and partial answers are those of a series of contests with many different powers competing:

Q: Who you gonna trust?
A: It depends on the issue and the interests.

Q: Who you gonna line up with?
A: It depends. Everybody, or nobody, or a shifting mix.

Q: Who you gonna compete with?
A: Everybody!

Ngaire Woods gives a European-flavoured view of how this strategic free-for-all might go:

Rather than a cold war, the world may be heading toward an international system led by four powers, with the US, China, Russia, and Germany dominating their respective regions and seeking the upper hand in international negotiations. Such a scenario is reminiscent of the World War II vision of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proposed that the four victorious allies — the US, the UK, China, and the Soviet Union — act as “Four Policemen,” each patrolling its own sphere of influence and negotiating with the others on world peace.

Today, approximations of the same four powers are once again in the lead, only now we have stronger international institutions to help keep the peace. Whether that peace lasts will depend on the willingness of the four powers to use and adapt those institutions to the emerging international system.

The formula looks broadly right, but too simple. And in its Asia dimension, it too easily grants China dominance.

From where Australia sits, a couple of other players must be added: India and Japan. And then there’s ASEAN, with Indonesia foremost in our calculations. As a “system,” this is more a cacophony than a concert of powers. And that brings us back to the label issue. Names matter, so let’s offer a name.

If this is not a cold war, what’s it to be called? One flippant suggestion from inside the Canberra system is “big cat spat.” It’s certainly an update of the proverb that one mountain can’t contain two tigers. The need, though, is to broaden this to suggest many mountains and many tigers.

My answer, in a phrase, is “hot peace.” In a paragraph, it’s this: Rather than a new cold war, we’re entering a hot peace of simultaneous cooperation and competition among many states. Think the heat and sweat of a great power decathlon rather than the frozen blocs and rigidly opposed ideologies of the postwar world.

“Hot peace” is a better label for what the world faces than “new cold war,” not least because we’re well short of an icy, bipolar face-off between China and the United States. Beyond the current superpower and the coming superpower, a lot of other big powers are going to matter in this new era. All those powers are going to be running in many different races. See the G20 as competitors, with lots of other nations also contending in the foreign policy version of track and field.

In the hot peace, the United States and China will be central but not always decisive. That’s because the main job of the G2 will be managing differences and divisions, not agreeing on decisions. If and when they can agree, Beijing and Washington will have the capacity to direct and dominate specific issues. Big deals, even good deals, are still possible in a hot peace.

But this era is going to make deals difficult, because competition and confrontation build as the elements of engagement fade. It will be a hotly contested peace. The argument is that we have arrived at a troubled form of peace, not a muted form of indirect war. The strategic contest will have many peaceful dimensions. Hot peace rebuts the cold war claim by saying, “We’re not there yet!”

Without getting too metaphysical, the hot idea works better in describing close partners who are simultaneously opponents. Lots of friction from all those close contacts and contests.

Rather than frigid nuclear and ideological stand-off, China and the United States are locked together, interdependent even if intemperate. Joe Nye gets it right in describing the relationship of the two giants as “cooperative rivalry.”

A former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, calls his new book From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. What McFaul sees with Russia has arrived with China. During the Soviet–US cold war, hot peace was the improved state many yearned to reach. Back in 1973, Pierre Hassner mused about that shift in the New York Times:

A new stage of “hot peace” has indeed replaced the cold war, but it would be wrong to assume that the farther one gets from war and propaganda the closer one is to peace and reconciliation. In this new state of ambiguity, situations may thaw without being solved, isolation may be broken but in favor of asymmetrical penetration or imbalance rather than of reconciliation.

One of the great American historians of the cold war, John Lewis Gaddis, notes that the cold war was fought at different levels in dissimilar ways in multiple places over a very long time. Any attempt to reduce its history exclusively to the role of great forces, great powers or great leaders would fail to do it justice. Yet for Gaddis, the first step to understanding is clear: “It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.”

If the many competitors stuff up this new era, they could freeze the hot peace and drive history to deliver us all to a cold war. •

The post Not the new cold war appeared first on Inside Story.

Reverse the aphorism to see its limits: most political careers fail before they start. Many dream of politics, but few are selected, much less elected.

And that end-in-failure epitaph does scant justice to the thrills and spills along the way. The thrill of the hunt. The joy of victory. The exhilaration of power: to speak and have thousands listen; to order and make things happen. Politics can demand everything a pollie has to give, yet still give a lot back.

A legendary Canberra journalist, Alan Reid, spoke of politics as “a fever in the blood.” Quoting that line, Bob Carr muses that politicians define themselves by action, and often it’s a gamble paraded as a decision. Let the dice fly high: “You play the game, you win. You play the game, you lose. You play the game. Or as old Captain Ahab opines in Moby Dick, live in the game and die in it!”

Whale metaphors appeal to Bob Carr, the longest-serving twentieth-century premier of New South Wales who zoomed into Canberra this century for a stint as foreign minister. Carr describes his beloved Labor Party as “barnacled and bruised like the toughest old sperm whale,” yet still, “with all its scars and imperfections, the essential medium for delivering change.”

Coming at politics from the other side of the world and a different side of politics, the Tory Party grandee Chris Patten ponders politics and identity as he recounts his “odd, demanding and occasionally satisfying political life.”

Both men beat Powell’s curse. Both start their books with the thought that most political memoirs are boring, then seek to break the mould. Carr delights in reliving old fights, but with a leavening of his own foibles and failures. Patten calls his book a confession.

They are unusual politicians in that they’re good writers, beating the rule that those who wield power are often lousy at wielding a pen. They’ve both done the book trick several times before: Patten with his fine account of his time as the last British governor of Hong Kong, East and West, and Carr with the calculated indiscretion and sharp observation of his Diary of a Foreign Minister.

Patten offers a conventional narrative, starting with church and family. Carr does autobiography as a jazz solo: “Fracture the storyline. Start at the end. Relegate solemn, serious narrative. Hold fragments up to the light. Even flight the whole thing in the air and see where it lands…” This makes for a satisfying pairing, because the two men are trying to explain what they made of politics and what politics made of them.

Despite their party markings, they’re a rough match in philosophy and temperament. They patrol the shrinking political middle ground, pushing against the winds blowing wildly from both wings, Patten as a “wet,” Carr as a champion of the NSW Right, dedicated as much to fighting the Trots on the left as to doing battle with the Liberals on the right. As young men on the make, each was addicted to what Carr calls “the colour, drama and entertainment of America.”

Patten refracts his understandings through his experience of great institutions: the Tory Party, the Vatican, the European Union, the Chinese government, the BBC and Oxford University. Out of university, he turned down a job at the BBC and — inspired by a short stint working on a New York election campaign — followed his true calling to a job at Tory HQ (“I had found politics, or, rather, politics found me.”) Carr went from uni to the ABC, starting his trek from journalism to politics while training the distinctive voice that became such a political asset.

Patten had a classic Enoch Powell failure moment: as a key cabinet minister and the Tory Party chairman he helped run a successful campaign that saw his government re-elected; at the moment of triumph for the party, Patten lost his seat in the House of Commons.

The derailing of his parliamentary career launched him on a glittering arc as what he calls a “poobah”: the final governor of Hong Kong (1992–97), a European commissioner, and an adviser on financial management to the Vatican. He now sits in the House of Lords and, as head of Oxford University, quotes a predecessor’s wisdom that the Oxford chancellor’s impotence is assuaged by magnificence.

Patten became chairman of the BBC Trust in 2011 and reckons the stress of the Beeb job (“ten times more difficult than I ever thought it would be”) had much to do with his heart attack. His ceaseless travel as an EU commissioner had led to the reworking of an old joke at the EU headquarters in Brussels:

Q: What is the difference between Chris Patten and God?

A: God is everywhere. Chris Patten is everywhere except Brussels.

Patten gives an account of his experience in the Vatican in 2014, working with Australian cardinal George Pell on reform of the church’s finances and management. He writes that the Rome bureaucracy pushed against and weakened Pell because of his “candid and too public assessment of the quality of Italian management… I admired his intellect and thought he provided exactly the sort of heavy construction equipment that you always need to get any change in organisations where the bureaucratic cement has been setting for centuries.”

In discussing how he was shaped by politics, Bob Carr delights in the tricks of the trade and tales of battle. His account confirms an observation made by the journalist Greg Sheridan, in his “misguided youth” memoir, When We Were Young and Foolish, describing the Carr he’d known first as a fellow journalist and then as a Labor minister:

Bob was glamour in politics, but glamour arrived at through the power of will rather than natural good looks or lifestyle. By nature a short-sighted, gangling geek with thinning hair, no affinity for sport and no head for booze, he reworked himself completely, while staying true to himself, a remarkable feat. And he thoroughly mastered politics. He was as sharp with the clever one-liners as with the show-off references to history and literature.

Carr offers myriad prose portraits of the incidents and intentions of that reworking of self to grasp the chance of politics.

For Carr, Gough Whitlam is the great Labor hero — a university friend called Carr’s adoration for Whitlam and Franklin Roosevelt a “father complex.” After the disasters of the Whitlam government, though, it was NSW Labor premier Neville Wran who showed how to get things done and keep getting re-elected. Whitlam inspired Carr, but Wran was the model.

Carr quotes Wran saying that his job was to be mayor of New South Wales because “as premier you get held to account for everything that happens.” The Carr rendering of the mayoral meaning: “Your ratepayers are never wrong and they all get to vote.”

The Wran magic involved being on both sides of an argument, offering a masterclass in reconciling opposites: “He could make you a winner as he let you down.” Faced with calls to use the death penalty on gang members guilty of a dreadful crime, Wran thundered: “The death penalty would be too good for them.”

Carr observes that Wran ran his egalitarian party with a Bonapartist touch. “The ALP, like the conservative parties, is improvised and cobbled together,” he writes:

What animates and unites any ramshackle old party is clever, crafty leadership; winning speeches and punchy one-liners to lift its spirits and direct scorn at its opponents. Wran, of course, exemplifies the leadership principle; making it up as you go along if it’s done with flair.

Patten was one of the Tories whom Margaret Thatcher derided as “wets,” and he gives an account of the value of political dampness. He pushes back against doctrinaire dries (“a thick skin of prejudice, reinforced by reading the tabloids”) and embraces as his most profound political observation the thought that life is a predicament not a journey: “I am suspicious of zeal, respect institutions and historical forces, and favour consensus and cooperation where possible.”

Patten’s favourite eminent Tory is Rab Butler, a master of politics who usually found the right balance between expediency and conservative principles. Ambivalence always served Butler well, as in his telegram of apology for not attending the retirement dinner of a Tory foe: “There is no one whose farewell dinner I would rather have attended.”

Margaret Thatcher strides through Patten’s book. He offers a shrewd, affectionate but pointed critique of the leader described by Ted Heath as “that bloody woman.” He reflects that “Thatcher’s freedom from doubt helped give her rhetoric a self-confidence that frequently belied what was really happening.”

Thatcher was “a strange mixture of kindness and occasional bullying” who developed a “battling Boadicea personality and a brittle carapace of opinions on everything under the sun. In practice, she was mostly more cautious and politically smart than her language.”

Blessed with both courage and luck, Patten writes, Thatcher drained a sea of fudge and re-established the governability of Britain. In her retirement, he judges, she became more stridently right-wing than her political instincts ever allowed when in office. And the “virus of disloyalty” she injected into the Conservative Party has much to do with the Tories’ “long-running nervous breakdown” over Europe. Patten is scathing about Brexit: “We have a century of experience to prove that narrow, bigoted nationalism is the path to trouble.”

Surveying seven years as NSW opposition leader (1988–95) and ten years as premier (1995–2005), Bob Carr dances from episodes to vignettes, mixing anecdotes with analysis: a “forty-carat political stuff-up” (road tolls), beating the bastards in a multinational corporation over asbestos, ditching a minister after one candid sentence in cabinet revealed his corruption, and being a tree-hugger (creating 350 national parks) and a politician who hated sport.

He offers a tough tutorial on how to survive, even thrive, in the worst job in politics — opposition leader:

• Cement the relationship with the party machine, so that any caucus challenger risks losing preselection.
• To have a chance at two terms as opposition leader, maintain relations across caucus but don’t be one of the boys. “Leadership involves an element of distance, the dignity of distance.”
• Hunt hard, because the hunt counts. Just as feral animals are “predatory and opportunist,” oppositions must take government scalps.
• Beware the aggrieved and unloved of the electorate. For every claim or charge, demand documentary evidence. Seek to hurt the government but nurture your own credibility “as if a cache of precious metal.”
• Fight until the tide turns. Opposition leaders are a “lonely, unloved breed,” prone to pessimism and fatalism. “Your personality is corroded by the frustrations of opposition leadership. You’re failing to sell yourself against a mood of public dislike. You find the whole political process unpalatable. You even doubt the viability of your own party. Then, everything changes.”
• Master parliament. “Become obsessive about speech preparation and drive your staff to research, research, research.”
• Make explicit policies, yes, but beware the swamp of detail. John Hewson’s 1993 election defeat with his tax manifesto is “a classic example of an opposition leader throwing away the chance to be prime minister because of ‘policy specificity.’”
• Don’t overreact to the small things. “In opposition many of the things you do fall short, as you get captured by the small buffooneries of parliamentary life and the demands of the daily news cycle.”

The purpose of politics is to crawl and claw out of the desert of opposition to attain the verdant chances of power. As Carr observes, “The joy of leading a government is getting to choose its words.” Carr and Patten offer fine words on the joys of the job. You can have a good time trying both to serve and to win.

Politics is, indeed, a strange life. Anything this important must carry risks — plenty of failures to go with the wins.

To rise by the vote. To live by the vote. To fall on the vote. The fall at the end is the exclamation mark on all the votes that went before, in a political life well lived. •

The post Fever in the blood appeared first on Inside Story.

Quoting Menzies at a Liberal government is always a good tactic, so here’s more from the founding father, from April 1939:

I have become convinced that, in the Pacific, Australia must regard herself as a principal, providing herself with her own information and maintaining her own diplomatic contacts with foreign powers… It is true that we are not a numerous people, but we have our vigour, intelligence and resource, and I see no reason why we should not play not only an adult, but an effective part in the affairs of the Pacific.

Menzies offers an enduring truth while stating the bleeding obvious. Over the decades since then, though, Australia has ceased using media power to play an intelligent and effective part in the affairs of our region. As one former senior ABC staffer puts it, our programming for regional audiences is simply “risible.”

To be clear, “broadcasting” is a catch-all covering a lot of ground: analogue to digital to satellite, Facebook to FM. Content converges: radio and TV become video and audio and text. Broadcasting is publishing. TV and radio are reborn online. The digital age both unites and atomises.

When the Abbott government axed the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV in 2014, just a year after it began, a communications minister named Malcolm Turnbull argued that there was no need for the Oz voice in a crowded regional arena. If people wanted international stuff, Turnbull said, they could go to the BBC or CNN.

The ghost of Menzies would have raised both eyebrows, because Menzies said the purpose of getting close to great and powerful friends was to bolster our interests, not hand ’em over — insurance policy, not giving away the store. During his three years as prime minister, the same Malcolm Turnbull came round to the “speak for ourselves” viewpoint.

In a key foreign policy speech last year, he reflected on the digital revolution:

Technology has connected local aspirations and grievances with global movements.

Hyper-connectivity has amplified the reach and power of non-state actors, forcing us to reassess how we, as nation states, assert and defend our sovereign interest…

Now, in this brave new world we cannot rely on great powers to safeguard our interests. We have to take responsibility for our own security and prosperity while recognising we are stronger when sharing the burden of collective leadership with trusted partners and friends.

The gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability are signals for all of us to play more active roles in protecting and shaping the future of this region.

Take responsibility. Don’t expect the great powers to safeguard our interests. Act to shape the future of the region. Menzies would nod at this description of the value of a powerful Australian voice — and the need to speak for ourselves.

And yet, these are the worst of days for Australian international TV, which is twenty-five years old this year. And they are the hardest days for Radio Australia, which reaches its eightieth birthday next year. They are gasping, limping shadows. The cash drips slowly; much life has departed.

In 2010, the ABC spent $36 million on international services (about $42 million in today’s dollars). These days, a guesstimate of the international broadcasting spend is $11 million. The ABC is vague about the exact figure; perhaps it’s an embarrassed reticence. Yet tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

To remake Australia’s international media thinking, the government and the ABC will have to separate domestic bickering from foreign policy. The government can overturn poor decisions that have damaged our international voice if it wants to, and the ABC has the capacity to recover its role as an international broadcaster, a core charter responsibility that Aunty has been shedding.

Surveying international broadcasting’s decline means picking through the ruins of past decisions by government and the ABC. The debris still remains from the Abbott government’s decision to axe the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV just a year after it began. That was a sad example of Australia’s international interests being trampled by domestic argy-bargy driven by deeply entrenched hang-ups about the ABC. The Liberal Party’s fear of the ABC was succinctly expressed long ago by John Howard’s consigliore Graham Morris: “The ABC is our enemy talking to our friends.”

The enemy–friends tension is a backhanded tribute to the ABC’s influence across Australian society. For many decades, ABC power also reached beyond our borders; domestic political arguments have obscured the ABC’s traditional role as a major media voice in our neighbourhood. It discarded its South Pacific audience by reducing electricity to its shortwave broadcast towers, degrading the signal and cutting off listeners, and then announced there was no longer a shortwave audience. The broadcaster decided what it was prepared to give, not what the South Pacific required.

A broadcasting recovery involves listening to what the Islands say they need, rather than telling them what they’ll get. Reviving South Pacific shortwave should be part of a bigger project: to restore the ABC as an international broadcaster and create a twenty-first-century Australian voice across the Asia-Pacific.

For its part, Canberra stopped thinking about what good journalism could do for the region, and for Australia’s vital interests. The fashionable chatter was all about new technology and soft power, losing sight of deep truths about the role of journalism. Soft power trumped hard news.

Discarding our journalistic heritage in our region is poor history, lousy policy and appalling judgement — and it meant that lots of old media agendas became fresh headaches for Australia. Propaganda and polluted facts are back, rebadged as fake news. Canberra laments challenges to the rules-based system in a tone tinged with a bewildered sense that things shouldn’t be like this. A media rethink can start with putting in the journalistic vision so lacking in last year’s foreign policy white paper.

The paper was happy to talk about “media” (fourteen instances) but didn’t once mention “journalism” or “broadcasting.” This was strange, given that the final chapter, “Partnerships and Soft Power,” stressed the “vital” need for persuasive Australian soft power to influence the behaviour or thinking of others. The closest reference to journos was a domestic tick for Australia’s “robust independent media.”

“Global governance is becoming harder,” the white paper judged, and the international order is contested by “measures short of war,” including “economic coercion, cyber attacks, misinformation and media manipulation.” The paper fretted that Australia must be ready to “dispel misconceptions and ensure our voice is heard when new and traditional media are used to sow misinformation or misrepresent Australian policies.”

The “ensure our voice is heard” line was where I expected to find journalism. Instead, the answer to the “voice” conundrum was lots of soft power and digital engagement — a reasonable start, not a full answer. Australia needs to rediscover the power of hard news as the sharp edge of our soft power.

For twenty-five years, Australia’s international TV voice has been a political plaything and a broadcasting afterthought, constantly facing chops and changes. This history of chop, change and political spasm is evident in the eight changes of identity and ownership over that quarter-decade:

1. First came Australia Television, or ATV, in 1993, when the Keating Labor government gave the ABC start-up funding. Unlike the rest of the ABC, though, ATV carried commercials. Canberra wanted it, but didn’t want to pay for it.

2. Channel 7 was given control in 1998 (twice — once with news, then as a pure shopping channel). The commercial network made a hash of it, didn’t make any money and lost interest. So…

3. In 2001, it went back to the ABC as ABC Television International.

4. A year later, it was rebranded as ABC Asia Pacific.

5. Then, in 2006, came another name change: the Australia Network.

6. In the 2014 budget, the Coalition cut all funding to the Australia Network. It closed, to be replaced by a drastically cutdown operation.

7. The Australia Network’s replacement, Australia Plus, started in September 2014.

8. From 1 July 2018, the network has been renamed ABC Australia.

Neither side of politics emerges with much credit from this zigzag. Canberra’s level of interest has been as changeable as the name.

The moment of creation under Labor illustrates recurring themes of limited attention, political crosscurrents, and plenty of vision but little money. Launching ATV to broadcast to the Asia-Pacific, the Keating government boasted of its significance for regional engagement and interests, ranging from media and education to business and foreign policy. Confident talk wasn’t matched by cash or commitment.

The ABC sought to establish an international version of its domestic service, but couldn’t devote proper resources to ATV, not least because the government didn’t want to pay for what Australia needed. Programming suffered because the ABC had domestic copyright to broadcast programs but didn’t own international rights. The Keating government knew ATV was worthwhile, but wouldn’t give anything more than start-up funding for the satellite service. Once established, it would have to pay its own way with advertising.

The refusal to launch ATV as a fully funded public broadcasting service (like the rest of the ABC) was telling. A hybrid design — part ABC, part commercial — was the half-arsed response of a half-hearted government. That half-in, half-out problem continued.

Domestic politics too often derails discussion of international TV. The Keating cabinet’s debates about establishing ATV veered off into rant-and-rave sessions about how ABC domestic reporting was hurting the government. Much bile was directed at ABC managing director David Hill, who’d fought budget cuts with a famous campaign proclaiming the ABC cost each Australian only “eight cents a day.”

A couple of times when ATV was on the cabinet agenda, Hill came to Canberra to support the idea. Having the ebullient ABC head in the cabinet anteroom was a disastrous provocation. After navigating past Hill, ministers would have another ABC hate session, then defer decision.

Themes from the creation story recur over the twenty-five years:

Politics overturns policy: Each change of federal government — Keating to Howard to Rudd to Abbott — has been a chop-change moment for international TV. The Liberal–Labor foreign policy consensus has never translated into agreement on the worth of our broadcasting service to the regions. (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are different regions with different audiences.) Thus…

The gap between big interests and little cash: The high rhetoric of Asia-Pacific engagement is negated by low commitment of dollars.

The ABC as problem and solution: All federal governments come to fear/distrust/hate ABC reporting on them; that perennial rant-and-rave problem obscures a clear understanding of what public broadcasting can do for Australia in the Asia-Pacific. The problem has a funny dimension: politicians know the power of the ABC, but they’re not willing to use that power to serve our international interests.

International ABC can’t be domestic ABC: The ABC’s domestic programming is vital to the international service, but that’s the start, not the finish. Reaching and holding audiences in Asia and the South Pacific is about talking with, not just talking to. Diverse audiences have different needs. Programming has to be for them, not just rebroadcast from Oz.

Chop and change hurts: International broadcasting is expensive and complex because a lot of power is in play. Australia’s constant and growing interests in the Asia-Pacific demand a constant and growing broadcast conversation, using all converging media.

A strong, consistent voice in our region serves Australian foreign policy. Get the zigzag pattern off the screen and adjust the international TV picture.

The wrack and roil afflicting the international system matches the digital disruption of news media. The rules and norms of the foreign policy game and media world shake, shift and suffer.

Australia frets about threats to the rules-based system as the tectonic plates of geopolitics and geoeconomics crunch. Not least of those truths is the one to be found at the heart of seven Australian defence white papers over forty years: geography matters.

Traditionally, Australia wanted a strong international broadcasting voice in what defence-speak calls our region of primary strategic interest: Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. That broadcasting tradition is looking very modern. Geography is back. Or, more accurately, the demands of geography never went away — we’re just feeling the weight with fresh force.

In the foreign policy game, the word “influence” stands besides “interests” at the calculating, cerebral end of the field. But influence and interests must always be within shouting distance of values and beliefs, which tend to reside in the heart and hearth part of the arena.

The qualities of good journalism — “reliable,” “independent,” “factual” — are exactly the same as are needed in the foreign policy of a country seeking to persuade others, protect interests, project influence and promote values.

Amid all the disruption, there’s a perfect media instrument ready to serve as Australia’s voice in the Asia-Pacific, to do journalism that’ll serve our interests and values. Well-tested by history, with a proud heritage of great journalism and a prescient charter, that instrument is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Simple as ABC, really.

Or it should be. To illustrate the ABC problem, come into my anecdotage while I recall a previous life as an ABC correspondent. Two decades ago, a sardonic line rattled around ABC executive ranks: “A peasant in Longreach is more important than a peasant in Lombok.” The bitter point of the comparison — central Queensland versus an Indonesian island — was that the ABC must devote scarce cash to its domestic users, not its potential international audience. Axing South Pacific shortwave last year affirmed that old corporate view.

But power politics zoom back, the digital revolution rages and Australia’s foreign policy dilemmas demand that the ABC get back into the international journalism game, bigger and better.

Three distinct decision strands must combine for the back-bigger-and-better conclusion to be realised. Strands one and two reside in Canberra: first, political and policy consensus; second, the shift from agreement to action.

Canberra’s troubled consensus: In international affairs, tectonic plates are crunching and lava is melting the rules-based system. Canberra’s agreement on how nasty things are looking is expressed in the 2016 defence white paper, the 2017 intelligence review and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

The defence white paper frets about fraying international rules: the word “rules” is used sixty-four times — forty-eight of these in the formulation “rules-based global order.” The stress on rules expresses the fear of what’s failing. “Rules-based global order” is a big phrase to cover such disparate forces as jihadism and China’s rise. Mostly, though, it’s about China.

The intelligence review identified three big trends: fundamental changes in the international system, extremism with global reach, and accelerating technological change. And the foreign policy paper got a lot into one stark sentence: “Today, China is challenging America’s position.”

The Canberra consensus fuels the substantial Liberal–Labor unity ticket on foreign policy. The ticket is tacit but important. As always, argument rages about whether the government or opposition will do a better job on China or the US alliance or in the South Pacific. What’s not disputed is the trouble in the trends. Beneath the usual politics, there’s a shared sense of foreboding.

From description to prescription: It’s always tough moving from anxiety to action. What can/should/must we do?

A strong broadcast voice in the Asia-Pacific, based on the ABC, is part of the answer to regional challenges. Australia must move from the agreed description of problems in strand one to a new Canberra consensus on the use of the ABC to support our interests, influence and values in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond.

We must rebuild a powerful and consistent broadcasting voice so we can rejoin regional conversations and contests. Tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

Canberra has to agree on the prescription, set the policy response and do the budget numbers for a sustained media commitment.

ABC changes: Recent decades show that the ABC will always choose Longreach. ABC priorities are domestic, not international. The institutional response is logical, yet it fails to serve Australia beyond our shores. We need a future ABC that can do what Australia needs for Lombok and Lautoka and Lae.

The domestic–international tensions inherent in the ABC charter must be resolved. The international responsibility must be more than a declining division of the ABC — it must become a new planet in the Australian policy universe. That planet must be created by the ABC and draw on its values and resources.

To serve Australia’s interests, influence and values in the Asia-Pacific, we need an Australian International Broadcasting Corporation, or AIBC. The AIBC would resolve the domestic–international tensions in the ABC charter, giving proper expression to the charter’s international dimension.

The charter is at the heart of the 1983 Act that remade the ABC from a Commission to a Corporation. In the charter’s foundational clause, the law gives equal weight to the ABC’s domestic and international responsibilities.

Domestically, the ABC must produce innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard — programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community, with a specific mention of “programs of an educational nature.”

Internationally, it must transmit news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural programs that will “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs; and enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs.”

The habit of rebroadcasting domestic fare has been maintained in the relaunch of the Asia-Pacific TV service, rebranded as ABC Australia. The ABC says the service “will deliver distinctive content to culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences and to Australian expatriates, encouraging international awareness and understanding of Australia and Australian attitudes.” Fine words, but the ABC’s reach falls short of its grasp.

The programming offers rebroadcasts of ABC news programs, “slice of home” shows and Australian Rules football. For an expat, an excellent menu. But for forty countries of the Asia-Pacific — those “culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences” — this is lots of Oz attitudes, about Oz for Oz.

Australian content is necessary but not sufficient for an Asia-Pacific service. Australian content needs to be the start, whereas at the moment it’s the finish.

To do more will need cash and commitment from Canberra — and the AIBC to deliver the focus. The aim is to talk with neighbours, not merely broadcast to neighbours; that supposes media conversation of many types, not just an oration from Oz.

Atop the excellent foundation of good ABC shows, the AIBC must offer reporting that matters in the lives of Lombok or Lautoka or Lae. The new organisation should be born of the ABC, reflect ABC traditions and standards, and draw on ABC resources — but it must have its own corporate identity as an expression of its distinct, international purpose.

The AIBC would have its own chair and board and its own separate budget. The deputy chair of the ABC and the ABC managing director should be on the board of the AIBC, but so should the head of the Special Broadcasting Corporation.

Replicating the successful ABC model, the board should have a staff-elected member, and then gather board members with international experience from business, diplomacy, aid and one of the major generators of Oz soft power in the years ahead, the universities.

Under its Act, the ABC can establish subsidiary companies, so in theory no new legislation is required. But in line with my argument that Canberra must pay for what Canberra wants, the AIBC must have its own budget allocation. Don’t leave it to the ABC. Aunty can’t pay for what Australian foreign policy demands.

The AIBC must have a separate identity so the international effort doesn’t get drawn into the domestic fights that are a natural part of the ABC’s existence. Like the ABC, it must be a fully funded, independent public broadcaster — not a state broadcaster.

Give the AIBC the right to seek partners where it sees a natural fit in such realms as development aid, philanthropy and universities. Its core, though, is as a public broadcaster.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Australia can have an important foreign policy instrument on the cheap. If the AIBC is going to have heft, it must be richly funded by Canberra; the ABC doesn’t have a lazy $30 million to redirect to Oz foreign policy, much less $50 million or $75 million.

Canberra has to see the need and fund the instrument. Australian interests, influence and values demand an Australian voice in the Asia-Pacific. •

The post The sharp edge of soft power appeared first on Inside Story.

That sounds familiar. Here’s Ellerston Capital’s Ashok Jacob, speaking earlier this month in Sydney at the launch of An India Economic Strategy to 2035: “Any CEO, any board, that does not take a good hard look at India will be asked in ten years’ time, did you at least look at it, did you visit the place, do you know what your competitors’ markets in India look like?” Jacob is a long-time figure in Australian big business, a member of one of India’s great business families and chair of the Australia–India Council.

The trail to 2018 is littered with weighty documents making similar points, among them India: The Next Economic Giant (2004), India: New Economy, Old Economy (2001), Australia’s Trade Relationship with India (1998), India’s Economy at the Midnight Hour: Australia’s India Strategy (1994) and Australia-India Relations: Trade and Security (1990).

So, has anything changed?

Yes. Lots. The times are different, and so is the report Jacob was helping to launch. To begin with, its author, Peter Varghese, is one of the outstanding public servants of his generation, a former high commissioner to India and secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. His family’s origins are in Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, though he would probably describe himself as a proud Queenslander. He is currently chancellor of his alma mater, the University of Queensland.

As Varghese observes, bilateral relationships are built on three elements: commerce, strategic interests and people. Ideally, a relationship has all three; in the past, the Australia–India relationship lacked the lot. India’s economic policies, focused on import substitution and self-sufficiency, gave a major role to state-run enterprises and produced a prickly thicket of regulation. Its “non-aligned” foreign policy equated the Soviet Union with the United States, a position that seldom lined up with Australian views. And, as late as 1981, Australia had only about 15,000 India-origin residents who were not Anglo-Indians. It was a negative trifecta.

Since then, the most obvious and important change is in the demography. Today, Australia has 700,000 residents of Indian origin. The number has trebled in ten years and continues to grow.

It’s a bit early to look among them for Silicon Valley–style entrepreneurs, or a Nikki Randhawa Haley (the former governor of South Carolina, now US ambassador to the United Nations), a Harjit Singh Sajjan (the Canadian defence minister) or a Salman Rushdie. But Australia has an unmissable group of young Indians who will connect the two countries by their constant coming and going. They will be looking for ways to turn their India skills and contacts into assets in Australia. And they’ll arouse in Australian friends and partners a readiness to connect with India.

Indian newcomers also have an asset shared with the British, Americans, South Africans, New Zealanders and Canadians who live here: a knowledge of English that ranges from okay to mother-tongue. The new diaspora gives the Australia–India relationship one of the three dimensions on which nation-state relationships are built: people.

What about the other two elements — strategic interests and trade?

Although the report is entitled an “economic strategy,” it argues that “an India economic strategy cannot exist in isolation… India should be seen not only as an economic partner but also as a geopolitical partner.” In the new world of a declining, frenzied United States and a rising, muscle-flexing China, lesser players look anxiously for friends and partners. “We have moved from Asia-Pacific to Indo‑Pacific to describe the crucible of our strategic environment,” Varghese writes. “And a large part of that shift is driven by how we see India.”

The term “Indo-Pacific” has been in vogue since the beginning of this decade and represents an effort to involve India in international agreements and discussions and thereby to dilute the effects of a powerful China. “The Indian Ocean provides a meeting point for Australian and Indian interests,” Varghese reminds us. “It extends the scope of our growing strategic congruence.”

It’s not that India is about to become an Australian “ally,” in the way that Australia is bound to the United States by treaty. But as maritime law assumes greater importance, from northeast Asia to the islands of the Indian Ocean, Australia and India will find growing cause to consult and act in concert.

But the focus of Varghese’s report is, of course, commerce and “the underlying complementarity between our two economies.” It presents two ambitious targets: to make India Australia’s third-largest export market and its third-largest investment destination by 2035. Using Australian Treasury projections, the report assumes an Indian growth rate averaging 6 per cent a year for the next twenty years. “There is no market over the next twenty years which offers more growth opportunities for Australian business than India,” Varghese argues in his letter submitting the report to the prime minister.

The report emphasises four areas of prime opportunity — education, agribusiness, resources and tourism. The “flagship” is education, where Australia has already succeeded in attracting tens of thousands of fee-paying Indian students. But there is potential for much more. India’s immense population of young people needs vastly more educational options. This is especially true of vocational training, in which only seven million Indian people are currently enrolled, compared to an estimated ninety million in China.

Tertiary education of all kinds is jealously regulated in India, and foreign participation can be viewed with suspicion. But vocational education also suffers from strong prejudices. Being a mechanic, an electrician or even a hands-on engineer is not something to aspire to, even if the salary might be good. India is looking for institutions that can navigate the regulatory jungle, deal with large numbers, make a profit — and, perhaps hardest, make vocational education attractive. Online programs may satisfy some of these requirements. The potential market is huge.

At the white-collar, clean-hands end of education, the Varghese report points out that although Australia has successfully attracted fee-paying students, it still lacks the prestige of universities in the United States and Britain. The report recommends enhancing Australia’s reputation as an educational destination by setting up a well-publicised program of Alfred Deakin Scholarships for outstanding doctoral candidates and supporting the existing New Generation Network of postdoctoral fellows established by the Australia–India Institute.

Among the report’s priority sectors, the education “flagship” is followed by three “lead sectors” (agribusiness, resources and tourism) and then by six “promising sectors” (energy, health, financial services, infrastructure, sport and innovation).

Varghese emphasises the importance of working with India’s federal system — “competitive federalism” is a feature of prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, based on his thirteen years as chief minister of the state of Gujarat — and commends the efforts of Australian states to maintain a presence there. (Victoria, for instance, has offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai.)

Ten of India’s states are singled out as places of opportunity for Australian businesses. Eight of them are obvious — the two western powerhouses of Maharashtra and Gujarat; the Delhi National Capital Region and Punjab, once India’s leading agricultural state, in the north; and Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, in the south.

The two other states are dark horses — West Bengal and its once great capital Kolkata, and the vast northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The inclusion of the latter draws attention to two aspects of the Varghese report that echo its predecessors: Australia’s need for (a) cultural and linguistic capacity and (b) patience. Uttar Pradesh is an immense potential market that will require plenty of both. Its population is 220 million; female literacy was 59 per cent in 2011; and in 2016 the infant mortality rate was the worst in India, at sixty-four deaths per thousand births. Education and health services beg for attention.

As Varghese emphasises, “regional languages become more important when directly engaging states and cities,” and this is especially true of Uttar Pradesh. Hindi, its common language, has 520 million speakers across India but is taught at only two Australian universities — the Australian National University in Canberra and La Trobe University in Melbourne. “Austrade’s current portal for international students can be viewed in eleven languages, including Russian and Italian, but there are no Indian languages.”

Six case studies of success reflect the title of one of the report’s sections, “The long view: patience, perspective and preparation.” All six enterprises explored the market carefully, maintained a constant presence in India, and planned to stay for the long term. None is a small-time player. They include the Macquarie Group, BlueScope Steel, the ANZ Bank, Monash University, the Future Fund and Simtars, Queensland’s mining safety research organisation.

So what, as they say on television, could possibly go wrong? A constructive critique of the report from an Indian perspective pinpoints a lack of focus on India’s goal of becoming a manufacturing colossus and providing jobs for tens of millions of young job-seekers. (“Make in India” is one of the BJP government’s signature campaigns.) Australian commercial propositions that offer little in these areas are likely to find muted enthusiasm among Indian businesspeople, politicians and policy-makers. The report, however, discounts the chances of India’s following an East Asian path of development, with large factories propelling rapid growth. It may be right, but India may not respond enthusiastically to this approach. “What employment prospects do your proposals offer?” is likely to be a regular Indian question.

On this view, the report’s other deficiency is its suggestion that greater commercial ties lead to closer strategic alignment. India has always seen trade and foreign policy as separate. India has a Ministry of External Affairs; Australia has a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. To assume that commerce and foreign policy go hand in hand might be to invite disappointment.

But even if the strategic and commercial flowers in the relationship bouquet don’t blossom as Australians might hope, the third flower — the India-origin population, 700,000 and growing — means the relationship has changed irrevocably. The Varghese report marks the beginning of a new era for Australian demography, commerce and foreign policy. ●

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Each week’s discussion in Manne’s class revolved around a key essay or book that illuminated the events and ideas that shaped the West during the twentieth century. The framework was laid out by Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, an intricate account of the dramatic upheavals during what he called “The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991.” By extremes, the historian was referring not just to the violent brutality of that era but also to the great prosperity that emerged in sections of the West following the second world war.

The forces driving the violence were identified by George Orwell in his essay “Notes on Nationalism.” Written towards the end of the war, it bears witness to the destructive effects of conformist mass movements. Orwell used the term “nationalism” in a broad sense to indicate any in-group partiality, whether to a particular ethnicity, a nation state, a political party, a religion, or an ideological orthodoxy. His concern was with “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil, and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests” and with the “self-deception” that underlies that drive.

Anticipating the tendency of today’s social media, Orwell wrote that “the smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise for a rival organisation, fills him” — the nationalist, male or female — “with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort.” Transcending that impulse is difficult: humans are inclined towards group identity, and in periods of significant change our parochialism becomes more pronounced as we seek the security of the familiar. The pluralist liberal democracies that emerged in the West in the period after the second world war were remarkably successful in overcoming, or at least subduing, those potentially self-destructive impulses.

Francis Fukuyama’s essay-turned-book The End of History? explained how this inclusive form of liberal democracy consolidated itself in the West and provided the setting for a considerable increase in social stability, prosperity and individual flourishing. But the essay was not the work of Western triumphalism that both its admirers and detractors believed it to be, and its closing chapters presciently anticipated the rise of destabilising figures like Donald Trump. If liberalism’s core tenets of universal access and opportunity were neglected, Fukuyama observed, then it would become vulnerable to figures keen to exploit the loss of confidence in its core values among those who feel their needs are being neglected.

The return to prominence of illiberal figures is both a symptom and a cause of the current age of uncertainty. How we treat the institutions that hold these figures accountable will indicate whether we see the dangers of overreach by government as a primary lesson of the twentieth century — a lesson conservative parties did embrace in the postwar period — or whether the temptations of state power to consolidate in-group ascendency re-emerge.

While another of our readings, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, may have taken an almost absolutist position on state power, his argument that the desire to control trade is an authoritarian instinct should be recognised and the tendency resisted. Hayek asserted that the state lacks the intimate information to understand how companies best produce their wares, which makes the desire to control how they operate misguided at best and nefarious at worst. That desire also demonstrates a disdain for the international institutions that allowed the West to flourish after the second world war.

Liberalism’s trust of human interaction (with prudence), and authoritarianism’s compulsive distrust formed the overarching theme of Robert Manne’s classes. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man provided us with a harrowing first-person account of his existence inside a Nazi concentration camp. From his prison cell, Czech dissident Václav Havel dissected the nature of totalitarian regimes and their incessant need for conformity in The Power of the Powerless. Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon explored similar themes of submission to a state that creates its own truth. And Sven Lindqvist searched for the roots of this dehumanisation in Exterminate All the Brutes.

Self-reflection of this kind is not a form of self-loathing but a vital component of a society’s self-preservation. The success of liberal democracy derives from an appreciation of and respect for the core civic institutions vital to its maintenance. Institutions that provide high-quality public information and those that help develop the skills to critically assess information and mitigate instinctive biases are fundamental to the prevention of democratic backsliding. University classes like Manne’s help create an awareness of how and when the seeds of discordance return.

The erosion of public trust in the institutions that serve as the structural defenders of liberal democracy is also a major threat to Australia’s strategic interests. Unlike the United States, Australia doesn’t have the capacity to maintain a high level of international influence if its internal institutions are destabilised. Here, the undermining of core institutions provides opportunities for strategic competitors to insert themselves into abandoned spaces. In a shifting global order, with Australia’s relative regional power set to decline, protecting core institutions — those that have allowed the country to become highly stable and prosperous, and punch above its weight — is paramount.

That the culture of suspicion towards these essential liberal-democratic institutions is originating from conservative figures demonstrates how increasingly untethered Australian conservatives have become from a philosophical conservatism for which the defence of institutions has always been a primary goal. Theirs has become the nationalism — in Orwell’s sense — that is undermining the national interest. In order to maintain Australia’s domestic resilience it would be wise for them to carefully consider the wider implications of the political tactics they use. Maybe they should take a class?

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A small Department of External Affairs was created in 1935, its staff drawn from the prime minister’s department. The new department accelerated through infancy and adolescence as Australia faced a new world, shaped by war and the rise of the United States, the challenge of communism and the end of colonialism. Asia grabbed for independence as Australia groped towards diplomatic adulthood.

Those who joined the fledgling department were present at the creation of an Australian view of the world and the diplomatic instrument to serve its interests. The new institution was a milestone in the transition to an Australia that looked to itself rather than to the mother country.

Even as the war taught Canberra that what Britain wanted wasn’t always what Australia needed, the British manner still influenced the way External Affairs thought of itself and selected its people (and rewarded its stars with knighthoods). Habit, sentiment and culture meant that London still loomed large.

But the diplomatic posts that quickly came to matter for those building the new department were in Asia and the capitals of the cold war superpowers. The list of key missions — Washington, Moscow, Korea, China, Japan, India, the United Nations — is a rollcall of the posting career of two of that first generation who rose to be diplomatic mandarins: Sir James Plimsoll and Sir Keith Waller.

Plimsoll and Waller both headed External Affairs — and Waller was secretary when the name changed to Department of Foreign Affairs in 1970. Amid the tides of the cold war, each of them served as Australia’s ambassador in Moscow and Washington.

These biographies of the two mandarins record the travels, travails and alarums of the diplomatic life. Each book demonstrates the fundamental truth that an ambassador’s most important diplomatic relationship is with his or her own minister and the prime minister, and that the hardest fights are waged back at home base.

Each book draws on deep research. Each is well written. Each presents a private man who had an important life of public service. And each tells the story of the foundation of Australian diplomacy understood through the life of a diplomat.

Fewster quotes Lord Balfour’s three duties of diplomats: to be accepted by the country to which they’re accredited; to interpret for their own government the policy of the country they’re posted to; and to interpret their own government for the state where they are ambassador. To this trio of often conflicting duties, he adds the dry dictum offered to ambassadors by the bishop-turned-diplomat Talleyrand: “Above all, not too much zeal.” As Waller, who judged that Talleyrand’s dictum holds good, commented, “People with passionate feelings make great national leaders. They make very poor diplomats.”

The conceptual frame that the journalist-turned-diplomat Alan Fewster uses in the title of his biography of Waller is equally useful in reading diplomat Jeremy Hearder’s biography (seventeen years in the making) of Plimsoll. Plimsoll and Waller both understood the tensions of the dictum — the need for judgement, the need to offer your government counsel as well as commitment. They trod similar paths but were vastly different men. They brought equal intelligence but contrasting skills to the creation cause.

Plimsoll was a “monkish” intellectual who never married, the better to serve his unstinting marriage to External Affairs. Waller was a harder, more forceful player. Plimsoll, a tall, rumpled figure, was happy to function with just one suit. The “suave” Waller — sardonically nicknamed “spats” for his “sartorial elegance” — had a mind and a tongue as sharp as the cut of his suits.

Plimsoll was a superb diplomat but a poor manager. Waller was a consummate bureaucrat, well able to fight Canberra battles.

Plimsoll started work in the 1930s as a bank clerk and spent eight years studying part-time at Sydney University. After war broke out he became an economist with the army’s think tank, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, an odd-ball collective of intellectuals that honed his talents. He was a captain with an untidy uniform that contrasted with his elegant mind, then a major who couldn’t salute, employed to think about Australia’s war aims and aspirations in the South Pacific and Asia.

Major Plimsoll joined the Australian military mission in the United States in June 1945. His career was transformed when he switched to a diplomatic role, “plunging into an international conference to discuss high policy relating to Japan.” Working with Dr H.V. Evatt, Australia’s external affairs minister from 1941 to 1949, his career took off.

Like many others who dealt with the Doc, Plimsoll had a close-up view of the flaws of a politician with an ambition as towering as his intellect. “Evatt’s ability was outpaced by his complete lack of principle,” Plimsoll judged. “He saw everything in terms of his own interest.”

Plimsoll’s intellect and total devotion to work quickly made him one of the elite of the diplomatic service, and he was knighted at the age of forty-five. He was no dashing diplomat — rather, he was a non-drinker who didn’t dance and was shy around women. Avoiding golf, he aimed to read one or two books a week and delighted in art. Hearder describes Plimsoll as “disciplined and monastic,” although capable of being “quietly devious.” His photographic memory was joined to “an ability to explain complex matters quickly and clearly both on paper and face to face.”

Plimsoll didn’t drive and liked to live in hotels so he could walk to work. When he was secretary of External Affairs, he lived in the Hotel Canberra, a five-minute stroll from the department. It was as though Canberra was just another posting.

Hearder illustrates this “certain otherworldliness” by telling a delightful story of Plimsoll visiting a colleague’s Canberra house and looking at the backyard with bemusement. “What are those round metal frame things?” Plimsoll asked. He was informed they were rotary hoists for drying clothes. “Oh,” said the secretary. He had deep knowledge of Australia’s world, but not much experience of the Australian backyard.

His ministers paid warm tributes to Plimsoll but none claimed to know the man. Richard Casey, external affairs minister from 1951 to 1960, was close to Plimsoll personally and professionally and once joked to him, “Heaven knows, you may be a dyed-in-the-wool dangerous radical, under the guise of a moral, balanced and intelligent individual. I don’t think you are — but who really knows?”

Paul Hasluck, Plimsoll’s minister from 1964 to 1969, called him “one of the most puzzling men whom I have met and I really don’t know whether I understood him. Yet we always worked well together.”

Our longest-serving foreign minister (1996–2007), Alexander Downer, who served as a junior diplomat under Plimsoll in Brussels in the early 1970s, acclaims him as Australia’s greatest-ever diplomat.

Like Plimsoll’s, Keith Waller’s career was boosted by working closely with Doc Evatt. Waller acknowledged Evatt’s drive to develop an independent international stance for Australia, his dogged internationalism in the creation of the United Nations, and his seminal role in the rapid growth of External Affairs. But he disliked Evatt more than anyone he ever worked for, describing his minister as “vain, venal, without honour, without principles, unscrupulous, surrounded by toadies, mean and cruel.”

The young Waller had double exposure to the great men and egos and invective of Australian politics, serving for two years as the key aide to the irascible former prime minister, Billy Hughes.

Fresh from Melbourne University, Waller arrived in what he described as a “bitterly uncomfortable” Canberra in early 1936, among the second intake of graduates recruited to the Commonwealth public service. Joining External Affairs, he later recalled, he found a “puny department without any muscle at all.” Other public servants advised him the new department was a doomed experiment that would quickly vanish — he should shift to one of the bigger bureaucracies “where the action is.”

When Billy Hughes became external affairs minister in 1937, Waller was appointed his private secretary. Waller thought the seventy-five-year-old took little interest in his department, and judged the Little Digger “capable of being both mean and dishonest.”

Waller’s first posting, in 1941, was to Chungking, the wartime capital of the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. Waller’s sensory memory of his three years in Chungking was of heat, garlic, smoke, decaying vegetation and human excrement. Much of the transport around the capital was by sedan chair, and Fewster reproduces a picture of Waller sitting, working on papers, as he’s carried on a chair and poles by four men.

First posting: Frederic Eggleston, head of the Australian mission at Chungking, presents his credentials, c. November 1941. Keith Waller is standing behind his left shoulder. Sir Keith and Lady Waller Collection, National Library of Australia

By 1945, Waller was in San Francisco serving as the secretary of the Australian delegation at the conference to negotiate the formation of the United Nations. Waller proved his diplomatic skill by handling what he called “a madhouse” delegation subject to two senior politicians who both thought they were in charge. Prime minister John Curtin had sent to San Francisco both deputy prime minister Frank Forde and external affairs minister Evatt but had been “deliberately vague” about which man was the delegation leader.

Waller gave Forde and Evatt equal status and treatment, finessed conflicting orders, and kept business moving. One of the other Australian diplomats at the conference, Paul Hasluck, paid tribute to the skill of the delegation secretary: “If ever Waller dropped a slice of toast, I feel sure that he could arrange that it would not fall with the buttered side down.”

At the summit of their careers, Plimsoll and Waller ran in parallel. Plimsoll was secretary of External Affairs (1965–70) while Waller was ambassador to Washington (1964–1970). Then they did a direct swap, with Waller becoming secretary (1970–1974) while Plimsoll went to Washington (1970–74).

Giving Washington to Waller broke the tradition that Australia’s ambassador to the United States was always a politician. As usual, the ups and downs of Canberra politics played a part in this great professional compliment to Waller. At a farewell meeting before he left for Washington, prime minister Robert Menzies was characteristically wry about the choice: “I’ll tell you quite frankly that this is a position in which I would prefer to have a cabinet minister, but the ones I consider suitable I can’t spare, and the ones I can spare are not suitable.”

The biographies do tandem duty in discussing the role of the two diplomats in running the department and the part they played in the wrenching policy challenge of the era, the Vietnam war.

In the role of departmental secretary, Plimsoll and Waller were contrasts of style and intent. Jeremy Hearder judges that Plimsoll’s five years as secretary “was the least successful appointment in his career up to that time.” Plimsoll aimed to keep External Affairs running rather than trying to run it. He wasn’t decisive enough, says Hearder, and he couldn’t delegate. He lamented the “layered bureaucracy” he had to direct, looking back fondly to the department he first knew when it was “small and personal.”

Moulderer: Sir James Plimsoll on 1965. National Archives of Australia, A1200, L52865

“On the other hand,” Hearder writes, “Plimsoll was more accessible than previous incumbents. He liked to walk the corridors, especially on evenings and weekends, talking to people. He did not convey a sense of being under pressure. He asked for views and listened, although without indicating if he agreed… He made time to see every departmental officer of diplomatic rank, including the most junior, on departure or return from postings.”

Plimsoll had a wait-and-see approach to his ministers and to policy questions. Rather than the usual bureaucratic alternatives — muddle on or move differently — Plimsoll preferred problems to moulder. The moulder method is easily mocked but often effective.

In preferring moulder, he was “a master of benign neglect.” A new personal assistant joining the secretary’s office found four in-trays laden with papers: “Many were marked ‘urgent’ or ‘decision required in four days,’ going back years.” A decision not to make a decision most definitely ranked as a decision. Plimsoll once quoted approvingly a line from a British prime minister, Lord Salisbury: “The time for change is when you can no longer resist it.”

Hearder offers one example of how Plimsoll could moulder-away an idea that he saw as difficult or wrong. In 1966, Hasluck was worried about the foreign policy impact of Radio Australia’s shortwave broadcasts to Asia. He sought to have the international service removed from the Australian Broadcasting Commission and placed under the control of External Affairs. Hasluck instructed Plimsoll to prepare a submission to that effect. Plimsoll got a draft submission then put it in his filing cabinet and waited. Hasluck didn’t raise the matter again.

Plimsoll once commented to a colleague: “Inactivity can be a policy.” It was the worldliness and wariness of a diplomat who served as an ambassador eight times. He understood that getting agreement inside a government is extremely difficult, and getting a deal between nations is even harder. Energy isn’t enough — timing and judgement are paramount.

When the moment demanded it, Plimsoll could be decisive. In a panicky Seoul in 1951, with advancing Chinese troops pushing back UN forces, he got a call in the middle of the night informing him that South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, “had gone to the airport intending to flee the country. Upon hearing this, Plimsoll, clad only in his pyjamas, pursued him to the airport and persuaded him to remain.”

In a different setting, in Washington in 1970, Plimsoll seized the moment by physically seizing his minister. Foreign minister William McMahon, in Washington for an ANZUS council meeting, attended a dinner in his honour at the ambassador’s residence with the secretary of state and the director of the CIA. Towards the end of the meal, McMahon left the table. Plimsoll followed him out and the minister told Plimsoll that he was tired and was going to bed. Plimsoll replied that the guests included a number of important, busy people who had come to meet him. McMahon replied, “Some other time.” He had turned to go up the stairs, when Plimsoll seized him by the back of his coat. “All right,” McMahon conceded. “I’ll stay.”

When Waller swapped Washington for the secretary’s job, he was determined to run the department in new ways, not merely keep it running. Waller admired Plimsoll but described him as an “appalling administrator” who left the department “a mess.” He found that the secretary’s office still had the same furniture and antiquated switchboard it had used when he joined in 1936. One of his first changes was to refurnish his office.

Plimsoll had loved the old department, so it was appropriate that Waller was in charge when the name of External Affairs was changed to the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1970. Waller also won a battle to end the unique status of the Australian High Commission in London, which was still administered by the prime minister’s department.

Waller brought Australia House under the effective control of Foreign Affairs, launching his campaign with a letter to the secretary of the PM’s department: “The time has probably come when we need to deal with the United Kingdom in much the same way as we deal with other countries of real importance to us like the United States and Japan.”

See this as a beautifully weighted public service sentence: a polite declaration of bureaucratic war, plus a reference to the “real importance” of the United Kingdom that is capable of different readings.

Waller remade the structure and administration of Foreign Affairs. He aimed to do away with the “sheep and goats approach to service in the department”: a divided culture where the diplomats were officers while consular and administrative staff were the lower ranks.

Fewster offers a vignette of Waller meeting junior diplomats to talk about his plans for change, “speaking concisely but in somewhat condescending tone.” He referred staffing questions to a personnel officer sitting beside him, but “tapped his cigarette holder sharply against his ashtray” if the personnel man’s responses were too long.

He wanted diplomats with the management skills to run a major public service department. “You would be surprised at the number of heads of mission who are brilliant but administratively inept,” he wrote to his old minister, Richard Casey. “The trouble they cause the department is endless.”

Like many of his generation and education, Waller spoke with more of an English drawl than an Ocker twang. When the Foreign Affairs head rushed to brief Gough Whitlam the day after Labor won the 1972 election, he was wearing a tweed suit. “Keith,” Whitlam boomed, “you look like an English duke!”

“Both men” — Waller and Whitlam — “belonged to a generation that was made to learn passages of the classics by heart,” writes Fewster, “and Whitlam could generally cap any quotation in English or Latin that Waller might throw at him. ‘This sort of thrust and counter-thrust can be enormous fun,’ [Waller] would write, ‘but the minutes would slip by and I would become increasingly conscious that there were many things we should have been doing instead of exchanging rather scholarly witticisms or arguing whether Thucydides was a better historian than Heraclitus.’”

Waller had started out on the Vietnam road in the 1960s every bit as hawkish as his minister, Paul Hasluck. The bitter journey made Waller rueful, if not dovish. His doubt grew during his time as Washington ambassador while Plimsoll, the dutiful External Affairs head, diligently pursued the Vietnam policy of the Liberal governments of Menzies, Harold Holt and John Gorton.

Hearder detects private reservations in Plimsoll’s approach to Vietnam. Yet Plimsoll shared the belief that a communist triumph in Vietnam would be disastrous for Southeast Asia and “tip the balance for the Communist Party in Indonesia.” Plimsoll’s general approach was shaped by a view of China as “unpredictable and a potential threat to the region.”

In checking the proposed text of his speech to parliament in April 1965 announcing the dispatch of the first Australian infantry battalion to Vietnam, Robert Menzies felt it didn’t adequately explain why Australia was making the military commitment. Plimsoll immediately wrote the outline of what became a famous passage on “the downward thrust of Chinese communism.”

In December 1964, Waller wrote a cautionary Vietnam letter to Hasluck, saying he didn’t want to put such a “gloom view” in a cable that would be shared throughout the Canberra system. “I believe I should tell you frankly,” he wrote, “that the signs of a robust and possibly successful policy in South Vietnam are vanishing rapidly.” With plenty of urging from Australia, America did adopt a more robust approach to Vietnam, but failure still arrived.

Waller was at the White House in July 1966 to hear Harold Holt, as prime minister, depart from his prepared speech and declare to president Lyndon Baines Johnson that Australia was the staunch ally that will be “all the way with LBJ.”

Channelling Talleyrand’s dictum about too much zeal, Waller was appalled by the pledge. Even the American president “shuddered” at the line, Waller later wrote, noting that LBJ “was a good enough politician to see that whilst it went down quite well in Washington, it wouldn’t be popular at home” in Australia.

In April 1972, Waller told his ambassadors that government ministers had developed a deep disillusionment with the United States, feeling that American policy was “something on which we cannot any longer rely.” The idea that America was Australia’s best friend was no longer the universal view of Australians. Waller described a “general sense of bewilderment” about “where America is going.” Accepting that there’d be a cooling in the US relationship, he wrote, “I don’t mean that anyone is thinking of denouncing ANZUS, but I think we are moving from a period when the US was the be all and end all of our existence.”

The issue of how much pressure the alliance could bear confronted the new Whitlam government only weeks after its election. The Nixon government responded to the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations with North Vietnam by resuming bombing raids on Hanoi. Waller told the US embassy in Canberra that the Labor government felt the bombing was morally wrong and politically indefensible.

On 28 December 1972, Whitlam sat down in Kirribilli House with his two senior foreign policy advisers, Waller and Plimsoll, who was visiting from Washington. With a detailed note of the conversation from the archives, Fewster puts the three men on stage and plays out the scene — the cut and thrust of their dialogue at the crossroads where politics, policy and diplomacy meet.

The prime minister, foreign affairs secretary and ambassador to the United States wrestle with the frustration of Vietnam, rehearsing the lines Whitlam will use at a scheduled press conference in a few days’ time. Whitlam must preserve the alliance while dissociating Australia from its ally’s bombing campaign. He must criticise Washington’s policy yet not inflame already strained relations with the Nixon administration.

Add to the policy conundrum the political dimension. Whitlam has to speak to Australian voters and hold together angry elements of his own party. There’s potential here for a divide between people and party. Senior members of the Labor Party are keener on breaking away from the United States than many of the voters.

In balancing these forces, Whitlam comments that he’s dealing with a US president, worried about losing face, who has already lost the war.

How should the PM respond to journalist questions about condemning the bombing? Plimsoll suggests that Whitlam might condemn bombing on this scale; the United States would not like the comment but could live with it. Waller says the government could express regret at the bombing of cities, whoever did it.

Whitlam worries about seeming to gloat about the previous Australian government’s Vietnam failures, although Plimsoll suggests that the PM could take the line that, “if there had been a Labor government in power, we would not have had forces in Vietnam.”

Whitlam has to walk a line between expressing his true views and wiping his hands “of a situation the Australian government of the time had helped to produce.” If the aim is to keep the United States interested in Asia, though, “the longer the Americans were involved in Vietnam, the worse the humiliation would be.”

Drawing on this debate, Waller was blunt in expressing the change in Australia’s perspective on Vietnam in a back-channel message to Washington the following month. The Whitlam government, he wrote, wanted good relations with the United States, “but not if the price for this was that they must remain silent in the face of an act which they regard as one of horrifying barbarity.”

Waller retired from Foreign Affairs at the age of sixty in 1974 and died in Canberra in 1992. After Washington, Plimsoll served as ambassador to Moscow, Brussels, London and finally Tokyo. He left Foreign Affairs in 1982 to become governor of Tasmania. Plimsoll died as he lived, hard at work, found in an armchair in Hobart’s government house, in 1987, with a briefing paper on his lap, taken by a heart attack at the age of seventy.

Today in Canberra, Plimsoll and Waller are remembered in the new northern suburb of Casey, named in honour of the minister they both served. All the streets of Casey are named after Australian diplomats and public servants: Plimsoll Drive winds through the centre of the suburb, while one of the streets heading to the heights, off Plimsoll Drive, is Keith Waller Rise.

Plimsoll would note that the backyards are smaller these days, so few have that suburban totem he found so puzzling, the rotary clothes hoist. From the top of his rise, Waller could look down the valley to see the city that has blossomed from the cold and uncomfortable place he first saw in 1936.

Following that valley to Canberra’s centre, the parliamentary triangle, leads to the truest memorial to these two great diplomats. Just down the hill from the parliament is the Casey building, the headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the service that Waller and Plimsoll helped create. ●

The post Australian diplomacy’s creation story appeared first on Inside Story.

Rather than incoherence, see the complexity of a relationship that now stretches across many elements of Australian life. Note a key lesson of the five icy ages: the Chinese system is always united and coherent in its proclaimed anger, while Australia debates with itself as much as it argues with China. A monolithic party in China confronts a system where the proper job of parties is to brawl; that makes icy ages messy for Australia but also strangely useful, even clarifying.

The saga of the changes in diplomatic climate begins with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. When China stood up, Australia turned away.

First icy age (1949­–72): Siding with the United States, Australia refused for twenty-three years to give diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic. After long and arid coldness, the Whitlam government’s recognition in December 1972 created an era of warm optimism. The return of a Coalition government in 1975 made the warmth bipartisan, especially as prime minister Malcolm Fraser — a pragmatic panda-hugger — saw China as an ally in confronting the Soviet Union.

Second icy age (1989–91): Bob Hawke’s tears flowed after the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June 1989. Australia bashed at China, suspending ministerial visits, aid and loans and stopping military contacts. The action that had the most profound effect — and turned out to be hugely beneficial — was Hawke’s decision that Chinese students and citizens in Australia didn’t have to return to China. With family reunions added in, that saw 100,000 settling here, the biggest wave of Chinese migration since the gold rush of the mid nineteenth century.

The onset of the second icy age was sharp. Australia’s first ambassador to China, sinologist Stephen FitzGerald, said that Australia had been guilty of naive euphoria about China — “we have seemed to lose all perspective” — and argued that Tiananmen marked the end of “official intoxication with China.”

Early the following year, though, Australia’s ban on ministerial visits was lifted. China was too important to shun. Another year later, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s official history, the “hiatus in relations” ended in 1991. Emerging from its short pariah period, China joined APEC in 1991 simultaneously with Taiwan and Hong Kong, a moment of equivalence unimaginable today.

Third icy age (1996): China attempted to put John Howard’s government, elected in March 1996, to the sword. Ministerial visits froze and Australian businesses in China screamed that they were being punished. The new government had offended on numerous fronts. Howard’s ministers criticised Beijing’s missile-test menacing of Taiwan; Howard’s call to reinvigorate the US alliance struck Beijing as an endorsement of a containment policy. Chinese commentators fretted that Japan and Australia would be “crab claws” gripping China. The perceived Australian slights piled up: cutting aid loans, a ministerial visit to Taiwan, the PM meeting the Dalai Lama. As Howard conceded in his memoirs, it was “a rocky start.”

The thaw came when Howard met with China’s leader, Jiang Zemin, at the APEC summit in November 1996. Howard rates that conversation “as about as important a meeting as I held with any foreign leader in the time I was prime minister.” It was the start of what Howard calls one of his greatest foreign policy achievements — “the great duality” of strengthening the alliance with the United States while building an ever-closer economic relationship with China.

Howard sat down with Jiang, he recalled, “determined to focus on the things that we had in common and to put aside those things that could never be resolved between our two nations.” He told Jiang that respecting the different heritages and politics of Australia and China meant not lecturing each other: “Encouragingly, as we walked out of the meeting, the President said to me in English: ‘Face to face is much better, isn’t it?’”

Howard’s course was set. He was deeply pragmatic, conceding China’s prerogatives, promising mutual respect (in his case, respect for China’s power) and seeking to focus on trade. It worked marvellously. The China boom lifted Australia’s boat and sailed it serenely into a golden economic era.

Fourth icy age (2008–09): Beijing thought the new Mandarin-speaking leader, Kevin Rudd (Lu Kewen), understood and loved China. Trouble was, Lu/Rudd knew China’s complexity and duality and spoke truth to power.

The Rudd sharpness shaped the 2009 defence white paper. His various offerings on China were bookended by significant speeches, two years apart, in Beijing and Canberra. The Beijing University speech in April 2008, four months after taking office, was a hopeful, opening effort to dance with China. His Morrison Lecture in Canberra in April 2010, two months before he was cut down by caucus, showed signs of the frostbite caused by the fourth icy age.

In Beijing, speaking in Mandarin, Rudd offered honest criticism and sought to be a zhengyou, a true friend who “offers unflinching advice and counsels restraint” on contentious matters. He proposed “a straightforward discussion” about “significant human rights problems in Tibet.” China decided it was going to have problems with Lu Kewen.

Two years later, reflecting on the icy age, Rudd described three chilly scenarios: China as threat; China as direct competitor with the United States for control of the international system; and China as self-absorbed mercantilist bully.

In the meantime, the diplomatic pressure from Beijing had thrown up a notable document, the October 2009 Australia–China joint statement, whose ceasefire terms will be a useful template for the eventual end of hostilities in this fifth icy age. The statement came out of the bombast and official snubs dished out by Beijing in July, August and September 2009. When the row became a resolution in October, Canberra avoided the need for a symbolic kowtow and managed to get a balanced deal adorned with language about mutual respect and equality. It was the kind of diplomatic boilerplate that matters.

Here are the five paragraphs of that 2009 Australia–China statement with my added translations of the diplomatese.

1. The set-up paragraph: Australia and China agreed on the “great potential and prospects” for what is described as a “comprehensive relationship.” China and Australia will promote the “long-term, sound and steady growth of the comprehensive and cooperative relationship on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.”

Canberra translation: We heard you yelling at us. You’ve had your say, now please consider your enduring interests — and show some respect.

2. The key paragraph on the end of the conflict: “The two sides noted their different national conditions could lead to differences of one type or another. The two sides should respect and take into full consideration the core interests and major concerns of each other [and] properly handle differences and sensitive issues in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, non-interference and equality…” Australia then reiterated its one-China position on Taiwan, but more pointedly offered an explicit statement of respect for “China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including in relation to Tibet and Xinjiang.”

Canberra translation: No Kevin Rudd meeting with the Dalai Lama and no more visits for a while by Uighur leaders. But, as with paragraph 1: show some respect.

3. The geoeconomics paragraph, covering market principles, Chinese investment and the huge benefits for each side of the trade synergies: “Recognising that the combined GDP of our two economies is greater than US$5 trillion, the two sides agreed that China and Australia enjoy strong economic complementarity, and it serves the common interests of both sides to advance economic, trade and investment cooperation on the basis of reciprocity and mutual benefit.”

Canberra translation: Your GDP is US$4.4 trillion. Our GDP is US$1.01 trillion. You’re bigger but we still count.

Also in the geoeconomics paragraph, the free-trade agreement. The negotiations were four years old. Time to try again, the statement suggests, and Australia still gets in its language about a “comprehensive, high-quality, balanced and mutually beneficial” deal.

Canberra translation: We won’t settle for the trade deal you foisted on the ASEANs, and we need a much broader deal than the Kiwis achieved. The Howard government started this agonising process so there’s not too much political pain for us if it drags on. Show some political will and kick your officials. If you’re not up to it, we’ll go elsewhere and see if Japan or South Korea can do “comprehensive and high-quality.”

Then comes the Foreign Investment Review Board bit: “The Australian side stated in clear terms that it welcomes investment from China, as China welcomes investment from Australia. Australia sees China’s increased investment interest as a positive development that will further consolidate the Australia–China economic relationship.”

Canberra translation: Read our lips: WELCOMES!

4. The geopolitical clause: “The two sides agreed that China and Australia share important common interests in promoting peace, stability and development in the Asia-Pacific region.” The usual institutions get a mention: the United Nations, G20, APEC, the East Asia Summit and the Pacific Islands Forum.

Canberra translation: I won’t mention your military expansion if you don’t mention my white paper.

5. The people-to-people clause: Education, culture, sports, tourism and the media.

Canberra translation: On culture and language, the Mandarin-speaking prime minister handles his own translation.

Icy periods between nations are difficult, challenging and even dangerous. Along with the perils of thrills and spills, though, chills are illuminating. The reality of the pushes, the pulls and the power plays is revealed. Differences have to be discussed, if not resolved. Dispute, not agreement, is to the fore and must be dealt with as the temperature drops.

Icy ages seldom get to a catharsis. As long as catastrophe is avoided, a rethink has its uses. Even after the let’s-move-on moment is reached (agree to disagree, or do a deal) the chill influences the future trajectory. Such periods force a reset. They do this because governments that throw the switch to cold can also recalibrate to warmer settings. That’s the positive message of history.

The fifth icy age disrupts the usual rhythms. This time the domestic dimensions of the wrangle loom large. This is more than a foreign affairs stoush — it has domestic dimensions that increase the political chill factor for both sides.

Previous icy ages tended to focus on things happening in China’s sphere. Today’s icy age has more of its action on Australian soil, because China’s sphere reaches into more Australian interests. As the balance of power moves steadily China’s way, so the blowback spills our way.

The elements of the chill — domestic and strategic — gathered last year. Australia held its tongue about Donald Trump, to hold firm to the alliance, while its language about China became shriller. Privately describing China as a “frenemy,” prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s major Asia policy speech in Singapore in June offered a “dark view” of a “coercive China” seeking regional domination.

In November, Australia’s foreign policy white paper emphasised the friendly side of China as frenemy; that’s as it should be in an official document. Its starting point, though, is a stark fear of China’s challenge to the United States and the “rules-based” order so prized by Australia. Having described that central reality, the paper reaffirmed Australia’s seventy-seven-year commitment to the US alliance and its enduring belief in America’s role in Asia.

The domestic dimension of the cooling was dramatised in December by the fall of a Labor senator seen to be doing China’s bidding because of donations from Chinese business. Almost at the same moment, the prime minister announced legislation to ban foreign political donations and broaden the definition of espionage. To make the point in the most pointed way, Turnbull used Mandarin to quote Mao’s famous line about China standing up to state that Australia will stand against foreign interference. Chilly!

Introducing the legislation to widen the reach of foreign interference and espionage law, Malcolm Turnbull took direct aim at China in a section of his speech headed “Protecting our democracy.” Turnbull used the cover of “media reports” but the legislation is based on the government’s understanding of what China is doing. Here is how he talked about China:

Media reports have suggested that the Chinese Communist Party has been working to covertly interfere with our media, our universities and even the decisions of elected representatives right here in this building. We take these reports very seriously.

Our relationship with China is far too important to put at risk by failing to clearly set the terms of healthy and sustainable engagement. Modern China was founded by the statement that Chinese people have stood up. And today, and every day, the Australian people stand up and assert their sovereignty in our nation, with our parliament and with our laws.

As the normal customs of Oz politics apply, even in an icy age, the “stand up” line got plenty of kicks, particularly from Kevin Rudd, commenting in Mandarin on Chinese social media. “Frankly, it was irresponsible and very problematic for Turnbull to say that ‘the Australian people have stood up,’” he wrote. It was “an insult to Chinese people, to Chinese Australians, and to Australians.” In another post, he said, “I have just criticised Turnbull on Australian television because he derailed China–Australia relations for his domestic political interests. That is very irresponsible.”

A significant date in any icy age is when governments cease to deny there’s a problem and start openly discussing what’s wrong. Icy age five is now acknowledged.

China’s ambassador to Canberra, Chen Jingye, complained to the Australian about “a growing lack of mutual trust” that could hurt trade: “We have seen a kind of systematic, irresponsible, negative remarks and comments regarding China which has caused adverse impact on bilateral relations.”

Malcolm Turnbull’s version is that “tension” in the relationship is caused by “misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of our foreign interference legislation in some of the Chinese media.” Blaming the media is standard stuff in the early stage of an icy age. Once tensions are acknowledged, governments can’t wave it off as a journalistic beat-up. The “misunderstandings” line is useful for leaders feeling the freeze. The tyranny of the talking points is the need to talk, so they blame the conflict on mistake or misapprehension. Don’t believe it. No misunderstanding here.

China knows the push-pull power-play basis of this process as much as we do. In the official grievance game, Beijing is an old master. The formal expression of affront was given by China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, at her regular press conference, where she rejected the claim of Chinese interference in Australia and then ramped up to a broader charge of Australian poor faith and prejudice.

“First, with regard to political infiltration, we have responded to it on multiple occasions,” she said. “There are normal people-to-people exchanges between countries and normal exchanges and cooperation can be conducted in various fields. If one views normal exchanges as infiltration, he had better lock himself in a dark room and live in isolation. People with such a mindset should reflect on themselves.

“Second, regarding China–Australia relations, the normal and friendly exchanges and cooperation between countries should be underpinned by reliable and strong mutual trust. Without mutual trust, exchanges and cooperation in other areas would be impossible. We hope that the Australian side can make concrete efforts to discard its prejudices and discriminatory practices against China, join hands with China to step up mutual trust and create enabling conditions and a relaxing atmosphere for our exchanges and cooperation across the board.”

These are Beijing’s justifications for applying the diplomatic squeeze. You can reject its version of the dispute while accepting the twin points are a useful definition of what the icy age is about.

Australia is arguing about China’s power and role in Asia. Added to this, Australia is now arguing about China’s effort to exert power within Australia. Getting a reset on those two issues will be extremely difficult. But the rethink has started in Australia.

The icy age asks Australia to think about itself, not just about the relationship with China, as the chill blows through many Australian worlds: security, economics and trade, society, diplomacy and politics. The orbits of these worlds converge, shifting political tides and disrupting social weather.

Traditionally, dragon-slayers worry about China as a security threat, a revisionist power eating at Australia’s interests. The slayers tend to come from the security and counterespionage realm — SecWorld — but other worlds feel dragon alarms.

Panda-huggers dominate the economic realm of EcWorld. Two-way trade is worth $150 billion (more than the United States and Japan combined). The Australian’s economics writer David Uren sees it as Australia’s most intense trading relationship since dependence on Britain faded in the early 1950s: “China takes a third of our exports of goods while its students and tourists provide a quarter of our services income. China also provides more than a fifth of our imports.”

As geostrategic and geoeconomic concerns grow, gravitational wobbles make EcWorld and SecWorld snarlier and snappier, and iciness spreads to other worlds.

SecWorld has upset the usual role of the diplomats from DipWorld, according to Geoff Raby, the former deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who was Australia’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011. As China adopts “an increasingly muscular foreign policy stance” and challenges US pre-eminence, Raby writes, many in Canberra have taken fright: “In response, the Security Establishment (Defence, ONA, ASIO, ASIS, PM&C’s International Division, and the think tanks they fund such as ASPI) some time ago concluded that the China relationship was too important to trust to DFAT. The foreign minister’s, and hence her department’s, role in managing this critical relationship has become inconsequential.”

More than a Canberra turf wrestle, this is a case of worlds converging. As Raby notes, “China today permeates Australian society — some form of Chinese is the second most widely spoken language in Australian homes; fee-paying Chinese students largely support Australia’s higher education sector financially, while Chinese tourists have long been the biggest spenders. They are now also the most numerous. All of these trends will continue to deepen.”

The line about “permeates Australian society” points to that notable difference between this fifth icy age and the previous four. Much of today’s action is on Australian domestic turf — social and political — in SocWorld and PolWorld. We’re arguing about ourselves as well as China: the way we do politics, how we run and pay for universities, the life of a multicultural society. The policy issues have become personal: the 2016 census found that 2.2 per cent of Australia’s population was born in China and 5.6 per cent have Chinese ancestry.

When he introduced the foreign-influence legislation in December, Malcolm Turnbull said the focus is on foreign states and their agents, not the loyalties of Australians from a foreign country. “There is no place for racism or xenophobia in our country,” he said. “Our diaspora communities are part of the solution, not the problem.”

It was a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to keep SecWorld separate from SocWorld. But the parliamentary review of the proposed legislation, the subsequent government amendments, and the range of public submissions all show the impact on a range of Oz worlds.

They’re also evident in the clash of the petitions between two groups of Australia’s China scholars. Coming from the panda-ish side, the Concerned Scholars of China see no evidence that China aims to compromise Australian sovereignty, and disagree with key claims about Chinese influence made in support of the national security legislation:

Instead of a narrative of an Australian society in which the presence of China is being felt to a greater degree in a series of disparate fields, we are witnessing the creation of a racialised narrative of a vast official Chinese conspiracy. In the eyes of some, the objective of this conspiracy is no less than to reduce Australia to the status of a “tribute state” or “vassal.” The discourse is couched in such a way as to encourage suspicion and stigmatisation of Chinese Australians in general. The alarmist tone of this discourse impinges directly on our ability to deal with questions involving China in the calm and reasoned way they require. Already it is dissuading Chinese Australians from contributing to public debate for fear of being associated with such a conspiracy.

A dragon-ish response came from another group of scholars who say that the debate isn’t driven by “sensationalism or racism” but responds to “well-documented reports about the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Australia.” They offered this checklist:

● Espionage and other unlawful operations by Chinese officials or their proxies on Australian soil
● Attempts to interfere in political elections
● Direct and indirect control of Chinese-language media in Australia
● Intimidation of Chinese Australians (both Australian citizens and permanent residents) for their political views and activities in Australia
● The use of political donations and agents of influence in attempts to change Australian government policies
● The takeover and co-opting of Chinese community groups to censor sensitive political discussions and increase the Chinese government’s presence in the community
● The establishment of Chinese government–backed organisations on university campuses, used for monitoring Chinese students
● Interference in academic freedom
● The cultivation of prominent Australians in attempts to sway public and elite opinion
● The covert organisation of political rallies by the Chinese government.

On the evidence of the previous three icy ages — under Hawke, Howard and Rudd — today’s chilliness will pass when both sides decide enough is enough. An icy age is a diplomatic device to inflict damage and denote displeasure. Eventually, other purposes must be served. A balance between row and kowtow will be restored.

Canberra and Beijing will have to agree on the terms of the thaw. That requires them to agree on what the argument is about. Then the leaders will meet and the language will swing from rancour and recrimination to mutual respect and shared interests.

The reset, though, will reflect a permanent change in the international weather system — the growing power of China. It will also show the many faces of China within our society. The terms of the eventual thaw will run through many Australian worlds. ●

The post China and Australia’s fifth icy age appeared first on Inside Story.

While Macron was careful to stroke the American president’s sensitive ego, he surprised many with a robust speech to Congress in which he reaffirmed the value of multilateral trade, reminded political leaders of the need to persist with the Iran nuclear deal and reaffirmed the importance of the Paris climate agreement, from which Trump has so blithely moved away. But will the French president’s soft-power strategy win concessions from Trump? Many doubt it, but only time can tell: diplomatic influence takes time and works beyond the media glare.

What was also striking was Macron’s courting of the next generation of American decision-makers at a very informal discussion with students at Georgetown University. This has become a standard feature of his international itinerary: whether he’s in India or Africa, he insists on addressing a young audience, leveraging his own relative youth to extoll the benefits of French higher education and French research and development, and projecting the message that “France is back” on the global economic and political stage.

Macron’s visit to Australia is one of a long list of international engagements, coming on top of visits to many other European countries. His arrival in Sydney brings his tally of continents to five of the seven, and no other French president has spent so much of his first year globetrotting. Where does the Australian visit fit into Macron’s political strategy? First of all, it’s important to remember that he is seeking to seduce different publics: an international one, a European one (to position himself as the next great European leader) and a national one back in France. The latter — as recent protests have highlighted — is far from being wholly supportive. For this Australian visit, a New Caledonian audience can be added, for he will visit Nouméa next, just a few months before a referendum decides whether the territory accedes to full sovereignty or retains links to France.

In this respect, Macron’s trip is full of symbolism. He will arrive in New Caledonia in time to take part in the remembrance services for the unrest in 1988 that triggered the independence negotiations and led to the Nouméa agreement of 1998, which allowed for this year’s referendum. In keeping with his self-proclaimed wish to be a “Jupiterian” president, above social divisions and political squabbles, he has been careful to stress that he won’t take any position on the referendum itself. But he has signalled that he will make an important speech before leaving the territory. It’s possible that the talks in Australia will have some influence on its content.

Macron’s Australian visit crowns four years of collaboration on the first world war centenary celebrations, which culminated in the opening of the John Monash Centre in Northern France last week. The timing puts the spotlight on the history of the military alliance and more broadly on defence collaboration, especially as it bears on the fight against Islamic terrorism. The two countries have shared terror-related intelligence since the deportation in 2003 of a French citizen, Willy Brigitte, who planned to establish an al Qaeda cell in Sydney.

At the intersection of defence and trade, Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, secured the $50 billion contract that will see a French company build twelve submarines, designed in Cherbourg, for the Australian navy. The project led to new links between the Brittany region and South Australia, the centre of the Australian government’s new naval shipbuilding plan.

In this respect, Macron’s visit was partly after-sales service. But he also has a far more ambitious strategic vision than his predecessor, which was apparent in talks at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base, which was designed to forge a strong Franco-Australian partnership to strengthen Indo-Pacific cooperation. The “security diamond” that links Australia to the United States, Japan and India is likely to be a particular focus: in the face of growing Chinese involvement in the region, this originally Japanese initiative is designed to pursue the associated objectives of a rules-based regional order, free trade, and security for smaller Southeast Asian and East Asian countries.

During his visit to India in March, Macron aligned himself strongly with prime minister Narendra Modi’s foreign-policy agenda. France has a particular interest in the Indian Ocean. Alone among European countries, it maintains a base there, an acknowledgement of the ocean’s importance as a trade and communications route. (Three-quarters of all European trade travels through the Indian Ocean and it is criss-crossed by internet cables.) Like other Western leaders, Macron is concerned with the need to manage China’s growing presence in the region, all the more so because of Trump’s erratic leadership. China has secured a military base in Djibouti, for example, a country that was once part of the French zone of influence on the Horn of Africa.

Macron’s interest in the Indo-Pacific region is part of a broader objective: not only to become the de facto leader of the European Union but also to be the leader who fulfils the underlying French vision that fuelled the EU’s creation, to give his country a leading role in the Western alliance. In this, he is perhaps the antithesis of Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, who made the decision to put the French armed forces back under NATO central command, and much more heir to presidents François Mitterrand and Charles de Gaulle, who, despite their different political allegiances, saw “Europe” as the vehicle for France’s influence. Both men pursued economic power, but only insofar as it could push France’s cultural influence; both saw in the European Union’s multi-level, rules-based governance a civilisational model. To his credit, Macron sees the need to combat climate change, and to honour the progress made at the Paris conference in 2015, as a major aspect of this model and has reminded prime minister Malcolm Turnbull of his own earlier commitment to action on climate change.

Macron and Turnbull do share common ground but have divergent priorities. For Australia, Macron’s visit is a golden opportunity to push forward negotiations with the European Union on a free-trade agreement. This has been an objective of the European Commission for a while, but Brexit gave the project much more impetus. As Britain plans its withdrawal from the European Union, Australia fears a repeat shock, in reverse, of what it experienced when it was locked out of the British market following Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973.

Macron is very mindful, however, of the European Union’s crisis of legitimacy as a result of the global financial crisis — or rather, as a result of the way it managed the crisis under the leadership of Angela Merkel. By imposing austerity across member countries, European policy-makers have kept economic growth anaemic everywhere except in Germany itself. At a Brussels summit in October last year, Macron warned of the dangers of pushing ahead with free-trade treaties when public opinion is hostile. A number of non-government organisations, trade unions and politicians have accused the treaties of undermining social norms, environmental protections and health standards.

As a consequence, negotiations for the Canada–Europe Trade Agreement were fraught, and the deal could still be derailed if one country vetoes it. Further complicating Europe’s position is the eternal problem faced by French governments, the need to manage an agricultural sector that has been under great pressure. As a result, official declarations about Macron’s visit to Australia have stressed that negotiations would only concern bilateral commercial agreements.

Big French companies are of course in favour of such a free-trade treaty with Australia. The current involvement of French construction giants Vinci and Bouygues in Melbourne’s infrastructure revamp has demonstrated the potential for expanded operations here. More broadly, French business is acutely aware of the fact that Australia’s economy is highly interdependent with China’s and that the country could be a useful platform to make headway in the Asian market.

But business doesn’t have to worry about securing popular support. Macron, on the other hand, is acutely aware of its importance following the wave of social protest triggered by his attempts to move France to a system of collective bargaining and to prepare the country to meet the European Commission’s directive on the liberalisation of railway transport, which set 2020 as the deadline for France’s main national lines to be opened to competition. With the railway system running at a loss, this delicate issue overlaps with the question of public debt. The strengthened EU rules established following the Greek financial crisis make it imperative for France to reduce its budget deficit.

The French government’s attempt to turn the national railway, the SNCF, into a private company has met with union resistance. A decent level of public support exists for the strikers, though it is eroding as disruption continues. In many ways, the SNCF — by binding the country with a network of lines that radiate out from Paris — is a symbol of the social pact French governments struck with France as a whole after the liberation from Nazi occupation. What people fear is that the profitable lines surrounding major cities will be retained but the periphery will be left to its own devices with possible negative social and environmental consequences.

The French presidential campaign made it clear that French society is deeply divided: the half of France that still operates within a national rather than international economic environment feels it has been abandoned by governments. Some have dubbed Macron’s attempt to reform the SNCF his “Thatcher Moment,” recalling the Iron Lady’s confrontation with mining unions in the mid 1980s. Macron has remained firm in the face of the protests, and will be hoping that En Marche! members of the National Assembly, under party leader Richard Ferrand, can swing popular opinion over to its program of liberalisation.

One test will be the next electoral contest, in 2019, when the French people choose their representatives to the European Parliament. European elections have traditionally attracted less interest than national elections in France, but Macron’s promise to engineer a change of Europe’s direction, combined with the political discontent evident in other European countries, means they could be much more decisive for national politics.

During his election campaign, Macron undertook to reform the European monetary union to give the European Union the capacity to mutualise debt and drive large investment projects. But the recent German federal elections confirmed what many had suspected: Germany will not go along with such a reform.

For a while, with the retirement of Wolfgang Schäuble (the architect of austerity) and the debates within Germany’s Social Democratic Party, or SPD, a change in German policy seemed possible. It was hoped that Germany would face up to the unsustainability of its incredible trade surplus (8 per cent of GDP, more than China’s widely criticised figure) and allow the grave economic balances between countries to be corrected. The SPD’s decision to once again join a “grand coalition” and the appointment of Olaf Scholz as finance minister dashed those hopes: Scholz is just as much a fervent believer in the virtues of a “schwarze Null” (a “black zero,” or balanced budget) as Merkel and he will not push for more national spending to rebalance exports and imports between Germany and the rest of the eurozone.

To put it differently, even though Merkel’s leadership has been weakened, Germany will continue vetoing the reforms many economists now realise are needed to resolve the imbalances and recover economic growth in Europe. Added to this is the fact that the countries that have been through punishing austerity measures and have reduced their budget deficits are unlikely to follow France in a stand-off with Germany.

Macron is desperately hoping that labour reform in France will be enough to deliver some economic growth and secure French popular support for his European vision. He also hopes that his international stature will encourage not only the French electorate but also other countries to stand by him. In France, his new party does not yet have a solid electoral base and the proposed reforms are therefore a major gamble for Ferrand’s government.

Emmanuel Macron was in many ways elected by default, as the result of the disintegration of the French Socialist Party, the fear surrounding the possibility of a French Trump, Marine Le Pen, and the corruption allegations against the candidate from the right, François Fillon. It is fair to say that he is walking a tightrope and it remains to be seen whether his charisma and the hope he has inspired — both of them on display in Australia this week — are enough for him to deliver the change that France, Europe and perhaps the Western world are calling for. ●

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But look out Hollywood, move over Bollywood. Operation Red Sea comes from China and is the latest in a series of blockbusters that combine explosive special effects with classic Hollywood clichés and propaganda motifs from the People’s Republic. Directed by Hong Kong film-maker Dante Lam, it is China’s second-highest-grossing movie of all time, raking in US$551 million in foreign sales during the five weeks after its release last month.

It’s a mixture of Black Hawk Down, Die Hard and The Perils of Pauline. Elite Chinese navy commandos are deployed to the fictional North African country of Yewaire to rescue Chinese citizens trapped between government and rebel forces in the middle of a coup d’état. During the operation, a beautiful French-Chinese journalist persuades the commandos to go beyond their mission and take down a group of Islamists who are fleeing with stolen radioactive materials. Many bangs and much bloodshed ensue as our eight heroes take on a stream of bad guys.

Zhang Yi stars as Yang Rui, the leader of the Jiaolong Assault Team (in real life, an elite Special Forces unit of the Chinese navy). Hai Qing, who was named the first UN Women national ambassador for China in 2015, plays the journalist who must persuade the tough-as-guts marines to disobey orders and save the day. It’s all great fun if you like gunfire, explosions and non-stop twists and turns.

The real significance of the film, however, lies in its propaganda value for the Chinese navy. Operation Red Sea was inspired by the 2015 evacuation of nearly 600 Chinese citizens from Aden during Yemen’s civil war, one of a series of similar recent deployments by Chinese forces.

This new kind of intervention was triggered by the deaths of Chinese civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2004. China’s president at the time, Hu Jintao, issued new guidelines on “diplomacy serving the people” (waijiao weimin), which required the military to protect Chinese nationals overseas. The policy faced its first real tests in 2006, when Chinese nationals were caught up in riots and disturbances across the Pacific. In April, China evacuated 310 nationals from Honiara after anti-Chinese rioting following the Solomon Islands elections. Later that month, another 243 Chinese were evacuated from Timor, fleeing armed clashes in the capital, Dili. In November, another 193 Chinese were flown out of Nuku’alofa after riots destroyed a number of Chinese and local businesses in the Tongan capital. Chinese small-business owners and workers from state-owned corporations were also targeted in anti-Asian rioting in Papua New Guinea in May 2009.

These responses were part of a global trend. China is becoming more internationally engaged under Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative and the expanded reach of Chinese state-owned and private corporations. According to the latest data, more than five million Chinese passport holders — diplomats, tourists, construction workers, development technicians and others — now live outside China, especially in the developing world. It’s hardly surprising that significant numbers of them face hazards.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has documented a range of Chinese interventions to protect civilians over the last fifteen years, including evacuations from Chad and Thailand in 2008, Haiti and Kyrgyzstan in 2010, and Egypt and Syria in 2011 during the Arab Spring. These evacuations generally use civilian aircraft and vessels, but the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, has also weighed in with military hardware. The Jiaolong Special Forces were first in the public eye during a 2008 mission to accompany three Chinese warships protecting commercial ships from Somali pirates as part of a UN mandate. Since then, they’ve been more active.

The PLA’s largest deployment was part of the evacuation of more than 35,800 Chinese citizens from Libya in March 2011. The operation involved civilian planes as well as the PLA Jiangkai-II class frigate Xuzhou and four PLA air force Ilyushin transport aircraft sent to Sabha in southern Libya. In March 2015, as the Yemen crisis escalated, 563 Chinese citizens and 233 foreign nationals from thirteen countries were evacuated to Djibouti by the PLA navy. In a region where the Belt and Road Initiative is expanding, China is constructing a naval logistics base in Djibouti, alongside existing military facilities used by the United States, France and Japan.

Given Beijing’s responsibility to protect the growing Chinese diaspora in Oceania, it’s possible that we’ll see more interventions by Chinese forces in the South Pacific. It’s a trend worrying Australian defence planners and politicians, who see the Pacific islands as “our patch” and are wary of the influence of “non-traditional” partners.

Until now, Chinese nationals have been evacuated from the Pacific in civilian aircraft. But some Australian defence analysts are anxious about wider strategic implications, fearing that the PLA’s growing role in “overseas citizen protection” will be used to deploy Chinese military forces in the South Pacific. In this light, films like Operation Red Sea are seen as part of a broader propaganda effort, supporting a strategic plan by the Chinese government to justify military deployments into the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

“Given the potential for anti-Chinese riots in the South Pacific, the requirement for Chinese ‘overseas citizen protection’ may become a reality in Melanesia in the near future,” argues Colonel Peter Connolly, director for international engagement with the Australian army. “In a hypothetical development where a PLA amphibious element arrives to protect evacuees in Papua New Guinea alongside the contingents from Australia and other traditional regional partners, there is scope for accidental friction leading to tension and suspicion of intent.”

There is a certain irony in Colonel Connolly’s concern — indeed, the words “pot” and “kettle” spring to mind. The Australian Defence Force, or ADF, has long deployed military forces to the Pacific in times of crisis, using the evacuation of Australian civilians as justification.

In May 1987, Operation Morris Dance saw the first operational deployment of an Australian infantry unit since the Vietnam war, in response to Sitiveni Rabuka’s coup in Fiji. During Operation Plumbob in June 2000, as conflict escalated between rival militias in the Solomon Islands capital, Honiara, HMAS Tobruk was used to evacuate 426 Australian nationals.

But perhaps the most noteworthy intervention took place between October and December 2006. The ADF deployed SAS troops and three warships off the coast of Fiji as tensions grew between the government of Fiji and the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, or RFMF, led by Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama — a political crisis that culminated in a military coup on 5 December.

The intervention, Operation Quickstep, ended in tragedy when a Blackhawk helicopter carrying the SAS troops crashed during a landing on HMAS Kanimbla, causing two deaths. Commenting on the board of inquiry report into the crash in 2008, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston noted the helicopter was participating in training that “involved performing special operations assaults.” The aim of the assaults, he wrote, “was to deliver Special Forces troops on to a specific target area quickly and at the first attempt in order to maximise surprise and minimise exposure to threat.”

On 29 November, RFMF troops in full battle gear had secured strategic sites, including the Telecom headquarters, Fiji Electricity Authority and government offices, and soldiers had set up roadblocks around the capital, Suva, and fired illumination rounds into the sea. A week later, Commodore Bainimarama seized power. Ironically, some observers in Suva felt that the RFMF used the Australian naval and SAS deployment as an excuse to move forward the date of the coup.

Given past problems with logistic capacity, the Australian government has recently launched HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide, two Canberra-class landing helicopter dock vessels, which can carry troops and helicopters for amphibious assaults. But with China now serving as Fiji’s largest aid donor, the next naval deployment to Suva harbour may not involve the ADF at all. ●

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Trump’s deference to Putin, his frequent words of praise and his desire to talk by phone and, when possible, have unmonitored one-on-one meetings suggest that the relationship is based in some measure on an awareness by Trump that Putin has some publicly undisclosed power over him.

James Clapper, the former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency and director of national intelligence between 2010 and 2017, believes that the relationship shows how well Putin “handles” Trump. “I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is,” he told CNN on 18 December. “He knows how to handle an asset and that’s what he’s doing with the president. You have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and the instincts of Putin have come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president.”

Clapper was referring to Trump’s very warm words about a phone conversation he’d had with Putin the day before, in which Putin had thanked him for valuable intelligence that forestalled a terror attack in Putin’s home city, St Petersburg. He probably also had in mind Putin’s comments during his annual marathon Q&A session a few days earlier, where he had warmly praised Trump’s performance and rejected allegations of collusion as “spymania” designed to damage the president and prevent him from developing better cooperation with Russia. Not immune to flattery, Trump immediately responded by seeking a phone audience with President Putin, which was granted.

When pressed for further elucidation, Clapper said he was speaking figuratively, but most people following the Trump–Putin relationship closely would have assumed he meant to convey a literal truth.

The exact nature of the relationship and its impact on Trump’s campaign and the formation of his leadership team remain the subject of three dedicated investigations by congressional committees, as well as the occasional interest of some other committees — and, above all, the investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, which the president and his supporters have been doing their best to hamper or derail.

The signs that the president wants to sack Mueller were given greater specificity on 26 January when the New York Times reported that last June Trump directed his White House counsel, Donald McGahn, to have the Justice Department sack Mueller. McGahn refused, saying such a move would have a catastrophic effect on the presidency and he would resign rather than carry it out. After the president’s earlier and highly controversial dismissal of FBI director James Comey for pursuing the Russian trail, McGahn probably feared that a second unjustifiable dismissal would have led to impeachment.

There is a view, however, that while Mueller’s investigation is well advanced into the territory of possible obstruction of justice and money laundering, the prosecutor’s personality and respect for institutions could lead him away from indicting the president.

Trump and his loyal Republican followers have not given up. Having a majority in both houses of Congress, and with so dominant a position in congressional committees, they have sought to block or reshape investigations to protect the president and discredit his “adversaries,” above all the special prosecutor. In one case, the Republican leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee failed to sign on to a report prepared by the committee’s staff on Putin’s attacks on democracy in the West, probably because of the negative light it cast obliquely on the president and the vigorous actions against Russia it calls on the president to undertake. The ranking Democrat on the committee released the text of the report anyway.

Republicans follow the president in raising ostensibly parallel issues about Hillary Clinton, but the parallels seldom look convincing; indeed they sometimes have an eerie similarity to the familiar Russian tactic of “whataboutism.”

The various investigations are still in progress. And yet the heart of the matter already seemed clear enough more than a year ago, on the basis of Trump’s strange pronouncements and appointments, and the sometimes bizarre behaviour of some in his entourage. The much- maligned Steele dossier was not the first cab off the rank in this debate, but the public discussion it generated did a great deal to set the debate’s parameters. Though much of it was not verified or indeed readily verifiable, the dossier rang true in many of its details. And material appearing since then has tended to strengthen the case it makes, regardless of legitimate differences of opinion about particular details.

It is perhaps a tribute to its insight that the Republicans in Congress still have their knives out for the dossier and its author Christopher Steele, as for Mueller himself. They seem to believe that if these two individuals can be eliminated the problem will go away. But the evidence in the public domain is copious and highly suggestive, and informal enquiries and exposures would be very likely to continue until such time as a credible and uninhibited investigation exonerated the president and the stranger members of his entourage, which seems unlikely to happen.

Perhaps the most egregiously Russia-linked of Trump’s intimates was general Michael Flynn. Flynn had been director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency until he was in effect dismissed — in itself, a good reason not to have cultivated him. He threw himself into Trump’s campaign in a raucously partisan way, publicly calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed. Having set himself up as a consultant after his departure from DIA, he accepted a US$33,750 fee to be interviewed on RT (formerly Russia Today), Russia’s main external propaganda outlet. He also appeared at the high table of a glamorous celebratory dinner in Moscow in honour of RT, where among his neighbours were RT’s very skilful director, Margarita Simonyan, and her star guest of honour, Vladimir Putin.

According to Luke Harding’s fine new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, Flynn met and became friendly with a young Moscow-born woman at a Cambridge seminar on Russian espionage, where he had been invited to speak. He struck up a conversation with her about her graduate dissertation on the Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police set up by Lenin. She drew his attention to some of the interesting discoveries she had made in the Russian archives while researching a book on the role of Russian military intelligence agents in infiltrating the US nuclear program in its earliest stages.

He was so struck by her that he invited her to accompany him as his official interpreter on a visit he was planning to Moscow as DIA director. She declined, but did subsequently conduct an unclassified email correspondence with him about Russian history, in which he signed off his emails as “General Misha” (Misha is the familiar diminutive from the Russian name Mikhail). Apparently Flynn didn’t report these contacts. Shortly after the Cambridge seminar, Putin annexed Crimea, and that particular trip to Moscow by General Misha failed to eventuate.

Flynn’s overall view was clearly that Russia represented no threat to US interests, and that Iran and Islamic terrorism were far and away the greatest threat to the United States and the world. This skewed perception would have predisposed him to accept the Russian propaganda line that the United States should abandon its sanctions against Russia, respect its sphere of influence in much of its former domain, and join with it in the struggle against “terrorism,” as defined by the Kremlin. In his post-DIA role as a consultant, he also accepted work from Turkey, despite that country’s increasingly hostile attitude towards NATO, the European Union and the United States.

Despite this erratic career path, Trump appointed Flynn as his national security advisor and only reluctantly relinquished him when it was clear that he was in trouble for lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential campaign. It had not taken this development — or revelations from the Steele dossier, or leaks from official investigations — for many people observing Flynn’s publicly known dealings with Russia to find his appointment as national security advisor astonishing and deeply dismaying. Yet even after accepting Flynn’s resignation, Trump tried to lean on FBI director James Comey not to pursue Flynn any further.

There were other curious figures in Trump’s inner circle. To take one more conspicuous example, Paul Manafort, an American salesman of PR and lobbying services, mainly to distasteful foreign dictatorships, became the de facto head of Trump’s campaign team for six months during 2016. During this time, he is widely believed to have engineered a mysterious pro-Russian change to the Republican platform on policy towards Ukraine.

Manafort had worked for years in support of the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime, and even lent support to the successor party to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the so-called Opposition Bloc, after the Maidan revolution had resulted in Yanukovych’s fleeing Kiev for Russia. For these and other services contrary to settled US bipartisan policy towards Ukraine and Russia, Manafort seems to have received large and dubious payments. He was also involved in some of the suspect dealings of Trump associates with Russian emissaries. As a result, he became the subject of the intense media publicity that led to his resignation. He has since become a person of interest to investigators regarding other dubious dealings involving Russia. Together with his close colleague Rick Gates, he is now under indictment by the FBI.

In addition to cosseting people with dubious Russian connections, Trump himself had contacts over the years with numerous Russian associates, including some very funny money people. In Collusion, Harding, a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, has assembled a mass of evidence on various aspects of the links with Russia, maintained sometimes over a long period, by Trump, his family and his dodgier associates (some of whom now face charges). Again, there may be reasonable differences of opinion about the weight of the evidence in this or that case, but the overall picture he presents is eloquent. In fact, Harding’s book should be compulsory reading for all involved in the current US debate.

(Michael Wolff’s instant bestseller, Fire and Fury, certainly provides a vivid and entertaining picture of the intimate politics of the White House, but is less illuminating on the Russian connections, the meaning and importance of which Wolff seems not quite to grasp.)

And so, for most long-time observers of the Russian scene, it seems clear that Trump is somehow in debt or even in thrall to Putin, as Harding puts it. But for some Westerners who welcome Trump’s economic policies or his robust positions on immigration, for example, the whole subject of his possible connections with Russia is just an unwelcome distraction they would prefer not to write, think or even hear about. For others it all still seems more like an overwritten spy novel.

Such people find it inherently implausible that Russian agencies could have bothered to assemble a thick dossier of compromising material (kompromat) on Trump with which they can now hold him to ransom. How could the Russians have possibly anticipated that this errant and in Russia not particularly successful businessman would ever end up as the president of the United States of America? And why should people like Manafort, Flynn, or Carter Page, another erstwhile member of the Trump team again in the news, be regarded as suspect simply because they liked Russia and Russians, enjoyed visiting the country, and tried to turn a buck there?

This is the natural perspective of people who’ve had the good fortune to live in relatively open societies. Russia has only briefly and very imperfectly been one of those. Tsarist Russia had a considerable penchant for close surveillance of suspect individuals, and their Bolshevik successors left them far behind in this and other techniques of oppressive rule. Putin’s Russia, some dissenting Western academics and broadcasters notwithstanding, is a KGB state in a very meaningful sense and, under the present leadership, bureaucracy generally and expenditure on the military and “security” in particular has expanded greatly. The appetite for kompromat has always been voracious in the Kremlin, and now is greater, thanks to the exponential growth of the technological means for collecting and exploiting it.

In the 1970s as a graduate student, I visited Moscow on a study trip funded by my university to collect materials not available in Australia. On my first day after arriving, I was sitting in a modest Moscow hotel hoping to be fed when a shabby-looking middle-aged man approached me and asked if he might join me. (Tables were often scarce in the under-resourced Soviet catering system, and this was standard practice.) Having quickly established I was a foreigner, he began asking questions: who was I; where was I from; what was the subject of my thesis; what was I doing in Russia; who had paid for me to come; where was I working the next day? When I said I’d be going to the Lenin Library, he immediately announced that he had a flat nearby and that I must visit him as he had some very interesting documents there which he was sure would be very helpful to me in my research.

By this time I was desperately trying to catch a waiter’s eye to pay and leave as soon as possible. Noting my haste, my interrogator began withdrawing what looked like identity cards or workplace passes from the inside pocket of his jacket, flashing them at me like naughty postcards. Averting my eyes, I paid and left.

Any visitors to the Soviet Union who struck the organs as interesting or untypical in any way would be given the treatment. And, as Luke Harding comments, Trump already looked extremely interesting to the KGB on the first of his several visits to the Soviet Union/Russia in 1987, much more so than an impecunious antipodean student.

Trump’s triumph in the presidential election was a delightful surprise for the Kremlin establishment. But not long after their first euphoric champagne cork-popping reactions, they began to feel disappointed, as media discussions and official enquiries into team Trump’s links with Russia multiplied and some of the most Kremlin-friendly in Trump’s entourage had to be jettisoned.

It’s often said that Putin is a master tactician, but a poor strategist. Some might reasonably object that his recent manoeuvres in the Middle East and North Africa demonstrate that he is quite capable of strategically outmanoeuvring the crumbly Western alliance under its current leadership. But in an important sense Putin, who never served west of Dresden in his KGB career, doesn’t “get” Western societies. He has learnt to plumb their growing weaknesses skilfully, but he has a poorer grasp of their complexity and their sometimes less than obvious resilience.

Having always existed in or presided over a top-down autocracy, it’s difficult for him to grasp that installing or helping to install someone at the apex of government in a pluralist society does not necessarily ensure radical and congenial changes in that government’s policies. Specifically, he didn’t reckon sufficiently with the US system’s checks and balances and the free media, and the limits that they place on the CEO.

Such pressures led President Trump to accept the replacement of Michael Flynn as national security advisor by the conservative general H.R. McMaster (whom, according to Wolff, he doesn’t even like).

Trump’s preference for military figures in key security roles may reflect, as Wolff also observes, Trump’s personal weakness for officers with plenty of “fruit salad” on their uniforms. But he would have sensed, given his domestic political vulnerability on Russia, that the nomination of the tough general Jim Mattis to the key defence portfolio would be a wise move also for him personally. On 19 January, this year, for example, Mattis restated US defence concerns forthrightly, highlighting China and Russia as the main potential threats to US interests, and relatively downplaying the significance of terrorism, which is neither Trump’s nor Putin’s preferred take on the international environment for bilateral purposes.

Trump also chose, first as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and later as his own chief of staff in the White House, another general, John Kelly. Kelly’s main aim in his present role seems to be to introduce order and decorum into the chronically chaotic scene that is the Trump entourage, as well as to smooth over the many rough edges introduced by the president’s ill-considered tweets and public statements. Kelly has not yet taken strong public positions on the bilateral relationship with Russia. But he seems unlikely to become another General Flynn.

What this illustrates is that Trump’s appointments to key security roles have been creating a circle of strong, traditionalist advisers who will not be easily persuaded to change US policy sharply in a pro-Russian direction. This phenomenon has been ironically labelled in the US media by terms like “adults in the room” and “adult supervision.” As used by the media, these terms do not apply only or even primarily to the Russian issue, but do include it, and are, perhaps, particularly applicable to it.

Two recent articles in particular, James Mann’s “The Adults in the Room” and Charlie Savage’s “Controlling the Chief,” both in recent editions of the New York Review of Books, take a broad and measured approach to their topic, focusing on such important issues as the future of civilian control of the military in the US and the possibility of an increased risk of ill-conceived foreign entanglements. They also provide much interesting detail about the “adults” themselves and some of their predecessors with similar roles and backgrounds. Surprisingly, however, they mention Russia relatively infrequently.

Other senior officials are also active on the Russia account. At Treasury, the new secretary, Steve Mnuchin, has been presiding over the implementation of what looked like some forceful policies. One that has riveted the attention of the Moscow elite is the preparation of a list of Russian oligarchs and siloviki with close ties to Putin, slated to be sanctioned as a response to Russia’s illegitimate meddling in the US election. This action was mandated by Congress in legislation, passed overwhelmingly in late July last year, that seemingly left President Trump with very little wiggle room.

Daniel Fried, a senior State Department official coordinating sanctions policy under Barack Obama, was reported on 19 January to be very enthusiastic about the Treasury-led process of formulating the list. As he put it, “It’s not been farmed out to some cabal of political employees who used to work with Mike Flynn and take money from RT… The pros are running with this. Straight, flat-out, serious pros.”

Treasury has also been pursuing intrusive inquiries into suspect bank transfers by US-based Russian diplomatic personnel that were identified as irregular and reported to Treasury. Until recent days, this all suggested that Secretary Mnuchin was not likely to give Putin a free pass.

Among other figures in key positions who are clearly sceptical about Russia’s intentions are general Joseph Dunford, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Nikki Haley, the US permanent representative to the United Nations in New York; and the experienced diplomat Kurt Volker, appointed special envoy to negotiate with Russia on advancing a settlement in Ukraine.

Even Rex Tillerson, Trump’s choice for secretary of state — undoubtedly in large part because of his long and successful experience of dealing with the Russian leadership on energy deals (and his Order of Friendship from Putin!) — has been doing his best to sound and act more or less like a senior American diplomat. At the launch on 23 January of a new organisation set up to identify and punish those who use chemical weapons, Tillerson roundly criticised Russia for its support of the Assad regime, its vetoing of UN resolutions on the use by Syria of chemical weapons, and its breach of an agreement with the United States on the removal of chemical weapons from Syria. He summed up the situation by saying that “Russia’s failure to resolve the chemical weapons issue in Syria calls into question its relevance to the resolution of the overall crisis.”

This sharper tone reflects the tougher approach that President Trump himself has adopted on Syria since the air strikes last April on the airfield in Khan Sheikhoun, which had been implicated in chemical weapons use.

Unlike Trump, though, Tillerson has severed his formal links with his previous high-profile role in business (as CEO of Exxon-Mobil), where he would have had, and may still have, huge potential conflicts of interest. People still worry, for example, about situations in which Tillerson is the only US official present at one of the president’s encounters in person or by phone with Putin, and perhaps rightly so.

Despite having installed his own man at its head, Trump is seemingly determined to destroy the State Department by huge cuts to its funding. He even actually applauded Putin for expelling 755 US diplomats in response to Congress’s passage of sanctions legislation last July, proclaiming it a valuable contribution to US budgetary savings.

Tillerson is seen as bearing full responsibility for this policy, having failed to stand up for his department and having left a large number of senior diplomatic positions vacant. He has also been criticised for not responding to Putin’s “hybrid warfare” on the West. Broadly, though, he does seem to be trying to hold the line against Russia’s policy overtures and manoeuvres while from time to time reiterating Trump’s message that a better relationship with Russia is what the United States would ideally like. So not an adult supervisor exactly, but perhaps not a pushover for Moscow either.

All in all, in fact, the Kremlin seemed to have relatively little to show for all its hybrid warfare efforts at the end of the first year of the Trump presidency. Not only were the key appointments often unpromising, the decisions taken and defended by those appointees seemed far from encouraging.

Disillusionment had set in early for Moscow. In March last year, the Kremlin launched its first big try-on, when a Russian diplomat reportedly presented the State Department with a comprehensive proposal for a total reset of bilateral relations across all areas in dispute. This démarche, which has never been publicly acknowledged by either side, but reports of which have not been categorically denied by Washington, looked very much like an attempt to take advantage of the fact that the Kremlin now thought it had a friend in the White House (and in the State Department) with whom it could surely do business.

Since soon after Moscow’s aggression in Crimea and East Ukraine, and in particular after the imposition of sanctions in the wake of the shooting down of MH17, Putin’s regime has been engaged in a peace offensive aimed at repairing relations sufficiently and for long enough to secure the easing or even lifting of sanctions, and to gain de facto Western acceptance of the annexation of Crimea and “autonomy” for Russia’s proxy regimes in Donetsk and Luhansk. This pitch called nostalgically for a renewed coalition as during the second world war. Moscow even began to speak positively about the one-sided Yalta settlement, which facilitated Stalin’s communisation of Eastern Europe.

These formulations betrayed Moscow’s hope that it could exploit any such grand coalition deal to regain as much as possible of its old sphere of privileged interests in Central and Eastern Europe. With President Trump in the White House, the collective Putin must have felt that a golden geopolitical opportunity had dawned.

Putin’s secret initiative went nowhere, Trump’s oft-repeated hopes for a good relationship with Russia and a great deal with Putin notwithstanding. As former US diplomat Steven Pifer of Brookings and others have argued, this was a classic case of “mirror-imaging,” when the leaders of one country project their own domestic understanding of how things work onto a country where that logic does not apply. Putin seemingly thought that Trump was now in a position comparable to his own, where he could make most things happen from the top down. But the US system is different.

President Trump was already surrounded by a network of senior officials who try to repair some of the damage caused by his impulsive tweets and the public insults he aims at countries and leaders around the world, especially key allies. They have also worked hard, and with considerable success so far, to hold in check his amorous impulses towards Russia and its president. While the Republican Party has begun to circle the wagons around the president, some Republicans, particularly in the Senate, have also acknowledged the need for adult supervision. Bob Corker, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and once a strong supporter of Trump as a candidate, declared last October that the White House had become “an adult day care centre.”

As a result of those efforts, Trump has found himself assenting to a series of key decisions and policy doctrines emerging from his administration that identify Russia as a major threat to US interests. Yet as a candidate, and even well into his first year in office, Trump had repeatedly cast doubt on article 5 of NATO’s Washington Treaty, spoken contemptuously of the European Union and asked aloud which other countries would follow Britain’s Brexit lead. Not only did he praise Putin repeatedly, at one point he seemed to be inclined to consider whether or not to accept Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Against that backdrop, the actual outcomes, particularly in the latter part of 2017, have been reassuringly benign for the Western alliance.

Thus, for example, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming ninety-eight votes to two, a veto-proof majority. (There had only been three votes against the bill in the House.) This emphatic result left President Trump with no option but to reluctantly accept it. Mooring sanctions in legislation makes it difficult for the measures it prescribes, primarily against Russian targets, to be modified by the executive, or repealed by the legislature. Moscow was furious, and many in Russia’s elite feared the possible consequences for themselves. As a result, capital flight from Russia increased sharply, leading to a run on Maltese and Cyprus passports and significant expatriation of Russian wealth.

As mentioned earlier, the US Treasury has also been examining financial records of transactions undertaken by Russian diplomatic staff in the United States. In accordance with US law, suspect records had been forwarded to the area of Treasury responsible for handling cases of money laundering and other financial misconduct. Treasury in turn had forwarded them to the FBI for consideration as possible evidence of Russian meddling in the presidential election. These activities and the documents themselves somehow found their way into the public domain via BuzzFeed.

Moscow has reacted indignantly to these leaks, describing BuzzFeed as a tool of US intelligence and demanding that Washington desist immediately. Disregarding for the moment the question of whether these accusations are well-founded, it is of course the case that sequences of events not dissimilar to those just described are typical of what Russia has itself been doing in recent times on a very large scale towards many of its Western adversaries, if with a thin veneer of deniability. Such tactics form an integral part of its hybrid warfare. Now it believes that the United States is turning these tactics against their originators; so the biter bit, it would seem, with BuzzFeed cast in the role of WikiLeaks. But maybe the Kremlin is mirror-imaging again.

So too for Europe and NATO. Despite Trump’s negative comments about NATO and collective defence, especially during his visit on 25 May to NATO headquarters in Brussels, just two months after that visit vice-president Mike Pence travelled to the Estonian capital, Tallinn, where he emphatically confirmed US commitment to both.

Moreover, the Trump administration has continued to implement and bolster the measures agreed upon at the Warsaw NATO Summit in 2016 to strengthen NATO’s defences in the east, and thus provide greater security for the new member states. The deployment of multinational battle groups to all three Baltic states and Poland, staffed on a rotating but ongoing basis, involves US forces as well as leading European militaries in key roles.

Despite its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 and 2014, its hybrid war against Estonia in 2007, and its threatening posture in the region overall, Moscow professed to find this deployment aggressive and unprovoked. It argues that the deployments are a breach of the NATO–Russia Founding Act, whereby it was agreed that NATO would not deploy any significant forces to the new member states. Some Western member states, including Germany, were inclined to respect this provision, despite the clear evidence of Russian aggression inconsistent with the Act and in breach of other international legal instruments, in particular the Budapest Memorandum. But sustained pleas from the new members and Russia’s own aggressive posture finally produced a consensus in NATO.

On 17 December last year, the Trump administration released a National Security Strategy that identified Russia and China as the main disruptive powers in the world, repressing their own populations, building up their militaries and pursuing revisionist, imperialist policies abroad. Trump had obviously been persuaded to accept the document, but his public comments about its contents touched on none of the formulations to which Moscow had objected.

On the contrary, he used his speech on the new doctrine’s release to speak warmly about a phone conversation he’d had the day before with Putin, in which the Russian president had thanked him for intelligence provided by the CIA that helped avert a terrorist attack in St Petersburg. This played perfectly into Moscow’s current mantra that instead of objecting to its defence of vital security interests in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria, Venezuela and so on, the United States should join with Russia to combat terrorism. But while it contained a few relatively moderate Trumpist accents, the National Security Strategy was basically “sound” on Russia and related issues, so seemingly another win for the supervisors’ panel.

And finally, reluctantly and under sustained pressure from his advisers and Congress, Trump decided on 22 December to approve weapons sales to Ukraine that would include Javelin anti-tank missiles, which Kiev has been begging for since soon after the Russian invasion began. On at least two occasions (at Ilovaisk and Debaltseve), proxy forces in eastern Ukraine under pressure from Ukrainian forces were suddenly able to dramatically reverse the trend of events, win decisive strategic victories and inflict severe casualties, thanks to major cross-border reinforcements of personnel and heavy weaponry from the Russian regular army. Had the Ukrainians then been equipped with Javelins the outcomes might have been very different

Some Western commentators argue that the decision to supply the Javelins will inevitably “cause” a disastrous Russian response, making a “tragic” situation even worse. This is certainly a difficult and complex issue. But the alternative of maintaining an embargo that prevents Ukraine from obtaining the weapons it needs to defend itself, while Russia continues to arm its illegal proxies to the teeth, is unsatisfactory. Such a policy will encourage further Russian military aggression in breach of the post-1990 liberal international order. The West would essentially be left only with the option of accepting Moscow’s “escalatory dominance” as a given and seeking an opportunity to discuss with it the terms and conditions under which Russia would resume full control of whichever former vassal it was laying claim to.

Even without delivering on key bilateral issues, Trump has done a great deal, no doubt often unintentionally, to deliver on Moscow’s investment. The manifest unfitness for presidential office reflected in his tweets, his insults, his lies and his racist utterances has severely damaged his country’s reputation in many parts of the world. Although, in the opinion of many, he sometimes punctures political correctness or diplomatic niceties with robust common sense on particular issues, he usually spoils the effect almost immediately with a grossly misjudged comment or tweet. It’s not that his instincts are necessarily always wrong, but that his conversion of them into coherent, diplomatic and sustained policy is often woefully inadequate.

His alienation of many important allies will still be causing satisfied hand-rubbing in the Kremlin. Likewise, his heavy-handed attacks on selected countries and policies — Iran and its allies in the Middle East, for instance, or Chinese trading policies — can often help Russia to consolidate key alliances and pursue important strategic objectives. At the same time, though, thanks to the determined efforts of the adults in the room, Trump’s policy towards Russia and its region is gradually acquiring a certain predictability and solidity along traditional lines. And Moscow is finding it all frustrating and difficult to deal with.

Will the system of checks and balances be sustained? Or will President Trump break free and try to strike a grand deal with Russia? Of course, there is also the prior question of whether he will remain in office, as controversy and various investigations continue to swirl around him.

Will the Republicans continue to cover for him despite the scandals and the growing evidence of his entourage’s dubious links with Russia? Will they support him all the way in any attempts he makes to discredit and dismiss Robert Mueller or any others who appear to threaten his position? This coming year should give us the answers.

So far, the signs are not good. The 30 January decision by the Republican majority in the House Intelligence Committee to force through publication of the highly questionable memo prepared by committee chair Devin Nunes suggests that many of them will fight dirty and fight long. In this endeavour, it seems likely that they will enjoy the direct support of the Kremlin’s troll factories, who have already been hard at work whipping up support for the “Release the memo” cause.

President Trump obligingly declassified the memo, despite the pleas against release from his own recent appointee at the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray. Reportedly, there were dissenters in Trump’s White House staff, but General Kelly supported the president’s action — though, as chief of staff, he could hardly do otherwise.

Virtually simultaneously, the administration gutted the list of oligarchs and Putin’s complicit cronies that had been in preparation at Treasury, and instead published a roll-call of Russian elite luminaries derived from familiar public sources. Absent were the foreshadowed details about their kleptocratic wealth and their closeness to Putin and to the Kremlin’s recent decisions to attack neighbours and subvert democratic elections in the West. The defanged document came out from Treasury with Secretary Mnuchin’s formal endorsement. It is not clear who in the administration took the decision to change course on sanctions and the Kremlin List, but clearly it was an accurate expression of the president’s wishes.

It’s true that a classified document was attached to the package, but a central objective of the operation had been to name and shame publicly, and to impose sanctions provided for by the July 2017 legislation. And the administration also announced that no sanctions were being put in place at that point. There were ritual statements of indignation at the list in Moscow at various levels, but the relief in elite circles was palpable. Putin staged another of his displays of conspicuous moderation, saying there would be no response from Moscow for the time being. His wobbly asset had delivered.

Once the elite had taken in that the threat had been revoked, they began to cautiously exult. A hashtag proclaiming “Trump is ours” (#TrumpNash), a conscious echo of the euphoric KrymNash (Crimea is Ours) of 2014, began trending strongly.

To make matters worse, and raise suspicions even higher, it became known that the leaders of Russia’s three key intelligence agencies, the FSB (Putin’s former bailiwick, and the nearest thing to a successor organisation to the KGB), the SVR (external intelligence) and the GRU (military intelligence) had visited Washington a few days earlier for discussions with US counterparts. Whatever the reasons for, or the content of, this extraordinary visit, the optics quite clearly flew against the trend of what appeared to have become settled US policy, and would have dismayed many in both countries.

Enough Republicans, particularly in the Senate, seem sufficiently worried about these latest trends to allow one to hope that they will not cohesively support further reckless actions by the president. The House Intelligence Committee has voted unanimously to publish the Democratic counter-memo, subject to the president’s declassifying its contents, which looks like a conciliatory gesture.

But Trump has been furiously tweeting that the ranking Democrat who prepared the counter-memo, Adam Schiff, is “one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington… who must be stopped.” If he were to block the document’s release or, even worse, if he were to sack deputy attorney-general Rosenstein in order to replace him with someone who would accept direction to dismiss Robert Mueller, this could trigger a major constitutional crisis. And if, at this point, the Republicans decided to support their president through thick and thin in spite of their misgivings, it is possible the precarious system of adults in the room on external policy issues might in turn come under pressure. And the future of US domestic politics might similarly look uncertain, with the pub test and social media beginning to challenge the rule of law. •

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But what about the files we’re not allowed to see? During 2017 at least 1140 government files were withheld from the public. Amid the celebrations each year, we should perhaps take time to investigate the limits of access.

A researcher wanting to see a file from 1967 entitled “Hong Kong — Communist Activities Within the Colony” could have finished two PhDs in the time it took for the file to be processed.

Recent days have provided an example of accelerated release of cabinet documents via filing cabinet. The official process is more controlled. Under the Archives Act, files more than twenty years old (reduced from thirty years in 2010) are said to be in the “open period.” But that doesn’t mean we automatically get to see them. Before they’re released to the public, records go through a process known as “access examination.” Their contents are checked against a series of exemptions defined under section 33 of the Archives Act, which cover things like national security and individual privacy. Most records are opened without restriction. Some end up as “open with exception” and have pages removed or text redacted. A smaller number are withheld completely and are assigned the access status of “closed.”

Each January for the last three years, I’ve harvested the details of all “closed” files from RecordSearch, the NAA’s online database. RecordSearch only displays the current status of a file, so by taking annual snapshots I’m hoping to expose trends and anomalies, and build up a historical picture of the access examination process. But snapshots of an active system will always be missing data, so anomalies appear in the details presented below. As you’ll see, it’s more of an archaeological dig than a rigorous statistical analysis.

The important thing is that we can ask questions of the harvested data that we can’t ask through RecordSearch’s own search interface. For example, why are files closed? The 2016 harvest showed that the privacy exemption, section 33(1)(g) of the Archives Act, was invoked most frequently. No surprises there.

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“Closed period” was cited in 2565 cases, but a little analysis revealed that the contents of most of these files were, by 2016, in the open period. There’s no time limit or mandatory review for closed files — they stay closed until someone requests them to be re-examined. More mysteriously, there were 3410 closed files labelled “Pre access recorder.” It turned out these were files closed before the introduction of the Archives Act in 1983.

The NAA dealt with some of these oddities in 2016 by changing the access status of most “Pre access recorder” and “Closed period” files from “closed” to “not yet examined.” They’re no longer closed, but neither are they any more open. Before being released they’ll need to re-enter the access examination pipeline and may yet be closed again. Swings and roundabouts.

These changes meant that the total number of closed files in the 2017 harvest dropped dramatically by about 25 per cent. The year’s harvest didn’t show any major shifts, but the total number of closed files increased by 484 to a total of 11,235.

Number of closed files at each harvest date
1 January 2016 — 14,370
9 January 2017 — 10,751
1 January 2018 — 11,235

Comparing the reasons cited across the three annual harvests, it seems that the number of national security exemptions (33(1)(a) & (b) of the Archives Act) are trending down. Privacy (33(1)(g)) looks steady after a big jump in 2016 due to the processing of repatriation files from men and women who served in the first world war. What’s most worrying for researchers is the steady increase in closed files citing “Withheld pending advice.” These are records that have been referred to other government agencies for their advice. As we’ll see, this can cause significant delays.• Enlarge this chart

So, what happened in 2017? As I mentioned, at least 1140 files were closed. But on the other side of the ledger, the access status of 623 files changed from “closed” to something else. Overall, there was a net increase of 517 closed files.

You might have noticed I keep fudging my findings. There were at least 1140 files closed in 2017, because it’s possible that some files were closed, then “un-closed” between my snapshots. And why un-closed? Couldn’t we just say “opened”? Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated. Most of the files that stopped being closed in 2017 are now “open with exception,” with parts of them still being withheld. Only 210 closed files were opened without restriction:

Number of files with new access status
Open — 210
Open with exception — 408
Not yet examined — 5

Just to add to the uncertainty, 189 files apparently went missing between harvests, while 173 mysteriously appeared carrying access decision dates prior to 2017. This is probably due to changes in the organisation and description of the records on RecordSearch, but I won’t know until I’ve examined them all in detail. Once again, it’s a case of trying to fill in the gaps between snapshots.

If we break down 2017’s “closed” and “un-closed” files by reason, we can see where the action was last year. Most of the changes were in the “Withheld pending advice,” or WPA, category. As mentioned, these files have been referred to other agencies for their input on the access examination process. They’re not finally closed — they’re in a sort of archival limbo, awaiting judgement on their access status. As a result, we’d expect a fair bit of coming and going — but the net increase of 377 files in this category indicates there might be a blockage in the pipeline.

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What sort of files are they? If we look at the 973 files closed in 2017 as WPA we see that the overwhelming majority come from just one series — A1838. This is the main correspondence series of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, and is critical in understanding the evolution of Australia’s external relations. Of the 4215 closed files citing WPA on 1 January this year, 2121 (50.3 per cent) were waiting for DFAT.

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This will come as no surprise to anyone investigating the history of Australian foreign policy. Delays in gaining access to files from A1838 have become the stuff of horror stories for would-be researchers.

When I analysed the 2016 harvest I noted that there were 1467 files in the WPA bucket that had been waiting more than three years for a decision. If we look at the files that were “un-closed” in 2017, we can calculate the length of the access examination process. A total of 595 files emerged from the WPA backlog last year, taking on average three years and seventy-seven days to complete their journey. If we focus just on A1838, the average time taken was three years and 195 days. The quickest turnaround was just 163 days, but four files clocked up over seven years in limbo. A researcher wanting to see a file from 1967 entitled “Hong Kong — Communist Activities Within the Colony” could have finished two PhDs in the time it took for the file to be processed.

Up until last year, the NAA provided information on access examination outcomes in its annual report. But WPA files were excluded from the total number reported as “closed.” You can understand why — a final decision hadn’t been made on the fate of these records. But while they might not be finally closed, delays of three years or more make them effectively closed. This is the reality of access. A lack of transparency and accountability frustrates users and undermines confidence in the process.

In recent years the NAA has attempted to streamline access examination. But with the number of WPA files rising by about 400 per year, more needs to be done. The NAA’s 2016–17 annual report highlighted a review of the access examination process by Paul O’Sullivan, formerly a deputy secretary in DFAT and head of ASIO from 2005 to 2009. In response the NAA has, according to its director-general, “taken steps to strengthen the integrity of the process and to ensure that as much as possible is released in a timely way.” We can only wait and see.

None of this should distract us from the fact that government records more than twenty years old are expected to be open to public scrutiny. The rules in section 33 of the Archives Act are called “exemptions” for a reason. The files released on 1 January each year are not a gift to researchers. They are opened because we have the right to see them. Only by understanding the legislative and bureaucratic processes through which access is constructed can we protect these rights. •

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But what happens when we ask Australians not about a distant past but about events in their own lifetimes? What do they see as the occurrences, at home and abroad, that have most shaped their country?

Australia is wired in to US perspectives on world events, but we are not quite “Austerica,” as some intellectuals worried we were becoming in the 1960s.

The Social Research Centre’s Historic Events Survey provides a snapshot of Australian historical consciousness. It asked its Life in Australia panel members — aged eighteen to ninety-three — what they saw as the “ten most important historic events” in their lifetime. It then asked them to choose a single event among their ten that had “the greatest impact on the country.” Subsequent questions invited respondents to reflect on which event made them proudest of, and which most disappointed in, Australia.

When the Pew Research Center in the United States asked Americans for their top ten in mid 2016, more than three-quarters included the September 11 terrorist attacks. Far fewer Australians, just 27 per cent, nominated 9/11, but this still placed the event second, just behind the same-sex marriage vote with 30 per cent. And when Australian respondents were asked to nominate the single most significant nation-shaping event of their lifetime, the most common choice was 9/11 (11 per cent).

Still, the lower rating of 9/11 in the Australian survey reminds us that national differences matter. Not only does 9/11 have much greater recognition as historically significant in the US, but so do the Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Australia is wired in to US perspectives on world events, but we are not quite “Austerica,” as some intellectuals worried we were becoming in the 1960s. It is notable, however, that the two youngest Australian generations each included the election of Donald Trump at the tail of their top tens.

Evidently, then, responses to such matters reflect generational differences. Of the five generations considered, only gen X (aged thirty-eight to fifty-two in 2017) had 9/11 first, with 35 per cent of the vote. This group also ranked highly the Bali bombings of 2002 (eighth, with 11 per cent, a higher proportion than any other generation). Many of the eighty-eight Australians killed in Bali, being in their twenties and thirties at the time, belonged to gen X. And the response to 9/11 reflects the fact that Australians see that event as part of a wider pattern of terrorist threat rather than as a specific US experience.

Australian respondents younger than gen X had 9/11 second, behind same-sex marriage. For these millennials (aged twenty-three to thirty-seven) and members of gen Z (twenty-two or younger), other terror events, such as the Bali bombings and the Lindt Cafe siege, were also prominent in their ten. In sum, for anyone younger than about fifty, terrorism provides a powerful defining historical experience, despite the small scale and relative paucity of attacks on Australian soil.

Baby boomers (aged fifty-three to seventy-one), by way of contrast, rated 9/11 as low as fifth (20 per cent), while for the silent generation (aged seventy-two to ninety-three), with their longer perspective on twentieth-century international conflict, it was not in the top ten at all (it came in at eleventh). Those born in 1945 or before nominated the second world war first, with a hefty 44 per cent placing it in their top ten, the largest figure for any event in any generation.

The Historic Events Survey was carried out online and via telephone between 13 November and 3 December 2017, when same-sex marriage was prominent in public debate. The survey results contradict claims advanced, mainly by opponents of same-sex marriage, that ordinary Australians regard the issue as unimportant. Indeed, 45 per cent of respondents nominated issues that could broadly be categorised as “human rights” or “civil liberties,” belying the frequent claim that Australians are concerned overwhelmingly with material or economic issues. So much for “jobs and growth.”

When respondents were asked about the most significant single event in their lifetime, same-sex marriage came in second at 7 per cent, behind 9/11. When they were asked what made them most proud of Australia, 13 per cent mentioned same-sex marriage, while 6 per cent were most disappointed at the cost and delay involved in bringing the reform about, and another 6 per cent nominated its achievement as their most disappointing event. When the top ten is considered, same-sex marriage was first for both gen Z and millennials. But for gen X it appeared less frequently than 9/11, while the baby boomers only had it at three (24 per cent), and the silent generation at six (13 per cent). For the two youngest cohorts, alongside their consciousness of the changes wrought by terrorism is a sense of profound transformation around gender and sexuality.

By way of contrast, baby boomers don’t appear to have been much preoccupied with the “identity politics” of race, gender and sexuality. The events that are usually seen as critical in their formation and experience are there: the Vietnam war at one (28 per cent), the Whitlam government dismissal at two (27 per cent) and the Apollo 11 Moon landing at four (21 per cent). This is seemingly a generation with a distinctive historical consciousness, shaped by a sense of the transformational events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, events associated with their coming to maturity in a world changing rapidly in political and technological terms. We should also perhaps not overlook the impact of a rich nostalgia industry, drawing on the televised imagery of the era, which frequently reminds boomers of the happenings that have supposedly defined them.

The boomers are distinguishable from the silent generation in that the second world war is outside their living memory, but the legacy of that war was often profound for them — a phenomenon impossible to capture in a survey on “events.” The Moon landing, the Vietnam war and the Dismissal also figured prominently for the silent generation (ranked two, three and four, after the second world war); but this generation also ranked a panoply of events concerned with the monarchy (Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and subsequent visits), nation-building and infrastructure (the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, the Sydney Opera House), and technological change such as air travel and medical advances.

The boomers shared with gen X Australia’s America’s Cup victory of 1983 (ranked six by both, 15 per cent for gen X and 12 per cent for the boomers). The 2000 Olympics might have performed some of the same work for the millennials and gen Z (both 14 per cent), but it was nominated by even greater numbers of gen X, who seem to be particularly preoccupied with sporting spectacle and national esteem. Gen X appears to have been most affected by the period’s strains of cocky sporting and corporate nationalism — a winged keel generation, perhaps.

Gen X has some other distinctive features, too. It is the only generation that ranked the development of the internet — at seven (12 per cent). Unlike the two youngest groups, who are “digital natives,” gen Xers are old enough to recall a world before the web. They are also mainly old enough to recall the mass shootings of the 1980s, and rated the Port Arthur massacre at three, with 21 per cent nominating it in their top ten, and gun law reform at equal tenth (9 per cent). In the national top ten, Port Arthur was fourth, with 13 per cent. But when respondents were asked to nominate the single most significant event, the Port Arthur massacre came in third (5 per cent), with gun law reform seventh (3 per cent).

Economic vulnerability registered most strongly among millennials. The global financial crisis, which appeared in their top ten (12 per cent), possibly serves as an event conveying their concerns about issues such as student debt, job security and the price of housing. But the relative success of Australia in weathering the economic storms of recent years is reflected by the finding that just 8 per cent of respondents overall mentioned the GFC.

Social researchers have remarked on white Australians’ reluctance to discuss wrongs against Indigenous people. But the survey suggests that many Australians do see Indigenous experience as important in their history. When the responses to the top-ten question are grouped in themes, Indigenous issues are ranked sixth, with 24 per cent nominating events such as the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children, the Mabo High Court decision on native title in 1992, and the 1967 referendum. In particular, the Apology has some purchase as a symbolic national event. It came in third overall, with 13 per cent, but the generational breakdown indicates that it was rated highly only among those younger than their early fifties. For members of gen Z — many of them at school when it was delivered — the Apology appeared defining, with more than a quarter mentioning it (27 per cent).

It is possible to agree that an event had a significant impact while disagreeing about the nature of that impact — whether it was good, bad or in between. The dismissal of the Whitlam government appeared in the top ten of Labor, Coalition and Greens supporters, but we can be sure that they do not see it in the same way. There were, more generally, significant areas of difference between supporters of the parties, even allowing for common ground. Labor supporters rated same-sex marriage slightly higher, and Greens supporters significantly higher, than 9/11. Coalition supporters had 9/11 first, and the Bali bombings, absent from the Labor list, was also in their top ten.

Labor supporters put the Apology to the Stolen Generations at number three, while Coalition supporters did not rate the Apology in their top ten at all. One Nation voters also omitted the Apology, as well as the Port Arthur massacre, and they rated same-sex marriage only at number seven: as many as 17 per cent nominated it as the event that had most disappointed them. This group seemed especially enamoured of Anzac Day commemoration, with 14 per cent nominating it as the event that made them proudest, and they had the Queensland floods at number six, expressing the strength of the party in that state and perhaps a sentiment about battling natural as well as social hardship.

There are also some notable gender differences. Men mentioned the September 11 attacks (27 per cent) more than same-sex marriage (25 per cent); women mentioned same-sex marriage (35 per cent) more than 9/11 (27 per cent). Intuitively, this result seems to mirror participation rates in the 2017 same-sex marriage survey, which were higher for women than men. Women also ranked the Apology significantly more than men did — 17 per cent compared with just 9 per cent — while Julia Gillard’s election as prime minister came in at six for women (11 per cent) but did not figure in the top ten for men (4 per cent). In general, her election was not Australia’s “Obama moment”: 40 per cent of respondents in the Pew survey ranked Barack Obama’s election in their top ten compared with a mere 8 per cent of Australians mentioning Gillard.

Sometimes an event, because it is local or regional, has imprinted itself much more firmly in a particular state or city than elsewhere in the nation. The most spectacular example of this pattern is the Port Arthur massacre, which was mentioned by 32 per cent of the admittedly small Tasmanian sample, outranking both same-sex marriage (31 per cent) and 9/11 (29 per cent). Similarly, 19 per cent of the small Northern Territory sample mentioned Cyclone Tracy. The Lindt Cafe siege, which occurred in Martin Place, Sydney, was mentioned by 13 per cent of Sydneysiders, compared with the much lower national figure of 7 per cent.

And the same is true for some happier occasions. The Sydney Olympics were much more likely to be mentioned in that city (21 per cent) and in New South Wales generally (18 per cent) than by people living elsewhere (the national figure is 12 per cent). Western Australian residents were twice as likely as Australians overall to recall the significance of the America’s Cup’s (the successful syndicate was from that state). They were also more likely to nominate the mining boom than their fellow Australians further east.

The sample size for Indigenous-identified respondents was very small (forty), but there were some variations from the national norms in Indigenous selections. The most significant is unsurprising: 37 per cent mentioned the Apology, compared with a 12 per cent non-Indigenous figure. On the other hand, rural and regional respondents rated both the Apology and same-sex marriage lower than their metropolitan counterparts did.

Historians might be puzzled by some of the results. Many events to which they commonly turn to explain the making of modern Australia figure barely or not at all.

One might have expected the issue of asylum seekers to have figured, perhaps in the form of a recognition of the Tampa crisis of 2001 as an influential historical event. In fact, it emerged only when people were asked about a time or event that has most disappointed them, topping this list with 8 per cent. The postwar immigration scheme was not mentioned in any top ten, perhaps not being recognised by respondents as an “event.” The end of the cold war is apparently regarded by Australians as none of their business.

Australians perhaps like to think of themselves as less insular than Americans, but 13 per cent in the US survey identified the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war as consequential, ranking these momentous events eighth. In Australia, neither the end of the long postwar economic boom in the 1970s nor the rise of China registered as a landmark. Indeed, economic “events” barely figured in Australian top-ten responses. The 1983 dollar float, for instance, a favourite among politicians and journalists, had little resonance. Nor were there any signs of environmental issues, such as the saving of the Franklin River, in the top ten — not even among Greens supporters!

Women’s lives have been transformed in recent decades, but there are few gestures towards this social revolution in the data. The arrival of the contraceptive pill (1961) appeared in no one’s top ten, not even the baby boomers’, whose lives are usually seen to have been so shaped by it. Those under about forty did, however, nominate a moment that encapsulates the shift in gender politics: the election of Julia Gillard was ranked five by gen Z (15 per cent) and eight by millennials (10 per cent). Overall, 8 per cent of respondents included Gillard’s election as the first female prime minister, placing it equal tenth.

Historians might be puzzled by some of the results. Many events to which they commonly turn to explain the making of modern Australia figure barely or not at all. And contrary to the image of Australia as a utilitarian society whose people are concerned overwhelmingly with material issues and practical outcomes, respondents appeared to have a taste for the symbol, the spectacle and the landmark.

The survey reminds us that we live in a globalised world where big international events — such as the Moon landing and 9/11 — are recognised across oceans and borders as turning points in a shared history. All the same, Australians continue to find a place for the national and even the local, still recognising their own backyard as a place where history happens. •

The results of the survey can be found here.

The post Our global backyard appeared first on Inside Story.

Evans chose it, the “dubious pleasures, and certain horrors” of a career not just inside the political tent but deep inside. He was a member of all four Hawke and both Keating cabinets from 1983 to 1996; a member of the Australian parliament for twenty-one years, mainly as senator for Victoria and briefly as member for Holt; a member of a major political party, Labor, and of its dominant Labor Unity faction. That latter allegiance was chosen early, ahead of “a more obvious political home,” Labor’s Participants group, which counted future ministerial colleagues John Button and Michael Duffy, and Victorian premier John Cain among its members.

At a time of widespread frustration with formal political processes, Incorrigible Optimist is a timely read from one of the only two politicians who served as ministers through the entire Hawke–Keating era. This period is now often referred to, as in this book, as the “Australian gold standard” for government. Evans attributes the reputation to four qualities: “a clear philosophy, sense of policy direction and narrative” maintained over the whole thirteen years; “a decent governing process”; a modus operandi based on “argument rather than authority”; and finally, a commitment to listening and consulting widely.

Times have changed, and in the final chapter Evans examines the economic, security and cultural anxieties that are putting liberal democracy under strain, and the new kinds of listening, thinking and acting that are needed to get it working again.

This is a big life. As well as Evans’s parliamentary period, the book traverses his earlier years as a student, academic lawyer and barrister, and his post-parliamentary career, mainly heading the International Crisis Group, an NGO based in Brussels, from 2000 to 2009, and as chancellor of the Australian National University since 2010.

Like any record of a long, public career, the scale and range of activity — just how much a person who chooses this kind of life sees and does — is extraordinary. The book is organised more or less chronologically, but the chapters have thematic titles that allow relevant events to be brought forward or back. So early chapters on justice and race, the terrain of law and human rights, include the 1965 South African Springbok tour as well as the 1992 Mabo decision and subsequent legislation; a late chapter on education starts with Evans’s schooldays and ends at ANU, contemplating the future of tertiary education and providing tips about how to run a contemporary university.

It is a topsy-turvy life, perhaps like many, where things that were supposed to be highlights turn out to be lowlights, and triumphs show up in unanticipated places. Evans made well-publicised blunders in his dream ministerial role, attorney-general in the first Hawke government, and got moved to the resources and energy portfolio. The two years he spent in the most senior position he ever achieved in the party, as deputy leader to Kim Beazley from 1996 to 1998, were “overwhelmingly… his least successful in federal parliament” according to biographer Keith Scott; the same period as shadow treasurer was dulled by what Evans admits was his own “less than totally consuming passion for the subject matter.”

The highlight, “absolutely the most moving and exhilarating moment of my twenty-one-years parliamentary career,” came in the chamber he joined as second prize, the Senate. Factional politics in Victoria would not serve up a winnable seat in the House of Representatives until late in Evans’s career, but as leader of the government in the Senate in December 1993, he spent almost all of the fifty-two-hour, four-day committee stage of debate on the Native Title Bill on his feet dealing with 237 amendments to the Bill’s 238 clauses, and needing to garner support from nine out of the ten minor-party and independent senators. It was a remarkable feat of legal and political skill and of physical stamina for which Evans gives his bureaucratic advisers generous acknowledgement.

The “most exciting and productive” period, though, was even better than might have been dreamt. From 1988 to 1996, Evans served as Australia’s foreign minister, during a time when the Berlin Wall came down, apartheid ended in South Africa, a “new course for peace” was charted in Indochina and so much else happened to transform the world. “International relations became… my consuming passion, and… has remained so ever since.”

Incorrigible Optimist is subtitled a “political memoir,” telegraphing the absence of personal detail. We learn that Evans was “newly married” when he spent two years studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford from 1968 to 1970; the book is dedicated to his wife, their two children and “the next generation,” but they are not part of this telling. There is nothing of the affair that earned Evans a song of his own in Keating! The Musical.

We got more of Evans himself in Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary­, published three years ago. It was written from the inside, on the run, and had a less conventional purpose as a political memoir. Covering two years from late 1984, it was a time when the senator was down, having blown a shot at attorney-general. Not too far down, of course; being a minister of the Crown is not too bad a gig, and overseeing a crucial sector of the national economy as resources and energy minister, still with a seat at the cabinet table, is not too bad at all. But it felt down, and the diary was a way of dealing with the moment.

Once Evans was back up, showing he could do and even enjoy the resources job, then serving as transport and communications minister and as foreign minister, the diary stopped. These better times have earned the more formal accounting of the whole career that makes up Incorrigible Optimist. He explains what was done and why. He is reflective, offering lots of lessons learned, but not deeply personal.

Many chapters begin with an anecdote from the six months Evans spent backpacking from Australia to Oxford in 1968, through Vietnam at the height of the war, Cambodia, India, Afghanistan and other countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. This journey provided motivations for the life ahead as well as a portfolio of physical, political and cultural sites and personal connections that Evans returned to many times.

Evans wants this book to encourage new generations to take up the task of politics, including through the major parties. He thinks it is “important not to understate the extent to which Australia and its major political parties have successfully weathered multiple political crises and periods of dysfunctionality over the past century.” He is especially worried about some specific challenges — the established tools of diplomacy do not work with non-state actors, and he has “abandoned the unequal struggle” for a serious Australian bill of rights. But he says he remains “on balance, optimistic” about most major domestic and international topics addressed in the book.

One striking feature of the book is the male-ness of the worlds described. The judges, the mining company executives, the media bosses, the senior public servants, the endless cast of diplomats and foreign ministers, prime ministers and presidents… almost all men. The last Keating cabinet, like the first of Hawke’s — one woman. It provides much more than a clue as to why this “dangerous trade” might be “best avoided by normally sane and sensitive souls.”

On the basis of Evans’s own career, is his “incorrigible optimism” evidence-based? He has been the most skilful and versatile of political technicians, an artist both of big pictures and microscopic details. “His mind craves structures,” one observer noted, but also, clearly, it feasts on the words and impressions behind laws and treaties and memoranda of understanding, and on the relationships between nations and people that, in complicated ways, go on to change lives. Choosing a life deep inside the tent of mainstream politics, Evans almost always celebrates “cool rational argument” and “clear-eyed realism” ahead of anything else, but one senses in this book’s silences some more corrigible, human hopes. ●

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Australia’s natural supporter, British prime minister David Lloyd George, brokered rough compromises on the first two issues, and successfully backed Australia against strong Japanese and other international opposition on the last. Evidence newly uncovered in the British archives sheds important light on how this was achieved.

Six months before Versailles, when the war was entering its final stages, Hughes was in Britain making red-blooded and widely popular speeches about the need to make Germany pay the whole cost of the war. Lloyd George, anticipating an election at war’s end, paid lip-service to this rabble-rousing, but he also knew that the German economy needed to be preserved for the sake of world trade. And Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the broad blueprint for the peace treaty, spelled out that there would be no punitive financial settlements against Germany and no colonial acquisitions.

Watching from afar, the new sources reveal, Wilson was horrified at Hughes’s extreme, eye-for-an-eye, tub-thumping nationalism. The president asked Robert Lansing, his secretary of state, to contact the British government to let it be known that if Hughes, who was due to pass through on his way home, made such speeches in America, Wilson would denounce him. Wilson even threatened to deny Hughes a visa.

Aware of their immense war debt to the Americans, the British supported Wilson. Lord Reading, the British ambassador in Washington, arranged for a quiet word of warning to Hughes. As it turned out, the war ended sooner than expected and Hughes stayed in Europe. Round one with Wilson was a draw, but the British had privately revealed a pro-American bias and opened a fissure in the unity of their empire.

In the northern mid winter, with the treaty negotiations in full swing, Hughes returned to the charge. During the British Empire delegation’s confidential deliberations, Hughes, together with the South Africans and New Zealanders, held out for annexing German New Guinea (Australia), South West Africa (South Africa), Samoa (New Zealand) and Nauru (joint British Empire). Hughes also wanted the German islands north of the equator, which were claimed and occupied by Japan. In the interests of immigration control, he opposed the racial equality clause proposed by the Japanese for the draft League of Nations Covenant. And he agitated still for full reparations from Germany.

Declassified British intelligence documents now show that, true to his trade union–bargaining background, Hughes tried to do a clandestine deal with the Japanese. To Lloyd George, he said he would go to the wall over his diplomatic battle for the German islands north of the equator, over reparations, and over racial equality. Australia might not even sign the peace treaty. But he told the Japanese a different story.

In secret talks, Hughes rowed back on his ambit claim. He said he would “raise no objection to Japan becoming a Mandatory for the islands North of the Equator” and would “cooperate” with the British to achieve that end. On racial equality he told them he “personally” had no objection but the question was “serious and difficult” domestically in Australia, where “public opinion” had to be “taken into consideration.” In short, he was suggesting tit for tat: keep the islands in return for not pressing on the immigration issue. Hughes did not know that the British had an “informant” in the Japanese delegation who immediately reported Hughes’s negotiating position.

Doubtless the Japanese were gratified. They were also keen to have British Empire support for their shakier claims to the old German concession in Shandong, northern China, so that too went into the mix. When the racial equality clause came up for discussion in the conference, Wilson unexpectedly kicked the clause into indefinite limbo by chair’s action, despite a strong majority in favour. He was concerned about his own “white America” zealots on the west coast, where Hughes threatened to stoke up the populist media in upcoming elections. As a result, the racial equality issue would lay fallow for another generation.

To compensate, Japan got Shandong and the north Pacific islands. Australia got New Guinea. New Zealand got Samoa. Reparations were fudged at Versailles for future determination. But in the meantime there was a reasonable return. In the small print of the treaty, Hughes secured a two-fifths share of Nauru’s phosphate deposits, worth £168 million to Australia at 1919 prices over the next half century, or just over half Australia’s war costs. All nations present, except China, signed the Versailles treaty. The Great Powers had managed Billy, or had he managed them? ⦁

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For its part, the Chinese foreign ministry issued a strong statement in the aftermath of the North Korean test, calling it unacceptable and expressing resolute opposition. But Chinese diplomats caution against any further escalation of an already tense situation, emphasising that diplomacy is the only way to deal with the North Korean nuclear impasse.

As the UN Security Council deliberates on a new round of sanctions against North Korea, the questions that remain all seem to revolve around what Beijing would and should do next. The expectations and reasoning are understandable — after all, China supplies over half a million tons of crude oil to North Korea each year, and over 90 per cent of North Korean trade is with China. In other words, China has significant leverage.

But the belief that Beijing should act to rein in Pyongyang must be placed within the broader context of three factors: China’s strained relationship with North Korea, its strategic interest in developments on the Korean Peninsula, and the state of US–China relations. To a significant extent, these will determine Chinese policy options and how they are implemented.

It would be a stretch to suggest that Beijing and Pyongyang maintain a normal relationship, let alone a cordial one, notwithstanding the fact that China’s only formal alliance with any foreign state is its 1961 treaty with North Korea. In recent years, Beijing’s experience in dealing with its erstwhile junior ally has been frustrating. Pyongyang’s reckless behaviour and endless provocations not only undermine Chinese security interests but also cause Chinese leaders to lose face. The Chinese government’s participation in sanctions against North Korea further strains its ties with the North; North Korean provocations and threats strengthen US alliances with South Korea and Japan. At the same time, the deployment of the THAAD missile defence system by the United States and South Korea has not only strained Beijing’s relationship with Seoul but also poses a serious threat to China’s limited nuclear second-strike capabilities.

This complex of factors should be sufficient reason for Beijing to desert Pyongyang or, at a minimum, to punish it for its behaviour. One option would be to reduce, withhold or cancel altogether the financial assistance, food and energy supplies, and bilateral trade that allows the regime in Pyongyang to earn foreign currency, which provides a lifeline to the regime and funds its nuclear and missile programs.

Beijing has not yet taken drastic steps, as urged by Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull, because they could have significant — and largely negative — implications for its strategic interests. China’s perspective is informed by a number of factors. First, while it opposes North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, it views them as a symptom rather than the cause of Peninsula instability. Without fundamentally addressing North Korea’s security concerns, it will be difficult to convince Pyongyang to give up its weapons programs, which it sees as its only guarantee of security.

Beijing therefore continues to place great emphasis on the need for a diplomatic solution through dialogue and negotiation. China helped to initiate the trilateral dialogue and subsequently hosted the Six-Party Talks between early 2003 and late 2008, at which point the multilateral negotiation process collapsed. Over the past decade, as North Korea has persisted with its nuclear and missile programs, Beijing has joined the international community in imposing increasingly stringent sanctions. These have included the cessation of imports of coal, iron ore and seafood from North Korea, and suspension of Chinese financial dealings with and within North Korea.

In recent months, Beijing, along with Moscow, has proposed a “dual freeze,” under which North Korea would suspend its nuclear and missile tests while the United States and South Korea do the same with their annual military exercises. This, Chinese diplomats suggest, would reduce tension and provide an opportunity for negotiation, with the ultimate goal of finding a solution to the problem. A sign of China’s continued faith in diplomacy is the recent appointment of Kong Xuanyou, a career diplomat and an assistant foreign minister, to replace Wu Dawei as the new special envoy for Peninsula affairs.

For obvious reasons, China’s primary strategic interest has always been maintaining stability on the Peninsula. Any threat that could result in the collapse of the North Korean regime would create enormous security challenges for China, with massive refugee flows, uncertainty over the custody of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles — not to mention its stockpile of chemical weapons — and the possibility of Korean unification and a US military presence near the Korea–China border. This explains the reluctance of the Chinese leadership to adopt harsh punitive measures, such as cutting off oil exports to North Korea.

Beijing also believes that such measures are not likely — at least for some time — to stop North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Pyongyang is likely to have created strategic reserves in anticipation of punitive measures. Given its nature, the regime would give hardly any consideration to the suffering its citizens would experience as a result of harsher sanctions. What is more, such measures would surely turn North Korea from an annoyance to an unpredictable menace.

Chinese policy towards North Korea must also be viewed in the larger context of US–China relations and the strategic rivalry between the two powers over the past two decades. Until and unless Beijing and Washington can reach a workable accommodation, China will have little incentive to push North Korea to the point of collapse. To do so would be to cede strategic ground to the United Sates. Whatever problems North Korean nuclear and missile provocations create for Beijing, these are more than balanced by the distraction and threat they pose to the United States and its allies in the region.

For these reasons, it is unlikely that Beijing will adopt the measures that President Trump prefers. Not even his threat to punish countries that continue to conduct business with North Korea will force China to sacrifice its fundamental strategic interests. This doesn’t mean that China will not resort to stronger measures than it has undertaken so far, but it would be foolhardy to expect Beijing, and Beijing alone, to take the key role in responding to North Korean challenges. That would require much more concerted diplomacy from the international community and especially — its strong rhetoric and frustration notwithstanding — from the United States. •

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The English-language edition of the Global Times didn’t carry this editorial, and the intended audience was clearly a domestic one. But the vocabulary is a reminder of what and whom Australia is dealing with in these globalised times. An Asialink blog post by Anthony Milner and Jennifer Fang, quoted by Needham in the same report, suggests the importance for Australia of joining with its neighbours in full acknowledgement of China’s leadership. But the Global Times, likely to be happy with Milner and Fang’s argument that Australia is out of step with the region on this issue, doesn’t make such a concession easy. Its editorial projects the image not of an established leader, but of an easily angered hegemon that hasn’t yet worked out how to make all its clients fall into line.

If they are well-read in their own history (and Xi Jinping certainly is), Chinese leaders will recognise the problem as an old one. When China’s first emperor was yet just one king among many, he granted an audience to the strategist Wei Liao. Wei flattered him, saying, “Qin’s might is such that the rulers of other states are like mere heads of a province or a district beside it.” The problem for such a strong state, Wei went on to say, was that these lesser states might join in league against it. He had a plan: “I hope Your Majesty will not be sparing of goods and money but will hand out bribes to their leading ministers so as to disrupt their schemes. By laying out no more than 300,000 in gold, you can completely undo the other feudal rulers.”

And so it came to pass. Qin followed Wei’s advice, and the surrounding states fell like flies into the trap. More than two millennia later, Beijing is following the same script. Rodrigo Duterte’s rapid transformation from a Churchill to a Chamberlain of the South China Sea is an outstanding example of how successful the strategy can be.

Most states in the region are still working out how to manage this big new power. Do they subscribe to China’s invocation of ancient historical relationships that were sundered by Western gunboats and are now, properly, being restored? Or do they stand on their dignity as modern nation-states with sovereign rights, as deserving of respect as any great power? For Australia, the question is a bit different, since it has no ancient relationship with China. Admiral Zheng did not land on these shores early in the fifteenth century, and Australians did not make their way to the capital to pay tribute any time thereafter.

Nonetheless, as is the case elsewhere, the “300,000 in gold” counts for a lot in Australia. When Milner and Fang argue that “Australia has become disconnected from its own region,” they imply that this reflects a dated attachment to the US alliance. In fact, the rise and rise of China has captured the attention of politicians, investors and educators in this country to an extraordinary degree. Influential Australian commentators here, as in Southeast Asia, have not only acknowledged China’s leadership but have been hard at work getting the rest of the country to do so as well. Bob Carr and James Laurenceson at the Australia–China Relations Institute and Hugh White at the ANU are only the most obvious advocates. Dazzled by China, Australians have lost sight of Southeast Asia in important respects. The fall-off in engagement is particularly evident in a decline of Southeast Asian expertise in our universities.

It is one thing to urge reconnection, as Milner and Fang do, and another to subscribe to an imagined regional consensus on the status of China’s leadership. Whatever Asialink knows about the attitudes of commentators in the rest of the region, it is at least clear that there is not at present a consensus on China’s leadership. Vietnam is resistant to Chinese hegemony; Indonesia is watchful; Singapore “remains a great believer in a strong US presence in the region.” Japan, which may not have entered into Milner and Fang’s analysis, seems in no present danger of being led by China. South Korea, a country that China should have been able to cultivate more effectively than has been the case, has put in place an American missile shield in face of China’s objections and threats of economic retaliation. Chinese enrolments in South Korean universities, accounting for up to half of some student bodies, have dropped precipitately in the current academic year.

China does have significant acolytes in the region, but must wish they were less flaky. The Philippines has a populist and erratic leader whose tenure is uncertain, Thailand is run by a military junta, and Malaysia’s prime minister is embroiled in ongoing financial scandal. These shortcomings in political culture at the leadership level do not mean that their cosying up to China is unimportant, or that Australia should not be engaging with the countries concerned. (In fact, this country’s current engagement with the Philippines is much in the news.) But it is open to question whether a democratic country with an anti-corruption commission and a free press should be lining up with them to pay tribute to China on the basis of regional consistency.

In an ironic historical shift, these three countries were aligned with the West during the cold war, and looked to the United States as protector, while Jakarta and Hanoi formed an “axis” with Beijing — at least until the military coup in Indonesia in 1965. Current relations are more complex. In July, Indonesia enraged China by bestowing a new name, North Natuna Sea, on the maritime zone in the northern outreaches of the Indonesia archipelago, crossing China’s sacrosanct “nine-dash line.” At the ASEAN meeting in early August, Vietnam in its turn provoked China by pressing for tougher wording in the South China Sea code of conduct.

Jakarta and Hanoi are now showing signs of wanting to strengthen bilateral ties. Two weeks ago, Nguyen Phu Trong, secretary-general of the Communist Party of Vietnam and head of the Politburo, paid a visit to Jakarta. This was the first visit from Vietnam at this level since Ho Chi Minh attended the Bandung Conference in 1955. Trong’s main presentation was delivered at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, and focused on the need for unity in ASEAN and for resisting great power interference. He did not name the “great power,” but with the renaming of the North Natuna Sea still fresh in their minds, the audience would have understood it to be China.

Trong’s visit coincided with the fourth annual meeting of the International Conference on Chinese Indonesian Studies, held at the country’s top university, Universitas Indonesia, and attended by scholars from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, China and (in a tiny minority of two) Australia. The theme of the conference was China’s Impact on Southeast Asia and Its Diasporic Communities. Papers by Chinese presenters in the plenary sessions, including one on Sino-Indonesian relations in the 1950s and another on China and ASEAN, provoked critical and even angry responses from the floor, expressed mainly but not only by Indonesians in the audience.

A matter of particular irritation for the audience was the supposition that China should be able to build bridges with mainstream societies (notably Indonesia and Malaysia) through its contacts with the diaspora communities. Such a strategy, defended by the speaker on grounds that it was “normal” and “understandable,” was viewed from the floor as divisive, and likely to have a negative impact on the Chinese ethnic communities in Southeast Asian countries.

It is not easy being a scholar in China. In international contexts in particular, there is a strong expectation that the interests of the country (in other words of the party-state) be defended in any academic presentation. In 2014, Xi Jinping embarked on a soft-power strategy of “telling the China story well.” Since then, academics in Chinese universities have been undertaking training (“brain-washing,” in their own words) in how to tell the China story. Not surprisingly, the senior academic in the Chinese delegation at the conference segued in his presentation from history to policy, urging the importance of ASEAN unity. Needless to say, the premise for this piece of advice differs from Nguyen Phu Trong’s.

China is demonstrating an ability to divide and rule ASEAN, particularly through its relations with Malaysia and Singapore. But Beijing is used to dealing with orderly hierarchies and prefers not to be in the position of herding cats; what it would ultimately like is its own Monroe doctrine in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia is far from being the only country in the region resisting this prospect. For this among other reasons, stronger connections with its neighbours seem desirable. The mere promise of military aid in times of crisis (as currently with the Philippines) is woefully inadequate. But these is no obvious reason why closer relations should entail capitulation to an authoritarian regime in the interests of regional conformity. Diversity, too, can be a source of strength that needs recognising and protecting. •

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While full details remain confidential until a further announcement next month, the agreement will create permanent maritime boundaries and revised resource-sharing arrangements in the yet-to-be-developed Greater Sunrise oil and gas field. This is a major step forward for the resolution of the long-running dispute between two neighbours.

Most importantly, it seems highly probable that Timor-Leste has secured a median-line boundary in the Timor Gap, creating a permanent maritime boundary for the first time. While many in Australian foreign policy circles have assumed that Australia would limit its negotiations to revenue sharing, and wouldn’t countenance permanent maritime boundaries or depart from its older claim for the “natural prolongation” continental shelf boundary, the ground appears to have shifted.

If this proves to be the case, it will represent a major victory for the small nation and a clear endorsement of the UNCLOS Compulsory Conciliation process. A median-line boundary will place 100 per cent of the present Joint Petroleum Development Area in Timor-Leste’s sovereign waters, where current treaties divide the revenue from existing fields, such as Bayu-Undan, 90–10 in its favour. This is an important outcome for Timor-Leste’s sovereignty, and will be hailed as a major victory in Dili, but it’s important to remember that these fields are nearing the end of their life.

Far more financially significant is the as-yet-untapped Greater Sunrise field, worth in excess of $40 billion. While Timor-Leste has respectable legal opinion suggesting that the entire Greater Sunrise field could be in its maritime waters under UNCLOS, this was always a trickier proposition, as the field straddles the eastern lateral (or side) boundary of the Joint Petroleum Development Area. Unlike the relatively straightforward and media-friendly median-line principles governing the east–west boundary, the north–south laterals involve far more complex technical considerations, with competing options for baselines and offsets. While Timor-Leste was clearly entitled to more of Greater Sunrise than current treaties allowed for, the lateral boundaries question could have opened up a minefield of differing interpretations.

Importantly, shifting the laterals might also involve renegotiating aspects of the previously settled 1972 Australia–Indonesia boundary, an outcome Australia has sought to avoid at all costs. Despite Timor-Leste’s opening bargaining position, therefore, compromise in this area was always a strong possibility, in favour of a bigger win represented by a median-line boundary and increased upstream revenues. Such revenues from Greater Sunrise will be especially critical to Timor-Leste’s future.

Earlier treaties placed 20 per cent of Greater Sunrise in the Joint Petroleum Development Area, giving Timor-Leste just 18 per cent of future revenues under the 90–10 split. The subsequent and now defunct Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea, or CMATS, increased Timor-Leste’s share to 50 per cent, but delayed permanent maritime boundary negotiations for fifty years. Though Timor-Leste acceded to CMATS, it had no option for an adjudicated settlement as Australia had withdrawn from international dispute resolution jurisdictions, putting the issue firmly in the realm of power politics.

With the 2006 treaty process marred by damaging spying allegations against Australia, Timor-Leste opted for the final avenue open to it: a compulsory (but non-binding) conciliation process, which has never previously been employed under the UNCLOS treaty. In January this year, the country announced it would terminate CMATS, and Australia agreed not to challenge that move. It was a win for Timor-Leste, but it was also a high-stakes gamble, reverting the young state’s guaranteed share of Greater Sunrise revenues to 20 per cent pending a new negotiation.

The gamble appears to have paid off. It is highly likely that the renegotiated agreement will see a substantial increase in Timor-Leste’s share of the future Greater Sunrise revenues from the 50–50 offered under CMATS, while allowing for joint development of the field under a special regime for Greater Sunrise. The final agreement will also determine the contested issue of where the pipeline from Greater Sunrise will land for downstream processing — in Australia or Timor-Leste — or whether it will be a floating platform, as preferred by the commercial partner Woodside.

From Australia’s perspective, the fact the agreement appears to retain the current “trilateral” endpoint markers of the Timor Gap will also be considered a win, as it means the 1972 boundary with Indonesia will not need to be revisited. This was Australia’s baseline position. While some critics might see the outcome as a retreat from Timor-Leste’s opening gambit, no one should doubt the strength of Australia’s earlier resolve to delay maritime negotiations indefinitely or, failing that, to stick to its longstanding continental shelf claims. Australia was defending the existing arrangements as recently as last year, and even now many in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade remain convinced of the merits of that position. The agreement therefore represents a major shift for Australia. Labor’s change of policy in early 2016 clearly had an impact behind the scenes, shifting a previously bipartisan consensus. Recent pressure from the United States for a resolution of the maritime boundary dispute, with the South China Sea controversy in the background, provided further incentive for Canberra to reach an agreement.

The resolution of this long-running dispute opens the way for a major improvement in relations between the two neighbours, which have been at a low point in recent years. As Kim McGrath’s timely new book, Crossing the Line: Australia’s Secret History in the Timor Sea, shows, Australia’s role in the Timor Gap has been a sorry one since the 1960s, when Australian authorities issued exploration permits north of the median line in the 1960s with no clear legal basis — an act that was challenged by the colonial power, Portugal, but later accepted by Indonesia in return for concessions on East Timorese self-determination and support for Indonesia’s controversial “archipelagic principle.” As McGrath makes clear, our foreign policy was unduly determined by the desire to close the Timor Gap along the same favourable lines determined in 1972 with Indonesia.

Saturday’s outcome is a major achievement for the East Timorese negotiating team, led by former PM Xanana Gusmão and minister of state Agio Pereira, backed by the Maritime Boundary Office and its legal team. While Fretilin narrowly won the 22 July election, and will lead a new cross-party government, it is understood that there has been no interference from the incoming government, which has been at pains to respect Gusmão’s stewardship of the well-advanced process.

The maritime frontiers strategy was firmly in place before the election, with September’s session in Copenhagen always likely to be the make or break. In the end, the breakthrough became evident when Gusmão finally revealed the sort of outcomes acceptable to Timor-Leste. The Conciliation Commission itself is to be congratulated on producing a workable compromise from potentially heated negotiations.

While many following the issue will reserve judgement until the final parameters of the deal are known, the East Timorese maritime boundary team returns to Dili today, no doubt to a substantial popular welcome. A new government is expected to be announced early this week and formed later in the month, with a few major surprises likely. •

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The philosophy of the baling-wire way is that of an affluent status-quo power. We like things as they are and want ’em to continue. That practical doing-things orientation drives Australia to be an international joiner. We always want to be in the club, to have a seat at the table, to be part of the game. Membership matters.

Our approach to Asia demonstrates the joiner instinct. Australia aims to be Asia’s odd-man-in. When your only natural regional partner is New Zealand, the constant diplomatic need is to foster the habit of belonging. To be in the club is to have a voice and some chance of influencing the discussion. Being handy with the baling wire, Australia can keep the show on the road.

Great powers do the architecture and the grand strategy. Australia pitches in with the practical stuff. This is both a limitation and a strength of doing it the way we do.

Part of being a pragmatic operator is knowing when the tractor is finally cactus or the ute is rissoled. Sometimes the old model of doing things delivers no more. So the pragmatist goes looking for new things that work. Australia’s history shows we might not be too good at foreseeing the big shifts, but we have a capacity to jump when it hits.

If lots of stuff needs to be changed or made anew, a pragmatic response is to ditch the baling wire, to reach high and go big. That was what Australia did in a period of golden diplomacy at the end of the cold war, launching APEC and being there when Asia was attempting to lash together new security architecture.

Australia’s national character makes it natural for the polity to focus on the practical, day-to-day doings of foreign policy. Yet in contrast to our military tradition, Australia has little appetite for heroic or ambitious international action. As Allan Gyngell observes in a masterful history of our diplomacy, Australia is “surprisingly young” at foreign policy:

There is something about foreign policy that has always made Australians a little uncomfortable. That’s not to say Australia hasn’t developed effective, in some ways distinctive, traditions of diplomacy. It has had creative foreign ministers and made its mark on the world. But the ceaselessly interactive processes of foreign policy, the adjustments and compromises it requires, the close attention it demands, its backroom dimensions, its unheroic nature; these don’t sit easily with Australians. In part, that is why defence and security policy has been much more central to their sense of themselves in the world.

Australia’s habit of mind about international affairs is so practical – or unambitious – we didn’t bother with an independent foreign policy until we were well into the second world war, forty years after the birth of the nation. This was not absent-mindedness. It was loyalty to Britain, as the nation that did our foreign policy for us, plus a hard-headed decision not to do anything that hinted at lack of faith in the strength of the British military guarantee.

Gyngell’s account of how Australia makes its way in the world begins at that point, in 1942, when Australian and British security were no longer inseparable. It was then that Australia ratified the Statute of Westminster, a law enacted by the British parliament back in 1931 to establish beyond doubt the international standing of its overseas dominions. At that moment in 1942, a reluctant, realistic and fearful Australia assumed full sovereignty over its international affairs.

The core emotion that drives Australia’s view of the world is offered in Gyngell’s title: fear of abandonment. Here is a country that has always scanned the horizon for sails. At first, the convicts of the British settlement prayed for the ships that brought food and supplies. Later, Australians feared unfriendly sails, arriving to challenge what Gyngell calls “an audacious claim to a vast continent.”

Gyngell believes that some will see fear of abandonment as too timid a motivation for a great country’s foreign policy:

But it has also been the driver of one of the most consistent and commendable aspects of Australia’s worldview – its rejection of isolationism; its conviction that Australia needs to be active in the world in order to shape it, and that gathering combinations of allies, friends and ad hoc partners is the best way of doing this. That will be a tradition worth defending in the years ahead.

In using this fear as his theme, Gyngell follows in the tradition – and the book titles – of other Australian diplomats: Gregory Clark (1968) In Fear of China; Malcolm Booker (1976) The Last Domino; Alan Renouf (1979) The Frightened Country; Rawdon Dalrymple (2003) Continental Drift: Australia’s Search for a Regional Identity; Richard Woolcott (2003) The Hot Seat; and Philip Flood (2011) Dancing with Warriors.

The place of this tradition was expressed in the 1986 review of Australian diplomacy by the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Stuart Harris, which saw Australia as “geographically isolated” but living “increasingly closely with neighbours with cultures, traditions and languages which are largely alien to it.” As Harris reported, “Countries still achieve their international objectives by threat, bribe or persuasion. Australia has limited capacity to bribe and less to threaten.”

Instead, Australia deploys the tools of persuasion: diplomatic skills, logic, cultural affinities and contrasts, interests and ideology. Gyngell gives a detailed Canberra-coloured rendering, because this has been his life’s work.

Allan Gyngell joined the Department of External Affairs in 1969. (The department was renamed Foreign Affairs in 1971.) He served as a diplomat in Rangoon, Singapore and Washington and rose to become the senior foreign policy adviser to prime minister Paul Keating (1993–96). Keeping his home in Canberra, he became the founding executive director (2003–09) of the Sydney think tank the Lowy Institute for International Policy – doing the commute with the aid of audio books. He returned to the public service to become the head of Australia’s intelligence community as director-general of the Office of National Assessments (2009–13).

Gyngell delivers diplomatic history written with the understanding of an insider. He gives away no secrets but offers sharp judgements along with the facts. He describes his book as the work of a practitioner, not a scholar, shaped by a public service culture that values “accuracy, dispassion and balance.”

The bespectacled Canberra wise owl dissects the world in a quiet, even voice. He traces the big foreign-policy themes (and the key Australian politicians who made the policies): Asia and decolonisation; the need for great and powerful friends; the openings to Asia; the “post–” world after the end of the cold war; and the long national security decade that began as the twentieth century ended.

A mass of detail is compressed into 400 pages. If you aren’t interested in Antarctica or the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Uruguay Round, skip the page to the next exciting bit. The dogs bark, the caravan moves on, the mosaic keeps moving. What is left out is any consideration of the bureaucracy and the operating parts of the machine; that’s in the different but complementary book Gyngell wrote with Michael Wesley in two editions (2003 and 2007), Making Australian Foreign Policy, which deals with the “actual, erratic, contingent way in which foreign policy making takes place” in Canberra.

Gyngell identifies three broad foreign policy responses in Fear of Abandonment:

• Australia wants to embed itself with what Robert Menzies famously called “great and powerful friends.” Without such friends, Menzies said in 1949, Australia “would be blotted out of existence.”

• Australia seeks to shape the environment around it. Bob Hawke called for enmeshment with Asia. John Howard wanted Asian engagement. Paul Keating said Australia would seek security “in – not from – Asia.”

• As a country “with weight in the world but not enough of it to determine outcomes through its own power,” Australia seeks multinational organisations, rules and norms to create a rules-based international order.

Once the bureaucrats/policy practitioners have lined up the forces of power and policy, they turn to the crucial role of personality. Who is the leader and what do they want? Allan Gyngell once described Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, which reimagines the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, as one of the best books “about politics – not just the politics of the Tudor court, but politics full stop… Not so much an historical novel as an astonishingly contemporary novel set in the past.”

As a man who served leaders as different as Keating, Rudd and Gillard, Gyngell responded to the portrait of the Tudor courtier trying to balance the needs of state policy and the demands of his king. So, in charting Australian foreign policy, Gyngell inserts regular pen portraits of the political kings and princes who have presided.

The description of John Howard is a good example. Gyngell describes him as a traditionalist but also “an adroit opportunist.” Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister could be seen as a public administration innovator, especially in the creation of the National Security Council that now sits at the peak of the policy process, delivering a higher degree of ministerial involvement.

Gyngell describes Howard as

a practical man and suspicious of conceptual analysis. Indeed, the words “practical” and “realistic” were favoured adjectives in his description of a good foreign policy. Howard’s way of thinking about the world always began from a domestic political core – a sense of what the Australian people wanted – and worked its way outwards to policy conclusions… He frequently framed policy around the avoidance of choice. Australia did not have to choose, he insisted, between its geography and its history, between “multilateral institutions and alternative strategies to pursue our national interests”; between its economic relationship with China and its alliance with the US.

Gyngell offers a sharp rebuttal of Howard’s line about Australia’s not having to choose between the United States and China:

This mantra, comforting but untrue, would be used in some variant by the Australian governments to follow. In fact, such choices would have to be made almost every day. This was the beginning of the delicate balancing act between Australia’s economic and strategic interests in which all future Australian policy-makers would have to engage.

As Gyngell notes, every Australian strategic planning document of the twenty-first century has come to the same conclusion: the roles of the US and China and the relationship between them are the most important factors shaping Australia’s future. In the final pages of this book, Donald Trump appears. Gyngell sees him as emblematic of the challenge to the globalising world that Australia has known and largely embraced throughout its modern history:

Now a push-back against globalisation is gathering strength across the world, from Indiana to Indonesia. Identities are becoming more atomised and the evidence of slowing globalisation is mounting in trade and investment data, migration trends and the rates of treaty-making. The counter-globalising mood fuels a new protectionism that could have calamitous economic consequences and a new nationalism that might spark fresh military conflict.

In these strange times, the pragmatic habits of baling-wire diplomacy won’t be enough. Gyngell says that Australian diplomacy too often lacks ambition, and that Canberra is reluctant to wield the power it has available. The preference is for diplomatic caution, hunkering down in the company of allies, content in the slipstream. More than this will be needed. “In a world whose largest components are propelling themselves erratically in uncertain directions, the slipstream will be a dangerous place for Australia to linger,” he concludes. “The country’s diplomatic capabilities are about to be tested again.”

If Australia’s international understanding of the previous century was based on fear of being abandoned, our approach to this century must reflect all the ways that we belong, and we must have the skills and ambition to help shape this journey. •

The post The fearfully pragmatic heart of Australian diplomacy appeared first on Inside Story.

If it was recounted in a work of fiction it might satisfy conspiracy theorists, but otherwise strain credulity. Yet we now know how and why it happened.

It went like this. On 12 April 2003, as Iraq descended into chaos after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the government of prime minister John Howard and the then chief of the defence force, Peter Cosgrove, ordered the armed forces to fly emergency medical supplies into Baghdad, possibly the most dangerous city in the world at the time. The supplies were flown in by RAAF C-130 Hercules, which during the actual invasion had been deliberately restricted to relatively safe areas. The plane carried with it three journalists, who up till then had been kept away from any Australian military operation. The medical supplies were rapidly off-loaded but never left the airport. Instead, they were left to rot.

As a manufactured news exercise, Operation Baghdad Assist was a triumph, played out not for the benefit of desperate Iraqis but for a domestic audience in Australia. It’s taken thirteen years for Australians to learn the facts. They come to us now thanks to a long-suppressed and still heavily censored account of the army’s role in Iraq, written by military historian Albert Palazzo of the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis.

We only know about Palazzo’s book thanks to a freedom-of-information request by Fairfax journalist David Wroe, whose reporting of its contents rightly focused on Palazzo’s key finding – that John Howard joined US president George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq solely to strengthen the alliance with the United States. The story attracted little follow-up, which is a pity because Palazzo’s history contains more than one insight.

What’s clear from Palazzo’s account is that the aim of winning maximum diplomatic credit from a minimal military contribution involved deft handling of purely domestic politics, which ultimately took precedence over our strategic alliance aims. Since the war was deeply unpopular and the Labor opposition was against it, the need to minimise casualties, control information and manipulate the media were all interlinked.

Controlling the message continues. Palazzo’s book, classified SECRET AUSTEO (Australian Eyes Only) and submitted to the army in 2011, has been locked away. In the version released under FOI, some 500 passages are redacted.

In releasing the censored version, the defence department gratuitously distanced itself from its contents, stressing that it is an “unofficial history” even though it was commissioned by the army and written in Palazzo’s capacity as an official historian with access to classified material. The current chief of the defence force, air chief marshall Mark Binskin, has questioned the book’s validity, status, academic rigour and conclusions, even though he’s admitted that he hasn’t read the full document.

Information and media control during the Iraq war predated Operation Baghdad Assist. It was central to the initial planning stages, when the ADF was sorting out the bare minimum of forces it could offer Washington in the event that Howard formally committed to supporting the invasion. Palazzo reveals that Cosgrove insisted on a direct line of command to officers in the Middle East so that he could “provide timely and accurate advice to the government” on a range of matters, including “any issue, no matter how tactical in nature, which may attract significant parliamentary or media interest.” As Palazzo notes, “almost everything fell within this mandate.”

It was in this context that Cosgrove, a soldier with sharp political skills honed during his time commanding troops in East Timor, could micro-manage from Canberra a media event like Operation Baghdad Assist. As Palazzo puts it, a nominal relief operation was quickly transformed into “an information operation targeting the Australian public rather than the humanitarian mission as it was first described… [T]he mission’s target was the Australian media and the Australian nation.”

It’s worth pausing to consider the term “information operation.” According to one official Australian definition, it means information-related activities involving the “execution of coordinated, synchronised and integrated lethal and non-lethal actions against the capability, will and understanding of target systems and/or target audiences.” Clearly, by this definition, these are operations directed at an enemy. Yet in this instance, the operation was aimed at swaying the minds of Australian voters, in which case “political propaganda” might be a more apt term.

Palazzo relates how, in a middle-of-the night call, Cosgrove instructed the Middle East commander, Brigadier Maurie McNarn, that the operation was going ahead and to facilitate media coverage. When McNarn protested that Baghdad airport was not secure and there was no way to distribute the supplies, he was told to “make it happen” by Cosgrove, who was about to announce the operation at a news conference in Australia. Palazzo doesn’t mention this, at least in the redacted version, but the insistence that journalists be given seats on the flight sharply contrasted with the suffocating restrictions the ADF usually imposes on media coverage. Palazzo notes that the mission “attracted considerable and highly favourable attention from the Australian media and achieved the objective of portraying the ADF in a good light. In a war that some had questioned, it was a definite ‘feel good’ story.”

While it was a public relations coup, it raises a troubling question for Palazzo about “the acceptability of government manipulation of the media” to influence the domestic politics. “In seeking a media effect on the Australian public Cosgrove and the Howard government played a dangerous if calculated game, perhaps the most risky act they committed” during the war, he writes.

This is a serious charge to make against the Cosgrove and Howard, and it’s worth restating: the government and Cosgrove are accused of using the apolitical armed forces to carry out a dangerous and partisan political stunt in the midst of a war. Yet it’s a conclusion Palazzo and his readers can reasonably draw, based on the accounts of McNarn and special forces commander Lieutenant Colonel Rick Burr. McNarn regarded the operation as a complete failure, cynically describing it as “photo opportunity.”

Burr was appalled, writing in his diary:

This was unbelievable. We had not been allowed to do anything without getting CDF [Cosgrove’s] approval, and only then after painstaking detail and risk assessment etc. next thing we know we are throwing a group into the supposedly the most dangerous location, with no preparation as a team, with no idea, and with no identified C2 [command and control] structure, and with no advice to me on the risk my blokes will be subjected to (because no one has thought of that). With regard to our C130, they couldn’t fly anywhere near western Iraq to support us, in what is a known low threat environment now, but out of the blue, they are allowed to fly into Baghdad.

Baghdad Assist confirms high-level military sensitivity towards the government’s domestic political interests. At the very least, it raises questions about the limits of the military’s obligations in a democracy to carry out the wishes of an elected civilian government.

Domestic politics – more than any military need – clearly influenced what forces Australia was prepared to offer the US in Iraq. Army planners who considered sending the cavalry’s light armoured vehicles to the war were acutely aware that the government was “uncomfortable with the prospect of losses due to the possible negative effect on the domestic political environment.” This was a key factor in the army ruling out sending in the cavalry for the invasion. Later, when they were despatched after the invasion phase, the government ensured they were assigned to an area where there was little chance they would actually have to fight. The obsession with controlling the news reached what Palazzo labels absurd levels when defence officials drafted an elaborate media strategy in the event word got out that a soldier had been involved – but not hurt – in a minor traffic accident. In all of this, the ADF “succeeded in meeting the government’s desire to avoid allowing Iraq to become a larger domestic concern than it could otherwise have been.”

If controlling the message and media manipulation are threads in Palazzo’s history, official secrecy has stifled his attempts to tell it. His book started as an effort to write an account of the army’s role in Iraq, with junior officers the intended audience. It was meant to be unclassified. But he recounts how this original mandate soon unravelled as his access to secret information meant the book would have to remain classified. His work “was not helped… by the ADF’s practice of minimising the amount of information it released to the open domain.”

The extent of the redactions in the version released under FOI – whole pages are blacked out ­– confirms the defence bureaucracy’s deeply entrenched tendency to overclassify information. Material that’s already in public– such as the fact that the army used bases in Jordan, Kuwait and Doha – is redacted. A footnote suggests that one redacted passage cites material already published in the Australian.

As to why the book was suppressed, defence chief Binskin gave a confused answer when questioned in a Senate estimates hearing on 1 March. He confirmed the “document’ was commissioned by the army, but then described it as “unofficial.” Palazzo’s conclusions, based on three years of research and the accounts of more than seventy current and retired military officers, were his “opinions.” Binskin dismissed the book as lacking “academic rigour.” Yet questioned by Greens senator Scott Ludlam, he conceded he had only read the redacted version.

In an exchange with Ludlam, Binskin disputed Palazzo’s conclusion that Australia’s sole strategic objective in joining the invasion of Iraq was to improve relations with the US. Pressed on whether such an objective was sufficient reason to put soldiers in harm’s way, Binskin replied, “Again, it is his [Palazzo’s] opinion. We operate in accordance with what the government's strategic intent is on the day.”

Ludlam: “What strategic objectives did Australia achieve through its involvement in that war?”

Binskin: “I think if we go back into that we could be here all day. I am happy to take all of that on notice and provide those details to you.”

While the chief of the defence force ponders what, if anything, Australia achieved in Iraq, there seems little chance the army is willing to overcome what Palazzo calls the “challenge” imposed by secrecy to allow the book to be distributed as widely as possible. Yet, he says: “The memory and recognition of those who served in Iraq warrants no less.” •

The post A dangerous game appeared first on Inside Story.

At the age of ninety-two, Bruce Grant has produced a memoir of just such a life – a coming-of-age story of a man and his country. As a journalist, public intellectual, diplomat and novelist, he has been writing this story throughout his life, in newspapers, in ten books of nonfiction and in six novels. He sees his life as “part of an evolving human story from the certainties of what might be called small history, with its national heroes and racial and religious myths, to the uncertainties of big history, with its invitation to contemplate a common humanity and global governance.”

The human story starts on a farm in Western Australia, where young Bruce ran free “in a land without vertical boundaries under a glaring sun and immense sky.” The toughness of the land and shrewdness of his people inoculated him against the lure of Marxism or the dogmas of conservatism: “I was suspicious of utopias that did not take account of the sun and the rain.” Grant’s father “used to explain, in a typically light manner, that I had not been baptised because there was a water shortage that year.”

Grant senior, who had served in the first world war, at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, gave a wry personal twist to the argument that the Australian nation came of age on the battlefields. “His rebellious spirit emerged in his war stories,” writes Grant, “which were so anti-British that I was confused as a child about who Australia was actually fighting at Gallipoli. Poor leadership and strategic errors were faults of the British; humour, camaraderie and bravery were shared by the Turks.”

Success in a statewide exam won Grant a place at Perth Modern School, and he “moved from the space and good humour of a rural community to a combustible world of intellectual rivalry, competitive sport and girls.” Later, as a journalist, he was always willing to argue with his editors about the editorial line (and how they cut his copy). That spirit showed early, when a confrontation with the headmaster saw Grant abandon his final school year. “I decided that I did not wish to be a prefect in his kind of school,” he writes, “let alone its captain.”

Having already written snippets for the Perth afternoon newspaper, the Daily News, Grant was taken on as a reporter. The writing and thinking life began. When the second world war erupted, he put up his age to enlist and commenced a broader education in the ways of the world. Spared war’s peaks, suffering only the lower levels of boredom, he had time to question his crude patriotism and “the hole at the centre of what it was to be Australian.” Why must Australia behave merely as part of the British empire? Why did Australia have no voice in the peak councils of war?

“It was like waiting for rain in a drought; there was nothing you could do except participate in the drought, and wait,” he writes.

The same could be said of war… Australia was not important in world affairs. We were robust, conscientious and courageous, as good as anyone on the fields of sport and battle, but we did not control our destiny, which was determined somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Whatever this condition was called, it was neither right nor fair!

A central motif of his writing life was set: the need for Australia to set its own destiny. “For me, the Australian story contained a persistent contradiction: we had underdog values at home and topdog values abroad. We resisted British cultural mythology at home, with dreams of mateship and a republic, but we accepted an imperial view of the world.”

For Australia, Western supremacy lost its inevitability during that war. “Since then, Australia’s engagement with Asia became more urgent and more real. Asia became less a threat to European supremacy and more a test of Australia’s own competence and intelligence.”

At war’s end, an ex-serviceman’s allowance took Grant to Melbourne University. On graduation, he joined Melbourne’s Age newspaper; he was an experiment, the only university graduate on the staff. He imbibed the lore of “the story,” the entity that became “the news” published by the newspaper. Stories originated in the world of public events but were shaped by the skill and serendipity of reporters, the people who found the “angle” and “wrote up” the yarn, perhaps combining two stories to make something more important than either of the original pair.

Grant sees journalism as a rough-and-tumble profession:

It has certain rules, like getting the facts right, but it is under pressure to reach quick conclusions, because of the nature of news and deadlines. The result is by no means an accurate reflection of a society. So much happens that journalism does not touch. So much that it touches is hurriedly recorded. So much is tainted by commercial or personal bias. Yet, even with this disability, journalism is a vital part of public life.

In 1954, Grant set out to see the world as a foreign correspondent. He spent the next decade in London, Washington and Singapore, developing “ideas about the world and Australia’s place in it that have remained with me.” To see your country clearly, stand outside it.

Big leaders stroll through the pages of Subtle Moments. Of the two US presidents he dealt with, “Kennedy was a man of taste. Johnson a man of appetite. Each reflected aspects of the American experience.” Meeting Kennedy at Harvard several times before he became president, he recalls not charm or charisma but the canniness and caginess of a cautious politician.

Covering the failed 1956 attempt by Robert Menzies to negotiate with Egypt’s president Gamal Nasser during the crisis over control of the Suez Canal, Grant saw an Australia out of its depth:

I went to Cairo to report on Menzies’s mission on behalf of the canal users, and saw his brilliance pegged back, his inability to understand Egypt’s national pride or Nasser’s ambitions made clear. My first sight of the bulky, white-haired Australian prime minister, in his dark, double-breasted suit, wiping his pink brow in the heat, moved me unreasonably.

A few years later, heading to Asia, Grant took letters from Menzies to Australian ambassadors that asked them to give the reporter “some special personal assistance and open a few doors for him. He is to be completely trusted and will, I am sure, not involve you in any embarrassment.” Reflecting on that unusual endorsement of journalist by politician, Grant thinks Menzies “accepted that the challenge of what to make of our location in Asia was a test for us all… He was possibly genuinely interested in what I would make of it all, and thus offered a helping hand.”

When Menzies retired, Grant kept in touch. “We had in common a background as scholarship boys from the country, a liking for literature and a romantic view of leadership.”

Grant is too good a journo, though, not to record a meeting with the man who signed the ANZUS treaty, the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who referred to Australia’s longest-serving PM as “that fat fraud, Bob Menzies.” Good quotes are always gold, even if you have to hang on to them for decades before use.

In 1964, Grant resigned as the Age’s Washington correspondent over “several inexplicable differences with [his Melbourne editor], who seemed determined to show me that he, not I, ran the Washington office.” Returning to teach at Melbourne University, he was launched on his career as a public intellectual.

He campaigned to get rid of the White Australia policy, opposed the Vietnam war, and was a member of the Australian Committee for a New China Policy, urging recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Whether White Australia was an expression of protectionism, fear or racism, Grant argued that Australia’s obsession with the risks of being a Western outpost in Asia was starting to break down “into more manageable proportions.” He used White Australia and support for the policy of Forward Defence (embodied in Australia’s participation in the Vietnam war) as a litmus test of Australian attitudes in the 1960s:

If you were against White Australia and in favour of Forward Defence, you were liberal, anti-communist and internationalist. In favour of both White Australia and Forward Defence made you conservative, anti-communist and nationalist. In favour of White Australia and against Forward Defence made you nationalist and isolationist. If you were against White Australia and against Forward Defence you were liberal, internationalist and probably pacifist.

Asked to return to the Age as a regular commentator, Grant demanded conditions any journalist would treasure. He got written agreement that his column would be independent of the paper’s editorial line, that his copy could be altered only after consultation and that he would be given a research assistant.

While opposing the Vietnam war as a threat to Australia’s credibility in Asia, he embraced the US alliance, stronger Australian defence and, if needed, conscription for compulsory national service. He was “not confident that Australia could manage the challenge from Asia without the alliance with the US.” The formulation he later devised is that Australia could be “double-jointed” (not two-faced), embracing both the alliance and Asia. The image was of the two hands of a batting cricketer, flexible rather than rigid.

Grant saw the election of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1972 as representing a new Australian confidence. His public support for Whitlam caused a breach with the Age’s editor, Graham Perkin, that entered Melbourne journalistic folklore. The disaster of the Vietnam war had encouraged “isolationism” on both the left and right of Australian politics, he writes, but in Whitlam he saw a fresh optimism for engaging Asia. He quotes Whitlam’s pronouncement that “an isolationist Australia would be rich, selfish, greedy, racialist and reactionary. Beyond doubt, we would be supporting this sort of society with the nuclear bomb.”

In office, Whitlam used Grant as an adviser and “startled officials at a meeting by introducing me as his Dr Kissinger.” The label became “Guru” when Whitlam appointed Grant as Australia’s high commissioner to India. “Neither of us paid attention to whether I had any of the formal skills or attributes of a diplomat,” Grant writes. “One of the delights of the Whitlam era – and a possible explanation of why it was so short-lived – was that those involved in it were confident they could do anything.”

Although Grant judges the Whitlam government “accident-prone,” he believes that it broke “the foreign policy mould of fear and deference.”

Australia’s progress gets most of the wordage in Subtle Moments, but Grant also describes three marriages and a love affair. This is a life that has gone through its share of scene shifts and character changes. His first wife, Enid, was an Australian, his second, Joan, an American and his third, Ratih, an Indonesian. In a book where the personal journey reflects that of the nation, these loves – Australian, American and Indonesian – carry geopolitical symbolism as well as adding up to a life’s emotional experience.

At the book’s close, as Grant contemplates his mortal end, he turns to an Australia that is merely beginning. Once race was “the heart of our being.” Now the creation of a multicultural society, he writes, “is probably the greatest and most surprising achievement of modern Australia.” This is optimism from a man who once worried that Australians might be a second-rate people because of stubbornly held low expectations.

Our geopolitical identity, long considered to be our nemesis, has become an asset,” he writes.

We are sited in a region that is increasingly powerful but not culturally defined. This also suits Australia. Once the odd man out, now the odd man in, we are uniquely placed to be an agent of peaceful change in our region.

Whether the region is called Asia or the Asia-Pacific or Indo-Pacific, it is a fusion of diverse values and customs: its essence is “networks, not institutions, and the energy of these networks comes from small and middle-size countries as well as big and powerful states.”

A pragmatic spirit will suit Australia: “We have shown, in a short span as a nation state, an unusual sympathy with the practicalities of ordinary life.” Asia can reach for informal consensus rather than discrete agreements. Grant cites Henry Kissinger’s vision for an Asia united by broad concepts of “community” and “shared enterprise.”

Australia faces a world that is unsettling and fractious, but not yet dangerous. By the fortune of both history and geography, the country is unique. And Australians have “no choice except to respond to the existential challenge of where they live.” As so often, responding to chance and challenge will bring out the best in Australians – a sceptical, practical people, as ready for drought as for bounty. •

The post Parallel lives appeared first on Inside Story.

The signs of trouble were on display during the election campaign. Among Trump's security themes, three were particularly prominent: a promise to destroy radical Islamic terrorism, especially Islamic State, within months if not weeks; a commitment to greatly increase US military strength; and a pledge to put “America First.” He also criticised America’s overseas allies, advocated better relations with Russia, and called for a tough line on China and Iran. In each case, he brashly advocated a break from past practice.

One thing that worked in favour of Trump the iconoclastic candidate was the failure of US strategic thinking following the declaration of a war on terror after 11 September 2001. The weapons of mass destruction fiasco; the invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed; and dropping the strategic ball in Afghanistan – these have cost trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives and an incalculable amount of American credibility. Meanwhile, China’s resurgence continued, Iran’s role in the Middle East grew, and Russia became aggressively self-confident. Civil war continued in Iraq and Afghanistan despite the moral and legal obligation on the invading powers – America, Britain and Australia – to ensure a basic level of post-war order.

A new approach seemed to be in order. Perhaps the new president could bring something valuable to the table, as he promised?

Typically, Trump had claimed back in 2015 to know more about Islamic State than American generals. He had a “foolproof” plan to bring about “total victory” over ISIS “very, very quickly.” Later, he said:

There is a way of beating ISIS so easily, so quickly and so effectively and it would be so nice… I know a way that would absolutely give us absolute victory…

[It’s] so simple. It’s like the paper clip. You know, somebody came up with the idea of the paper clip and made a lot of money and everybody’s saying, “Boy, why didn’t I think of that, it’s so simple.” This is so simple, so surgical, it would be an unbelievable thing.

Trump said his plan had to be kept secret to avoid tipping-off the enemy. But there’s no evidence he had any special insight into ISIS or the best way to deal with it. Time will tell if the commander-in-chief really has a heavily camouflaged magic bullet, but he’s already passed his implied deadline to destroy the organisation. ISIS has indeed been squeezed hard on the battlefield, but this reflects strategies adopted before Trump’s election. In any case, the difficulties ahead are considerable.

Thwarting potential terrorists is an ostensible aim of Trump’s immigration policy. Critics see his position here as essentially racist and encouraging the inflammatory and counterproductive idea of a war against Islam. Add to this his earlier comments suggesting families of terrorists ought to be killed, and the claim that torture works (and should be “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and it’s easy to understand why US officials might be alarmed about how relations with the Islamic world could unfold.

America’s fight against ISIS hasn’t been hampered by lack of money. Despite Trump’s claim that US forces are dangerously depleted, the defence budget is running at a relatively high level in historical terms. In any case, aside from a small fraction of the air force, the military component of the war on terror mostly involves special forces rather than the big-ticket items that dominate the Pentagon’s budget. Even so, Trump has called for an extra US$54 billion per year (an almost 10 per cent increase), despite the fact that the United States continues to spend more than double the combined totals for Russia and China.

Trump’s thinking is simple: the stronger the US military, the safer the country. This is not a new idea; every president has said much the same thing. Indeed, President Barack Obama had already set in train significant and costly military upgrades. But Trump’s bombastic rhetoric suggests he wants to go further:

We’re also putting in a massive budget request for our beloved military. And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military – all of our military. Offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before… nobody is going to mess with us, folks. Nobody.

It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history. No one will dare to question – as they have been, because we’re very depleted, very, very depleted… Nobody will dare question our military might again.

Strategic dominance is being equated with security. The overwhelming focus is on hard power. This point was underlined by the fact that the military spending boost would be partly funded by cuts to the US foreign service and overseas aid, something that 120 retired American generals and admirals described as short-sighted and counterproductive.

The prominence given to the US military is often difficult to separate from one of the oldest tricks in the book – highly politicised flag-waving. This merges with another conspicuous feature of Trump’s agenda, “America First,” a close relative of his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

On one level, strident nationalism has been standard fare in US politics for as long as anyone can remember, mostly playing to a domestic audience and without significant ramifications, at least since the Second World War. This time, though, it seems different. First, Trump disparaged longstanding US allies. During his election campaign, he called NATO – a cornerstone of post-1945 American foreign policy – obsolete, and suggested he favoured the break-up of the European Union. He generally considered traditional US allies to be freeloaders who had become prosperous at America’s expense. He also implied that the US security guarantee could no longer be taken for granted, which critics worried would undermine deterrence in Europe, South Korea and Japan.

Since his election, though, Trump has back-pedalled, presumably at the prompting of those in his cabinet with more experience in world affairs. The US security umbrella over South Korea, for example, is currently being strengthened by a new missile defence system.

Most remarkable is the fact that the nature of the relationship between the Trump administration and the Kremlin is unclear. At one extreme are suggestions that President Putin is a brilliant puppet-master, or has significant leverage over Trump’s administration. Trump’s defenders, on the other hand, say that he simply wants to break through the deadlock of the past several years and take US–Russian relations into an era of peaceful cooperation. This would presumably mean working closely together on Syria, for instance.

When it comes to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, candidate Trump appeared to lean towards letting bygones be bygones and moving away from sanctions. If Democrats had proposed this sort of reset, Republicans would have shouted appeasement. Yet it makes sense for two of the most heavily armed states in the world, which between them account for a very large proportion of the world’s nuclear weapons, to try to get along. Not that this is predestined: their perceived national interests often diverge, and Putin might be just as uncertain as anyone else about where Trump will jump next.

And Beijing? During the election campaign, Trump said China was “raping’” America with unfair financial and trading practices. He has also questioned America’s “One China” policy, a hot-button issue for Beijing, though he soon backed off. In January, Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said that Chinese access to disputed islands in the South China Sea “is not going to be allowed.” If the threat had been followed through, this could easily have started a shooting war; in the event, the idea seems to have been shelved or abandoned.

But the waters off China remain a combustible mix. In addition to the South China Sea and Taiwan, a dangerous dispute has been simmering between Beijing and Tokyo in the East China Sea. And both Beijing and Trump seem prepared to play the nationalist card, although in the South China Sea it is Beijing, with a more direct stake, that has the stronger hand. Whether that’s enough to contest America’s strategic edge remains to be seen. Perhaps in a crisis Trump will imagine himself a brilliant poker player, in which case the scope for miscalculation and inadvertent escalation will be considerable.

Something similar might be said of the Iran issue. Candidate Trump heavily criticised the complex multilateral deal struck in 2015 between the community (led by the United States) and Tehran to defuse Iran’s nuclear program. The agreement was the subject of one of Trump’s more worrying campaign pronouncements on security: “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran… it is catastrophic for America… I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me.”

On advice from his more level-headed colleagues, Trump could back away from this overheated rhetoric. That would be a good thing: the deal was the best that could realistically have been hoped for. Yet he has kept the door open to ditching it, which might spur Iran to resume its nuclear program. Where US policy would go after that is anyone’s guess. Abandoning the diplomatic answer worked out in 2015 would imply moving towards armed conflict.

Trump has so far been remarkably quiet about two other major security challenges: Afghanistan (and the related problems in Pakistan) and North Korea. This is despite the fact that the military operation in Afghanistan represents America’s longest war, with still no end in sight. It’s probably fair to say that Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do (although it must be said that his predecessors were also short on effective answers).

North Korea – less integrated into the system (and more dangerous) than Iran – is a wildcard that could destroy North East Asia. Apart from containment, though, it’s unclear what Washington can do. Time will tell whether the blustering showman in Trump will be provoked into reckless behaviour by the even more reckless North Korean leader. Both men seem animated by the “performance” aspect of their roles, something that could work out well or very badly.

This brings us to who, if anyone, will become the central figure in Washington’s foreign and defence policy-making. Will it be Trump, possibly steering policy via hit-and-run tweets? Or secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who (apart from his early South China Sea comment) has so far kept a low profile, and may already have been sidelined? It could be the dubious Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist, perhaps working with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, neither of whom is likely to inspire much confidence outside the administration. Many US soldiers and diplomats, as well as most foreign leaders, are probably hoping replacement national security advisor H.R. McMaster and secretary of defense James Mattis (both well regarded former generals) will provide a steadying influence.

Trump’s presidency started inauspiciously. The crassness of his campaign style carried over into his tenure and looks set to continue. Within weeks, he lost his first national security advisor, the deeply unsuitable Michael Flynn. Trump’s first high-profile security initiative, to prevent entry into the US from a range of Muslim countries, ran into constitutional and court challenges. His response was a swaggering “See you in court.” It didn’t happen; he pulled back and his team spent weeks redrafting the ill-conceived executive order.

All this feeds concerns that Trump prioritises self-importance and dramatic impact (including unpredictability) over the likely consequences. Apparently convinced of his superior gut instincts, he shows little sign of reflecting deeply on issues. Applied to global security matters, this self-belief often looks like strategic illiteracy. Stay tuned. •    

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Five years later, the changes won’t be so dramatic. Xi Jinping is certain to stay on as head of the Party, and so too, it seems likely, will the current premier, Li Keqiang. But beneath this apparent stability is a bundle of issues that will make this congress, the nineteenth in the Communist Party of China’s almost century-long history, as keenly watched as any other.

First of all, by the time the Congress is over – in October or, at the very latest, November this year – we will know much more about the vexed question of just how powerful Xi Jinping really is. Since 2013, as his sweeping anti-corruption campaign has claimed even former members of the central standing committee, some observers have been making increasingly shrill declarations that Xi has dictatorial tendencies. Others, like the émigré US-based author Yu Jie, have labelled Xi the new Mao. So fond has he been to place himself at the heart of almost every organ of decision making that he is, in the words of the Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé, the “chairman of everything.” Even former US president Barack Obama went on record as saying that Xi has become the most powerful leader in China since Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch of post-1978 reform.

At the moment, though, all of this might be explained by the need for the Communist Party to demonstrate unity at a time of potential crisis. The party has always placed a premium on leadership, and that helps explains the huge space granted to Xi. And there is little value in trying to compare him to Mao, not only because the founder of the regime was such an idiosyncratic leader, but also because the China he ruled over was economically and socially far less complex and had fewer links with the rest of the world than the China of today. It could even be argued that the Mao Zedong of the second decade of the twenty-first century remains the Mao Zedong of half a century ago, so large does his shadow fall even forty years after his death.

It’s true that Xi has now added the title “core of the fifth generation leadership” to his host of other designations. But for all the apparent self-aggrandisement, he could just as easily be on a mission to make one-party rule sustainable rather than being dedicated to promoting the power of one transient individual. The congress will make it clearer whether the personal is taking priority over the party: if the appointments to the central committee, the 350-strong body that constitutes the party’s super elite, are seen as distinctly Xi’s people then those who declare that we are looking at a full-blown autocracy will have much more evidence to back up their claim.

The second key feature of the Congress will be the message it gives about reform. Since 2013, reform has been one of the most overused words in party documents. Reform of state enterprise, of the legal system, of the fiscal system and, most critically, of the economy – they have all been greatly talked about. What has been left off the list, most strikingly, is political reform. The distinctive feature of the first five years of Xi-ism has been a curious combination of market-friendly reformist language and harsh, categorical attacks on any attempts to question in any way, shape or form the party’s monopoly on power.

Despite Xi’s rhetorical support for reform, a critic could say that big changes have been few and far between. Reform is still in process, and is nowhere near even a staging post, let alone a final destination. Hybrid state and non-state companies, promised in 2013, are rare. The decentralisation of some fiscal powers since 2014 has been significant, but complex and so far inconclusive in its outcomes. As for allowing the market to be “necessary” and given greater space, as was heralded in 2013 – this was tested almost to destruction by the massive government intervention in the plummeting Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2015 and early 2016.

The reforms the government has mandated most successfully – lifting the one child policy and relaxing the household registration system so rural dwellers could permanently move to cities – have largely been consolidations or confirmations of processes already under way. Were this a multiparty democracy, the first line of attack on the Xi administration would be to contrast its ambitious talk and its often underwhelming implementation. “Where’s the beef?” a dissenting voice might ask, were it allowed to speak out.

The Congress, and the government, must remorselessly focus on delivery. Even in a one-party system, undelivered promises become hugely problematic. The timing makes this doubly the case: those who emerge in high positions later this year will make up the leadership that must deliver on the all-important “centennial goal” – the point during 2021, on the party’s hundredth birthday, by which China will have become a “middle income” country. The anniversary is of immense symbolic and also spiritual importance for the party. It cannot make any mistakes here, because its chance to stake a claim to the next half century or more is predicated on how well it does in delivering this goal.

The final thing that will make the 2017 congress different is that never before has the leadership of China been so globally significant. Past congresses were regarded as esoteric events for sinologists and those with little better to do with their time. But now, with the uncertainty arising from the Trump presidency in the United States and Brexit in Europe, the stability and sustainability of the Chinese elite leadership has never been more ly significant. As the unipolar world erodes, a wider public understanding of what happens in Beijing, particularly around congresses like these, has become critically important. No matter what walk of life we are in, we must all become sinologists to some extent. And reading the tea leaves of an event like this year’s congress will become a necessity. •

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The election of a wealthy media celebrity on the promise of making America great again confirms Beijing’s view that the United States is in terminal decline. And if, as promised, Trump abandons the alliance system and the liberal order that Washington has maintained through decades of investment in diplomacy and regional security in the Asia-Pacific, then it’s game over for Pax Americana and win-win-win for China.

As far as Beijing is concerned, Trump can breach protocols on the status of Taiwan, throw up trade walls, call out currency manipulators, and do any number of deals intended to make life difficult for Beijing, but so long as his transactional approach to world affairs undermines the rules-based order and throws alliance partners into a spin, it’s a welcome trade-off. The Chinese leadership is confident that if it comes down to a knuckles-bared fistfight over trade, territory and regional influence, China will win in a knock-out.

Unless Canberra moves adroitly, Australia could be knocked out too. Moving adroitly doesn’t mean siding with Beijing in any dispute with Washington, as some have suggested. Rather, it means calling out China as readily as we do the US when its behaviour threatens the values and principles that underpin our security and wellbeing as a nation.

China’s leaders have long complained that the principles, rules and alliance networks associated with the postwar order – an order imposed by the US – limit their country’s room to manoeuvre. Today, they argue, Washington’s writ should no longer apply in Asia. In a recent policy statement on Asia-Pacific security, Chinese authorities declared that “ and regional rules should be discussed, formulated and observed by all countries concerned, rather than being dictated by any particular country. Rules of individual countries should not automatically become ‘ rules.’”

China is not the only state constrained by “ rules.” All states in the Asia-Pacific region are effectively constricted by a regional security regime designed after the war to inhibit arbitrary or aggressive behaviour by one state towards another. Japan’s margin for movement, for instance, is far narrower than China’s. Until recently, Japanese nationalists have been kept on a tight rein by a postwar constitution, drafted under the supervision of American occupation forces, instituting a liberal-democratic form of government and formally renouncing the sovereign right to wage war. Following China’s aggressive posturing, however, Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe has hinted that the restrictions imposed by the postwar order no longer apply to his country either. In anticipation of a visit to Hawaii in December 2016, he is reported to have told colleagues that “if I go to Pearl Harbor, the ‘postwar era’ will come to a complete end for Japan and the United States.” If China takes off the gloves, it can expect other states to do the same.

China’s chaffing at its place in the postwar order differs from Japan’s chiefly in its lack of any tangible foundation. Beijing alleges from time to time that America’s alliance network is an existential threat to China, that open global markets primarily serve American interests, that concern for human rights is merely an excuse for meddling in domestic affairs, that currency movements are manipulated by devious American markets, and that the freedoms enjoyed by the liberal media and academy in the West mask underlying anti-Chinese sentiment. All these claims are contestable. What cannot be denied is that China has adopted its own Leninist party-state constitution, that it does as it pleases around the globe, and that it points its nuclear-tipped missiles towards every point on the compass. Nobody is stopping it from doing so.

Americans also point out that China has been the primary beneficiary of the regional stability underpinned by US security guarantees. American journalist John Pomfret, author of a major recent study on US–China relations, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,notes that, apart from a short spell during the cold war, “the United States has been, if anything, the prime foreign enabler of China’s rise. America’s open wallets, open society and open universities have been key factors in China’s ascent from a Third World backwater to a global economic power.” Early American generosity built China’s finest hospitals and universities, American power ended Japan’s horrific occupation of China, American diplomacy secured the region in the postwar era, and America’s commitment to open trade underpinned China’s rapid economic development.From an American perspective, China’s Communist Party would sooner undermine the path that carried China to prosperity than acknowledge that China’s accomplishments were not the Party’s alone.

Australians may not care one way or the other about Chinese revanchists or aggrieved Americans. If they pointed to evidence of American hypocrisy in violating the rules and principles the US lays down for others, they would not be alone. Still, it’s worth asking what the end of a liberal rules-based system, however imperfect, could mean for Australia.

China’s alternative to Pax Americana is not the absence of order, but a new kind of order, one grounded in values that are not universal and rules that are anything but liberal. Unlike America, China will never be accused of hypocrisy: it has no intention of breaching the hierarchical authoritarian principles that underpin the Communist party-state. The Chinese Communist Party is already using local media and other avenues to extend these values into Australia and other countries in violation of the universal rights and values championed by countries working in the liberal tradition.

Put simply, China’s government promotes obedience to authority ahead of freedom, champions hierarchy over equality, and demands submission of individual and community interests to those of an authoritarian state. It could be argued that some of these priorities have merit in the abstract, but there is nothing abstract about them when the authority to be obeyed is the Communist Party of China.

Christopher Ford of the Hudson Institute has spelled out what extending Chinese Communist Party values under a new regional order could mean for states in the region. Beijing aspires to refashion the regional political order after its own hierarchical, authoritarian and deferential style of government. The new order it envisages would see political authority operating “along a vertical axis of hierarchical deference to a lead actor, rather than along a horizontal axis of pluralist interaction.” All states falling under the shadow of this new order would need to accept their place within a framework of authority centred in Beijing, and abide by norms and rules set in Beijing. What this would mean for business and civil society abroad is unclear but, as a mark of deference, governments in the region would be expected to eschew conduct or commentary that might possibly offend the government or people of China. Under Chinese rules, respect for particular national values cannot be separated from ritual displays of respect for the regime in Beijing that sets and polices them.

An idea of how this might work in practice can be gauged from China’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea and the historical arguments mounted on its behalf. Chinese officials frequently point out to Australian business leaders and diplomats that Australia has no skin in the game and hence no business inserting itself in the process of claims settlement in the South China Sea. Nothing could be further from the truth. Australia’s future security and territorial sovereignty require concerted defence of the principles underpinning the existing rules-based system for resolving disputes over land and maritime sovereignty in the region.

Beijing’s maritime claims are based not on commonly understood general rules governing maritime sovereignty but on historical claims unique to China – on Chinese rules, as it were. If Beijing were truly committed to norms, it would have defended its position on maritime sovereignty by contesting specific findings of the arbitral tribunal’s decision on the Philippines’ South China Sea case in July 2016 while respecting its overall jurisdiction in the case. Instead, Beijing chose to ignore the tribunal’s jurisdiction. Its claims to disputed maritime territories are based not on commonly accepted rules and norms, but on particular historical claims to seas and territories over which no tribunal outside China is permitted to exercise jurisdiction.

In laying claim to disputed territories, Beijing reaches back centuries to establish historical ownership over land and maritime territories that can then be forcefully “reclaimed” as its own. A country can never invade itself, and so China’s leaders believe that by claiming to be recovering “lost” territories they can never be accused of invading anyone.

Beijing’s elliptical style of historical thinking seems to inform the judgement of retired state and federal political leaders in Australia who insist, from time to time, that China is a peace-loving nation that never has and never will extend its authority by force. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser presented this argument most starkly in his book Dangerous Allies (2014).The claim fails to explain how China grew from a modest state in the lower reaches of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers into a vast continental power stretching from the deserts of central Asia to the peaks of the Himalayas, and north to Siberia, without apparently conquering the territories it incorporated. The propensity of Australian leaders to repeat China’s claims can be explained by reference to classical Chinese military strategy, most clearly set out in Sun Zi’s Art of War, in which artful deception of the leaders of rival states is a key tactic in any successful conquest.

When this kind of history rules, anything goes. What kinds of historical claims could Australia find itself open to if it were to concede China’s historical claims to the South China Sea? In the absence of contestable principles of governance, could China claim Australian territory without, in its own terms, “invading” Australia?

On 25 November 2016, the Chinese naval training vessel Zheng He, named after a famous fifteenth-century Chinese admiral, docked in Sydney Harbour. According to the local Chinese-language press, China’s consul-general, Gu Xiaojie, welcomed the vessel in Chinese with these words:

The Chinese nation is a peace-loving nation. Adhering to the road of peaceful development is the serious choice and solemn commitment of the government and people of China. Six centuries ago Zheng He’s fleet, vast as it was, did not occupy an inch of territory belonging to other governments. Today the development of China’s naval forces has one aim only, to preserve peace, and is not aiming at expansion or regional hegemony. The Zheng He comes in peace and is certain to return home laden with friendship.

The consul-general’s claims bear little relation to history. It is not true to say that China has never expanded by force or occupied territory belonging to other states. Nor were Admiral Zheng He’s voyages peaceful argosies. History aside, at this moment the People’s Navy is advancing China’s territorial expansion at the expense of the Philippines, Vietnam and other neighbouring states. While spinning stories of historical ownership and peaceful intent, China is seizing territory and building military bases in the South China Sea from which it can project hard power into adjacent territories, including US bases in the region and ultimately Australian territorial waters. It has done so peacefully only in the sense that it has advanced in incremental steps, as Ross Babbage has put it, “below the threshold that would trigger a forceful Western response.”

So it has always been. China has historically expanded through incremental conquest and periodically contracted after defeats. Sometimes the conquests have involved Chinese forces invading neighbouring territories and folding them into China, as with Yunnan and Tibet in the south. At other times, neighbouring forces have invaded China and brought their conquered territories with them. When the Manchus conquered China in 1644, they brought the vast lands of Manchuria into China where they became known as the Northeastern Provinces. In the 1750s, China invaded the immense territories to the west, incorporating those into the country as Xinjiang.

These were not peaceful conquests. In the western conquests of the 1750s, for example, the Qing emperor ordered the massacre of the dominant Dzungar Mongol community in what is known as the Dzungar Genocide. An estimated 500,000 Dzungar Mongols were killed and the remainder were taken into slavery. The history is little known because once Xinjiang was incorporated into China the Dzungar were no longer around to recount their own genocide.

Three centuries earlier, at the time of Zheng He’s voyages, the Ming emperor was mounting massive invasions into continental Southeast Asia and across the northeastern reaches of the lower Himalayas. Part of the invaded territory was incorporated into China as Yunnan Province. Another part fell within what we know as Vietnam; it was subsequently wrested back by locals and is now considered Vietnamese territory. Zheng He’s voyages were historically associated with these fifteenth-century Ming conquests.

There was little that was peaceful about Zheng He’s own ascent to the position of admiral. He was a Muslim of Persian descent whose family is thought to have been associated with the Mongol rulers of China before the founders of the Ming Dynasty drove them out. As a boy, he was captured and castrated by Chinese forces during the Ming invasions of Yunnan. He ascended the Ming military hierarchy through association with an able member of the Ming imperial family, Zhu Di, who seized power in a military coup from his nephew, the reigning emperor, before executing thousands of the nephew’s loyal followers.

Zheng He’s fabled naval expeditions were not especially peaceful either. His well-armed troops engaged in fighting and kidnapping en route and set up maritime defence posts on far-flung alien territories. His fleets established military bases in Malacca and Samudera to control maritime passage through the Straits of Malacca. At one point they returned to China with the captured ruler of a Sri Lankan kingdom.

In a rules-based order, these troubled histories and the disputes they generate would be of interest to few but historians. But in a regional order based on contested national stories, China’s claims to historical precedents begin to matter at the highest levels of government.

In a formal presentation to the joint houses of the Australian parliament on 24 October 2003, China’s president, Hu Jintao, laid the foundations for the recent visit by the training ship Zheng He when he told parliament:

Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what they called Southern Land, or today’s Australia. They brought Chinese culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the local people, contributing their proud share to Australia’s economy, society and its thriving pluralistic culture.

At the time President Hu was speaking, China was still largely playing by the rules. His reference to Zheng He’s fabled expeditionary fleets reaching Australian shores raised a few eyebrows among historians, but his remarks were allowed to pass in the belief that they were merely ceremonial. Can we now be so sure?

If we concede that China’s primary test of maritime sovereignty is a historical claim to seas once traversed by its own fleets, then it would be prudent to ask whether President Hu’s speech to the Australian parliament could one day support a historical claim to sovereignty over Australian territory. Could there come a time when Beijing will claim Australian territorial waters as it now claims the South China Sea?

In this light, China’s actions in the South China Sea should concern all Australians. President Hu’s historical claim to continuous Chinese contact with the Australian continent over a period of six centuries, initiated by the Chinese state and carrying prior naming rights to what we now call Australia, is all but identical to the historical claim that Beijing is mounting in support of its territorial and military expansion in the South China Sea. In each case, the claim asserts that state expeditionary forces sailed a particular sea long before anyone else, made contact with local peoples, named their lands, and maintained continuous contact for centuries thereafter, presumably until European colonial powers intervened to “contain” China. In an order where historical claims trump commonly agreed norms and rules, failure to challenge President Hu’s claims at the bench of history could place Australian territorial sovereignty at risk.

President Hu’s assertion that the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores is based not on historical documentation but on generations of myth-making by popular historians in China. These myths gained currency beyond China a decade ago when an Englishman, Gavin Menzies, published a book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which claimed that Zheng He discovered America, New Zealand, Australia and other places besides. Menzies’s facile arguments were exposed over a number of years by Australian historian Geoff Wade, most memorably in an ABC Four Corners documentary in 2006. Nor is there any evidence to support popular Chinese claims of the “discovery” of Australia. And yet Hu Jintao’s words have neither been challenged nor denied in parliament, and stand as a matter of record.

President Hu’s words also invite Australians to reconsider the historical arguments underpinning Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea. Chinese state expeditions and merchant junks sailed through the seas and straits, but they did so alongside ships of numerous other states and principalities, including Southeast Asian and South Asia polities, and even distant Persia. Zheng He’s voyages retraced routes mapped out by earlier Islamic navigators and traders. If history rules, then China’s exclusive claim to the South China Sea is a weak one.

These historical details counted for little when China appeared content to operate within the liberal order. In a new order based on unique historical claims, territorial disputes are presumably arbitrated through critical evidence-based historical inquiry. And yet, under Communist Party rule, no historian in China is permitted to challenge any of the government’s historical claims, and the views of foreign historians who challenge them are categorically denied and suppressed. In 2004, for example, sixteen scholars who jointly published a book on the history of Xinjiang covering the Chinese conquest and the Dzungar massacres were denied visas to enter China for telling that history. The book has been banned in China ever since.

Historical claims made by Chinese leaders on Australian soil can still be challenged, however. If the gloves are off, Australia’s political representatives in federal parliament should ensure that the historical record is corrected by formally refuting President Hu’s speech to parliament.

Alternatively, to avoid embarrassment to premier Li Keqiang ahead of his mooted visit to Australia this new year, Beijing could reaffirm its respect for the “ rules” cavalierly dismissed in its recent policy statement on Asia-Pacific security. Together, Beijing and Canberra should acknowledge that these rules underpin the prosperity and security of China, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. •

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Aside from provisions for sharing the proceeds of under-sea resources, the key feature of the 2006 agreement – known as CMATS – was a fifty-year moratorium on negotiations to determine the boundary between Australia and Timor-Leste. Instead, the two countries negotiated a series of revenue-sharing agreements, known as “provisional arrangements” under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS.

Monday’s announcement is especially significant because it is the first time since the restoration of East Timorese independence in 2002 that Australia has publicly committed to negotiating permanent maritime boundaries. Malcolm Turnbull and foreign minister Julie Bishop had consistently rejected calls for boundary talks and were voicing their support for CMATS as recently as late last year, so the turnaround is a significant step.

Several factors help explain the change in Australia’s position. For one, the 2006 treaty had been tarnished by allegations that Australia had spied on the East Timorese negotiating team in 2004. The reported evidence of a former ASIS agent, “Witness K,” provided grounds for Timor-Leste to challenge the treaty, invoking the Vienna Convention’s principle that negotiations should take place in “good faith.” Monday’s joint announcement is, in effect, an acknowledgement that Australia wants that case to end.

Equally significantly, last April the government of Timor-Leste initiated compulsory conciliation proceedings under UNCLOS with the aim of concluding permanent maritime boundaries with Australia. Australia’s opening legal gambit – the claim that the CMATS treaty had already settled the border dispute – was roundly dismissed by the proceeding’s judges, who found that Australia’s obligation to settle the boundary survived the treaty, despite the purported moratorium. Having lost this argument, Australia had little further use for CMATS. Monday’s announcement demonstrates that the UN-auspiced conciliation process is working, and highlights the importance of the principles and institutions of law in these disputes.

The third factor was the dispute between China and its neighbours in the South China Sea, which raised the regional profile of law in boundary disputes. In that case, Australia urged China to follow the rule of law, as represented by the decision of the tribunal formed under UNCLOS. The contrast with Canberra’s own behaviour – its refusal to discuss a boundary in the Timor Sea and its withdrawal from the dispute-settlement provisions of UNCLOS shortly before East Timorese independence in 2002 – has created something of a public relations problem for Australia.

While Australia’s new commitment to negotiating a permanent maritime boundary is overdue and welcome, this doesn’t mean that negotiations will be conclusive or rapid. The two sides are likely to start from very different positions on where a boundary should be settled. While Australia may find it difficult to maintain its “natural prolongation” continental-shelf argument given the increasingly strong presumption of a median-line boundary in law, the process of negotiating frontier and lateral boundaries, and the consequent revenue arrangements, could be lengthy or deliberately drawn out.

It is also notable that the government’s pledge to negotiate a boundary does not go as far as Labor’s policy, which commits to ly binding dispute resolution if bilateral negotiation fails. In other words, Canberra hasn’t committed to the settlement of the dispute in accordance with law. Nonetheless, this week’s announcement is a positive step, and a clear endorsement of the UNCLOS conciliation process initiated by Timor-Leste. For its part, Timor-Leste is likely to drop the espionage case against Australia.

The key issue ahead is the division of royalties from the Timor Sea. Setting the boundary at a median point between the two countries would certainly lift Timor-Leste’s revenue from existing fields in the Joint Petroleum Development Area, which stands to rise from 90 per cent to 100 per cent. But these fields are heading towards the end of their lifespans, and the larger and as-yet-undeveloped Greater Sunrise field, which straddles the eastern lateral of the Joint Petroleum Development Area, is a trickier question. CMATS divided future rents over this field on a fifty–fifty basis, but the earlier Timor Sea Treaty, which prevails until the coming negotiations are concluded, gives just 20 per cent to Timor-Leste.

Though these are merely numbers on a page while the field remains undeveloped, and would be superseded by any fresh negotiations, they highlight how critical the final revenue details will be for Timor-Leste. The future placement of the eastern lateral boundary will therefore be of prime relevance. The East Timorese government has formal legal opinions suggesting it should receive a larger share of that field when the boundary is finalised. Herein lies clear potential for disagreement between the parties.

Of potential relevance to this question is Timor-Leste’s current maritime boundary negotiations with Indonesia. While these talks will start off on the north coast, it is the south coast determination that could have a wider impact – not least where the lateral boundary is set within their territorial waters, which could potentially influence its extension further south in any new division between Australia and Timor-Leste. Canberra also remains concerned that a median-line boundary, favoured by law since UNCLOS, could open up a challenge to the 1972 “continental shelf” border with Indonesia. This possibility can’t be ruled out, though it is fair to say that the political risks exceed the legal exposure, as there remains a very substantial difference between a border settled and observed for forty-five years and one that was never negotiated.

Less often posed are questions over the western lateral boundary of the Joint Petroleum Development Area. Longstanding fields like Corallina, Laminaria and Buffalo lie just outside it, but potentially within the future Exclusive Economic Zone of Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste has received no royalties from these fields, which have returned rents to Australia. Will a settlement of boundaries include compensation for lost royalties? These issues could arise in negotiations, and suggest that Timor-Leste will have cards to play in terms of trading off potential claims. Though understandings exist between the two governments relating to these matters, they could come back into play in fresh negotiations.

The coming negotiations won’t necessarily be conclusive; nor are they guaranteed to meet all of Timor-Leste’s aspirations. But this is a significant turning point in the dispute. It may also give pause to critics of the East Timorese government’s legal strategy.

Critics are less likely to resile from their critiques of the ambitious East Timorese plans for “downstream” processing of oil and gas on the country’s south coast, which remain out of favour with commercial partners like Woodside Petroleum. More broadly, the East Timorese government’s current approach to development, heavily focused on mega-projects and large-scale infrastructure spending, continues to attract criticism, as does the sustainability of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, given current rates of annual budget expenditure.

While these matters tend to attract attention in commentary on the boundary dispute, they are separate issues, subject to increasing debate within Timor-Leste’s lively civil society itself, and are likely to feature in this year’s elections. •

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