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

The post Soeharto’s Australian whisperer 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.

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. •

The post Open season appeared first on Inside Story.

The mass adulation came as Albanese — like a swathe of Australia’s politicos, strategic thinkers and business leaders — embraced India as the best available escape from dependency on China. Add to that the fact that the fast-growing Indian community is made up of the ideal sort of migrant: well-educated, professionally skilled, prosperous, English-speaking, pious but moderate and even cricket-loving.

India may well turn out to play a key economic role for Australia one day, and the Indian community, now nearly 800,000-strong and the second-largest foreign-born component of the population (after those from Britain), has all the qualities claimed for it.

But since the mass rally in Sydney’s former Olympic stadium in May, the lustre has come off Narendra Modi. Longstanding concerns about where he is taking India are getting more air, and other members of the Quad grouping lined up against China, and their Five Eyes intelligence allies, are questioning his scruples.

Most pointedly, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau revealed in September “credible allegations” that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist gunned down in British Columbia in June. Canada immediately expelled India’s chief intelligence official in Ottawa

India called the allegations “absurd” and responded to the expulsion by sharply cutting the number of Canadian diplomats in New Delhi. But the following month, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the ABC he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter.”

Then, on 29 November, the US Department of Justice announced the prosecution of an Indian man allegedly commissioned by a senior intelligence official in New Delhi to organise the assassination of another Sikh separatist, US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on American soil. The plot was thwarted when the hired gunman turned out to be an undercover anti-drug agent.

According to a contributor to the respected US journal Foreign Affairs, any intelligence plans to kill Pannun and Nijjar would most likely have been cleared with Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser: “He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.”

The ripples spread further. A well-regarded Indian news outlet, the Print, reports that the British government asked a senior official of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence agency reporting to the prime minister, to leave his station in London. The US also expelled a senior official with the same agency from his station in San Francisco and blocked the agency from replacing its station chief in Washington. US president Joe Biden, has since declined an invitation to be chief foreign guest at India’s big Republic Day parade on 26 January.

That kind of foreign interference, and its alleged source, was not what Australia’s government and security apparatus had in mind when they introduced controversial laws to criminalise clandestine influence-building in 2017. Their aim was to keep an eye on Australia’s Chinese-origin community, numbering about 1.2 million, and on efforts by Beijing’s spy agencies and Communist Party “united front work” operatives to manipulate its members and recruit gullible or venal figures in the wider population.

Now it appears our spooks and analysts need to worry about the possibility of India’s intelligence service working in illegal ways to further the political aims of its ruling party. They need to educate themselves about how Modi’s brand of communal politics plays out in the diaspora, and reassess the lengths to which they believe New Delhi is ready to go.

This isn’t likely to be a short-term problem either: after nearly ten years in office, polls show Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to be as popular as ever and his Congress Party–led opposition failing to gain much traction, pointing to another Modi victory in elections due early next year.

Modi’s campaign to turn India away from the secular, minority-inclusive model of its modern rebirth into a Hindu-majoritarian state is likely to get fresh impetus after that likely win. At the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, he seemed to float a name change from India to the ancient, pre-Muslim, pre-British Bharat. The new Indian parliament building, opened in April this year, includes a mural showing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and part of Afghanistan as forming Akhand Bharat (“unbroken India”), an idea pushed by the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Order), or RSS, the movement from which Modi sprang.

On 22 January, Modi will inaugurate a lavish new temple at Ayodhya to mark the legendry birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. To hundreds of millions of poorly educated Hindus, mainly in India’s north, the new Ram Birthplace Temple marks a historical truth rather than a legend. It is described as a replacement for an ancient one torn down centuries ago by a Muslim conqueror and replaced with a small mosque. That mosque was notoriously destroyed in 1992 by Hindu mobs fired up by earlier BJP leaders, initiating decades of communal strife and friction between Hindus and Muslims.

No wonder Biden didn’t want to chance standing alongside Modi four days after the new temple is opened. If he did, he might also have gazed down New Delhi’s majestic Edwin Lutyens–designed avenue — the avenue that ends in a memorial arch to the Indian dead of the British forces in the world wars — and noticed a new structure alongside, inaugurated by Modi last year. Under a stone canopy is an 8.5 metre black granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the independence fighter who rejected the non-violent campaigns of Nehru and Gandhi and aligned himself with the Axis powers. After being smuggled by Nazi agents to Germany, where he met Hitler and Himmler, Bose was delivered by U-boat to the Japanese, for whom he raised an anti-British army among Indian prisoners of war. In Modi’s eyes, Australians, the British and the Americans were on the wrong side in the Pacific war.

Although Indians have been in Australia since first British settlement, the community’s present numbers were reached by a fivefold expansion only in the last twenty years. Its social and political streams are still in formation. But pointers to emerging internal pressures can be found in British historian Edward Anderson’s important new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora.

Of an estimated thirty million worldwide, Anderson focuses on those living in Britain, making comparisons with the United States, in both cases communities that grew large a generation earlier than Australia’s. If our diaspora follows the same pattern, a Hindu identity will grow in importance over an “Indian” one, and even more than a “South Asian” one, for its members of that faith. And that identity will increasingly be flavoured by a Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) wider than religious belief and worship.

Hindutva is almost synonymous with the Hindu nationalism pursued by Modi and his BJP: a majoritarian, conservative and militant political ideology and ethno-religious movement (in Anderson’s description) that rejects pluralistic secularism and is ascendant in contemporary India.

Strangely, Hindutva also has wide support among Hindus living outside India, who simultaneously favour a chauvinistic, majoritarian ideology in India while negotiating recognition and rights in their new homes as a “model minority” noted for peaceful and prosperous integration. “Why is it that some of the most outspokenly patriotic Indians are those who have chosen to live outside of their motherland, or may have never lived in India at all?” Anderson asks.

It’s not just an assertiveness masking insecurity or guilt about leaving for a better material life, he says, but the result of decades of cultivation by Hindutva idealogues centred on the RSS. Founded in the 1920s, the RSS has nurtured generations of pracharaks (cadres) dedicated to hardening up India’s Hindu population to throw off the influence of Muslim and then British overlords.

“The life of a pracharak,” Anderson tells us, “is in many ways modelled on an ascetic: itinerant (as and when required), abstinent and unmarried, and renouncing of material possessions (receiving no salary, but provided with accommodation and vegetarian diet).” They are often from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, university-educated and English speaking, and well travelled, though they don’t mix much outside RSS circles.

Although he comes from a low caste, from where he was put into a teenage marriage (apparently unconsummated), Modi spent his early adult years as an RSS pracharak. He was then placed as the BJP’s chief minister in Gujarat, just ahead of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom there that stained his reputation and kept him barred from the United States until he became prime minister. His humble origins count as a plus for a BJP often accused of trying to keep the Hindu upper castes in charge.

The RSS began its external proselytising in the 1940s among the Indian communities in East Africa, mostly from Gujarat, which thrived as commercial intermediaries between the British and the Africans. Expelled after independence, they were able to settle in English cities, notably London, Birmingham and Leicester, by virtue of their British passports. The RSS followed them, setting up in 1966 in England as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS, an organisation that remains active today.

Living in group housing in Leicester, the pracharaks organise rank-and-file recruits, the swayamsevaks, at regular shakhas that start with a Sanskrit prayer and hoisting of the saffron-coloured flag of Hinduism, followed by marching drills and practice with bamboo staves, sessions of the Indian game kabaddi, closing prayers, and singing of the RSS anthem “Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhoomi” (Hail to Thee O Motherland).

Physical development is very much part of the ethos. The aim, Anderson says, has been “to ‘rebuild’ a population of strong Hindu male figures, largely to countenance (while simultaneously justifying) the threatening construction of the Muslim Other…” Tolerance and Gandhian non-violence have been shelved in favour of warrior models from history and legends.

“The promotion of physical training, toughness, and group unity also relates to the perception that individualism and material comforts of the West constitute a danger for Hindus,” he writes:

Second-generation Hindus overseas are considered particularly susceptible to picking up bad habits from morally bankrupt host societies, and many have discussed the “disdain” South Asian migrants have for the lax ethics of the West, its declining parental authority, licentiousness, culture of instant gratification, weakening family units, and so on. The HSS has performed a specific role in this context, providing segregated spaces for socialisation away from “corrupting influences,” in which curative “Indian” values can be transmitted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is not large: the eighty-two shakhas operating in Britain have an average weekly total attendance of 1903. They are notably more casual than those in India (where volunteers turn out in uniforms), many participants are female, and the dropout rate is high. The local volunteers often find visiting RSS cadres from India possessed of a much more hard line against Muslims than they themselves feel, or are willing to express.

Recognising this tension, the cadre-based RSS and its mass affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) have slipped into the background in recent decades, pushing forward more worldly figures to head councils claiming to speak for the one million Hindus among the 1.8 million Indian-origin residents of England and Wales. The same trend is found in the Indian diaspora of the United States, which has grown to 4.2 million from one million in 1990.

The message is also much the same, expounding the virtue of ancient Hindu theology and social organisation. All religions that began in India — Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism — are claimed to be branches of Hinduism. The theory that Hinduism itself flourished among Indo-Aryan migrants from Central Asia, imposing the caste system on darker-skinned Dravidians, is portrayed as being wrong. The real invaders were the Muslim conquerors of the last millennium. Marriage and the rearing of children are the principal roles of women. The ideal diet is vegetarianism. Homosexuality is “against nature.” Caste provides social space and closer identity, and was much more tolerant and accepted until the British raj started classifying everyone. And watch out for those young Muslim men waging a “love jihad” to seduce and convert Hindu girls.

Any criticism of these historical distortions and attendant social ills is increasingly attributed to “Hinduphobia.” In fact, Hindu councils in both Britain and the United States consciously borrow the example of Jewish organisations using charges of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. Indeed, India’s previously lukewarm, sometimes hostile relations with Israel have been transformed under Modi, who made the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 2017 and often speaks of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beyond defence and corporate interests (Modi’s favoured entrepreneur Gautam Adani runs Haifa’s port) and shared suspicion of Muslims, Modi would like to follow Netanyahu’s pathway to a state with two-tiered citizenship that gives the religious majority more rights than minorities.

Alongside this assertive victimhood, which Anderson calls a “soft” neo-Hindutva, have been occasional flare-ups of a harder version, often attributed to new arrivals from India. In 2006, a vandal forced the closure of a London exhibition of paintings by the Mumbai artist M.F. Husain, a Muslim forced into exile for his depictions of Hindu goddesses. In Leicester last year, hundreds of masked young Hindus paraded through a Muslim neighbourhood shouting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) after watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match.

Internet trolls in India and among the diaspora fire threats of murder and rape at academics who criticise Modi and Hindutva. In 2014, Wendy Doniger, an eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, came under attack by a US-based online firebrand, Rajiv Malhotra, for her book, The Hindus. Malhotra’s campaign eventually resulted in Penguin India pulping its local edition.

Although Hindu activists often accuse Muslims of living in ghettos, the Hindus in Britain are remarkably concentrated and have low rates of marrying out of their communities. Given the first-past-the-post voting system, this has made some British constituencies and their MPs captive to the Hindu vote. Periodically, British ministers invited to their functions are embarrassed when pictures circulate showing them standing next to dubious communalists visiting from India.

Where Indians were once more inclined to the Labour Party because of its warmer embrace of migrants, Hindu organisations have swung behind the Conservatives in the past decade. The diaspora’s advance into higher income brackets would have something to do with this, but the Tories are less likely to worry about human rights issues in India and have shelved a Labour initiative to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain itself. Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be more representative of the secular, US green card–holding CEO class, but he does wear his Hindu identity as a temple thread on his wrist.

Conceivably, the United States could get a president of Indian ancestry in Nikki Haley, a US-born daughter of Sikh migrants (although she converted to Christianity when she married out of the community), or a part-Indian one in Kamala Harris if she were to take over from Biden.

Australia is probably a generation off seeing an Indian-Australian close to national political leadership, though many are already at the top levels of professions and corporations. But the diaspora’s generally sunny picture is already showing some of the tensions Anderson portrays.

The RSS has a local outfit, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh Australia, running forty-nine regular shakhas with an average combined attendance of 1230 volunteers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also well established, as is a self-proclaimed umbrella body, the Hindu Council of Australia, which fits Anderson’s definition of soft neo-Hindutva. For Modi’s visit in May, a new body calling itself the Indian Australian Diaspora Foundation, which claimed to include 367 professional, caste, regional, religious, cultural and local groups as well as RSS and BJP branches, organised flights and buses for thousands of attendees at the Sydney meeting.

Hard neo-Hindutva showed up in 2019 when hecklers forced the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, set up by Kevin Rudd’s government to further bilateral relations and knowledge, to revert from public lectures to closed seminars on issues relating to Modi and Hindutva. More than a dozen India scholars severed links with the institute in protest at the decision.

Probably in response, the Albanese government announced during Modi’s visit a new body to take over the task of promoting the bilateral relationship, implicitly leaving the Australia India Institute to function as an academic think tank. The new Centre for Australia–India Relations has a banker, Swati Dave, rather than an academic as its advisory body’s chair. It will be located in Sydney’s Parramatta, a focus for the city’s Indian diaspora, whose newly elected federal MP, economist Andrew Charlton, has just written an upbeat book about the India relationship, Australia’s Pivot to India.

But there’s an important reason to think that Hindutva’s appeal might never be as great among the Indian diaspora in Australia. Our Indian population is more diverse than the British one, with Hindus barely 50 per cent of the Indian-born population and many of them drawn from India’s southern states, which are resistant to the BJP message.

As well as a large number of Christians, the diaspora also includes as many as 200,000 Sikhs, some of whom support the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan in India’s Punjab. In their meetings, Modi has ambushed Albanese with charges that these elements have vandalised Hindu temples with separatist slogans. Albanese doesn’t seem to have responded by pointing out that police suspect some of these to be “false flag” operations, or that the most violent clash so far has been an attack with bats and hammers on a Sikh group in Western Sydney in February 2021 by men recognised from a BJP–HSS rally. Or if he has, we have not been told about it.

In Sydney, as in London, New York and Texas, Indian groups opposed to Modi’s Hindutva campaigns picketed outside his mass reception. This book will help our politicians understand why. •

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
By Edward T.G. Anderson | Hurst | $57.99 | 488 pages

The post Modi’s expatriate army appeared first on Inside Story.

From the stand, Manasseh Sogavare, the Solomon Islands prime minister, looked on with relief and satisfaction. “Sports is the glue that holds the nation together,” he had told local reporters earlier. “It binds and unites us. It brings out the best of us, as individuals and collectively as a nation.” Regardless of “misinformation and shallow opinions” about the Pacific Games, “especially by a few foreign media,” Solomon Islands was united and proudly telling its games story to the world.

The games, which kicked off at that ceremony last Sunday night, have lifted the mood here after three years of turmoil and hardship. A dispute in November 2019 over Sogavare’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing led to ethnic-influenced rioting that trashed Honiara’s old Chinatown — the unrest ended, Sogavare’s government saved, by Australian troops and police flown in from Townsville. Then came Covid-19 and two years of isolation that shrank the economy by around 5 per cent.

Economic growth returned this year, but the mood was still gloomy. Along with the daily struggle for their livelihoods, people were mostly concerned about how their home provinces were doing, rather than the Solomons more widely, says veteran Honiara journalist Dorothy Wickham. “The only time you see Solomon Islanders proud of their own country is when there are things like this,” she says, referring to the games.

“I think that was one of the reasons the government wanted to go ahead,” Wickham adds. “They felt this country needed a unifying event. Even though it has come at a big cost, it was needed at this time. Especially after we’ve come through the ethnic crisis and people are fragmented.”

The cost of building facilities and hosting 5000 athletes is a big one for a country of 720,000 people with a per capita GDP of about A$3500, its deficit in trade and government spending covered largely by foreign aid and growing remittance flows from the 7000 seasonal workers now in Australia and New Zealand.

But the games have also became the focus of another competition that Solomon Islanders sum up in one word: geopolitics. China spent around A$120 million building playing courts, pools and the main stadium. While some feared that Honiara would be left with facilities unduly expensive to use and maintain, the stadium is far from grandiose — more like a typical Australian sporting club’s home ground than a grand final venue. New or improved halls of residence for visiting athletes are attached to seven colleges and schools around the city and will be a legacy for Solomon Islands students.

In the lead-up to the games, Chinese chargé d’affaires Ding Yonghua was dispatching influential Solomon Islanders off for tours of his country: all the provincial premiers for two weeks in October, a group of journalists for nine days in November. Two ambulances and four dental chairs arrived from a city in Guangzhou that has old trading links with the South Seas. In mid November, a squad of Chinese police installed metal detectors and video cameras at the games venues. Though only about fifteen-strong, their presence led to some overheated reports of Chinese police “patrolling” the city.

Big projects are being rolled out by Chinese contractors. One has just completed a new terminal and tarmac resurfacing at the airport in Munda, a tourism hub in the country’s west, which will enable direct Airbus flights from Brisbane. Huawei, the much-suspected Chinese telecommunications giant, will build 161 new mobile telephone towers funded by a A$96 million soft loan.

Not to be outdone, Australian high commissioner Rod Hilton has been in diplomatic overdrive, dispensing A$17 million in games assistance, including teams of sports medicine specialists. Together with Sogavare, he flew to Taro, the main town in the prime minister’s home province of Choiseul, to mark completion of the local airport’s hard surfacing and night-landing lights.

The Australian navy’s amphibious ship Choules arrived in early November to deliver two 4WD ambulances, vast numbers of uniforms and much other paraphernalia for the games, along with rolls of newsprint to keep Honiara’s two papers on the streets. A hundred Australian Federal Police officers flew in, on top of the fifty stationed in the Solomons since the 2019 troubles. New Zealand brought in two helicopters. The day the games opened, the US navy hospital ship Mercy arrived as part of the United States’ annual Pacific Partnership exercise, its great white bulk anchored off the city.

Australia won the VIP stakes at the opening ceremony, fielding governor-general David Hurley, who also used the opportunity to open new Australian aid projects. China came up only with Cai Dafeng, an architecture professor who is a vice-chairman of its National People’s Congress and leader of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, one of the eight tiny parties allowed in the NPC alongside the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the mission implied in his party’s name, Cai figures in the US sanctions list of officials alleged responsible for subverting Hong Kong’s limited democracy.

“The switch to China? I see some benefits in it,” Wickham says. “The best thing is the Americans have come back in, and the Australians are making more effort now. They are falling over themselves.”

Sogavare has played a hard game to fight back from his troubles of four years ago. Those troubles were driven by Daniel Suidani, then premier of Malaita, the country’s most populous island and historically the one that has sent out the most ambitious people to take advantage of the modern world.

Suidani, alone of the premiers, refused to back the switch to Beijing and cultivated continuing links to Taiwan. At one point he talked of a referendum about seceding. Sogavare’s supporters in the provincial government put up three motions of no-confidence to unseat him. The first failed. Street protests in the Malaita capital Auki prevented the second from getting to a vote. Early this year, though, the third was passed. Soon after, the central government used its supervisory powers to banish him from the provincial assembly, a move Suidani is still contesting in the courts.

While it lasted, Suidani’s defiance won support from anti-China hawks in Washington and Canberra. In a perhaps ill-judged move, the US government announced a US$25 million aid program for Malaita focused on sustainable village and forestry development. Honiara insisted such aid had to come through the central government, and when the US tried to send the funds via a civil contractor posing as a non-government organisation, the central government delayed work permits for its managers and experts.

Though some of those projects are visible in Malaita, Sogavare’s relationship with the Americans is still testy. A proposal from Washington in 2019 to resume sending Peace Corps volunteers, after a twenty-five-year absence, is still awaiting approval by Sogavare’s cabinet.

Although accusations of bribery have flown thick and fast around the votes of no-confidence that kept Sogavare in office and unseated Suidani — with sums of up to A$10,000 allegedly offered to MPs to switch sides — Ronnie Jethro Butala, the speaker of the Malaita assembly, says he saw no evidence of corruption. The explanation, he tells me, was simpler: Malaitans could see they were losing out.

“A lot of the Malaita public were getting tired of geopolitics,” he says. “No more funding was coming from the national government, and also the national government diverted all the projects from Malaita to other provinces. So it came to a stage where a lot of people said, ‘Okay, we are fed up of geopolitics, politics of different countries. We want the [provincial] government to go back to joining the [national] government so they look to ways to improve Malaita, especially with the roads and infrastructure.’”

As well as lacking development funding, Malaitans were being passed over for senior positions in the central government. Officials from the island used to be strongly represented among departmental secretaries, police commissioners and heads of authorities. Under Sogavare, preference has gone to officials from the Western and Choiseul provinces, the prime minister’s home ground. “A lot of experienced Malaitans now, most have found their way back to the village,” says Butala.

Still, Malaitans were used to being singled out and resented for their pushiness. “The black sheep within the flock,” he says. The idea of withdrawing from the Solomon Islands and going it alone isn’t dead. “My private view is that when you look at the resources in Malaita, [it] can become a very rich country if we have our independence,” he says. But a huge improvement in infrastructure would be needed first.

If the Pacific Games conclude successfully, Sogavare still faces the challenge of a severely stretched government budget and looming national elections, which have been postponed six months until next April. At sixty-eight, he is in his fourth period as prime minister and said to be anxious to finish his career with big achievements in infrastructure to bind the islands together.

The son of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Sogavare is admired for his discipline and focus. His main problem, says Wickham, is that his parliamentary supporters have little understanding of economics. “That’s his biggest downfall: he’s surrounded by politicians who just want to get rich out of the system.”

Like elections in surrounding Melanesian countries, next year’s vote  will be a contest of personalities and patronage networks. Formation of government will start only after results are declared in the country’s fifty electorates (fourteen of them in Malaita, where Suidani is forming a ticket) and MPs arrive in Honiara.

As for the geopolitics, voters will no doubt be swayed by the projects they see being built in their provinces and electorates. A good Chinese-built project would overcome the widespread antipathy this highly Christianised population feels towards China, says Wickham. “It’s like throwing a coconut into the sea — it will roll with the waves. That’s how we are reacting now.” •

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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.

Ahead of an American presidential election that might return to power an isolationist and avowed admirer of dictators, Australian national security insiders have been assured during their regular “leadership dialogue” with their American counterparts that, yes, protection and patronage remain. But whether or not Donald Trump returns, says Lowy Institute analyst Sam Roggeveen, the Americans will inevitably pull back from trying to maintain strategic primacy in the Western Pacific.

Eventually, Roggeveen argues in his important new book The Echidna Strategy, the Americans will come to terms with a power balance involving its adversaries — China, North Korea and Russia — facing off against strong friends like Japan, South Korea and Australia, with independent emerging powers Indonesia and India in the middle.

Roggeveen doesn’t envisage a sudden US withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific. But Australia will gradually lose great-power protection, forcing it to take a more independent path. “There won’t be a principled declaration of independence, but a hesitant and gradual process of separation triggered by America’s declining interest and motivation to protect Australia.”

Since this shift could conceivably happen over the first half of this century — during the next twenty-five or so years, that is — he believes it should be influencing the defence investments and foreign policy decisions we are making right now. Instead of placing a “big bet” on the United States remaining dominant, and acquiring nuclear submarines to assist, Australia should adopt a version of the porcupine strategy — by promising to inflict too much pain on the aggressor to justify any gains they may anticipate — for its own defence and go all out to keep Indonesia on side and help build its strength.

In a little over 200 pages of elegant logic, Roggeveen, who has led the security team at Lowy for the last fifteen years and before that worked in the Office of National Assessments, delivers a broadside at Canberra’s bipartisan consensus on the AUKUS agreement. He adds to the case made by figures like James Curran, historian and Australian Financial Review international editor, that the agreement still hasn’t been explained — and probably can’t be, except as a political fix.

As former ONA head Peter Varghese says, Roggeveen’s book “defies the echo chamber of current strategic policy” — the chamber that takes in the two main parties, the defence and foreign affairs departments, ONA’s successor the Office of National Intelligence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the ANU National Security College, and a federal press gallery captivated by gee-whiz weaponry and China panics.

Roggeveen builds on the thinking of strategic analysts Hugh White and the late Allan Gyngell, who could see an era of power contestation developing in Asia. Far from “appeasement” — the cheap slur thrown by junior minister Pat Conroy at Labor’s national conference last week — they urge a bristly defence of Australia and its approaches combined with efforts to avoid being roadkill if the big vehicles start moving.

Roggeveen looks first at America’s national will. So far, the cost of its post-1945 security presence in Asia has been manageable and the risks low. But China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weaponry are changing the calculus. “When it comes to taking on China, the costs are too high and the stakes too low,” Roggeveen says.

The United States is uniquely secure, he points out, buffered by wide oceans east and west, and by benign neighbours north and south. It has the world’s largest military, its largest nuclear arsenal, and a young and growing population. With foreign trade only 23 per cent of its GDP, it can be economically self-sufficient.

“When Donald Trump said what was previously unsayable for a US president — that America’s allies are free-riders, that NATO had passed its use-by date, and that America gains nothing from its forward military presence in East Asia — the response from the US security establishment was swift and predictable,” Roggeveen writes. “America’s alliances, they said, are the backbone of global security.”

But Trump had grasped an important point. “America’s alliances are not a service the US offers to its allies and the world. Ultimately, they need to make the United States safer. If America’s alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia cease to have any benefit for the US, then it will stop making sacrifices for them.”

Cold war justifications for alliances are crumbling. East Asian allies are starting to question the “extended deterrence” of US nuclear forces and thinking about acquiring their own. “The US has learned to live with French, British and Israeli nuclear weapons. It can do the same for South Korea and Japan,” Roggeveen says.

And unlike Washington’s old enemy, the Soviet Union, China lacks an exportable ideology. “Communism in China is little more than a series of slogans (such as the ‘China dream’ and a ‘community of common destiny’). To be a communist in China today is to be committed not to the global spread of Marxist-Leninist ideology but simply to the preservation of Communist Party rule at home.”

Realistically, no nation of China’s economic weight would ever be content for its rival to be the leading strategic power in its own region, “any more than the US would tolerate China being the leading strategic power in North and Latin America. Imagine tens of thousands of Chinese troops based in Canada, an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in Cuba, and Chinese spy planes routinely patrolling just off the US east coast, and you get the idea.”

Should Trump be re-elected, or a “Trump-like figure” take the Republican Party back into the White House, his agenda would return, and probably with less institutional resistance. Trump might have been unexpected but he isn’t anomalous, says Roggeveen. His rise injected a new uncertainty into Australia’s strategic future.

The result will be “a long sunset of American power in Asia, in which China emerges as the leading nation but not the dominant one.” Australia’s alliance with the United States won’t be formally abrogated or repealed: too many people in both countries have a stake in its preservation.

“The treaty will remain,” says Roggeveen. “So will the troops, and the joint exercises, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements, and the arms sales. What will erode is the credibility of the alliance. Australia and the region in general will simply stop believing that the alliance represents an implicit promise that the two countries will fight on each other’s behalf.”

Yet Australia is doubling its bet on the United States staying on top. The planned eight nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs, more than the British or French navies possess, will operate as a one-eighth addition to the US navy’s SSN force. Aside from being able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with a 1500 to 2000 kilometre range, their role will be to find and chase China’s ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs.

For nuclear powers, such SSBNs are the guaranteed “second strike” capability against a successful “first strike.” Roggeveen could have said more about the fact that China has only six SSBNs, five operating from a base in Hainan island facing the South China Sea and one near Qingdao in the Yellow Sea. Maintenance and training mean that only one or two are likely to be on patrol at any time. The relentless “freedom of navigation” patrols in these waters by US and allied forces seem designed to stop those SSBNs slipping out into the open ocean, from where more of the continental United States would be in missile range. Or perhaps they are poised to destroy the subs before they can launch. Either way, are we out to remove this stabilising element of mutual assured destruction?

This is a case of capability determining defence policy rather than the other way round, Roggeveen says: “Once we have the capability to send a fleet of boats thousands of kilometres to our north around China’s coast, and the capability to fire missiles at the Chinese mainland, we are going to have to come up with reasons why we are choosing to withhold that capability in the event of war.” Equally worryingly, “by the time this question arises Australia will have been enculturated and integrated with the US Navy over decades. It is too much to expect that our leaders would turn their backs on all that in the decisive moment.”

Any sense that the United States might have to compel Australia into helping in a future conflict is contradicted by the continuing willingness of both major political parties to lock military planning into US thinking. As Roggeveen puts it, the AUKUS agreement shows that “Australia didn’t need to be talked into anything.” And from an American perspective, what’s not to like when Australia comes offering to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for US weapons?

All the costs of AUKUS weaponry will be carried by Australia, with no hard promises in return. “It is a project of vaulting ambition that is out of step with Australian tradition as a military middle power, wildly at odds with our international status and, most importantly, a wasteful expenditure of public money that will make Australia less safe,” Roggeveen says. “But having cancelled the French project and inaugurated AUKUS, Australia is now proposing to manage not two but three submarine designs. The Collins upgrade is still going ahead, and we are adding two nuclear-powered designs as well, a technology with which Australia has no experience. It will surely shock no one if this initiative fails entirely, or is severely cut back over time.”

Meanwhile, Canberra’s advocates of more defence spending are vague about what exactly Australia needs to defend itself against. At the same time, they assume that China is or will be so powerful that resisting it without US help is pointless.

Waging war on Australia wouldn’t be easy, says Roggeveen, and Australia can relatively cheaply raise the stakes even further. “Australia’s security commentators project their anxieties about Australia, their lack of confidence in it, onto China. They think we can’t manage the challenge of China alone because we’re not strong or mature enough. I say we are, and I say we can.”

The invasion scenario put up by defence hawks like late army general and Liberal senator Jim Molan are laughably implausible. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to defend ourselves against invasion,” says Roggeveen. “[T]his will remain beyond the capabilities of any rival military force for the indefinite future, and even if it becomes achievable, it will remain unnecessary and even counterproductive for the aggressor.” The only plausible reason to attack Australia would be to strike facilities being used to attack China — the US strategic bombers at the Katherine air base, for instance, and the SSNs at the Fremantle naval base.

Instead, Australia should rely on distance to put huge restraints on any Chinese military action. “Put simply, distance is Australia’s single biggest defence asset,” Roggeveen says, reminding his readers that Beijing is closer to London than to Sydney. That distance is invariably played down in the Australian defence debate in favour of a view that Australia is on the front line of military competition with China, or on China’s doorstep.

Australia should invest in forces that can punish and repel any antagonist who comes close — an antagonist gaining a military base in the Pacific islands, for example — but not attempt to project power any further. In other words, no capabilities aimed explicitly at hitting Chinese territory. Submarines, yes, long-range air power, yes, some missiles, yes, a lot of troops for restoring peace or providing disaster relief in the region, yes — but no heavily armoured army. Backing these capabilities would be hardened military bases, stockpiles of fuel and strategic materials, and deeper protection against cyberattack and other “grey” threats.

This is the “echidna strategy” of the book’s title — a version of which Roggeveen suggests for the defence of Taiwan. (He doesn’t favour a simple surrender of this democracy, and perhaps could have made this clearer.) It is essentially a strategy of denial.

“[This means] we are essentially planning to inflict the bare minimum damage on China so that we can persuade Beijing to stop but not give it a reason to hit us even harder,” Roggeveen says. It may not be heroic, “but such is the lot of a middle power when facing a great power. The alternative, which we are now pursuing, is a defence strategy which incentivises China to pay more military attention to us.”

Roggeveen does explore the ultimate defensive spike — nuclear weapons for Australia — but concludes that as nuclear weapons haven’t been used against non-nuclear adversaries since 1945, the chances of China raising the stakes that far against a much smaller, distant power are slim enough to discount.

But this doesn’t mean Australia should withdraw into a ball like a threatened echidna. It should be ambitious, but by using diplomacy and defence support. The focus should be Indonesia, the only emerging big power in the most contestable region around China capable of pushing back against the Chinese. “All the threat inflation, all the fever dreams conjured by our security pundits about China’s military threat to Australia — we are at risk of being surrounded; there is danger on our doorstep — would suddenly become real if Indonesia was ever hostile towards Australia.”

Then there is preserving Australia’s sphere of influence in the Pacific by doing more: more aid, more infrastructure, more investment, more labour mobility, more diplomacy and more defence cooperation. Though the smaller nations might be reluctant to surrender their China leverage, a European Union–style economic and political pact could cement island relations with Australia and New Zealand, with free trade, open borders, shared services, a regional airline and perhaps even a regional bank with a single currency.

This initiative could build on Roggeveen’s argument for a doubling of the Australian population to create a bigger economic base. With Papua New Guinea’s population now put tentatively at 11.8 million, and another three million or so in the other Pacific island nations, the region is there for us all to bulk up.

Roggeveen also puts the case for strong regional organisations. Not the Quad so much — its members are too dispersed, too divergent and too invested in China to agree to a NATO-style common defence, or even to explicitly mention China — but the much-derided Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its appendages. Instead of being disappointed about what ASEAN fails to do, we should look at what it’s been able to prevent — namely, wars between its members.

The Albanese government might sincerely believe in AUKUS, or it might be using it to help gain time in office in the expectation it will collapse on someone else’s watch. Either way, this book from such a seasoned and centrally placed figure in the defence and foreign policy sphere shows that our national future is being decided in panic and haste. •

The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace
By Sam Roggeveen | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $32.99 | 232 pages

The post Spiky questions about the US alliance appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the US-supported president Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the economy has shrunk by 20 per cent or more. Around twenty million people are short of food, and an estimated 3.2 million children are malnourished. Some rural people are reportedly selling organs or even children for cash to survive. Others have streamed into relief camps near provincial capitals for meagre rations.

For its part, the Taliban leadership seems less focused on dealing with this crisis than applying its interpretation of sharia law to social behaviour. It bears down chiefly on women and girls, restricting or even stopping their access to work and education or movement outside the home.

Behaviour like this is the reason the world hangs back from helping the country recover from war. Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran and Qatar have kept their embassies running in Kabul, and India rejoined them in August last year. But none of those countries has formally recognised the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, and nor has any other Muslim-majority country. Australia and other Western countries maintain cautious communication with the Taliban through diplomatic posts in Qatar, and in the United States’ case through occasional fly-ins or third-country meetings.

Around US$9 billion of the former regime’s foreign funds have been frozen by the United States, several European countries and the United Arab Emirates. After seventy top economists, including Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, urged president Joe Biden last August to let the Afghan central bank tap the reserves — and stop the “collective punishment” of the Afghan people — the United States set up a foundation in Switzerland to allocate half of the reserves in American banks (US$3.5 billion) to pay for humanitarian supplies and electricity from Central Asian neighbours.

But what more can and should the outside world do to alleviate the suffering and starvation of the Afghan people — and beyond that, influence the Taliban towards the more inclusive interpretations of Islam, especially in the treatment of women and religious minorities, that apply in so many other Muslim nations?

In The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left Pakistani-American scholar Hassan Abbas suggests that the immediate prospects for reform in Afghanistan are not great, but that the West must try anyway.

He opens his book by describing how contact between the Taliban and the United States in Qatar from 2012 first acquainted Western officials with some of the figures who were destined to emerge in top positions in the new emirate. After Donald Trump became president in early 2017, this contact developed into negotiations for a US withdrawal.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat of Afghan origin, was appointed leader of the American team, and in January 2019 he was cleared by secretary of state Mike Pompeo to offer a drawdown of US forces to zero. In July that year, Trump imposed a nine-month deadline for an agreement. With no gains to show from pulling out of the Iran nuclear pact and talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump needed a deal before the 2020 election.

The Taliban persuaded the Americans to agree on a complete pull-out, including from the huge Bagram air base near Kabul. In return they promised that Afghanistan would not become a base for terrorist attacks on the United States or its allies, and that US forces and their local helpers could withdraw without harassment. Rather less firmly, they also pledged to enter power-sharing dialogue with Ashraf Ghani, and to look after Shia and Hazara minorities and allow female education.

Trump got his peace deal in February 2020, though it was signed in Doha rather than, as he’d hoped, at Camp David near Washington. He overruled Ghani’s objection to the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners as part of the deal. With withdrawal by May 2021 pledged, the Taliban suspended action against American forces and concentrated instead on attacking Kabul’s army. By the time Biden formed his administration, Taliban fighters controlled most of the provinces and were closing in on Kabul. Ghani dithered and postured, losing any opportunity to bargain.

Biden decided not to abandon Trump’s agreement, though he shifted the final departure date to 11 September 2021, exactly two decades after the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan-based al Qaeda. After a trillion dollars, 2448 Americans killed, 20,722 wounded and many more traumatised, Biden said, a changed outcome was highly unlikely even if America stayed another hundred years.

The reality, says Abbas, is that “the Taliban outlasted the Americans.” Afghans were disabused of any faith that the West and their favoured Kabul politicians would save them. “The glorious myth of the ability of foreign intervention to install a democratic order” was comprehensively debunked.

Parallel with the negotiations in Doha, the Taliban were undergoing successive leadership changes. In tracking these shifts, Abbas give us important insight into the make-up and views of the men now in charge of Afghanistan.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive but charismatic Ameer ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful) during the Taliban’s first spell of government in the 1990s, resurrected the movement after it was ousted by the Americans and the Northern Alliance in late 2001. Around 1995, he had boldly entered a museum in Kandahar, the country’s second city, taken out a rarely seen cloak said to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad, and put it on before an amazed and adoring crowd.

In 2013, a little over a decade into the new insurgency, Omar became ill and died in a Karachi hospital. His death was kept secret by the Taliban and their mentors in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, while succession plans proceeded. The natural successor might have been Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Omar’s young brother-in-law, but he was viewed with suspicion by the ISI because he’d opened contact with a brother of Mohammed Karzai, the then US-backed president in Kabul. He was also out of the picture: the ISI had arrested and jailed him in 2010.

In his absence, Mullah Akhtar Mansour was proclaimed the new emir in 2015. A mullah though he was, he was known for his worldly appetites, heading frequently to the Gulf to “buy perfume” — in other words, enjoy Russian sex workers — and hosting Gulf sheikhs for falcon-hunting. It was under his leadership that the Taliban made their first breakthrough in Afghanistan’s north, seizing the city of Kunduz.

Mansour’s term as emir ended when an American drone strike killed him on the road back to Quetta, his Pakistani hideout, after a stay in Iran. The ISI helped target him, Abbas says, so that US forces struck him on the road, rather than at a tea-stand halt, to avoid civilian casualties. With this “help” from the ISI the United States may have lost an emir more inclined to deal with Kabul.

Succession came down to one of Mansour’s two appointed deputies. The victor, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, then fifty-five, was one of the few mullahs who actually knew the Qur’an and hadiths (sayings of the Prophet), though his interpretations diverged from those of most Muslims elsewhere. Apparently strict and calm, Abbas reports, even now he doesn’t know how to use a mobile phone.

Hibatullah retained Mansour’s other deputy, Sirajuddin (or Siraj) Haqqani, a military commander regarded by US intelligence as an ISI asset, who to this day has a US$10 million bounty on his head. One of Omar’s sons, twenty-six-year-old Mullah Yaqoob, was added as second deputy. Baradar, added as a third deputy in 2018 after his release by the Pakistanis at Washington’s request, was soon assigned to the Doha negotiations.

Two years after its return to Kabul, the new Taliban emirate has two centres of power. Hibatullah resides in Kandahar, surrounded by equally conservative mullahs in a council known as the Rahbari Shura. This is the ultimate power centre, akin to the supreme theocratic figure in Iran.

The other centre is the government in Kabul. Unlike its counterpart in Tehran, it isn’t the product of any form of popular election. Its most powerful figures are Siraj Haqqani and Yaqoob, who seized the interior and defence ministries respectively in August 2021 and remain entrenched there.

The prime ministership went to a seventy-year-old mullah, Mohammad Hassan Akhund, regarded as safe hands by Hibatullah. The important qualifications for the job, according to Abbas, were being in Pakistan’s good books, having been in the Taliban councils in Peshawar or Quetta shura and, having studied at the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, being of like mind with Hibatullah.

Akhund heads a cabinet of mostly Pushtun conservatives, nearly half of whom are on a UN terrorism blacklist. His government did become a little more diverse when deputy ministers were added, notably deputy economics minister Abdul Latif Nazari, a member of the Hazara ethnic minority who holds a PhD in political science, and deputy health minister Hassan Ghyasi, a medical doctor who is also Hazara.

From the time of the Doha peace agreement until their first weeks after entering Kabul, the Taliban purported to have changed since the 1990s, when women were forced into the all-enveloping burqa, and executions and amputations conducted in public were substituted for sport. Siraj Haqqani even told readers of the New York Times in February 2020 that “killing and maiming must stop,” that the Taliban would work for a new inclusive political system, and that women would have the “right to work” and the “right to education.”

There have been glimmers of progress since the takeover. Taliban fighters guard the Shia minority’s mosques and festivals. Women in the cities wear headscarves, as they would anyway, rather than the burqa, and women have been appointed heads of maternity hospitals and gynaecological schools. A contest to head the Afghan Cricket Board became a “fistfight,” suggesting that attitudes towards sport had changed from when the first Taliban regime expelled the Pakistan soccer team with shaven heads for wearing shorts on the field. Hibatullah has also issued a fatwa against forced marriage and the disinheritance of widows.

Mobile phones and social media are allowed. Indeed, Taliban spokesmen have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. With seven million Afghans using the internet — “a necessity of the people,” one minister has said — the regime accepts that this particular tide of modernity can’t be ordered back. A new 100,000-strong regular army and a 140,000-strong police force, many with shaven faces, have been formed. Foreign correspondents are allowed to stay in Kabul, and often get interviews with government figures.

Yet if the promises on taking Kabul seemed too good to be true, that’s because they were, according to Abbas. In December 2021 women were told they must be accompanied by a male relative when travelling medium to long distances. Girls’ schools for grade six (age eleven) and above were subsequently closed.

In June last year, a book by chief justice Mullah Abdul Hakim (with a foreword by ) emphasised the absolute authority of the emir, and entertains no notion of a representative mechanism. Modern (non-religious) education was causing all the country’s problems, he wrote, so education had to be inherently religious. Women could only be wives and mothers, and their intellectual inferiority meant they could never be the emir. They had to be taught at home by family members, and must never study alongside men; if they had to leave the house, the teacher must be a woman.

In October, a government guidance said girls shouldn’t take college entrance exams for subjects like economics, engineering, agriculture, geology and journalism, which were deemed “too difficult.”

Abbas sees two minds at war here, with the conservative clerics advising so far prevailing, to the dismay of more progressive elements. It doesn’t help that some Western media call this “a return to traditional Islam” — it isn’t, he says. The Taliban “routinely mix up their tribal norms with Islam” instead of following sayings of the Prophet such as “Education is incumbent on every boy and girl.” Once again, women are the victims of war, Abbas writes. “They have become the bargaining chip, their liberties the sacrifice.”

And what of the Taliban’s other promises?

On security, the main terror threat comes from the regional branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State in Khorasan. Its suicide bombing amid the crowds outside Kabul’s airport on 26 August 2021 killed 170 Afghans and thirteen American soldiers, and it has also targeted the Shia and Hazara minorities where it can. The Taliban are said to be seeking aid from the Americans, including signals intelligence, to fight the ISK; outflanked in extremism, it worries that its now-idle fighters might gravitate to the radical group.

But old Taliban friendships persist. In July last year, a CIA drone strike killed the visiting al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul residence where he was apparently a guest of interior minister Siraj Haqqani. The muted response of the government showed its embarrassment.

While the ISK, with its many foreign members, might struggle in Afghanistan, a worsening security problem is blowing back on the Taliban’s old puppet-masters in Pakistan. A wave of terror bombings by the Taliban’s counterpart, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, is aiming to establish an even purer (to its mind) form of Islamic rule in the country whose name means “Land of the Pure.”

As for inclusion, the Taliban resisted bringing figures from the former US-backed government into even symbolic roles. But Hamid Karzai, the former president, and Abdullah Abdullah, a former chief minister, continue to live in Kabul. The Hazara ethnic minority fares better than during the first Taliban period, when they were victims of a genocide that saw desperate journeys to foreign asylum — some to Australia by boat — but Abbas notes Hazara lands reportedly being taken by Pashtuns and Hazara being excluded from relief supplies.

Economic stringency is affecting the Taliban as well, and helping moderate figures. Baradar has come back into the picture as head of economic policy with oversight of the finance ministry. Though not an economist, his Doha background makes him best suited to approach foreign partners and donors.

Another frontman is a foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, who grew up in New Zealand, speaks fluent English and may be a son-in-law of the late emir Mansour. As part of this effort to improve their image abroad, the Taliban have invited foreign correspondents to witness the drive against opium cultivation.

Overall, Abbas says it’s too early to declare that anything resembling a “New Taliban” has arrived. The regime is a toxic mix of “religion gone sour,” patriarchy, tribalism, nationalism and ethnic rivalry — all surrounded by baleful geopolitical rivalries: Saudi Arabia vs Turkey vs Iran; India vs Pakistan; the United Arab Emirates vs Qatar. But change might happen over the next five years as the Omar-era old guard retires.

This is very much an interim book, breezily written, more journalistic than academic, with necessarily vague attributions to the Taliban, diplomatic, intelligence and army figures whom Abbas quotes. It is strong on the who, how and where, less so on the “why.” The explanation of the Taliban’s theology derived from the Deoband school in Northern India could be a lot clearer: Abbas assumes a knowledge of the Salafi and Wahhabi purist schools originating in the Arab world in making a distinction about the Taliban.

But Abbas does buttress his contention that holding back doesn’t help anyone. The Taliban are the de facto government, and the West recognises regimes with equally atrocious human rights records elsewhere. Distinguishing between engagement and endorsement, Abbas argues that only through “creative engagement” can the Taliban be influenced effectively. He concludes: “Not engaging is going to support the view of hardliners that the world is against them — and consequently they will rise further within the organisation.” •

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left
By Hassan Abbas | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 305 pages

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US president Joe Biden had rushed back to Washington from the G7 summit in Hiroshima to negotiate a debt-ceiling deal with Congress. Otherwise he would have joined Modi, Albanese and Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida in Sydney for a meeting of the Quad, that relatively new grouping seen in American and Australian circles as a way of countering the two Asian countries’ diffidence about lining up against China. (Japan’s diffidence reflects its post-1945 constitution’s bar on non-defensive use of force, India’s its longstanding non-alignment doctrine.)

But what if the Quad instead became a forum for Japan and India to enlist Australia’s help in persuading Washington to give China some space? Just such a proposal is put forward in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads: A Japanese Strategy for Peace and Sustainable Prosperity,” a paper published in Tokyo at the end of July.

The paper comes not from familiar members of Japan’s left but from Japanese scholars and a South Korean co-author who mostly gained their doctorates in the United States. The two lead authors, Mike Mochizuki and Kuniko Ashizawa, are professors at George Washington University in the American capital.

In essence, the paper argues that Japan should lead a “middle power” effort to lower tensions in Asia. “As part of its middle power diplomacy,” the scholars write, “Japan could also build on the Quad… and take the lead in promoting a ‘middle power coalition’ among Japan, Australia, and India, and thus lead the agenda-setting of the Quad.”

The coalition could then be extended to include other middle powers in the region, including South Korea and the ASEAN countries: “In this process, it would be effective to envision a ‘middle power quad’ by inviting South Korea to join the Japan–Australia–India coalition. By building on its partnerships with middle powers in Asia and in Europe, Japan should vigorously engage China to stabilise bilateral relations as well as to cooperate on pressing transnational challenges.”

The paper’s critique and proposals may upset comfortable assumptions in Washington and Canberra. “Rather [than] being solely dependent on the United States,” it says, “Japan needs a more autonomous foreign policy — what might be called a ‘pro-American, autonomous diplomacy.’” Instead of being “self-righteous” about values-oriented foreign policy, Japan should respect political diversity and promote peaceful coexistence, resisting efforts to divide Asia into a struggle between democracies and autocracies.

This vision is offered as a counterpoint to the concept of the “Indo-Pacific” — a formulation developed by Canberra pundits and adopted by the United States — which “diminishes the importance of continental Asia and suggests a regional orientation designed to counter and even contain China.”

The authors see the National Security Strategy announced by Prime Minister Kishida in December as a “180-degree turnaround” from longstanding Japanese defence policy. It included a doubling of defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP and an arsenal of new Tomahawk cruise missiles designed to strike back at China and North Korea. Commenting on the counterstrike capabilities of the missiles, they argue that “what would only be of tactical use during a military conflict is recklessly justified from the logic of strategic deterrence.”

Rather than treating Australia as Japan’s most important partner in middle-power diplomacy, the authors turn to South Korea: an established democracy and developed economy (one of the world’s ten largest) with per capita income equal to or exceeding Japan’s.

“Both countries [Japan and South Korea] are close allies of the United States; and they both see North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as acute threats and are concerned about China’s military build-up and coercive behaviour,” says the paper. “But at the same time, they share a deep interest in preventing a military conflict in East Asia that would have devastating consequences for both countries; and they want to maintain close and stable economic relations with China, which is their largest trading partner. In short, both Japan and South Korea desire an Asia that is not divided into two conflicting camps and would prefer a region that is open and inclusive.”

The scholars believe the new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the trade, investment and data pact Australia and Japan pressed ahead with after Donald Trump withdrew the United States — should be opened to simultaneous admission to both China, once it meets its qualifications, and Taiwan.

The paper’s authors aren’t arguing for an unarmed Japan. But they fear that conflict over Taiwan would have a devastating impact on Japan, probably as a result of Chinese attacks on US bases there. They agree that the United States must show it could beat off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Japan can best contribute to this deterrence by denial by improving the resilience and survivability of US and Japanese defence assets in Japan and by strengthening Japan’s own capabilities to defend its own territory, especially its southwest island chain that is close to Taiwan.”

The key point is that the capacity to strike Chinese military targets on the mainland with missiles would not add greatly to deterrence, since China has too many targets and could rain fire back on a more compact Japan.

While the Biden administration has recently emphasised that America’s “One China” policy hasn’t changed, calls by Congress members and former officials to drop the policy, extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan and defend Taiwan unconditionally are “especially provocative” and have raised the danger of conflict over Taiwan.

Japan’s aim “should be to maintain the conditions for preserving the status quo until the day comes when China and Taiwan can find a peaceful solution to the issue of unification,” the scholars urge, adding: “Moreover, Japan should not base its policies on forecasts of imminent military conflict or Chinese purported deadlines on unification and should not support the drawing of various ‘redlines.’”

The proposals in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” are likely to be welcomed by those senior figures in Australia’s foreign affairs and strategic circles — mostly out of government positions now — who criticise an increasingly security-oriented approach to Asia, along with our tightening “interoperability” with US forces and an apparent concurrence in US primacy.

They also chime with the kind of ideas the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was putting forward in opposition, which have been submerged by the unequivocal embrace of the AUKUS agreement on nuclear-powered submarines and advanced technologies.

Some of Kishida’s December proposals are similar to contentious Australian moves by Scott Morrison and now Anthony Albanese. Notable among these are a closer commitment to the defence of Taiwan and general alliance war-fighting capability, and the acquisition of 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawks and other missiles to strike back at China. The difference here is that Australia’s missiles would have to be fired from submarines, ships or aircraft some thousands of kilometres away from Australia.

The key question is: how much influence will “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” have in Japan? The answer is not much, at least immediately. The paper was published two days before Japan’s defence ministry, the Self-Defence Agency, came out with a new white paper that, as defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said, “explains how we will drastically reinforce our defence capabilities.”

On Taiwan, the white paper doesn’t go as far as Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party predecessors — Shinzo Abe said a Taiwan conflict would be an “emergency” for Japan and Taro Aso suggested Japan could join Taiwan’s defence — but it strongly supports the “counterstrike” capability in case Japan comes under fire.

Still, the yearning for peace in Japan, ingrained since the wartime US firebombing and atomic attacks on its cities, will act as a political brake on rearmament and assertive power play. Despite the belligerent drift in Chinese security policy since 2012 under Xi Jinping, the notion of an underlying Asian affinity also remains.

That notion last surfaced in 2009 when a splinter of the Liberal Democratic Party called the Democratic Party of Japan, led by former LDP politician Yukio Hatoyama, swept into power, interrupting near-unbroken LDP rule since the end of the Allied occupation in 1952. The foreign policies of the incoming government so concerned Washington that US secretary of state Hillary Clinton handed Japan policy to the Pentagon. (One of the authors of “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads,” Kiyoshi Sugawa, was an adviser in the Democratic Party government.)

Three years later, with the Democratic Party in disarray, the LDP was back under Shinzo Abe, who set about turning Japan into a militarily “normal” state.

Yet the LDP’s Kishida has gone part of the way in the direction proposed in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” by rescuing Japan’s relations with Seoul from the plunge under Shinzo Abe over South Korean grievances dating from Japan’s 1910–45 annexation of that country. Helped by South Korea’s election last year of a more conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and stepped-up missile testing and nuclear threats by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Kishida has developed a warmer partnership on several fronts, including defence.

In June, he also announced plans to expand staff in Japan’s foreign ministry to 8000 by 2030, a 20 per cent increase on current levels, in order to step up Japan’s engagement with the world, especially Asia, and counter China’s influence. While most reporting focused on China’s 7 per cent increase in defence spending this year, Beijing also said it was spending 12.2 per cent more on its diplomacy.

In Australia, meanwhile, the military brass section still dominates the foreign policy orchestra. The latest formal talks between Australian and US foreign and defence ministers, in Brisbane on 28–29 July, will have pleased China hawks and made critics of the alliance drift grind their teeth. In the background, some 30,000 American, Australian and allied defence personnel were engaged in the biannual Talisman Sabre war games.

Australia will be hosting more US forces, manufacturing missiles for both countries in two years, somehow getting hold of its US nuclear submarines despite problems in the US Congress, and — mentioned only vaguely — becoming more deeply involved in US space warfare capability. Albanese is out to pre-empt any criticism at the upcoming Australian Labor Party national conference in Brisbane.

The growing closeness to Washington has so far earned Labor no evident traction in getting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange free of US efforts to extradite and charge him under its espionage law.

Some sign of a resurgence in the influence of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came in April, when the government’s Defence Strategic Review recommended that it “be appropriately resourced to lead a nationally determined and strategically directed whole-of-government statecraft effort in the Indo-Pacific.” And glimmers of Foreign Affairs influence were evident when Albanese stressed the importance of diplomacy as well as deterrence and the need for “guardrails” to avoid conflict, and praised Biden for talking to China, at the annual Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore in early June.

But Foreign Affairs still seems undernourished for a more central role. A departmental spokesperson tells me that “work is under way across agencies to implement the government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review,” but evidence Foreign Affairs is still a supporting act to Defence can be seen in one of its latest budget allocations: $52.7 million over two years from 2023–24 “to provide international policy advice and diplomatic support for the nuclear-powered submarine program.”

The sophisticated debate in Japan and India’s ambivalence about deeper military ties under the Quad (including its late withdrawal from the Talisman Sabre exercise) indicates the department has much work to do in guiding its political masters around this complicated region. And if Donald Trump does return to the White House, the idea of Japan, India and Australia using the Quad to handle America might not be so far-fetched. •

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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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That firepower wasn’t enough. In a succinct summary of his judgement yesterday, Justice Anthony Besanko found that three newspapers — all of them part of the Fairfax group at the time — and their journalists had established the “substantial truth” of their reports that Roberts-Smith had murdered and assaulted unarmed Afghan prisoners. A Victoria Cross–winning war hero was instantly labelled a war criminal.

Notably, Justice Besanko accepted as true the report that Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed and handcuffed captive, Ali Jan, backwards off a cliff and then ordered a subordinate soldier to shoot him dead. Further details will emerge when the full 1000-page judgement is published on 5 June. A further fifty pages containing sensitive national security details goes to a more select readership.

What next? Roberts-Smith remains a free man. The defamation case was not a criminal trial. A judge finding substantial truth on the balance of evidence in a civil trial is not the same as a judge or jury finding guilt beyond reasonable doubt in a criminal case, as some of Roberts-Smith’s former colleagues in the Special Air Service Regiment were quick to point out.

The Seven Network — whose owner Kerry Stokes paid for Roberts-Smith’s legal expenses over 110 days of hearings as well as those of some supporting witnesses — has said Roberts-Smith continues in his job of managing the network in Queensland, though on leave, pending review.

Lead counsel Arthur Moses SC asked for and received stay of judgement to consider an appeal. An estimated $25 million has already been spent by the two sides; whether Stokes wants to put up more of his money remains to be seen. The defence side will seek to claim its share of this from Roberts-Smith and “third parties” (entities controlled by Stokes). So the Perth-based magnate could be up for most of the legal bill.

Will he quit or double down? If an appeal does proceed, it could delay a final resolution of the civil action for another year or more.

Watching it all closely will be the Office of the Special Investigator, or OSI, the war crimes unit that was revealed during the trial to be examining Roberts-Smith’s actions in Afghanistan. Will an appeal be an obstacle for the OSI if it is thinking of a move against the former soldier?

The OSI was set up after the defence force inspector-general, Justice Paul Brereton, found “credible” evidence that twenty-five current or former special forces personnel participated in the unlawful killing of thirty-nine individuals and the cruel treatment of two others during the Australian army’s deployment in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. Where the evidence justified it, the OSI was charged with launching prosecutions.

Under a former secretary of the federal attorney-general’s department, Chris Moraitis, and with former Victorian Supreme Court justice Mark Weinberg as special investigator, the office has a powerful array of federal police and legal investigators hard at work. Its first fusillade came in March, when a former SAS soldier, Oliver Schulz, became the first Australian serviceman or veteran to be charged with the war crime of murder, in his case for the alleged killing of an Afghan man in Uruzgan province in 2012. Schulz, who was given bail, is expected to be tried next year or in 2025.

Some other governments that fought in Afghanistan, including Britain and Belgium, are believed to be closely studying the Australian model. The OSI has also opened a close liaison with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, an important move because Australia, as a signatory to the Rome Statute setting up that tribunal, must show it is vigorously investigating and prosecuting any war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by its own armed personnel or citizens. Otherwise, the ICC is entitled to launch cases itself, with Australia having to hand over the suspects.

We also now know that the United States warned Canberra in early 2021 — via a US embassy defence attaché to Australian defence force chief General Angus Campbell — that the human rights violations detailed in the Brereton report might oblige the US military to suspend cooperation with Australian special forces under US legislation known as the Leahy Amendment.

Some might find this threat a bit rich given the United States’ counterinsurgency record and the character of some local forces it has sponsored, but the American military for many years cut contact with the Indonesian special forces, Kopassus, over its killings and abductions of government critics. That Australia now risked being tarred with the same brush must have been a shock.

With the Americans watching and Brereton having found credible evidence of specific war crimes, the Morrison government had little choice but to follow the judge’s recommendation for a formal criminal investigation. Now, with a federal judge finding “substantial truth” in the allegations against Roberts-Smith, the current government has added interest in the OSI’s work.

A finding for Roberts-Smith would have been a strong warning light for the OSI. The light has turned green, though the OSI would need to feel confident it has the high standard of proof required for a successful prosecution. It must be encouraged by the fact that former members of the tight-knit SAS have moved from being anonymous sources for the Fairfax journalists to protected and indemnified witnesses for Brereton, and then to in-camera sworn witnesses before Justice Besanko.

That these soldiers have risked ostracism to testify does, to a large extent, save the “honour of the regiment” for the SAS. Since Brereton, the unit has also been intensively retrained in the rules of war. The warped command system described by Brereton, whereby seasoned non-commissioned officers came to overawe both the younger lieutenants and the captains above them, has also been tackled.

But the question of responsibility doesn’t end with the soldiers committing the alleged offences. Fellow soldiers didn’t come forward. Officers failed to monitor their soldiers closely, signed off on falsified reports of enemy encounters, or implicitly condoned the practice of planting “throwdowns” (weapons or radio sets) on the bodies of killed civilians.

One of the most sickening allegations against Roberts-Smith was that he murdered a one-legged Afghan man and took his prosthetic leg back to base as a war trophy. In an unauthorised bar on the main Australian army base in Uruzgan known as the “Fat Ladies Arms,” Roberts-Smith and other soldiers used this leg as a beer-drinking horn.

The existence of this bar, flouting the rules against alcohol on operations, can hardly have escaped the attention of any of the officers or non-commissioned officers running the operation. That this breach of orders was tolerated perhaps shows the leeway afforded the SAS troops.

In the wake of the Brereton report, at least two serving or retired generals tried to hand in medals won as commanders in Afghanistan but were asked to hold off. ADF chief Angus Campbell’s decision to withdraw the unit citation from special forces personnel who’d served in Afghanistan was overruled by Peter Dutton as defence minister.

This week in Senate hearings, Campbell said a review handed to defence minister Richard Marles two weeks ago had considered whether “a small number of persons who held command appointments” should lose medals or honours. Campbell himself was commander of the Middle East task force covering Afghanistan in 2011–12, regularly visiting Australian troops in the field from his base in the United Arab Emirates, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role. Pushed by independent senator Jacqui Lambie, a soldier for ten years, Campbell said he was himself included in the review.

A wider responsibility rests on the political leaders and policy advisers who sent soldiers into an unwinnable conflict in which forty-one would be killed and many more injured, and after which dozens would commit suicide and others, partly for want of control and discipline, seem likely to face imprisonment.

Kim Beazley, newly appointed chair of the Australian War Memorial council, faces some immediate challenges. Two of his predecessors — Kerry Stokes and former defence minister Brendan Nelson, who appeared as a character witness for Roberts-Smith — left an unexploded bomb: an exhibit of Roberts-Smith’s combat gear and material extolling his heroism.

It may be tempting to simply remove the display. But rather than a historical airbrush, an exhibit about the Brereton inquiry and the OSI might better suit the times. Even Charles Bean, the AWM’s founder, included the 1918 rampage in 1918 by Anzac troops against Palestinians at Surafend in his official history of the first world war.

A sad reminder that the whole operation was never really about the Afghans came when the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade withdrew its embassy from Kabul at the first sign of US withdrawal, two months before the city fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Thousands of Afghans who had worked with Australian forces or agencies were left at risk of vengeance.

This week Australia’s former inspector-general of intelligence and security, Vivienne Thom, reported on their plight to the government. Responding, ministers including Marles, foreign minister Penny Wong and attorney-general Mark Dreyfus blamed the Morrison government and said criteria for asylum would be expanded. But Afghans have been given only until the end of November to apply — how they would do that in the absence of an embassy is unclear — and the program will close at the end of May next year.

Brereton’s recommendation that Canberra not wait for the end of investigations and trials to pay compensation to Afghan victims and bereaved families was put in the too-hard basket eight months later when the Taliban took Kabul.

The dust of Uruzgan, as sung about the Australian diplomat who performs under the name Fred Smith, will keep blowing in. •

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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

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The deal developed by the RAN’s vice-admiral Jonathan Mead and his project team, and accepted by the Albanese cabinet, is like a boy given carte blanche in a toy shop: we’ll have three to five of the US-model Virginia-class subs; then eight or more of the British follow-on to the existing Astute-class, to be built in Adelaide.

Albanese insists that Australian “sovereignty” will be paramount. But until 2033 or so, Australia will be protected in large part by US Navy and Royal Navy nuclear submarines patrolling out of the RAN’s Cockburn Sound base near Perth. The base will be expanded at a cost of $1 billion to accommodate them.

Only in 2033 will the RAN get its first nuclear-powered submarine, a Virginia-class boat transferred from the United States. It is unclear whether this — or the next two, three or four subs — will be new or second-hand. That will depend on how quickly the two US shipyards building the Virginia-class can ramp up production beyond the two per year demanded by the US Navy and concerned members of the US Congress.

To this end, Biden is asking Congress for US$4.6 billion. Canberra will be putting in A$3 billion, with a bit of that going to the British submarine yard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Rather than building new slipways, the extra capacity will be created by introducing a nightshift at the American yards. With US unemployment at a record low and the yards paying somewhat miserly wages to new staff, that might be hard to achieve. Australia is also hoping to rotate workers from Adelaide into the US and British yards to gain experience.

American experts think the transferred submarines will be second-hand, probably from the third and fourth production “blocks” commissioned since 2014. This means some will have as few as fourteen years remaining of their thirty-three-year reactor life when they are transferred in 2033 and beyond.

The price tag is put at somewhere between A$268 billion and A$368 billion over thirty years. The government insists that the initial $9 billion, over the next four years, won’t be felt at all: it will be met by $6 billion that would otherwise have gone to the cancelled French conventional submarines and $3 billion carved out of other defence programs. Expect protests over the latter, especially from the army, which is likely to see its heavy armour cut back.

The San Diego announcement by the three leaders has been greeted by a display of bipartisanship. The Coalition claims AUKUS as its own initiative, under the helmsmanship of Scott Morrison. But once it comes to finding the money — likely to be equivalent to 0.15 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product each year — the bipartisanship will start to fray.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has already nobly offered to support cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care to fit the bill. Expect some in Labor and the crossbenches to suggest the stage-three tax cuts and the capital gains tax discount are fairer sacrifices. What better excuse than national security and the Chinese peril for breaking election promises?

The biggest loser in the short term is South Australia. It is left with only the two-year-long refurbishments of the RAN’s Collins-class conventional submarines, one by one from 2026, when the first boat, the HMAS Collins, reaches thirty years in service.

Further work depends on progress in the joint British, US and Australian design work on the Astute-class follow-on submarine, known as the SSN-AUKUS. If it is ready to build, the first steel will be cut and laid down in the early 2030s and the first submarine commissioned in the early 2040s, with the rest to follow into the late 2050s. It is unclear whether the US will build some of these AUKUS submarines for itself, or continue developing the Virginia-class successor, known as the SSN (X).

BAE Systems has taken nine to eleven years to complete each of the seven Astutes for the Royal Navy, as against just under seven years for the American yards to turn out a Virginia-class boat. That relative slowness has already given rise to doubts about the promised schedule and cost of what is an entirely new design.

“Defence does not have a strong record in this area and the navy in particular has struggled to maintain design discipline,” Peter Dean, a professor and defence expert at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, wrote in the Nine papers. “Constant design changes have slowed projects, frustrated industry and blown out budgets,” Dean went on.

BAE Systems is also running the $45 billion program for nine Hunter-class frigates. They were originally priced at $30 billion, and the first was supposed to be laid down in Adelaide last year but work has not yet commenced. The frigate “was supposed to bring synergies by sharing the design between the UK, Canada and Australia,” wrote Dean. “But this project has blown out the budget, hit delays and fractured its initial approach as the design has constantly been modified, raising concerns about its viability.”

Former Coalition foreign minister Alexander Downer, for one, thinks the 40 per cent cost savings of building the SSN-AUKUS submarines overseas rather than in Adelaide will be tempting for a future government. “Assuming South Australia’s relative decline in its share of the national population will continue,” Downer wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week, “federal governments will become less concerned about holding a diminishing number of seats in South Australia and more concerned about how they’re going to pay for their other expensive and right-on plans.”

It’s tough, but Adelaide has declined the chance of sending a fourth generation of the Downer dynasty to Canberra.

Cameron Stewart, a former defence signals analyst who is now one of the Australian’s best strategic commentators, thinks it could go further than this, and Rishi Sunak or his successor could be in for the kind of treatment Morrison meted out to France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The decision to go for the British design is “madness,” he wrote. “After Australia has done all of the very hard work — overcoming the regulations, the red tape, the export control, the politics — in securing a system whereby we can acquire three to five Virginia-class submarines from Washington, it gives it all up. For what? To help build from scratch in Adelaide a completely separate next-generation British designed nuclear-powered submarine.”

“This all but guarantees a future nightmare of massive delays, development risk, price blow-outs and schedule nightmares — everything that we see on every first-of-type submarine project around the world,” Stewart went on. It would be better just to keep on acquiring Virginia-class submarines rather than making a “needless U-turn” to keep Adelaide and the British happy.

The long schedule at least means that if the balloon goes up over Taiwan — as feared within the next three years by the hawkish thinkers recently assembled by the Nine papers in their “Red Alert” series — conflict between the United States and China will happen without us being able to do much about it, nor China paying us much attention.

We still await a formal statement to parliament and the Australian people outlining why we need these very large submarines with the capability to cruise to China’s nearby waters and bombard it with cruise missiles. Defence of the archipelagic approaches to Australia will be left to smaller, silent conventional submarines: our own Collins-class for a while and then perhaps with some help from the Indonesian, Singaporean and Vietnamese navies. •

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Canberra scholar James Cotton takes us back to those years in his new book, The Australians at Geneva, introducing us to a real-life group of talented people who worked in Geneva with the League and the associated International Labour Organization. He shows us how Australia’s role in world affairs evolved from the crass nationalism of prime minister Billy Hughes at the Versailles peace talks and in the years immediately after the first world war (“Who cares what the world thinks!”) to the ambitious internationalism of H.V. Evatt at the San Francisco conference after the second.

And what an array of Australian talent it was, working as League and ILO officials, support staff, visiting delegates to assembly sessions, and members of interest groups. As Cotton writes, “Geneva was Australia’s school for internationalism.”

Whether Hughes liked it or not, Australia had no choice but to engage with the League. At the insistence of American president Woodrow Wilson, colonies captured from the Germans and the Italians during the war had not been annexed to the victors, but were instead granted as League of Nations mandates, with sometimes tough conditions attached.

Australia was let off lightly, gaining relatively strings-free control of German New Guinea and Nauru. The government in Canberra wasn’t expected to grant early independence to either territory, or to open up two-way migration and trade.

But the Australian mandates didn’t altogether escape scrutiny. Why had a surplus in New Guinea’s public accounts been sent to Canberra rather than invested locally, came a query from Geneva. Why were workers in Rabaul on strike? How come explorer Mick Leahy was happily writing about shooting thirty tribesmen on his trek into the New Guinea highlands?

Canberra had other reasons for engaging with the League. It felt that a strong presence in Geneva could help ward off pressure on Australia to water down the White Australia policy, dismantle its tariff wall and submit to compulsory arbitration of disputes.

Despite the awkward queries, Australia came to see the League as a benign theatre, compatible with the emerging British community that came to be known as the British Commonwealth of Nations. Australia’s presence in the League — overseen by the high commission in London, which former prime minister Stanley Bruce headed from 1933 until 1939 — also helped extend its contacts to less familiar nations.

Former Rhodes scholar William Caldwell, a veteran twice wounded in France, was among the impressive Australians who took a senior role in Geneva, and he went on to feed the wider vision he gained there into the public debate back home. Having joined the ILO in 1921, he visited Australia a few years later to try to persuade sceptical state governments and employer groups to improve labour entitlements — though he received little help from trades halls convinced the ILO was a capitalist plot to divert workers from the revolution.

With states holding much of the responsibility for labour issues, Caldwell and another Australian with ILO experience, Joseph Starke, were among the first to suggest that the Commonwealth could use its treaty-making powers to intervene. The pair’s arguments were first tested in the High Court in 1936 and finally used successfully in 1983 to stop Tasmania’s Franklin Dam.

As his remit in Geneva extended to “native and colonial labour,” Caldwell also kept a file on the treatment of Aboriginal employees. In a 1932 letter found by Cotton, he wrote that “Australia is shamefully neglecting her obligations towards that dispossessed race.” Progressives like Mary Montgomerie Bennett were welcomed at the ILO, where they were able to raise the treatment of Aboriginal Australians.

Raymond Kershaw, another Rhodes scholar with a distinguished war record, joined the League at the end of 1923. As an officer in its minorities section he helped deal with the grievances of subnational ethnic, linguistic and religious groups stranded in other countries after the contraction of Germany and the break-up of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. It was an insoluble problem and a thankless task.

Kershaw left the League in 1929 to join the Bank of England. In 1930 he accompanied the bank’s Sir Otto Niemeyer on his mission to crack the fiscal whip over Australia’s “feckless” Depression-era state governments. Kershaw at least wrote papers arguing that the pain of Niemeyer’s prescriptions should be shared rather than fall mainly on the unemployed and poor.

Another Australian, Duncan Hall, had studied at Oxford during the war and completed the equivalent of a doctorate on the future of the Commonwealth. With Fabian socialists Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb and Leonard Woolf, he had done much to popularise the idea of a grouping of like-minded nations that could be a model for — or the nucleus of — the League. Failing to get an academic position back in Sydney, he joined the Australian delegation to a new regional body, the Institute of Pacific Relations, run from Honolulu.

From there he took up a professorship at Syracuse University in New York state, where he set up a model League of Nations among his students, a teaching simulation widely copied. On a visit to Geneva in 1927 he was invited to join the League’s opium section, which was trying to regulate trade in narcotics, as well as investigating child welfare and the trafficking of women.

Hall’s inspections and conferences took him out of Europe, to Iran, India and Siam (as Thailand was then known). In Calcutta he encountered erudite Indians who pointed out the double standard in the British Commonwealth: a higher status for the white dominions, a much lower one for the Asian and African colonies. The perspective he gained during the trip contributed to the emergence of an “Australian School” of international relations that looked beyond the Atlantic.

In the 1930s, Hall turned to psychology to explain the rise of mass movements supporting authoritarian regimes across Europe. He drew on the work of scholars, including the Austrian psychoanalyst Robert Waelder, who applied Freud’s concept of the “group mind” to the trend. Hall worried that advances in technology like radio were intensifying group consciousness, bringing people closer, extending mob oratory to entire nations and creating a collective psychosis.

At the League, Hall urged that a “realist” view of this threat should prevail over “Utopian pacifism.” His warnings were not welcomed by League secretary-general Joseph Avenol, who was ready to compromise with dictatorships. He barred Hall from making public addresses or broadcasts on his trips.

Another Australian in Geneva with a fascinating backstory was C.H. “Dick” Ellis, who arrived as a correspondent for a popular London newspaper in the late 1920s, and improbably wrote a heavyweight book on the League that became a standard reference. Ellis was also an MI6 officer, having served in the British army during the war, taken part in the anti-Bolshevik intervention in Central Asia, and studied languages at Oxford. He later became a friend of Australian external affairs minister Dick Casey, and in the early 1950s, by then very senior in MI6, he advised Casey on the formation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.

As Frank Moorhouse shows in his trilogy, the mood in Geneva shifted from the optimism of Grand Days, set in the twenties, to the gloom of Dark Palace, set in the thirties. The hopes of world disarmament foundered at a failed League conference in 1929. Japan annexed Manchuria in 1931 and withdrew from the grouping. Germany quit after Hitler took power in 1933, and other nations began pulling out. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was met with ineffective sanctions. Despite Wilson’s early enthusiasm, isolationism kept the United States out.

With the failure of peacekeeping, diplomats including Australia’s Stanley Bruce tried to keep the League useful by expanding its roles — not without a touch of national self-interest — in fields like health and nutrition. As Cotton remarks, “Bruce also considered that a world thus organised would be more receptive to exports of Australian agricultural commodities.”

In May 1939, with war becoming more likely, Avenol turned to Bruce to help rescue the League from its dire straits and the impasse on collective security. He asked the Australian to chair a committee to report on extending the League’s role in encouraging cooperation on health, social matters, economic affairs and financial regulation. By the time Bruce reported in August, his proposals had been overtaken by war. Avenol resigned to join the Vichy government in France.

An Irish deputy-secretary and a handful of staff kept a skeleton office going. After the war, however, Geneva was no more than an annex to the new, New York–based United Nations, though the city also became home to some of the agencies that took up the Bruce committee’s ideas, and the ILO continued to run from there.

Moorhouse’s novels picked up on a pioneering aspect of the League that Cotton also explores: the role of women. From the outset, the League declared all its positions open to female recruitment, though few women made it into positions more senior than the typing pool. Surprisingly, the otherwise conservative Hughes government decided in 1922 that Australia’s delegation to the League’s annual assembly should include at least one woman.

The League gave women like Emilia Hernya a role, albeit subordinate, and a voice.

In practice, the Australian women were only appointed as substitute delegates, not full members. When one woman asked her delegation leader what her role was, he responded, “Your business is to hold your tongue.” In 1927, women’s rights campaigner Alice Moss did stand in for delegate T.J. Ley, a federal MP and former NSW justice minister — as well as a confidence man and, later, convicted murderer — who had other things to do in Europe rather than attend a League committee in dreary Geneva.

Many of the women delegates had well-off spouses who could provide the funds for them to travel and agitate. Back in Australia they gave speeches and wrote articles about the League, often through the League of Nations Union branches that sprang up around Australia and across the world.

Bessie Rischbieth, the wife of a wealthy wool dealer in Perth, was an outstanding advocate of the League. In articles that still read well, writes Cotton, she pointed out how the effects of the Versailles treaty could be seen in the rise of the Nazis, and argued for a stronger League covenant, lower trade barriers, the abolition of exchange controls, and an open door to goods from colonies and mandates. As Cotton notes, “Seen in its context, Rischbieth’s assessment of the times was as comprehensive and insightful as any offered in Australia in the later 1930s.”

Melbourne woman Janet Mitchell was in Shanghai as a delegate to an Institute of Pacific Relations meeting in 1931 when the Manchurian crisis erupted. An Australian newspaper correspondent, W.H. Donald, persuaded her to visit Mukden (now Shenyang) and see for herself. She stayed a year in Harbin, a city teeming with Japanese occupiers and White Russian refugees.

Back in Australia Mitchell became a frequent broadcaster for the League of Nations Union, and in 1935 she was invited to join the League information section (probably by Duncan Hall, whom she had met at the 1925 meeting in Honolulu). She arrived in time to be disappointed by the League’s handling of the Ethiopia crisis. As she left Geneva, and the League, she wrote, “I began to see it, not as it was conceived by its founders as an effective force for peace, but as a little world born before its time, bound to fail.”

Ella Doyle, an Australian shorthand typist, moved to the League from the Australian Imperial Force staff in London. In 1937 she visited Germany and wrote an article about the Nazi crackdown on “decadent art,” pointing out that the works under attack were by the cream of modern German artists, one of whom had designed the stained-glass windows in the League’s new building. After 1945 Doyle had several UN engagements, and much later, in 1978–81, she was Australia’s first female ambassador in Dublin.

Alas, no one on Cotton’s list of Australians fits the character of Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Campbell Berry. Emilia Hernya perhaps comes closest, though her parents were Dutch and British and she was schooled in France. But she moved to Australia in 1913 and was naturalised in 1917 before returning to Europe and joining the League in 1920. Hernya’s childhood had been colourful: her parents worked near Paris’s Moulin Rouge nightclub where as a toddler — Cotton informed me by email — she is said to have sat on Toulouse-Lautrec’s knee and pulled his beard.

The model for Edith, Moorhouse confessed, was actually a Canadian, Mary McGeachy, who worked in the League’s information section. McGeachy left a huge volume of writing about the League and its time, which Moorhouse transferred into his character’s thoughts and speeches. She also appears in the novels as one of the real-life characters around Edith.

Though Hernya and McGeachy socialised in places like Geneva’s International Club, and no doubt had their love affairs, the model for Edith’s adventures on the boundaries of sexual identity was Moorhouse himself. Geneva provided neutral ground in more ways than one.

Moorhouse’s trilogy, an Australian classic unlikely to be added to a school reading list except by the bravest principal, is yet to make it to the screen as the film or series many of its fans have long anticipated. Two production groups have started projects but let them lapse. Meantime, I can attest that the trilogy is just as enjoyable on a second reading, and Cotton’s fascinating book amplifies the factual thread of Australian involvement. •

The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist Diplomacy in the Interwar Years
By James Cotton | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 246 pages

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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. •

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Like its model in London — the British Museum, which opened in 1759 — it was a flower of the Enlightenment. Its role was twofold: to explore, classify and exhibit the peculiar animals and plants of the Antipodes, and to document the peoples newly encountered by Europeans.

As became the notorious case for the British Museum and its counterparts in France and Germany, colonialism and settlement accompanied and aided the collecting of specimens. By the time the Australian Museum got into its stride in the second half of the nineteenth century, Voltaire’s “noble savages” had been overtaken by evolutionist attempts to rank human subspecies. As Brendan Atkins observes in his compact but panoramic new book, The Naturalist: The Remarkable Life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch, “Darwin’s theories became evil in the wrong hands, as they drew conclusions about racial superiority from bone measurements.”

Atkins’s subject is a little-remembered scientist whose brief but highly productive career covered both natural history, brilliantly, and ethnography, more controversially. McCulloch started work at the high-water mark of evolutionary theory and colonialism, and ended just as broadcast media was beginning to challenge and rival the static collections of museums.

Allan Riverstone McCulloch was the great-grandson of Scottish Radicals transported to New South Wales in 1820 for demanding universal suffrage, lucky not to be hanged and beheaded like their two leaders. The family flourished, with a grandson becoming a member of NSW parliament and a land developer, a symbiosis that continues to plague the state. McCulloch’s middle name derives from this uncle’s greatest deal, the subdivision of an estate that became a Sydney suburb.

When his uncle went bankrupt “he did what any gentleman would do in the circumstances: he fled the colony.” This left McCulloch’s widowed mother without much support for herself and her four children. At age thirteen, through family connections, Allan was placed as an unpaid cadet in the Australian Museum, apprenticed to Edgar Waite, the curator of vertebrates.

It was the start of a deep education within the museum and on expeditions with Waite around the coast, islands and waterways of Australia. McCulloch became a world-leading fish biologist and, with the help of artistic training from Julian Ashton, a superb illustrator of his specimens.

His public lectures, livened by lantern slides, were packed. The Latin tag for the Murray cod includes his name. Just before his death in 1925 he had written a script for the newly introduced radio and was using a movie camera to document wildlife on Lord Howe Island. In more modern times, he would have been a local David Attenborough.

Atkins, who trained as a zoologist himself and then, after a career as an environmental scientist on the Murray, edited the Australian Museum’s magazine, was intrigued by McCulloch’s story. Why was such a successful scientist airbrushed out of the museum’s history, snidely derided in its 150th anniversary history, and still occasionally subject to rumours he was syphilitic or a drunk sipping on his own preservation alcohol? (The latter transgression was by an earlier curator.)

The Naturalist circles towards its unhappy end in chapters focused on McCulloch’s artistry, his work on fishes and his ethnographic asides. It was in the latter, Atkins thinks, that “cracks first appear in McCulloch’s persona.” Visiting the Torres Strait Islands in 1907, he and senior colleague Charles Hedley were primarily collecting fish and shells but had also been asked to augment the museum’s collection of Indigenous artefacts.

Already, the locals were making artefacts for sale to visitors rather than for their own use. Seeking more original objects, the scientists went to a hidden grave on Nagir Island, where their delving in the dirt revealed a model of a bird made from turtle-shell plates sewn together with split cane. They smuggled it out.

Much later, in 1922, McCulloch accepted an invitation from photographer Frank Hurley to join an expedition into the remote waterways of the Papuan Gulf, Fly River and Lake Murray. One of McCulloch’s roles was to relay Hurley’s accounts of his daring exploits by Morse code to a sponsoring Sydney newspaper. Atkins recounts more dubious acquisitions, some by outright theft, others by purchase under intimidating circumstances from village elders who would not normally allow strangers to see, let alone take away, their sacred objects.

McCulloch and Hurley sent one shipment of this plunder back to the museum without the Papuan administration’s knowledge when they sailed their ketch Eureka directly to Thursday Island, an Australian territory, for repairs. A larger second shipment was impounded at the Papuan port of Daru after a missionary recounted Hurley and McCulloch’s frank admissions of their collecting methods.

An aggrieved Hurley kept up an acrimonious public correspondence with Papua’s governor, Sir Hubert Murray. But McCulloch’s notes, included in the second shipment, revealed feelings of guilt about the acquisitions. The shipment was eventually released to the museum, with a few confiscations, and Hurley gave up his protests.

McCulloch was to “take the fall for these thefts,” Atkins says. Soon after he returned to Sydney in 1923, wracked by dysentery and malaria, a fight erupted at the museum. Two powerful trustees appointed by the state government, auditor-general Frederick Coghlan and businessman Ernest Wunderlich, decided the place needed to be more popular.

They ordered the museum’s scientists to curb their expensive research and get out into the suburbs and country towns to spread their knowledge. On a pretext, they dismissed the senior-most scientist, Charles Hedley. Two eminent scientific trustees, professors Edgeworth David and William Haswell, resigned in protest, but to little avail. “Now with Hedley gone, the trustees took aim at McCulloch,” writes Atkins, “who had by default become their most senior scientist and star curator.”

In May 1924 an invitation came for McCulloch to deliver a paper at a big scientific conference in Hawaii on the Pacific’s food, agriculture and fisheries. Coghlan and other trustees voted against his attendance. It was a devastating blow to McCulloch, still reeling from illness and with his battering over the Papuan artefacts worsening his tendency to bouts of depression. After he suffered a breakdown in early 1925, he was given a year’s leave on half-pay. Respites on his beloved Lord Howe Island helped a patchy recovery.

At this point a former NSW premier, Joe Carruthers, stepped in. He was going to Hawaii, and persuaded the state government to pay half of McCulloch’s expenses to go along and attend another conference, this one focused on fisheries. 

There, McCulloch found the event still vaguely in the planning stage. But he wrote a paper, was invited to give talks, and enjoyed the company of local figures while waiting for proceedings to begin. It seemed like a turning point. A proposed Pan-Pacific institute wanted him as chief scientist. After a long bachelorhood, he had fallen in love with a woman, Jean Innes, on Lord Howe. Yet he was still disturbed in mind and unable to sleep.

In a poignant chapter, Atkins delves in great depth into the feelings of regret and self-reproach that might have deepened McCulloch’s mood swings, and reaches a tentative diagnosis of bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it used to be called.

On his death, McCulloch was lauded as a great scientist. But no church in Sydney would bury a suicide. His friends at the museum raised funds for a granite monument on Lord Howe Island’s seafront, facing the reef he had explored, and buried his ashes beneath it.

Coghlan’s arrogance in a non-museum matter got him removed from office and the museum celebrated its centenary amid reports of internal disorder. It was not until 1975 that new legislation removed outside trustees and put scientific and professional directors in charge.

Conflicting pressures of popularity and science remain. The Australian Museum is currently hoping for a record million-visitor milestone this year on the back of a Lego dinosaur exhibition and another featuring fibreglass sharks. It’s no doubt true that schools and parents are less likely to bring their kids to another exhibition showing how the land snails of Norfolk Island have been rescued. Science is now more likely to deal with the gloomy subjects of species extinction and climate change, while ethnology turns to revisionist accounts of colonialism, turning the concept of “savagery” around.

Since at least 1981, when a large timber slit-drum was returned to newly independent Vanuatu, the Australian Museum has been returning objects to traditional owners, mostly in quiet fashion. But the turtle-shell bird stolen by McCulloch and Hedley from the grave on Nagir Island is still in the collection. In June this year, in the village of Usakof on Lake Murray, I found villagers demanding the return of “powerful objects” stolen by Hurley and McCulloch from their longhouse in 1922.

The museum is now readying a new Pacific gallery to be opened next year. It would be wonderful if this could be accompanied by a more visible examination of its vast holdings of Oceanic objects, mostly in off-site storage, with objects taken in less scrupulous times identified and their disposition with their communities of origin discussed.

It would be satisfying, too, to see McCulloch’s wonderful watercolours of fish made available as prints and his surviving dioramas of sea and birdlife accorded heritage status. Yet none of the museum’s senior directors turned up to the launch of Atkins’s book, which is nonetheless a fine memorial to this outstanding Australian. •

The Naturalist: The Remarkable Life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch
By Brendan Atkins | NewSouth | $34.99 | 190 pages

The post A museum’s fall guy appeared first on Inside Story.

Collaery, a former ACT attorney-general, was charged with having breached secrecy laws when he revealed that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service had bugged Timor-Leste government offices in 2004. At the time, Australia was negotiating a maritime boundary straddling a rich natural gas field in the Timor Sea. Also charged was one of Collaery’s clients, a former ASIS officer known as Witness K.

When the case eventually went to trial, Justice David Mossop accepted the Coalition government’s argument that much of the evidence needed to be kept from the public, and some of it even from Collaery himself, to protect national security. But a three-person bench of the ACT Court of Appeal, including the territory’s chief justice, overturned Mossop’s ruling.

Before the court could publish its reasons, Dreyfus’s predecessor, Michaelia Cash, directed the government’s most senior legal officers to seek to have the ruling overturned by the High Court, with a stay on the decision in the meantime. Otherwise, Cash’s lawyers argued, information “likely to prejudice national security” would be made public. Open justice was of “undoubted importance,” they said, but national security considerations had to be given “the greatest weight.”

That argument was received sceptically by chief justice Susan Kiefel and her High Court colleagues. Justice James Edelman asked solicitor-general Stephen Donaghue if the ACT chief justice’s error was merely that she “did not make the order that you sought.” Offered a choice between having the application thrown out or having the stay left in place, Donaghue opted for the latter.

Dreyfus’s termination of the prosecution left the status of the ACT Court of Appeal’s ruling unresolved. Surprisingly, he then asked the court to reconsider its decision to allow the contentious evidence to be made public. The ACT’s new chief justice, Lucy McCallum, heard the application in September, and her decision is now awaited.

The Human Rights Law Centre’s Kieran Pender, who has followed the Collaery case, says it is “very unusual” for the government to try to “relitigate” the Court of Appeal judgement. “Given the question of redactions has already been determined once by the Court of Appeal, and the government has withdrawn the High Court appeal, to attempt a second go at the Court of Appeal is remarkable.”

Instead, says Pender, “the attorney-general should get on with dropping the outstanding prosecutions of whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle and reforming Australia’s lacklustre whistleblowing laws. Whistleblowers should be protected, not prosecuted in secret trials.”

Collaery believes the Albanese government is “encased” by the same circle of security advisers, in and out of the public service, who orchestrated the moves against Witness K and himself. But he can see why Dreyfus might have accepted advice against publication from ASIS director-general Paul Symon, a retired army general and former head of defence intelligence.

“When you’ve got an ex-warrior, albeit with no actual experience in the trade — when you’ve got a man of that eminence and decency, which he has, advising you that publishing the Collaery case would prejudice national security, you accept that advice,” Collaery tells me. “But it’s tripe. It was khaki dressage.”

Beyond the court actions themselves, many influential figures are incensed that responsibility for the murky chain of events stretching back to 2004 could remain unresolved.

Among them is the president of the International Commission of Jurists in Australia, John Dowd, a retired NSW Supreme Court judge and former state Liberal leader. In a letter to prime minister Anthony Albanese on 17 October he called for a royal commission looking at whether ASIS’s bugging operation broke Australian law, whether the secret service was deployed for private commercial gain, whether the national security claims for secrecy are valid, and whether Collaery and Witness K should be compensated.

Not surprisingly, Collaery also wants a royal commission. It should encompass not only the ASIS operation and its propriety, he argues, but also issues of “utter, utter treachery” he says he isn’t at liberty to discuss. Before he was charged, Collaery had security clearance to handle a range of sensitive legal issues involving intelligence agencies and personnel — the very reason why Witness K was originally referred to him for advice in relation to his misgivings about having led the Dili operation.

Collaery particularly wants a fairer outcome for Witness K, who was given a three-month suspended sentence in June last year for conspiring to reveal classified information. He contrasts the treatment he and K received with the kid-glove handling of senior ASIO and other Canberra officials who were exposed as having been compromised by the KGB when the Soviet intelligence agency’s chief archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, handed over a vast trove of secret records following his defection to Britain via Estonia in 1992.

“We never compromised any national security,” says Collaery, “but those who did and were exposed after Vasili Mitrokhin took the stuff to Estonia were just left alone. Not even dishonourably discharged. And allowed to keep their medals and decorations and all the rest.”

Moreover, Collaery adds, “K was never a whistleblower, despite the media constantly calling him that. If anything he was leading the charge as a mutineer. And for good reason, and he wasn’t alone. The reason why they brought it down on us was to stop L, M, N, O, P, Q [from going public]. So the story’s not told.”

On the face of it, a royal commission should appeal to the new government. It could sheet home the duplicitous Timor-Leste dealings to Coalition leaders at the time of the bugging, notably prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer, and perhaps also other members of the cabinet’s national security committee (which would have included treasurer Peter Costello, attorney-general Philip Ruddock, defence minister Robert Hill and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone).

Yet the idea appears not to have seized Albanese — if the ICJ letter ever got to him. As his department’s acting first assistant secretary for national security, Philip Kimpton, wrote to Dowd, “We are not aware of an intention by government to pursue such a course of action at this time.”

A Labor figure knowledgeable about foreign policy issues explained why the government might be wary about looking into the 2004 spying incident. “Did it continue?” the figure asks, clearly mindful that similar intelligence-gathering activity might well have been going on under the Rudd–Gillard government.

Canberra’s fixation on securing the big undersea gas deposit now known as Greater Sunrise goes back to its first discovery in the late 1960s. Diplomacy, legal argument and espionage were harnessed to negotiate maritime boundaries with Indonesia, Portugal, Indonesia again, and Timor-Leste with the aim of bringing as much of the gas field as possible into Australia’s economic zone. This push by successive Coalition and Labor governments extended over decades.

The Witness K revelations started emerging under Labor, which continued to uphold the boundary negotiated by Downer (with help from the ASIS operation) between 2004 and 2006. It was not until 2018 that Timor-Leste, having had Downer’s 2006 border agreement nullified because it wasn’t negotiated in good faith, convinced an arbitration court at The Hague to endorse a new agreement that moved the border to the middle of the Timor Sea and gave Timor-Leste 80 to 90 per cent of the revenue from Greater Sunrise.

If a royal commission isn’t on the horizon, Albanese and Dreyfus may have opened another avenue for inquiry by creating the new National Anti-Corruption Commission. Susan Connelly, the Josephite sister who fought hard for a median-line boundary and strongly backed Collaery and Witness K, is one who has signalled a reference to the NACC.

This would put targets on the backs of Downer, who later accepted a consultancy from the leader of the Greater Sunrise consortium, Woodside Petroleum, and the late Ashton Calvert, who as secretary of Foreign Affairs supervised ASIS at the time of the bugging and on retirement became a director of Woodside. But the NACC legislation has an escape clause that allows the attorney-general to declare an investigation to be against the national interest.

Foreign minister Penny Wong seems to hope that focusing on practicalities will shift attention away from this rancorous past. In October she appointed former Victorian Labor premier Steve Bracks to broker agreement on developing Greater Sunrise. Bracks’s extensive post-political advocacy for Timor-Leste includes work on the maritime boundary.

Getting the gas field into production has become a matter of urgency for the government in Dili, which has been dipping into its Petroleum Fund — its sovereign wealth fund derived from oil and gas revenues — at an unsustainable rate. The last revenue from existing oil fields will flow into the fund at the end of this year.

If the current rate of withdrawal is maintained, the fund will run down to zero over the next decade. By 2034, according to the country’s finance ministry, Timor-Leste faces “a fiscal cliff” that will necessitate a “radical cut in all spending.” Using similar language, the World Bank has referred to an “inescapable macro-fiscal cliff in the next decade.”

“Timor-Leste is a petro state without much petrol,” says the respected Dili-based think tank La’o Hamutuk in a recent report. The government’s policies “continue to be based on blind faith that, because oil money has carried the country thus far, it will continue to do so indefinitely.”

Politicians in Dili follow former prime minister Xanana Gusmão in pushing for Greater Sunrise to be connected by pipeline to Gusmão’s Tasi Mane scheme. Forecast to cost US$15–20 billion, this complex on the island’s south coast would include an oil refinery, LNG plant, offshore gas and onshore oil pipelines, and a supply base for offshore petroleum projects, along with transport infrastructure and new towns.

Woodside Petroleum and many oil industry experts say the proposed pipeline is too risky. It will need to traverse the 3000-metre-deep, steep-sided, unstable Timor Trench between the gas field and the coast. Other analysts say its revenue and employment benefits have been wildly exaggerated by Tasi Mane’s proponents. Dollar for dollar, investing in coffee production could create six times as many jobs and six times as much GDP growth per dollar as investing in Tasi Mane, says one recent study.

The alternatives to the Greater Sunrise pipeline would be a floating LNG plant, or a connection to existing pipelines in the Timor Sea to transport the gas to Darwin for processing. Timor-Leste would still get most of the revenue but would need to stump up far less capital and would avoid the risk of pipeline failure. Australia might be seen to be getting an undue share of the benefits, though, despite its perfidy.

In September newly elected president José Ramos-Horta tried to pressure Canberra into overruling Woodside’s objections by threatening to bring in China to take over the project. Although China’s banks are reported to have already turned the project down as unfeasible, a Chinese state oil firm is said to maintain a permanent desk inside the office of Timor-Leste’s tiny state oil firm, TimorGAP. Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has not always put economics ahead of political-strategic factors.

TimorGAP, meanwhile, has released selected passages from a report by British oil industry consultants ERCE claiming that the running costs of the Tasi Mane and Darwin processing options are much the same. TimorGAP is still refusing to release the full 130-page ERCE report, says La’o Hamutuk, despite Ramos-Horta saying, on his Canberra visit, that this would be helpful.

Adelaide consultancy EnergyQuest says it would be far more productive for all parties to be talking instead about plate tectonics. The Indo-Australian plate is moving north at seven centimetres a year, meaning it would move 1.5 metres over the life of the project. “Building a pipeline [to Timor-Leste] subjected to the full force of one of the most rapid tectonic plate movements in the world is an idea that should never have got off the ground,” says EnergyQuest.

But the country’s successful independence struggle left a complex legacy. “In 1999, Timor-Leste ousted the Indonesian occupiers in defiance of ‘experts’ around the world who told them it would never happen,” wrote La’o Hamutuk’s Charles Scheiner in the recent report. “In 2018 they transcended ‘expert’ advice again, coercing Australia to agree to a fair maritime boundary.”

As a result, says Scheiner, “some Timorese leaders, especially veterans of the independence struggle, now believe they can accomplish anything, regardless of physical or economic realities.” That means Steve Bracks has his work cut out if he is seeking to pierce what some call a “mystical” belief in the pipeline — especially if, as seems likely, pipeline-proponent Xanana Gusmão returns as prime minister after next May’s election.

But Bracks may emerge as an envoy to Canberra rather than to Dili, persuading the Australian government to detach Woodside Petroleum from its lead position in the Greater Sunrise consortium, perhaps through a buyout, and let Timor-Leste take the running and the risks. Woodside has already written the value of its 33 per cent stake down to nothing and has plenty of other projects to keep busy with. Continuing to run Woodside’s case makes Australia look selfish and colonialist, say critics.

Bracks’s ability to persuade would be strengthened if Canberra showed any contrition over the spying and lack of good-faith negotiations — by holding a royal commission or other review, by apologising, and by rejoining the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice on maritime boundaries, from which Downer withdrew Australia in 2002.

The current limbo is far from satisfactory, says Bernard Collaery. “All it does is leave Australia’s great moral issue in ambiguity.” •

The post Timor gaps appeared first on Inside Story.

It was late 2002 or early 2003, not long before Howard publicly committed to joining George W. Bush and Tony Blair in waging war on Iraq. Papers by ASPI analysts, including inaugural director Hugh White, had disputed the case for war and opposed Australian involvement.

In a gathering that included government figures, White, a former deputy secretary for strategy in the defence department, found himself under attack for breaking ranks at a time of crisis. Howard, who was present, intervened. “No, no,” he said. “Hugh’s doing exactly his job.”

Two decades later, the notion of an ASPI head taking an adversarial stand against the government of the day and its defence–security establishment — or even allowing alternative voices in its analytical ranks — seems unthinkable.

The Australia Institute’s Allan Behm, another former senior defence official, is among those who think ASPI has strayed far from its original mandate. Howard’s aim, he says, was to create “a freestanding and independent commentator on mainstream national defence issues” that would hold defence officials like him accountable. It would make sure their advice “was subject to appropriate scrutiny by other people who knew as much as we did or indeed knew better than we did.”

White, who is now emeritus professor of strategic studies at ANU, believes a founding principle of the institute — that there should be no “ASPI view” — has also been eroded. Over time, the institute developed a single, hardline view on how Australia should respond to the biggest foreign policy and strategic challenge for a long time, the rise of China.

“Very little of what ASPI has published, except some material on its blog, has seriously contested what you might call the Canberra orthodoxy on those big questions,” White tells me. “And that’s a failure of ASPI to fulfil its true function.”

“Maybe that’s unfair,” he adds after a pause. “Where ASPI has criticised the prevailing orthodoxy and government policy it has criticised it solely on the grounds it hasn’t gone far enough.”

Talk to many of Australia’s most senior figures from the worlds of defence, intelligence and foreign relations, and similar criticism of ASPI comes thick and fast. Even among the toughest, though, the criticism is tempered with praise for Marcus Hellyer and other ASPI analysts who are still doing what used to be the institute’s core business — pulling apart the defence budget, scrutinising the uniformed and civilian defence machine, and assessing the costs and benefits of weapons systems.

Critics chiefly argue that ASPI has talked up the China panic and then proposed only one way to deal with it: more powerful weapons in larger quantities, closer military ties to the United States and an adversarial posture.

“ASPI started doing too many things, then it took on the ‘wolverine’ tendency” — a hawkish attitude to China — “to such a degree that I always knew what it would say about China so it wasn’t worth reading,” says one retired but still influential security figure. (Like some other critics keen to keep communications open, he asked not to be named.) “There was some genuine research which was valuable, but all of it was directed to proving a point. And once a think tank goes down that road and it’s a case for the prosecution, which it was, then it is no longer as influential as it might have been.”

With ASPI seen as echoing rather than questioning the Canberra orthodoxy, outsiders could assume it to be the voice of Australia, and a rather strident one. Those who actually set policy — the diplomats, defence personnel and intelligence analysts with perhaps more nuanced views — are muzzled by official secrecy requirements.

“ASPI has gone into a rather dark direction, where what it is really doing is amplifying a kind of new security ideology, a rather old-fashioned one,” Behm says. “Where it has ended up is in the creation of a network of reinforcing binaries, which in fact distort reality and are built around a premise that China is embarked upon world domination.”

That premise leads logically to very substantial build-ups in military capabilities, says Behm. “The consequence is to marginalise diplomacy and put the big emphasis on the ability to deliver kinetic force.” Worryingly, “it has been, and is being, successful,” he adds.

The former security figure echoes this concern. “There’s a really big story to be written about the military–industrial complex in Australia,” he says. “There are a lot of very powerful companies which have a vested interest in the defence area, and are therefore willing to put money into supporting the sorts of things that ASPI has done. Therefore ASPI has a vested interest in making its stakeholders and donors happy. There’s no equivalent in the foreign policy area.”

According to ASPI, nearly 40 per cent of its $11 million annual budget comes from the Department of Defence and another 25 per cent from various federal departments and agencies. Foreign government agencies in the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Japan chipped in nearly $2 million, or 18 per cent, in 2020–21.

Defence contractors like BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rafael and Thales contributed just $316,000, or 3 per cent of the ASPI budget — small change for them, and a bargain if ASPI does in fact influence spending on weapons deals such as the F-35s, submarines, frigates and armoured vehicles each worth tens of billions of dollars.

John Blaxland, professor of international security and intelligence studies at ANU, is one who disagrees that the sources of funding have called ASPI’s tune. At times, he says, its analysts have directly criticised what donors have been doing.

For an outfit of some thirty analysts and twenty support staff working mostly from open-source material, ASPI has an outsize voice. That’s largely the legacy of its longest-serving executive director, Peter Jennings, another former defence deputy secretary, who ended his ten years leading ASPI earlier this year. That decade roughly matched Xi Jinping’s first two terms as China’s supreme leader.

As Xi moved from the sweet-sounding goal of realising the “China Dream” through his Belt and Road Initiative to displays of military power, Jennings’s warnings became louder. ASPI and Jennings were quick to point to danger from China and ready to provide a quick quote to this effect for press gallery defence and foreign affairs correspondents. As one China specialist puts it, “He was kind of like driving around Canberra with a police siren on every day, yelling, ‘China! China!’”

Sometimes Jennings jumped the gun or ignored contrary evidence. He quickly blamed the crash of the Australian census computer system in 2016 on a Chinese cyberattack, but post-mortems found it was just an overload. When a proposed Chinese-built wharf in Luganville, Vanuatu, was played up as a base for the Chinese navy, the Vanuatu government’s insistence that its non-alignment forbade any foreign military bases was disregarded.

It was almost as if Jennings was leading a sort of backlash against the whole idea of diplomacy. The field of international relations has traditionally been a conservative one, respectful of government and diplomacy, as Rodney Tiffen, emeritus professor of government at the University of Sydney, points out. “Now there is a sort of counter-establishment, or new establishment, against the old Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade approach.”

Jennings declined to be interviewed for this article, saying any comments should be left to his successor. And, to be fair, he wasn’t the only contributor to rising public and government concern about Chinese power and influence. In 2016–17, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and his own national security officials look for evidence of Chinese subversion and influence buying. Tighter laws on foreign lobbying and political funding resulted.

In an interview in 2019 after five years as ASIO director-general, Duncan Lewis warned about the risk of “insidious” espionage and interference. “You wake up one day and find decisions made in our country that are not in the interests of our country,” he said.

The academic Clive Hamilton also added to the fevered atmosphere in two books that painted Australia as already deeply penetrated by Chinese spies and political manipulators. News Corp newspapers provided an eager forum for this kind of “disclosure,” and some Fairfax and ABC investigative journalists named prominent business figures as instruments of the Chinese Communist Party, in one case resulting in a large defamation payout.

As well as deriding DFAT and specialist academics for clinging to hopes that Beijing would converge politically with the West, the hardline China critics attacked business leaders. Their sin was to try to stop trade being further damaged after the $20 billion worth of retaliation for Scott Morrison’s switch to “calling out” and “pushing back” against China in 2020.

That year the business-supported Sydney think tank China Matters lost funding from several federal departments and had its tax-deductible status removed. News Corp tabloids obliged by accusing it of lobbying against Australia’s interests. “Advocacy of ongoing engagement with the PRC does not make one a stooge of the Communist Party of China or an agent of influence,” protested its chair, former Macquarie Bank chief Kevin McCann. But the punishment remains, crippling this alternative voice.

While saying he sometimes disagrees strongly with what comes out of ASPI, the ANU’s Blaxland says its stance on China was probably consistent with a consensus among “insiders” briefed on the “aggressive and industrial scale of Chinese attempts at foreign interference.”

“Successive prime ministers, once they’ve been briefed on it, change their tune,” Blaxland says. “Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, who was the most dovish, and not just Scott Morrison but now Anthony Albanese.”

The big question, says Blaxland, is how you respond to the challenge. “Do you beat the drumbeats of war or do you speak more softly and try and carry a bigger stick, which is what I would recommend. Let’s be careful about what we say.” The answer should not involve muffling or defunding ASPI, “which has done a public service by provoking a necessary and vigorous national debate. Let’s fund more bodies: AsiaLink, the Australia Institute, China Matters.”

Ahead of the recent federal election, Morrison’s defence minister, Peter Dutton, took steps to keep ASPI on the path set by Jennings. New appointments to the ASPI council included former Coalition ministers John Anderson and Michael Keenan, cybersecurity business figure Rachael Falk, and former army officer Catherine McGregor. Then, in this year’s budget, the Coalition granted ASPI $5 million in extra funding over two years to open a branch in Washington, a move that has baffled or infuriated many informed observers.

ASPI is about contributing to the Australian defence debate, not the American one, says Hugh White. “To the extent that ASPI’s role in Washington is simply to convince Americans that everyone on this side of the Pacific agrees with them, which they don’t, then they’re doing both us and the Americans a disservice.”

Adding to the puzzle is the fact that Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies had just set up its own Australia chair, under Charles Edel, a Yale-educated long-time think-tanker who has written extensively on foreign policy and security and has been a guest scholar at Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre. And that’s not to mention that Australia has one of its biggest embassies in Washington. Could not the $5 million have gone to research in places like Tokyo, Singapore, Jakarta and New Delhi?

Dutton also vetoed the new executive director proposed by a search panel of ASPI council members, former defence minister Brendan Nelson and former federal Labor MP Gai Brodtmann. Its preferred candidate was Michael Shoebridge, a former defence official who had long directed ASPI’s research covering defence, strategy and national security — its traditional focus.

Instead Dutton appointed Justin Bassi, chief of staff in the office of Marise Payne, Morrison’s foreign minister. Bassi had earlier been a national security adviser to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and, further back, to attorney-general George Brandis. His career in the public service started in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Office of National Assessments, or ONA (now the larger Office of National Intelligence).

Some think Bassi’s experience rather narrow for the role he has taken on. He has mainly focused on cybersecurity and domestic threats, hasn’t run any organisation larger than a ministerial office or a small ONA section, and hasn’t done anything much in the public domain.

His credentials as a security and China hawk are impeccable, however. On Turnbull’s staff he would have been deeply involved in the investigation of influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. And his job on Payne’s staff, one China-watcher says, was to “ride shotgun,” but until his or Payne’s memoirs are published we may not know for sure.

Payne did take on China during the Covid-19 outbreak with her call for an outside inquiry in April 2020. But three months later, during what is usually an annual bilateral ministerial love-in, she explicitly distanced Australia from harsh attacks on China by her US counterpart, Mike Pompeo.

Justin Bassi declined to speak to me about his plans for ASPI, and didn’t respond to emailed questions. “ASPI doesn’t tend to do interviews on itself, but rather interviews relating to its research on strategic and security issues,” its head of communications, Olivia Nelson, told me.

It is too early to judge how ASPI will fare under Labor, which is yet to reveal whether its bipartisan concurrence with nearly every defence and foreign policy step of the previous government was tactical — in an effort to avoid being wedged — or reflected genuine accord.

If there is pushback against the defence–security mindset, it will come from foreign minister Penny Wong, who has been active on the ground in the near regions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. Signs of a reorientation of China policy include the appointment of former Beijing and Tokyo ambassador Jan Adams as secretary of DFAT, replacing the non-diplomat and part-time army general Kathryn Campbell, who was installed by Scott Morrison in August 2021. Joining Wong’s staff are DFAT officers with intelligence assessment experience, along with Natasha Kassam, a Mandarin speaker who has served in Australia’s Beijing embassy and was until recently a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute.

Wong’s office will have a receptive ear in the prime minister’s office. The new national security adviser, Philippa Brant, is a Mandarin speaker with a China-related doctorate who has worked with Wong; and Anthony Albanese’s new foreign policy adviser, Kathy Klugman, comes from DFAT.

Publicly, Wong is taking a quiet approach. But according to the Australian’s Ben Packham, she told DFAT staff a month ago, “I am asking you to help me bring DFAT back to the centre of the Australian government.” Later, in an interview with former ONA chief Allan Gyngell, national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, she indicated ambitions for a stronger DFAT voice in government. “The levers of state power have not been accorded equal value,” she said.

For the moment, many China hawks remain in place in Canberra. Andrew Shearer is still director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, and accompanied Albanese on his first foreign foray, a meeting of Quad leaders in Tokyo.

And so far, according to Packham, ASPI’s main paymaster is happy with it, and with Bassi. The first foreign trip by the new defence minister, Richard Marles, was to Washington, where he opened the new ASPI office, spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and attended the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a closed-door gathering of official and private-sector ANZUS alliance worshippers. Marles astonished many defence analysts by going beyond the doctrine of “interoperability” to declare Australia’s forces should be “interchangeable” with those of the United States.

Back in Canberra, the new defence minister held a teleconference with twenty-five selected experts in defence and security fields, each given a few minutes to talk about what they saw as the most pressing issue. “No one who spoke at that meeting seriously contested the principles upon which the present government and their predecessors are approaching Australia’s strategic circumstances,” says Hugh White, who was one of the invited, though didn’t himself speak. Another participant said the general theme was the “urgency” of building up the defence forces, and improving equipment and munition procurement.

Nor has the appointment of two notably cautious figures — former Labor foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence force and air force chief Angus Houston — to conduct a review of defence policy inspired hopes of a contest of ideas. From hints given at a recent defence conference in Perth, the pair will recommend more of the same, including more F-35 fighters.

Bassi, meanwhile, has many things to master in his new job. His installation has been deeply unsettling at the institute. Despite being elevated to deputy director, Shoebridge has resigned and circulated a barbed email to his colleagues.

Some see a bifurcation under way at the institute, with its International Cyber Policy Centre, directed by Fergus Hanson, employing more analysts than the traditional defence and national security wing, and eclipsing it somewhat in research output.

Overall, though, Bassi seems happy with the trend in Canberra. In one of his earliest writings as ASPI head, for the Australian Financial Review, he praised the new government for maintaining Coalition policy on Huawei and the 5G network, AUKUS and the Quad, for standing with other small and medium countries against Chinese “coercion,” and for not having “compromised” any foreign policy, national security or defence settings for the sake of dialogue with China. Nor, he wrote, should the bar be lowered for China to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade and investment pact. For ASPI’s new head, the Albanese government has got off to a splendid start. •

The post Diplomacy on the defensive appeared first on Inside Story.

Melbourne University’s Michael Wesley goes through some of this history in his lead essay for Australian Foreign Affairs. He shows Australia clinging to its diminishing status in London as one of the “white dominions” and then falling in with the United States in its suspicion of India’s Soviet ties and sanctions over its nuclear tests — before having to play catch-up when Washington, London and Paris decided a nuclear Indian superpower was needed.

Wesley points out the dilemma for Canberra. “Its foreign policy has tended to be ‘heliocentric’ — the major elements of its statecraft are shaped by its commitment to a single major ally,” he writes. That single ally — first Britain, then the United States — has always been culturally similar. “Heliocentrism has enshrined a presidential element to policy formulation, with the prime minister taking personal charge of relations with the major ally. It has also resulted in Australia looking at the world from the same perspective as a global power, rather than as an isolated country with limited capabilities.”

Hence our expectation to be heard in global councils, our willingness to join military expeditions, and our past contempt for Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned foreign policy. In return, we drew contempt from New Delhi’s external affairs ministry, its suspicion of America only recently fading, as the monkey to the Washington organ-grinder.

This heliocentrism is now deeply challenged, says Wesley. “The US investment in a relationship with India signals an admission that America has neither the capacity nor the stomach to face China alone. Washington has ceded its pre-eminence in the Pacific to an order in which China and the United States become two among a series of great powers — including Indonesia and Japan — seeking to prevent any single state from dominating the region.”

This shift has clearly not yet sunk in among Canberra foreign policymakers. Our diplomats and security analysts are still pushing for India to stop acquiring Russian-supplied armaments and buy American in the name of “interoperability” with the other Quad members. With New Delhi proceeding with the purchase of the powerful S-400 air defence system from Russia in spite of threatened US sanctions — a similar purchase got NATO ally Turkey barred from the F-35 fighter program — Canberra will be put in an awkward spot if neither partner backs down.

India is unlikely to transform into another dutiful US ally like Japan and Australia. But it would help us adjust out of heliocentrism if India displays the kind of kindred liberal democratic and free-market values cited by exponents of a closer embrace.

Will it? Indian journalist Debasish Roy Chowdhury and Sydney University political scientist John Keane offer a dismaying portrait of neglect and institutional decay. The world’s “biggest democracy” is an “endangered” one in its “death stages,” characterised by dark money, manipulated media and muscle power, its people at risk from toxic air, poisoned water, and (as Covid has shown) disease.

The authors of To Kill a Democracy believe the seeds of decay were planted soon after independence when Nehru echoed the 1835 advice of Thomas Babington Macaulay that higher education for the upper classes was more useful than basic education for the masses. In Nehru’s case, he wanted brains to run the institutions of state and his new industrial “temples of modernity.”

That neglect has left India with an employment gap between agriculture and the booming but relatively low-labour services sector. A huge pool of jobless young has been waiting for a demagogue like Narendra Modi to enlist them as stormtroopers in a quest to turn the secular Indian state into a Hindu one.

A first-past-the-post electoral system allowed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to translate a 37 per cent vote into an absolute majority of seats. With anti-defection laws reducing MPs to ciphers, cabinet cowed and civil servants at risk of transfer to remote posts, Modi and his authoritarian home minister Amit Shah are the government. That makes for decisive but sometimes disastrous decisions, as when Modi suddenly “de-monetised” large-value banknotes in 2016 in an effort to flush out the black economy. Representing 86 per of cash in circulation in an economy overwhelmingly reliant on cash transactions, the move paralysed the economy.

The book’s most dispiriting passage concerns the abject complicity of the widely respected Supreme Court of India, under former chief justice Ranjan Gogoi, in Modi’s manoeuvres against Muslims, notably his overnight abolition of Kashmir’s autonomous statehood and his National Register of Citizens, which was used to remove citizenship from some 1.9 million Muslims in Assam.

All this has been played down by Quad enthusiasts. Modi has had a warm rapport with Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump. As Wesley writes, “There are elements of his populist political style and can-do approach to governance that appeal to conservative leaders, who are more likely to overlook his government’s chauvinistic approach to communal relations at home.”

Fortunately, Australia’s Indian diaspora seems to be bringing the best of India with them, eager for space, a clean environment and less competition for jobs. Aarti Betigeri, a journalist living in Australia, writes a stand-out essay for India Rising? from inside this diaspora, which is, or soon will be, our biggest new migrant cohort and one that is moving rapidly up the echelons of our institutions and companies — though not yet in politics, as its numbers would suggest, because it associates in divergent language, caste and other interest groups.

Betigeri believes the hunger to migrate has been thoroughly exploited by Australia:

We have set the intake pipeline so that it benefits Australia at every stage. First, students pay huge sums of money to study here (usually it’s their parents’ life savings, or land is sold to finance the fees). Then, while they’re studying, they provide a cheap, readily available and compliant source of unskilled labour. After graduation, they take on unpaid internships of three to six months, living off their savings, or fitting in overnight shifts at the servo to pay the rent. Then they emerge, fully trained, with an Australian education, ready to join the workforce, fuelling our economic growth. At every stage, the benefits are stacked in Australia’s favour. The house always wins.

The ever-higher bar of Home Affairs criteria for converting temporary residence into citizenship is another grievance. The Morrison government’s treatment of foreign students during the pandemic — go home or fend for yourselves — and its ban on flights from India at the height of the Delta variant panic have hardly improved Australia’s external image.

That adverse perceptions are prone to persist is shown in Harsh V. Pant’s essay for India Rising? on the view of Australia from India. He opens by recalling the wave of attacks on Indian students in Sydney and Melbourne in 2009–10, which he accepts as mostly racially motivated and epitomising a “social and political gap” between India and Australia. But street-level enquiries by Indian diplomats revealed that nearly all the attacks were made by disadvantaged teenagers set on stealing mobile phones and bling from relatively well-off students in the outer suburbs to which they had been dispersed by the gentrification of old inner-city student quarters,.

From New Delhi, Amit Dasgupta, the Indian consul-general in Sydney at the time, tells me, “I had said then and maintain even now that, with the exception of a few, the majority of the attacks were not racist and to allege them as such is incorrect.” That even Pant, a professor in international relations at King’s College, London, is still swayed by the hyped-up “news” generated by India’s hectic new electronic channels and websites illustrates the dangers of a debased media that has only flourished and become more chauvinist under Modi.

Such is the degree of intimidation that Oxford University Press has opted out of producing a cheaper edition of the Roy Chowdhury and Keane book for the Indian market. This followed a warning in the journal of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the militant Hindu-nationalist movement from which Modi sprang.

While the strategic partnership between Australia and India won’t follow the US alliance model, economic ties seem likely to grow steadily, and an essay about this would have rounded out this issue of Australian Foreign Affairs. The Morrison government is again talking up the free-trade agreement shelved soon after Abbott and Modi announced talks. This is again raising unrealistic hopes.

As Peter Varghese, author of An India Economic Strategy to 2035 for the Australian government, put it to me earlier this year, India is “deeply protectionist and unlikely to fundamentally change.” He says India is an “investment story” requiring Australian businesses to get in behind India’s protective barriers and develop a domestic business — a big call for Australia’s parochial and short term–minded business community. “I think it would be a mistake to overinvest in getting a free-trade agreement done because it will just distract the relationship for a considerable period of time with a limited prospect of success,” Varghese said. “And there’s a heck of a lot of things you can do without an FTA.”

On the shared values front, the old secular India may be pushing back. As Roy Chowdhury and Keane admit, India may still have the world’s largest pool of illiterates, but adult literacy grew from 12 per cent in 1947 to 74 per cent in the latest census, in 2011. Mobile phones and the internet have empowered and enlightened, as well as being channels for bigotry and porn. Political cultures in the non-Hindi language states and lower-caste mobilisation also stand in Modi’s way: in the important West Bengal state elections this year, the fiery chief minister and leader of a Congress Party splinter, Mamata Banerjee, roundly beat Modi’s BJP.

The Supreme Court may also be regaining its nerve under a new chief justice. This year it accepted public interest litigation from a group of Modi critics who found their mobile phones infected by Israeli spyware available only to governments. The court rejected the government’s attempt to assert national-interest secrecy, and set up its own independent commission to investigate.

And this month, Modi abruptly announced the withdrawal of his new agricultural laws that would have ditched guaranteed prices and government purchases of major crops, and left individual farmers to deal directly with emerging giant retail chains. Until suspended by the Supreme Court in January, the laws drew a blockade of New Delhi by farmers and their tractors. Over 600 died in clashes with police, as Modi’s spokespeople called the protesters “traitors” and “terrorists.”

With state elections approaching in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, from where many of the protesting farmers came, the Indian prime minister is backing off. Perhaps we have seen peak Modi. •

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

The post Can-do communalism appeared first on Inside Story.

Thanks largely to the political turmoil and a drought caused by two successive La Niña weather patterns, the World Food Programme says that 22.8 million of Afghanistan’s thirty-nine million people are short of food, with 8.7 million at “emergency levels” of hunger. Fast approaching is the country’s bitter winter, when nothing grows and many villages are cut off from the outside world.

On top of this, nearly 700,000 people have been displaced this year by the conflict. The financial system has little money to dispense; doctors are unpaid and medicines are running out. Families are selling possessions to raise cash for food, some even offering their infant daughters for between $200 and $500 as future brides. The Taliban took power entirely unprepared for government.

“Afghanistan is under immense stress,” says the WFP’s Shelley Thakral. “By some estimates 2022 may be the year in which we witness near universal poverty in Afghanistan.”

The Australian Council for International Development’s Tim Watkin told a Senate inquiry on Monday that “Afghanistan is at a high risk of state collapse.” More extreme suffering seems inevitable, as does regional instability, an increased risk of terrorism and a renewed refugee crisis. “It would bring huge security risks for Australia,” said Watkin.

While geopolitical manoeuvring and concern about terrorism are hampering the WFP’s massive attempt to fund and organise relief, the Taliban is trying to leverage diplomatic recognition from its cooperation with aid efforts. But even the surrounding powers, with fewer scruples about the Taliban’s fundamentalist ideology — let alone Western countries — are holding back from recognising the new regime.

Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and Qatar initially demanded early recognition of the Taliban government, says Lahore-based analyst Ahmed Rashid, author of acclaimed studies of the Taliban. But now they seemed to have “cooled down.” Partly, says Rashid, this reflects the Taliban’s failure to engage with neighbouring countries. And it would be awkward, “especially for the respectable states like Qatar,” to annoy the Americans by hastily recognising the new government. “What is happening now is a rolling back of this bloc of five countries who were ready to recognise and are now hesitant.”

Most of these countries still have embassies in Kabul, but Rashid says this doesn’t amount to recognition. “These embassies are basically involved in helping their compatriots leave the country,” he says. “The airlift continues. Americans are still there — they’ve got three or four hundred Americans they’re trying to get out, including people out in the boonies they’re trying to get into Kabul.”

Pakistan, whose Inter-Services Intelligence agency was the sorcerer training the Taliban apprentice back in the 1990s — with the goal of extending its own influence over Afghanistan — is likely to be caught by the blowback from the Taliban’s success. “There’s been a strong reaction by fundamentalist groups of all sorts, which include the Pakistani Taliban and a variety of other groups who have been very active on the streets,” says Rashid. “The fear is this is going to increase in the weeks and months ahead.”

The Taliban are not making it any easier for the outside world by bringing the extremely violent Haqqani Network into their interim government. The new interior minister, Haqqani leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, is on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “most wanted list” as a “global terrorist” with a US$10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest.

“It’s very much like what the Taliban did in 1996 when they took Kabul,” says Rashid. “They had no clue, nobody training to run a government, no governance, people starving, and they threw out the UN. Much of that is being repeated now. They won’t throw out the internationals — they want international recognition — but recognition is not going to come, unless they really clamp down on terrorism.”

So far, Rashid adds, the Taliban haven’t taken up the measures being demanded by Western countries, the basic one being to eliminate international jihadist terror groups like al Qaeda. “And Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran are all very nervous, because they want early recognition so the Taliban will settle down. It’s been quite amazing that the Haqqanis have been running the negotiations with the foreign forces. That shows you. It’s going to be very difficult for the Americans to strike a deal with the Haqqanis.”

Washington’s response has been to block the release of US$9 billion of Afghan’s foreign reserves held in US institutions and as borrowing entitlements with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, lest it go to the Taliban for non-humanitarian purposes. At the Senate hearing on Monday, aid groups urged Canberra to seek ways of unlocking the reserves via trust funds for relief work.

The WFP and other non-government groups report the Taliban are starting to cooperate to some degree. World Vision’s Patrick Thomas told the Senate committee that permission had come through last week for female staff to take part in the group’s relief operations in four western provinces around Herat.

Even before the fall of Kabul in August, the WFP says it was in contact with the Taliban and had been able to deliver food assistance at the height of the conflict. “The de facto authorities continue to allow WFP to conduct our life-saving work,” said the WFP’s Thakral. With relief convoys coming overland from Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and 170 trucks distributing aid across all thirty-four provinces, “no major issues” were impeding transit.

The agency estimates that US$2.8 billion will be needed in 2022 to reach the nearly twenty-three million Afghans at most risk. “Since August, some governments have stepped up, but money pledged and received to date is a drop in the ocean given the vast scale of humanitarian needs on the horizon,” Thakral said.

In September, the Australian government announced it was giving $65 million to UN agencies for immediate relief operations, with a further $35 million following over the next three years. But it is holding back on any moves that might constitute recognition of the Taliban, despite the longstanding foreign policy convention that Australia recognises states, not regimes, when it comes to opening embassies.

The government decided to close its Kabul embassy on 28 April, not long after US president Joe Biden set a date for withdrawing the remaining US forces. Hundreds of Afghans who had worked for Australia were left to seek visas by complex online form-filling.

Along with the United States and several other Western governments, Canberra maintains informal contact with the Taliban in Qatar, where diplomat Daniel Sloper operates as “special representative on Afghanistan” at the Australian embassy. “This mission is helping to deepen our cooperation with partners, many of whom also moved their missions to Afghanistan from Kabul to Qatar,” the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in its submission to the Senate inquiry.

Ahmed Rashid says this cooperation between Western governments has yet to result in a clear message to the Taliban. “They haven’t spelt it out,” he says. “But clearly their number one focus is to wrap up all these non-Afghan terrorist groups in Afghanistan — kill them, shoot them, imprison them, do what you like, but get rid of them. That includes multiple groups — from Pakistan, Central Asia, and Arabs. Everybody is still there, al Qaeda included.” Then they want the Taliban to deal with Islamic State Khorasan, “which the Taliban would like to do but they don’t seem to be getting done.”

For the West, women’s education and jobs are the other big issue. “My critique of all of this,” says Rashid, “is I don’t think the West has laid it out clearly enough: step by step that the Taliban need to take. If it was clear, then all visitors to the Taliban could make the same points, and you would hopefully get the Taliban to do some of this stuff.”

Such a diplomatic push may be starting. The Biden administration’s new Afghanistan special envoy Thomas West was due in Islamabad yesterday to meet the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, along with Pakistani, Chinese and  Russian officials. West would “make clear the expectations that we have of the Taliban and of any future Afghanistan government,” said the US State Department, while a Pakistani official briefed that the meeting was “primarily aimed at… finding ways to avert a humanitarian crisis and to look into possibilities of setting up an inclusive government in Afghanistan.”

Canberra seems to be waiting for leads from this meeting, and from another hosted by India in New Delhi on Wednesday that was attended by Russia and the Central Asian republics, but not Pakistan or China.

The Senate inquiry is hearing all kinds of submissions about what Australia did in Afghanistan after it joined US president George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” The near twenty-year engagement cost us forty-one soldiers killed, hundreds injured and traumatised, scores of post-service suicides, a continuing war crimes investigation, and some $13.6 billion. And for the United States, of course, and some European allies, the price was much, much higher.

The Australian government would much rather have us focus on military heroics than this debacle. On his way back from his fraught visits to Rome and Glasgow, Scott Morrison stopped off in Dubai for a restorative immersion in khaki, meeting and thanking some of the defence force personnel who, at great risk, extracted 4100 citizens and visa-holders from Kabul’s airport after the city fell to the Taliban.

On the positive side of the ledger was a sharp increase in life expectancy for Afghans; more access to education, including for girls; reduced maternal mortality; and more representation and opportunity for women.

All this is now at risk, which is why few, if any, of the Senate witnesses said the Taliban deserved formal ties yet. “There is a real danger that any steps to accord them recognition at this point would be read by the Taliban as an indicator that they could openly violate important international norms and expect to get away with it,” a quartet of academics — William Maley, Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Nishank Motwani and Srinjoy Bose — told the committee.

And yet the pressing human disaster seems to require contact, which in turn might open channels for persuasion. “The dire situation should compel the separation of politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said WFP spokesperson Thakral. “We understand the concerns of the international community, but delivery of life-saving aid is still possible by channelling funds through humanitarian agencies like WFP. We cannot wait, we need to save lives today.” •

The post Lest we forget Afghanistan appeared first on Inside Story.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of the software house Atlassian, paid a record $100 million for Fairwater in 2018, and moved in with his young family. Atlassian’s other founder, Scott Farquhar, had already bought the neighbouring house, “Elaine,” which had been owned by Sir Warwick’s cousin and John Fairfax Ltd director Sir Vincent Fairfax, for $71 million.

Where Sir Warwick went to work chauffeur-driven in finely tailored Prince of Wales check suits, in later years favouring mutton-chop sideburns, forty-one-year-old Cannon-Brookes wears jeans, sweatshirts and a peaked canvas cap, has a straggly beard and shoulder-length hair, and takes public transport to work.

The old Fairfax building on Broadway featured different tiers of catering, ranging from an executive dining room for senior managers, editors and directors down to two greasy-spoon canteens, one for white-collar staff and the other for the inky printers. A reserved elevator took Sir Warwick and other directors to the wood-panelled top floor. Otherwise the building was so bleakly utilitarian it was once used as a location for a movie set in Stalin-era Moscow.

Some 300 metres away, Atlassian’s new $546 million headquarters, recently approved by the NSW government as part of the remake of Central railway station, will be a forty-storey concrete, steel and timber structure running on 100 per cent renewable energy. It will feature indoor and outdoor garden terraces where executives and programmers will mingle under a corporate philosophy that declares “no bulls—t” as one of its guiding principles.

The Atlassian story, now a legend, has inspired a generation of internet startups. It began when Cannon-Brookes, a banker’s son who went to the expensive Cranbrook school, not far from where he lives now, and Farquhar, a working-class boy from Sydney’s outer suburbs who won a place at the selective James Ruse high school, met during information technology and science classes at the University of NSW.

On graduating in 2002, they formed Atlassian and began work on a new program called Jira, designed to improve collaborative software development projects and sort out program bugs. They financed the startup with $10,000 drawn on maxed-out credit cards. Jira and other products designed to enhance creative cooperation found ready markets. Two decades later, Microsoft, Oracle and the other top-ten software makers use Atlassian products, as do major global companies including Shell, Toyota, Amazon and Nokia Verizon, and universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale and MIT.

In 2010 the partners raised US$60 million from a big US venture capital fund, and in 2015 they floated Atlassian on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York. It now has a market capitalisation of US$108 billion, making it the 143rd-biggest corporation in the world by that measure, with 6000 employees in Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Japan and India. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar both own 22.7 per cent, making each of them worth US$24.5 billion.

The two partners haven’t just spent big on the finer things in life. They have also been lobbing boulders into the stagnant ponds of Australia’s economy and politics. Belatedly, a decade or so after the United States, tech billionaires are disrupting Australian business, and their firepower is immense.

One of the first inklings came in early 2017 when South Australia suffered a statewide blackout after tens of thousands of lightning strikes and two tornadoes cut power lines. Conservative politicians and journalists pounced, blaming the then Labor state government for relying too much on wind and solar power rather than “stable” coal or gas generators.

Cannon-Brookes picked up on a claim by Tesla’s vice-president for energy products, Lyndon Rive, that his company’s big lithium batteries could fix the state’s energy network in one hundred days. On Twitter, he asked Tesla founder Elon Musk how serious he was. “If I can make the $ happen (& politics),” he asked, “can you guarantee the 100 MW in 100 days?”

“Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free,” Musk tweeted back. “That serious enough for you?”

Musk was derided by then federal treasurer Scott Morrison, who around the same time brandished a lump of coal in parliament to taunt Labor and the Greens. “By all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country,” said the man destined to be prime minister. “But that is not solving the problem.”

The big battery began operating in November that year, some sixty days after an agreement had been signed between Tesla, French renewable firm Neoen, and the SA government. As a backup, it can power 30,000 homes for eight hours, or 60,000 homes for four. As a source of cheap power, it’s estimated to save South Australian consumers about $40 million a year.

The battery’s capacity is currently being doubled, and state governments and power companies around Australia are following its example.

“The way capital has moved much more strongly towards renewables than the Coalition has is fascinating,” says former Australian National University professor of economics Andrew Leigh, now a federal Labor MP. “You can see the tension within the Business Council of Australia and how increasingly renewables are being seen as the sensible way to go.”

Leigh believes that Mike Cannon-Brookes stands out so much because the Australian business landscape has been so static. Aside from pharmaceutical major CSL, he says, the five largest firms on the stock market are the same as they were thirty-five years ago. “You see much more dynamism and flux in the US. The US has completely turned over its top five companies in the last thirty-five years, and the dominance of tech in the share market has been well-established for a decade.”

Business is coming round on climate, though. Leigh reports having very different conversations with business leaders from those he has with his counterparts on the other side of parliament. Coalition MPs, he says, “are caught up in talking about 2050 targets when the conversation in Glasgow is going to be about 2030. They’re still running scare campaigns about electric vehicles ending the weekend. You get a sense when you are talking to businesspeople that they’re excited about what Tesla and others are doing, they’re looking at renewables, they’re aware they have to account to the market on climate emissions. It’s just a very different conversation.”

“It’s a great thing for Australia that Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar have made an absolute fortune,” says Ralph Evans, a former head of the federal government’s Austrade. “There have been venture capital successes before, but much smaller. This is a very big one and it shows it can be done. It will encourage many others.”

Evans cites other examples of emerging firms, notably the Sydney-based graphic design platform Canva, started by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams in Perth eight years ago, which now has 1500 staff and 750,000 customers worldwide, and is valued at US$40 billion.

For Evans, the Atlassian partners reflect the spirit of the San Francisco Bay area. “It’s full of people like Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar,” he says. “They are not going to put up with what they’re told to think by Murdoch or Donald Trump or anybody else like that.”

As well as taking a high-profile position on climate, the company weighs into debates on immigration, arguing for more open transfers of expertise, and IT security, questioning the push by intelligence agencies to compel communications and social media companies to give them “backdoor” access to encrypted data.

But green technology is the subject that has brought Cannon-Brookes out into advocacy — and action. Over the past week, as Morrison dragged his Coalition partners into reluctant agreement on a net zero target for 2050 while sticking with the Abbott government’s target of 28 per cent reduction by 2030, Cannon-Brookes has been spurring action outside the federal government.

He and his wife Annie pledged to invest $1 billion in green technology projects and donate a further $500 million to organisations working on the climate crisis, and promised that Atlassian itself would be a net zero operation by 2040. He says the 2050 target cited by Morrison as a historic moment was already a “done deal” for most of the advanced economies, with ambitious 2030 targets now far more important.

His latest commitments come on top of some $1 billion that Cannon-Brookes has put into green energy ventures. One is a company called Sun Cable, with offices in Singapore, Darwin and Sydney, started by partners David Griffin, Mac Thompson and Fraser Thompson. It was seed-funded by Cannon-Brookes’s private investment firm, Grok Ventures, alongside iron ore magnate Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy and others.

On 20 October, as the Nationals caucus was still chewing the grass stalks on net zero, Sun Cable announced that a raft of important global firms, including engineering giants Bechtel, Hatch and SMEC, were joining its $30 billion project to take solar power from northern Australia to Singapore.

The project involves some 125 square kilometres of solar arrays in the Simpson Desert, connected to Darwin by an 800 kilometre cable, and then undersea to Singapore by a 4200 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable. The project is designed to supply 15 per cent of the island republic’s electricity and cut emissions by enough for it to reach its 2030 abatement target. Construction is planned to start in 2023, with completion in 2028, when it is expected to generate about $2 billion a year in earnings for Australia.

It’s a big test of the cable transmission technology. The most ambitious example so far is an 800 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable between Norway and Britain, with shorter ones from offshore windfarms to European centres. But a solar-cable project over a similarly ambitious distance is proposed to link solar arrays in Morocco with Britain.

Iain MacGill, a UNSW associate professor of electrical engineering who has collaborated with Sun Cable, says the project is “technically leading edge” in its combination of terminal configuration, distance, power transfer capacity, and water depth. “There are other HVDC links that collectively do most of these things (except that distance), but not all together,” he says.

“The commercial challenges and risks are likely the most important in terms of the project being implemented,” MacGill goes on. “However, the commercial opportunity is also extremely attractive given Singapore’s current reliance on gas generation, limited local renewable energy options, and plans to increase their use of renewables and reduce emissions.”

Another big renewables scheme, the solar-and-wind Asian Renewable Energy Hub proposed for northwest Australia, has switched from HVDC energy exports to green hydrogen and now green ammonia. Ralph Evans notes that Singapore is already building floating solar arrays in its own backwaters, and could find larger floating arrays in nearby Indonesian waters a cheaper proposition than the distant Australian source.

Somewhat ironically, Scott Morrison has found himself part of the marketing for Sun Cable, pushing its merits to his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong on a stopover to the G7 summit earlier  this year. Australia’s ambassador in Jakarta, Penny Williams, also worked to gain the Indonesian government’s approval for the undersea cabling, announced last month, with the project pledging $2 billion in technology transfers to Indonesian institutions.

After these latest announcements, Cannon-Brookes said Sun Cable could be just the start of renewable energy exports, and Australia should be thinking of a “500 per cent” renewables target.

“Every step forward puts the naysayers further in the rear-view mirror,” he tweeted. •

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

The post Atlassian shrugged appeared first on Inside Story.

Shum loses US$100,000 in a game called Kill the Landlord, but that’s okay — it’s a good investment in connections. As the drink flows, Ningbo tycoon Yu Guoxiang boasts of the official favours that enabled his expressway and hotel deals.

Once they arrive, museums and art galleries aren’t on the itinerary. David Li, son-in-law of Chinese Communist Party heavy Jia Qinglin, wants to open an exclusive wine club in Beijing, so first there’s a dinner at the Pavillon Ledoyen in Paris, where the wine-tasting alone costs US$100,000, and then it’s on to a Rothschild estate in Bordeaux.

Next stop is the Côte d’Azur, where Xu Jiayin, the ex-steelworker who founded Evergrande — the property group whose US$300 billion–plus in unpayable debt is currently causing China systemic risk — wants to check out a yacht that might work well as a floating palace for entertaining contacts away from snoops. He looks over one being sold by a Hong Kong businessman, but even at US$100 million it’s not dripping with enough luxurious fittings for the purpose.

Then on to Milan, where the wives go crazy with top Italian brands. They do so much shopping that getting their value-added tax refunds delays the return flight by three hours, though it’s unclear why they are bothered with such small change.

The trip is just one episode in Shum’s tell-all account of his days as entrepreneur and fixer. Red Roulette is a mind-boggling window into the era of breakneck economic growth and excess that the enigmatic Xi Jinping would start shutting down eighteen months after the European expedition following his ascension to the pinnacle of power in China.

Shum’s book recalls, though with much less intimate detail, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994) by Li Zhisui, the personal physician to Mao Zedong. It also has a tinge of Mr China (2005) by British investment banker Tim Clissold, which recounted how, during China’s early switch to private enterprise, some of his clients found their ex-managers opening factories down the road making copies of their products.

Educated in Hong Kong and the United States after his parents got out of Shanghai, Shum was recruited by an American investment fund anxious to put money into Chinese startups. “I quickly learned that in China all rules were bendable as long as you had what we Chinese called guanxi, or a connection into the system,” he writes. “And given that the state changed the rules all the time, no one gave the rules much weight.”

One client was importing Heineken beer in massive quantities into Hong Kong, to be smuggled onto the mainland by various parties including the Chinese navy. Shum’s employers pretended ignorance of this and other transgressions. “A lot of Western businesses in China adopted a similar, don’t ask don’t tell business model,” he writes. “Abysmal working conditions in factories making high-end sneakers? ‘Who knew?’ Prison labour making blue jeans? ‘There must be a mistake.’ In business with the army or the police? ‘We weren’t aware.’”

Shifting to Beijing in 1997, Shum found foreign firms playing a higher-stakes game, using the offspring of high-ranking Chinese officials to gain favour. “These sons and daughters functioned like an aristocracy; they intermarried, lived lives disconnected from those of the average Chinese, and made fortunes selling access to their parents, inside information, and regulatory approvals that were keys to wealth.”

He got close to Jiang Minsheng, son of party general secretary Jiang Zemin, who was rolling out fibre-optic cable. One associate proved less reliable, marrying a granddaughter of previous supreme leader Deng Xiaoping and driving around Beijing in a red Rolls-Royce convertible with military numberplates — a bit too ostentatious, even for the red aristocracy. Other relatives of Deng got deals like supplying bottled Tibetan spring water to China’s high-speed rail network.

It was during those heady times that Shum got to know Whitney Duan, a woman from Shandong province who had parlayed a brilliant computer science degree into a job as assistant to the head of a People’s Liberation Army real estate firm, then branched out to selling IBM equipment to telecom companies and developing land owned by a state shipping company.

Whitney took Shum to be vetted by a mysterious older woman who turned out to be Zhang Peili, wife of vice-premier Wen Jiabao, who was on the verge of becoming premier. A trained geologist like Wen, she’d gained an interest in business via gemstones. Desmond passed the test, and he and Whitney married.

By then Whitney and “Aunty Zhang” were business partners sharing an office in a sought-after tower on the understanding that Zhang would get 30 per cent of Whitney’s profits. Famously nerdy and workaholic, Wen saw nothing of this, not even recognising the expensive rocks and US$10,000 Hermès handbags flashed by his wife.

Big breaks followed, including the well-timed acquisition of a 3 per cent stake in the insurance giant Ping An from the state shipping line, COSCO, that eventually turned a US$12 million investment into US$200 million for Whitney and Desmond.

The couple pushed for a new cargo hub to be attached to Beijing’s airport, which was being expanded for the 2008 Olympics. Airport chief Li Peiying and Sun Zhengcai, party secretary in neighbouring Shunyi district, were cultivated for their support, as were lots of underlings. Gifts included US$10,000 golf club sets and US$15,000 watches.

One of their employees took officials to bathhouses so many times his skin started peeling. The airport customs office demanded and got a US$50 million staff centre, and the quarantine office something similar. On a “study tour” to Los Angeles, an official collapsed, requiring a US$300,000 triple bypass, which Shum funded.

This kind of behaviour was essential, says Shum, “in a system where the rules regarding what was legal and what was proscribed were full of vast areas of grey and every time you wanted to accomplish something you had to wade into the grey.”

It was an intoxicating time for businesses with links to the red aristocracy. “In the 1990s, China’s well-off bought knock-offs,” Shum says. “In the 2000s, we bought the real thing — LV, Prada, Gucci, and Armani.” Whitney spent US$15 million on a pink diamond and US$5 million on a painting, She paid a big import duty bill for a Rolls-Royce, and gave Shum a half-million-dollar Swiss watch for his birthday that F.P. Journe had taken two years to craft. (It was seventh in a series, of which Vladimir Putin was reputedly given the second.)

It could be hard going, though, and risky. Sun Zhengcai moved on, and Li Peiying, who had no party ancestry, was arrested and eventually executed for corruption. “Red aristocrats got a prison sentence; commoners got a bullet in the head,” says Shum. Funding from state banks dried up. Whitney and Desmond had to kick in some of their Ping An profits to complete the airport project. Faced with bureaucratic niggling from Li’s replacements, the couple found a buyer for their stake, abandoning the idea of further airport logistics centres.

“I began to understand what some of my entrepreneur friends had been telling me all along: the smart way to do business in China was to build something, sell it, take money off the table, and go back in,” Shum says. If you stayed in, you could lose it all.

“Two thirds of the people on China’s one hundred wealthiest list would be replaced every year due to poor business decisions, criminality, and/or politically motivated prosecutions, or because they’d mistakenly aligned themselves with a Party faction that had lost its pull,” Shum adds, noting that “anyone running a sizable business was bound to be violating some law.”

By this time, it was widely believed that China would become more open and transparent once private enterprise came to dominate the economy. Indeed, in the early decades of the capitalist experiment, Communist Party thinkers were looking at Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and Singapore’s People’s Action Party as models for one-party elected rule in perpetuity.

But the global financial crisis convinced party leaders that China had the right model after all. With Wen Jiabao’s term as premier coming to an end in early 2013, Whitney and Desmond thought they had a new patron emerging in Sun Zhengcai, the old party secretary in Shunyi, who had risen rapidly from mayor of Beijing to minister of agriculture, with membership of the Politburo standing committee to follow.

The top-level intrigue turned truly nasty with the approach of the 2012 five-yearly party congress, where the succession would be decided. The ambitious Bo Xilai, another red aristocrat, used his fiefdom in the vast Chongqing conurbation to promote himself via a campaign of Mao-era nostalgia. But his plan began to come unstuck when the British business fixer Neil Heywood, who was close to his wife, was found dead in a hotel room in November 2011. Three months later, the city police chief informed Bo that his wife had poisoned Heywood. Bo was enraged, and the police chief fled to the US consulate in nearby Chengdu; giving himself up to State Security not long after, he was taken to Beijing to tell his story.

According to Aunty Zhang’s account, says Shum, the scandal came to the Politburo standing committee in March. Zhou Yongkang, the powerful member supervising security agencies, argued that investigation should stop with the police chief, whose running to the Americans he considered the real offence.

Xi Jinping, still a relatively junior committee member, argued that all players in the affair should be pursued. Wen Jiabao backed Xi’s view, and in September 2012 Bo Xilai was sentenced to life imprisonment, putting him safely out of Xi’s way before the party congress.

Shum has since confirmed to the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor that this account came from Zhang, who would have heard it from Wen. If so, it is the first account of cut-and-thrust inside the Politburo standing committee, so far a black box for sinologists.

Dirt was meanwhile being thrown in all directions. In June that year, Bloomberg reported that Xi’s family had a billion dollars’ worth of assets. In October, the New York Times estimated Wen Jiabao’s family members held an estimated US$3 billion in assets. Aunty Zhang told Whitney the revelations had been fed to the newspaper by Bo.

The double whammy from the two American outlets enabled the victims to argue that the bad publicity was a foreign plot. The party closed ranks, and Xi’s and Wen’s families were encouraged to “donate” their wealth to the state. Whitney agreed to declare that Zhang’s wealth was actually hers. “She willingly became the fall girl to prove that Aunty Zhang had been right to trust her for all these years,” Shum says. Wen wanted to divorce Zhang and become a Buddhist monk: the party vetoed both moves.

Amid all this, Whitney and Desmond pursued a new project, the redevelopment of a rundown state hotel site in Beijing’s fashionable Chaoyang. Two office towers were built, together with a Bulgari hotel and apartment building designed by New York’s Kohn Pedersen Fox and a museum by Tadao Ando. The couple occupied a penthouse in this US$2.5 billion “Genesis Beijing” complex.

But they had become estranged, and after they divorced in 2014 Shum moved to Britain with their son. Their post–Wen Jiabao ally, Sun Zhengcai, had run into his own problems under Xi. Shifted to Chongqing to replace Bo Xilai, he was found to have not done enough to eradicate Bo’s influence, and an investigation for corruption followed. Purged from the standing committee, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 2018.

By then, Whitney’s problems had deepened in tandem with Sun’s. On 5 September 2017, after telling Desmond earlier in the year that she had been banned from leaving China, she disappeared from her office at Genesis Beijing, along with two executives and a personal aide. Shum wasn’t to hear from her for four years.

The silence was broken last month, shortly before Red Roulette’s release, when she telephoned Shum to implore him to stop its publication. Implying that their son might be at risk, she seemed to be reading from a script under duress.

Amid all the colour and movement of Shum’s account of those years, one central mystery remains: what did Xi Jinping have that his rivals for the top job lacked? He was consistently underestimated on his way up, says Shum, despite having made a mark by cleaning up corruption in coastal industrial domains (though selectively, like his later campaign as leader). The consensus among business contacts in those regions was that “he wasn’t even borderline talented.”

The couple’s only contact with Xi came when Aunty Zhang and Whitney had dinner with the future president and his wife, the glamorous People’s Liberation Army chanteuse Peng Liyuan. According to Whitney, Xi let his wife do the talking. “He sat looking a bit uncomfortable, cracking an awkward smile.” No rapport was established. But Xi often looks awkward, particularly posing with foreigners, when he often looks away from the camera. And he may well have been unaccustomed to being surrounded by women.

Since then, the idea that Xi was “signalling left to turn right” has been steadily dispelled by his moves to centralise power around himself, extend his tenure indefinitely, and elevate his ideological status close to that of Mao. Extreme wealth and celebrity is now decidedly out of fashion.

It remains to be seen whether the legacy of that wild period of growth — Evergrande’s debt, and some ninety million empty apartment dwellings — along with the country’s dire demography and his own crackdown on the most vibrant forms of private enterprise, will bring Xi’s dreams of rising Chinese power down to earth. •

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No such meltdown is known to have occurred among the navies that have operated nuclear-powered submarines over the past sixty-five years, not even aboard the USS Thresher, which was lost with all hands during deep-diving tests in 1963. Even so, a lot of public reassurance will be needed following Scott Morrison’s joint announcement with US president Joe Biden and British PM Boris Johnson that nuclear-powered submarines will be built and maintained by the Australian Submarine Corporation, or ASC, at Osborne, just outside Adelaide.

As independent senator Rex Patrick, a former submariner himself, points out, this means “nuclear reactors sitting on hard-stands at Osborne and moored in the Port River.”

American and British nuclear submarines are understood to use highly enriched uranium fuel that is close to bomb grade. With only one small nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights near Sydney, used for making medical and industrial isotopes, Australia will need to have made a big investment in nuclear expertise by the time these submarines arrive.

Morrison’s surprise decision to dump Australia’s commitment to twelve diesel-electric submarines designed by France’s Naval Group in favour of eight US or British nuclear-powered vessels is still being analysed and debated. But one thing is clear. “This is a strategic decision, not a commercial one,” says Steve Ludlam, a former managing director of ASC and, before that, head of Rolls-Royce’s program of modernising Britain’s submarines.

No one is hiding the fact that the new Australian–UK–US technology agreement, AUKUS — which also includes cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other frontier science — is about facing up to China, although none of the three leaders mentioned the fact at this week’s announcement.

“If there was any doubt about what Australia would do in an armed conflict between the US and China over Taiwan or the South China Sea, that’s now gone,” Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on Friday. “The US doesn’t provide you with the crown jewels of its military technology if you are not going to use them when it calls for help.”

But we would have been expected to sign up anyway. It is a popular misconception that the navy needs these nuclear submarines to help out in Northeast Asia. Its existing Collins-class boats, and the Oberon-class before them, have operated in that region. Silent conventional submarines like the Collins-class and India’s and Vietnam’s Russian Kilo-class are said to have successfully stalked and “sunk” US nuclear submarines and major surface ships in exercises.

As Canberra strategist Hugh White points out, for the money likely to be spent on the nuclear submarines — exceeding the $90 billion price tag on the twelve French vessels — the navy could have got twenty-four smaller conventional submarines suited to defence of Australia. The twenty-four ultra-quiet subs could also be deployed further afield with replenishment from bases like Singapore, Guam or Japan’s Sasebo.

The latest British and US nuclear submarines benefit from pump-jet propulsion rather than propellers, quieter engines and battery power for lurking, though, and are big enough and powerful enough to carry autonomous underwater vehicles and other new weapons.

Regardless of the technical issues, Thursday’s announcement leaves Scott Morrison with several fires to put out.

China’s reaction to the agreement so far uses routine language to accuse the AUKUS allies of a “cold war mentality.” As the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor has observed, Beijing must be aware its own defence build-up has helped create this level of alarm.

Trade issues might anyway be more pressing for the Chinese. The night before the AUKUS announcement, the Chinese commerce ministry fired another salvo in the US–China strategic contest by lodging a formal application to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a free-trade deal that links eleven countries including Australia. Although the timing appears entirely coincidental, the request painted the United States and its allies as preoccupied with military matters.

Pushed by George W. Bush’s administration, the original TPP was pursued by Barack Obama and negotiated to signature in 2016 by the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam. Then, after the Republicans stalled ratification in the US Senate, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2017. Malcolm Turnbull and Japan’s Shinzo Abe got the remaining parties to hang in, hoping for a change of mind in Washington. Biden says the agreement will need to be modified for this to happen.

The Chinese application sits oddly with Xi Jinping’s move back to promoting state-owned enterprises, subsidising selected industries, and separating off China’s internet and cloud storage — each of which would breach the terms of the TPP. But it will throw attention back on Washington’s position when Morrison and Japan’s Yoshihide Suga meet Biden on 24 September.

A more immediate challenge is the rift with France. Morrison has said he started thinking about the switch to nuclear submarines eighteen months ago. It wasn’t until June this year that he broached the idea with Biden — who has final say over transfers of the US nuclear-propulsion technology previously shared only with Britain — at his meeting with the US president and Johnson on the fringes of the G7 meeting. Morrison went on to Paris for an effusive meeting with Emmanuel Macron at which he made no mention of the impending decision. Eventually — about ten hours before the announcement, and after the first leaks by Morrison’s office started appearing in the media — defence minister Peter Dutton notified his French counterpart.

The rift throws into doubt the strategic spin-off from the cancelled submarine contract. France controls vast swathes of the Pacific through its territories’ economic exclusion zones, and French forces add to the West’s array of power in the Indo-Pacific. The political future of New Caledonia and French Polynesia are consequently being closely watched.

The French ambassador to Canberra, Jean-Pierre Thebault — recalled to Paris this week, along with his counterpart in Washington, over what the French foreign minister called “a stab in the back” — has revealed that France had offered Australia the nuclear version of its submarine. The agreed Shortfin Barracuda was actually a diesel-electric version of the Barracuda nuclear attack submarine, the first of which is now operating.

Thebault told the Sydney Morning Herald that his government had asked “at the very high level” whether Australia would be interested in nuclear-powered submarines and had “received no answer.” France had “a high level of expertise in nuclear reactors,” he pointed out. Seventy per cent of the country’s electricity is generated by nuclear plants.

Though closer, at 5000 tonnes, to the size originally sought by the Australian navy, the nuclear Barracuda had three disadvantages. It would not directly contribute to closer strategic engagement with the United States, symbolised by being entrusted with America’s nuclear-propulsion knowledge, nor would it help Boris Johnson’s vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain” beloved of Anglophiles in Coalition circles like Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer. And, unlike the American and British submarines, whose highly enriched fuel is believed to last the lifetime of the submarines, the French systems are believed to use less-enriched fuel that needs to be replaced every ten years. And the French submarines would not be attached to a nuclear umbrella.

That brings us to the domestic promises Scott Morrison has made about the new submarines: that they will be built in Adelaide, that no civil nuclear power industry needs to be developed to support them, and that the submarines don’t breach the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed by Australia, which bars the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Already the first promise is being watered down. The local content requirement for the submarines now seems to be 40 per cent — no doubt to the fury of Naval Group, which was being held to 60 per cent for the Shortfin Barracuda. Canberra briefings are also testing the idea of building the first one or two lead submarines in the United States or Britain to speed up the program. Meanwhile, about one hundred Australian workers who moved their families to France, and numerous Naval Group staff and contractors living in Adelaide, face a long gap before a new submarine program starts.

Steve Ludlam, the former ASC chief, has no doubt the Osborne yard could handle construction of either of the two most likely models of the Shortfin Barracuda, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest “Block V” version is 10,200 tonnes and 140 metres long, or Britain’s Astute-class, which is about 7000 tonnes and ninety-seven metres long.

An American naval expert told me that the hull section, which contains the highly secret reactor plant, could be shipped to Adelaide for assembly with the other hull sections. This is already done between the two shipyards building the Virginia-class for the US navy. “Every Virginia-class boat has been built this way, so this approach is well established,” the expert said.

Most Canberra reports suggest the Virginia-class will be the choice of the panel Morrison has set up to advise within eighteen months. But the American naval expert thinks the Astute-class will be favoured. The British boat is about the same length as the Barracuda and, importantly for the Australian navy, has fewer crew requirements — ninety-eight officers and sailors against 135 — than the Virginia-class.

Those who know about these things are cagey about the fuel endurance of the two submarines. Choosing the Barracuda would have required Australia either to build its own uranium enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication plants or to rely on French sources. But the expert said that a US or British design wouldn’t necessarily have fuel rods installed for the submarine’s lifetime.

Ludlam says the naval nuclear capability could be developed without a civilian industry, but that Australia already had expertise in the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which runs Lucas Heights and manages nuclear waste. “We are capable of doing it,” he says. “We haven’t got the same experience as the UK or US, but that’s the value of the partnership.”

The American expert agrees, while observing that it might make the naval program more expensive and pointing out that the US navy’s nuclear-propulsion program is run separately from the nuclear power industry.

But there are those who think a civil nuclear industry will follow, despite Morrison’s promise. “On the issue of nuclear power plants, don’t believe him,” Giles Parkinson, editor of Renew Economy, wrote on Friday. He points out that a poll by the Australian found that forty-eight of the Coalition’s 112 federal MPs and senators support nuclear energy.

“The nuclear lobby will say it is bizarre that Australia could be the only country in the world planning to sustain a nuclear-powered submarine fleet without a civil nuclear industry,” says Parkinson, noting that the Minerals Council of Australia has declared this to be “an incredible opportunity for Australia’s economy — not only will we develop the skills and infrastructure to support this naval technology, but it connects us to the growing global nuclear power industry and its supply chains.”

All these messy details can be pushed into the eighteen-month study behind closed doors, however, along with the costing. Construction in the United States or Britain would probably get eight boats for about US$40 billion (A$55 billion unless China undermines the Australian dollar by buying iron ore elsewhere), though the figure will be much higher if they’re built here.

And on Morrison’s third promise, Washington officials are saying the nuclear-propulsion transfer comes with an insistence the submarines will never carry nuclear weapons. Putting nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard a submarine, even a conventional one as Israel does, would be the most attainable delivery system for Australia. That now seems ruled out.

The doubts among Australia’s hard realists will no doubt remain: would the Americans really risk a Chinese nuclear strike for us?

Morrison, meanwhile, will be counting on his political fortunes being boosted by what his officials are describing in journalists’ briefings as a pivotal strategic decision to protect Australia. He might be hoping to get the same electoral bounce that some believe Robert Menzies received in 1963, recovering from his near defeat in 1961, after he announced the acquisition of the F-111 bomber. By the time the F-111s went into service in 1973 the threat from Indonesian president Sukarno’s fevered anti-Western posture had disappeared, and the aircraft never saw action.

The new submarines won’t start operating until about 2040 — well after the 2035 date Xi Jinping seems to have set for his own retirement, aged eighty-two, after he has settled the status of Taiwan and other outstanding issues. •

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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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Even before the airlift of foreign citizens and at-risk Afghans has ended, the question presents itself: do we have any continuing interests in Afghanistan? That has just been answered: preventing terrorism, if nothing else. So, does the West work with a Taliban-run Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan or against it?

Much will depend on the nature of that government. Taliban leaders have promised that an amnesty will be applied to former government soldiers and civil servants, that women can work and girls study wearing only headscarves or cowls rather than the full-body covering, and even that the right kind of music will be allowed. Many with long knowledge of the Taliban will believe all this when they see it.

Future relations will also depend on who beyond the Taliban leadership the new government includes in more than a token way. Hamid Karzai, the president installed after the United States helped eject the last Taliban regime in 2001, is back in Kabul talking to them. Abdullah Abdullah, a veteran of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of the 1990s and a senior figure in the ousted Ashraf Ghani government, is another.

Afghan resistance is also a factor. Ahmad Shah Massoud, son of the legendary anti-Soviet mujahideen warlord of the same name killed by al Qaeda in 2001, is holding out in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. He may have been joined by Amrullah Saleh, vice-president in Ghani’s government, who stepped down and fled the country just ahead of Kabul’s fall — which Saleh says makes him the “legitimate caretaker president.” Unless Massoud can lever his way into power sharing and policy moderation, a new phase of civil war might be starting.

The Taliban must also grapple with an Afghanistan that is vastly more sophisticated than the one they ran in their previous five years of rule to 2001. In those days, non-violent resistance was by word-of-mouth and anonymous letters. In Herat, Mohammed Nasir Kafesh circulated his unsigned satirical poetry on scraps of paper, unsigned, and Leila Razeqi, after being expelled from university for being a woman, organised tutorials for herself and friends under the guise of a sewing circle.

As Financial Times correspondent Jon Boone has noted, Afghanistan had very few telephone lines twenty years ago. Now 90 per cent of the country’s forty million people have access to mobile phones, with twelve million using data services. Even illiterate people have smartphones and Facebook accounts set up by village phone shops. Journalism is thriving. Cities are full of young Afghans returned from study and work experience overseas. Taliban leaders themselves are adept users of social media.

All of this could be turned off, of course. During the advance on Kabul, Taliban units shut down local mobile networks at night to prevent tip-offs about their movements. But once safely in power, would the leadership rob themselves of this channel to the population, as well as all its potential developmental leaps in e-commerce and banking?

The Kabul airport bombings also provide an early test of assurances that Afghanistan will no longer be a base for external terrorists, as it was for al Qaeda under the previous emirate. At a meeting with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Tianjin on 28 July, Taliban co-founder and political wing chief Abdul Ghani Baradar gave an assurance that the Taliban “will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for plotting against another country.” Wang asked the Taliban to “deal resolutely” with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an underground movement among the Uighurs of Xinjiang, adjacent to Afghanistan across the Pamir mountains. Baradar also welcomed continuing Chinese investment in Afghanistan.

Similar assurances — in their case, about Chechen jihadists and cooperative engagement — are thought to have been given to the Russians.

The Taliban also promised during the two years of negotiations in Qatar with Donald Trump’s special envoy not to let Afghanistan again be the base for terrorist groups. Trump didn’t achieve his second aim — getting the Taliban to enter power-sharing talks with Ghani’s government — despite releasing 5000 hardcore Taliban prisoners, who promptly went back into the fray. He went ahead anyway with his drawdown of US forces, to be completely out by 1 May this year, on the basis of the Taliban’s agreeing not to attack them. (Joe Biden extended the deadline to 11 September, the twentieth anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks that led to the US invasion, but later shortened it to 31 August.)

Separately, the Sunni-based Taliban assured Iran that it would no longer discriminate against or persecute its fellow Shia Muslims in Afghanistan, including the Hazaras, who streamed out as refugees, many to Australia, during the last Taliban ascendency.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, security analysts are cheering what they see as the severing of India’s post-2001 engagement with Kabul, which has seen about US$3 billion in investments and an array of civil society and state-building projects, including 2000 scholarships a year for undergraduate study in India.

Behind this upbeat appraisal is some nervousness about possible blowback into Pakistan itself. The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency fostered the formation of the Taliban from the country’s Koranic schools and launched them across the border. Now analysts worry that Pakistan’s own Taliban will feel encouraged to step up attacks on the state. Prime minister Imran Khan sent his foreign minister around Iran and the Central Asian republics this week to enlist them in his push to urge the Taliban to reach out beyond its ethnic Pushtun base.

The same goes for Beijing. Beneath the derision at the failure of twenty years of US state-building is thought to be great unease at a radical Islamist regime being installed in the centre of the Eurasian network of its Belt and Road Initiative.

In Kabul itself, China, Russia and Pakistan have kept their embassies open. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which along with Pakistan were the only countries to recognise the last Taliban emirate, are likely to be back, along with Qatar, the recent intermediary between the Taliban and the United States. India has withdrawn, evacuating citizens as well as Sikh and Hindu locals, and is taking a wait-and-see position on reopening its embassy in consultation with Russia.

The Americans, of course, made a priority of helicoptering their embassy staff out to Kabul airport. But the two years of Qatar negotiations, circumventing the US-backed government in Kabul, have given Washington a greater familiarity with some of the Taliban leadership. On 23 August, Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns flew into Kabul to meet the Taliban’s             , presumably to talk about problems in the evacuation operation, but perhaps also to discuss longer-term issues. It can’t have been warm — the outfit that rained down Predator drone strikes talking to the one that set off roadside bombs — but it showed some pragmatism.

Two days later, US secretary of state Anthony Blinken said the Biden administration is not abandoning Afghanistan but rather shifting its focus from military power to diplomacy, cybersecurity and financial pressure. He said that the administration has worked hard to build alliances and that the United States would continue to work with allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The financial pressure involves the conditions Washington has placed on the release of the US$9 billion foreign reserves of the Afghan state, which are held in US institutions, and the US$450 million in special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund, in which Washington and the Europeans pull the strings. It doesn’t sound very friendly so far; more like war by other means.

And Australia’s role? When Biden announced in April his target of fully withdrawing forces, Scott Morrison’s government didn’t wait around. On 28 May, Canberra closed its embassy in Kabul, and withdrew the ambassador, Paul Wojciechowski, and his staff to the United Arab Emirates, from where they were to operate on a fly-in, fly-out basis, as required.

With its implied lack of confidence in Kabul, the rapid exit is said to have met with strong disapproval in Washington and London. In retrospect, it also pre-empted two and a half months of embassy operation on the ground that could have expedited visas and passages out for Afghans at risk because of their work with the Australian military and civil projects.

Veteran diplomats hear that a contributing factor was a fear among foreign affairs department figures that they would be blamed for “occupational health and safety” failings if anything went wrong. But some also believe that statements by defence minister Peter Dutton — that some former Australian army interpreters might have switched to the Taliban or Islamic State, or even steered Australian troops onto improvised explosive devices — suggest a cynical “playing to the base” in abandoning Afghanistan.

Just before yesterday’s bombing, Dutton reacted to intelligence warning of an imminent attack by withdrawing Australia’s small detachment of soldiers and officials from the airport, leaving the Americans and British to hold the line. He said it was “wheels up” on the evacuation that had brought out 4000 citizens and visa-holders, leaving behind an uncertain number. The defence minister indicated the operation is unlikely to resume in the days remaining to the Taliban and American deadline of 31 August for an end to the military evacuation of civilians.

Nor is Canberra likely to reopen an embassy any time soon. Morrison would be wary of offending the 26,000 veterans who served in the 2001–14 military campaign against the Taliban, with forty-one of their comrades killed and hundreds of them suffering physical injury and mental trauma. Voices among the 70,000 Afghan-Australian population also object strongly to any recognition of the Taliban they or their parents fled, even though an Australian mission would help them to bring out relatives.

Aid organisations are keen to resume operations, with one official telling me a working relationship with Kabul is necessary. A US congressional report on 30 April described how Covid-19 and rising urban poverty levels mean that 16.9 million people are facing a “crisis” of food insecurity, including 5.5 million people experiencing “emergency” levels — the second-highest in the world after the Democratic Republic of Congo — and almost half of children under five years old are projected to face acute malnutrition in 2021.

No doubt this will weigh little with the Morrison government, nor indeed the Labor opposition. Next week present and former leaders, John Howard and Julia Gillard among them, will join celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, glossing over the hasty exits from Kabul. It’s wheels up on that alliance exercise. Or is it? •

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

The post Our enemy’s enemy appeared first on Inside Story.

The 5 August ruling by Federal Court judge Richard White, sitting as a presidential member of the AAT, stripped away the prime minister’s veil of secrecy around proceedings of the national cabinet, in which Morrison meets state and territory leaders to discuss pandemic strategy.

The judge upheld Patrick’s appeal against the refusal of the prime minister’s department to disclose the national cabinet’s minutes, and tore into its argument that the group met as a subcommittee of federal cabinet and was therefore subject to the twenty-year secrecy rule.

The government was given twenty-eight days to appeal before the judge’s decision takes effect. But any appeal must be based on points of law, and the options seem narrow. Patrick says he is ready to fight for the documents in the Federal Court and the High Court if necessary. “If they want to push on with it, there’s no harm from my side,” he tells me.

In fact, the crossbench senator is basking in the attention his secrecy-busting has attracted, and that’s invaluable for a first-term independent facing election within ten months. “People who are really engaged in politics and perhaps law and transparency issues are very interested in the fact of the judgement, the nature of the decision,” says Patrick. “Everyone else just says good on Rex for beating up Scott.”

The appeal is the latest in a dozen wins on freedom of information cases Patrick has taken to the AAT, the federal information commissioner and appeals bodies back in his home state of South Australia.

Transparency has been his campaign theme since taking his old boss Nick Xenophon’s place in the Senate in November 2017, following Xenophon’s resignation to contest the South Australian election, unsuccessfully as it turned out. On his first day as senator, Patrick sought details of water buy-backs in the Murray–Darling basin, eliciting the independent valuations that eventually showed that the federal government had paid vastly excessive prices to private interests for the water.

Some 200 FOI requests and pointed questioning of public servants in Senate estimates have made Patrick something of a terror for the government and bureaucracy. Xenophon dubbed him “Inspector Rex,” after the tenacious German shepherd in the beloved Austrian and Italian police series.

On one occasion, Patrick was in the AAT arguing against seven lawyers for the Commonwealth and a company. He has spent approaching $15,000 of his own funds in pursuing FOI applications, and in many cases he has also been able to make gratis public interest claims as a senator. He gets good advice: in the national cabinet case, the Canberra historian and journalist Philip Dorling found a 1940s precedent that undercut the argument of Morrison’s department head, Phil Gaetjens.

A particular focus has been the huge investment in naval shipbuilding in his home state, which started under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Patrick has exposed the escalating prices, technical risks and slipping delivery times of the now $90 billion future submarine and $45 billion future frigate builds. Coming from a background in the navy and the defence industry, he carries authority. “When I read him, I think: this bloke does know what he’s talking about,” says Haydon Manning, an adjunct professor of politics at Adelaide’s Flinders University.

Patrick’s new target is the Howard government’s policymaking on the Timor Sea maritime boundary with Timor-Leste, just as the new nation was emerging from a United Nations interregnum following the end of Indonesia’s occupation in 1999.

Those maritime discussions were a prelude to the bugging of Timor-Leste government offices in Dili by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 2004 during fraught boundary negotiations. Distinguished Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery and a former ASIS officer named only as Witness K are on trial over alleged disclosure of the operation.

Patrick told the Senate last week that the operation was probably illegal and therefore improperly authorised by then foreign minister Alexander Downer for the benefit of Australia’s Woodside Petroleum, which led a consortium with rights to the big Greater Sunrise natural gas deposit straddling the contested sea border. Noting that former attorney-general George Brandis stalled the prosecutions of Collaery and Witness K for three years, Patrick questions his successor Christian Porter’s judgement in letting them proceed.

Again, the fact that he speaks as someone who was once immersed in the armed forces, and almost certainly in intelligence-gathering, strengthens his point that this was an egregious misuse of ASIS.

Having migrated with his parents from New Zealand, Rex Patrick grew up in the coastal South Australian town of Whyalla, where he joined the navy aged sixteen. Once his talents were spotted, he was trained as an electronics engineer, running radar, sonar and communications systems. His sea service during the 1980s was mostly on the Oberon-class submarines, legendary for snooping on naval bases in places like Vladivostok and Shanghai. Patrick is guarded about the details. “Everyone in submarines is cleared to top secret, and will find themselves at some stage conducting highly classified surveillance and intelligence operations,” he says.

After eleven years he left for a specialist sonar company, working with navies around the world, and then set up his own sonar advisory company. A decade ago, his writings for defence industry journals about the looming replacement of the Australian navy’s present Collins-class submarines led to him advising former Coalition defence spokesperson David Johnston.

But he declined an offer to join Johnston’s staff when the Liberal MP became defence minister in 2013. Unhappy that the major parties approached all issues from a partisan viewpoint, he was attracted by Xenophon’s different “algorithm” when someone asked him to take up an issue: “If it was right and he could do something about it, he would take it on.”

Patrick shut down his company and started working in Xenophon’s Senate office. But he didn’t anticipate filling Xenophon’s seat. “I’m an accidental senator — I never ever sought a pathway to entering politics,” he says. “I got here by seeing the government embarking on the very costly, very risky future submarine project.”

He clearly thinks Canberra would have been better sticking to an existing submarine like the German Type 214. “They are superb submarines, and they will do 90 per cent of what the Australian navy requires,” he said. “Unfortunately, when you try for the other 10 per cent, that’s when you triple the price and quadruple the risk.”

Now the navy waits on innovative French-designed vessels, adapted from a nuclear-powered model, that will arrive ten years later than originally envisaged. In the meantime, the lives of the Collins-class submarines will be extended at a cost of $10 billion.

Patrick’s career also informs his approach to issues like the ASIS operation in Dili. “I came from a submarine background, where submarines conduct intelligence operations, and that happens all the time between countries,” he says. “Nations keep an eye on their neighbours and their capabilities and I have no objection to that. I also have no objection to intelligence services looking out for us.”

But this was different, he says. “This was a negotiation that in law was supposed to be in good faith. That’s what we signed up to, with one of the poorest nations on earth. Ultimately that operation harmed our relationship with East Timor. I’ve been up there. I’ve seen the Chinese building freeways on the southern plateau, power lines, ports. I can’t help but think that the Chinese have gained a strategic foothold based on Australia treating them in an awful way.”

From his maiden speech onwards, Patrick has pressed for parliament’s intelligence and security committee to have the same powers of investigation over intelligence services as the equivalent committees in the United States Congress. Australia’s Intelligence Services Act of 2001 created the committee but barred it from looking into any past, present or proposed operations.

Following up on Patrick’s statement last week on the Collaery–Witness K prosecutions, Labor senator Katy Gallagher says a Labor government would authorise an inquiry into the Dili operation, first amending the Intelligence Services Act to allow it. Patrick will believe it when he sees it, as Labor has voted against his similar amendments on six occasions.

Clinton Fernandes, a UNSW professor of international relations who has also battled intelligence secrecy with FOI appeals, gives Patrick full marks for persistence. “There are others like [MP] Andrew Wilkie and [senator] Nick McKim and so on, but in terms of consistency and banging the drum as often as he can, it’s Rex Patrick,” Fernandes says, adding that “his opposition is not to the intelligence system as a whole, or even part, but that specific problem that’s not able to be examined.”

Patrick says the amendment would be a crucial safeguard. “The intelligence services have greatly increased powers since the establishment of that committee, powers exercised in secret, and generally involving impositions on people’s liberties and rights to privacy. And my view is you have to have the correct checks and balances in place.”

His attitude brought him into public dispute with a key figure behind those greater security powers. After the Australian Federal Police raids on the ABC’s Sydney headquarters and the Canberra journalist Annika Smethurst in 2019, Patrick said then home affairs minister Peter Dutton and department secretary Mike Pezzullo “clearly hate media scrutiny” and had a double standard about leaks. Pezzullo rang Patrick and asked him to “reconsider” his remarks. Patrick took this as threatening and pushed back. Pezzullo was given a pro forma rebuke by Dutton.

Federal governments have had Senate majorities for only thirty months over the past forty years, and Australia probably accepts the virtues of the upper house’s plural voices, especially as that last spell of government control, in 2005–07, led to John Howard’s overreaching with his WorkChoices legislation.

As well as scrutinising and proposing amendments to legislation, the Senate and its committees have an important oversight role, says Patrick. “The most important thing about Senate estimates is not what gets revealed there, but that the people who are working in government buildings who are making decisions and spending taxpayers’ money must always be thinking: what or how will I answer questions about what I’m doing at the next estimates?”

For the crossbenchers who put the swing factor into this oversight, a Senate career is often just six years or less. The Greens have their niche vote, and some earlier splinters from the main parties, like the Democratic Labor Party and the Australian Democrats, had a longer span. For others, like Jacqui Lambie and Pauline Hanson, longevity can depend on personal projection. That’s why Patrick cut himself loose from the Centre Alliance with the aim of boosting his own name recognition.

South Australian voters tend to kindness towards politicians in the middle. Flinders University’s Manning says they liked the late Janine Haines’s “plague on both your houses” approach when she led the Australian Democrats. They backed Steele Hall when he split from the old Liberal Country League to form his Liberal Movement, and later returned to the Liberal Party. Local Labor leaders like Don Dunstan and John Bannon were hardly blue-collar. So Xenophon’s group fitted well into that moderate, centrist tendency.

Even so, Manning thinks Patrick may struggle for re-election. To win a slot, he will need 14 per cent or slightly more of the vote. “He might get 5 per cent but where’s he going to get the preference help?” says Manning.

“The sad reality is you can be as smart as anything as a senator, you can be really good on policy, but in the end do most voters get what you’re going on about?” says Manning. “I’m not so sure.” Xenophon carefully based his media “stunts” on policy issues he knew would resonate broadly, like poker machines, he says. “Do most voters really ponder about the national cabinet and its machinations? Though it’s really important and interesting, I did wonder about Rex on that one.”

Patrick says he is getting a steady flow of small campaign donations. He has also been careful, he says, to balance his efforts with bread-and-butter issues like JobKeeper and tax compliance. His strong stand against China’s treatment of its Uighur minority has attracted support, even though the state’s wine industry has suffered for Canberra’s frosty relations with Beijing.

“I would like to be re-elected,” says Patrick. “I like what I do, and I think I do reasonably well as a single person, with a very good team working behind me. But if I got to the election and was unsuccessful, I would just move on to the next stage of my life without batting an eyelid.” •

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

The post The accidental senator appeared first on Inside Story.

Many people have been reminded of that novel — or the film version starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner — in the depths of the pandemic lockdowns. Despite the quip that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world,” falsely attributed to Gardner, the British-born Shute showed great affection for the city, and indeed for Australia as whole.

This bestselling British author had upped sticks and moved to Australia in 1950, and would spend the last decade of his life on a property southeast of Melbourne. Starting that year with A Town Like Alice, his immensely popular books portrayed Australia as a sunny land of opportunity — and plentiful steak and eggs — contrasted with a tightly rationed Britain in the grip of complacent civil servants and envy-ridden politicians. They helped fuel the surge of “ten-pound Poms” taking up the Australian government’s offer of assisted migration. When Shute died in 1960, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran an editorial declaring that “this country has lost one of its greatest friends and propagandists.”

And so, when a reporting trip recently took me to Queensland, I decided to look at the unlikely place where this infatuation began: the country on the southern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. From November 1948 until January the following year, Shute and his friend James Riddell toured this region in a light aircraft they’d flown out from Britain. In those days, cut off during the three-month “wet” and baked dry for the rest of the year, the region’s human population counted in the hundreds.

At Normanton, not far inland, Shute and Riddell met pastoralist Jim Edwards, who had been a prisoner of war working on the Burma railway. For filching food from the Japanese, he’d been tied with wire to a tree for three days and bashed with rifle butts. He became the model for A Town Like Alice’s Joe Harman, the archetypal Australian bushman, laconic and true, played by Peter Finch in the 1956 film of the book and by Bryan Brown in the 1981 miniseries.

Immensely popular: Nevil Shute in London in 1953. Picture Post/Getty Images

Shute had also come across the story of a group of Dutch women and children who had been shunted around Sumatra for three years by the Japanese. He made them the novel’s English families, marched around Malaya by perplexed guards, with a Malay-speaking planter’s daughter, Jean Paget, assuming leadership. Barefoot, sarong-clad and, like all of Shute’s heroines, wise beyond her years, she was played by Virginia McKenna in the film and Helen Morse in the miniseries.

Shute joined his storylines in occupied Malaya, when Joe Harman, driving a truck for the Japanese, steals his commandant’s chickens to feed Paget’s group. He is caught, nailed through the hands to a post and left to die. Although he is rescued, he only learns much later that Paget and her group survived — and, moreover, that she was Miss Paget, not Mrs as he’d assumed.

Back running a cattle lease in the Gulf, Joe scores a modest lottery win and sets off to London to track her down. Meanwhile, Jean, now a secretary in a London leather-goods firm, has come into an inheritance (another favourite Shute plot device) and goes back to Malaya to repay the villagers who sheltered her group. Having learned that Joe had survived, she travels on to Australia to find him, first to Alice Springs and then to “Willstown,” where he now works.

After many crossed wires the pair meet in Cairns. Joe is somewhat awed by the smart English lady Jean has become, but the ice is finally broken on Green Island in the Great Barrier Reef when Jean dresses in her old sarong. Though the gates of passion open, they agree to wait until they are married.

Shute’s love affairs were always chaste until marriage. He boycotted the premiere of On the Beach because its director, Stanley Kramer, had the US nuclear submarine commander, played by Peck, consummate his relationship with his Australian friend, played by Gardner, instead of staying loyal to his wife, presumed dead in America.

Leaving Cairns and Green Island, Joe and Jean return to “Willstown,” where Jean sets out to revive the old mining town and make it “a town like Alice.” Her scheme is to set up a shoe-making factory using the handy local supply of crocodile skins and employing girls who would otherwise head for the big cities. With a supply of young white women enticed further by a new ice-cream parlour, open-air cinema and hair salon, young white men also throng to Willstown. Soon new houses are going up on abandoned lots and the footpaths are full of prams.

To get to the original of that fictionalised place, I take the Trans North bus from Cairns to Normanton, then rent a four-wheel drive with a strong bull bar for a 230-kilometre journey along Australia’s national Highway 1, hereabouts called the Savannah Way. If you follow for the next 13,000 kilometres, as a lot of grey nomads do, it will take you around the edge of Australia and bring you back to the same place.

Highway 1 is sealed by the Queensland state government from Cairns to Normanton. But from there to the Northern Territory border, about 700 kilometres, it is left to the two local shires to maintain, a task clearly beyond the means of their few hundred ratepayers. Strips of bitumen alternate with gravel and dried mud, though most of the frequent wet-season floodways have concrete paving. The trees are stunted except along creek beds, ant hills are ranked like tombstones, a wedge-tailed eagle gorges on the carcass of one of the wallabies lying dead by the road.

Before reaching the river named after the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who traversed this country in the 1840s, I turn onto a dirt track and come to a lonely monument marking the northernmost camp of Burke and Wills in their hubristic attempt to make the first south–north crossing of Australia. Across the Leichhardt, I come to a strip of sealed road that leads into Burketown, the none-too-hidden model for Willstown.

Even after seventy years, it hasn’t become a town anything like Alice. The population is just 176, with 152 more in the surrounding 40,000 square kilometres of Burke Shire — not counting the temporary residents of its Century nickel mine, the dry-season tourists, or the 1200 or so people of the Aboriginal shire of Doomadgee, to the west.

Still, it’s a great improvement on the town Shute would have seen. For one thing it has trees, thanks to a permanent water supply from a spring-fed river up-country, and a central grassy park with sprinklers pumping away. The Commonwealth Hotel, where Shute would have stayed, burnt down in 1954; in its place is the Savannah Lodge, with cabins set among thick greenery around a Southeast Asian–style open-sided lounge.

When I phone him the next morning, Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp, is out on his horse somewhere on his cattle spread. He tells me that when he was a small boy in the 1960s conditions were still primitive. “If you wanted a power supply you had to generate your own, or use carbide or kerosene lamps.” No roads were sealed, he says, and there was a single telephone line. “You could wait up to three days to get a telephone call out.”

As in most towns across Australia with significant Indigenous populations, the local Aboriginal people lived in shanty settlements out of sight. “I can remember coming into Burketown as a kid and seeing a complex of buildings just outside town,” Camp says. “Most people referred to it as a compound.” The only Aboriginal people in Shute’s novel are out on the cattle stations, as stockmen or as domestic servants in the homesteads, speaking broken English, subservient, and bearing offensive joke names like Bournville and Palmolive.

“People here were pretty much enslaved out on stations,” community leader Murrandoo Yanner tells me later that day at the offices of the Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council. “They used to pay the mob in opium. Then they switched to paying us in tobacco, flour, sugar and tea, and one uniform a year. You got a pair of boots, a hat, and pastoral clothes.”

Murrandoo Yanner, who assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. Anna Rogers/Newspix

“We were all out on the fringes, on reserves on the edge of town,” recalls Yanner, whose first name means “whirlwind” or “waterspout” and replaces the “Jayson” he was first given.

His great-grandmother brought her children into Burketown after a massacre of Aborigines, including her husband, by police and pastoralists early last century. This was not the last clash: only five years before Shute’s visit, on Bentinck Island some forty kilometres from Burketown, spear-wielding Aborigines confronted a launch carrying Australian air force radar technicians from Mornington Island. They thought that the men, who had stopped for water on their way to Burketown, were about to abuse their women like a previous army survey team had done. One Aboriginal man was shot dead.

“It was worse than Soweto,” Yanner says of the fringe camp. “No water, no sewerage, you had to walk kilometres to get your water in buckets. Pit toilets, housing just tin shacks. People used to live off the land basically, aside from the rations they used to drop off. People controlling the rations would often rort that, keep half of it and sell it on the sly in the black market to their white mates.”

Shute didn’t show us this side of his Willstown, though he has entrepreneurial Jean Paget set up a separate space for Aboriginal customers in her ice-cream parlour, with an Aboriginal girl serving. Throughout A Town Like Alice, he used pejorative white Australian terms — “boongs” or “Abos” — while showing surprising understanding and respect for Malays and even putting some of the Japanese guards in a sympathetic light. The Aboriginal locals were just part of the background.

Shute was not outstandingly racist for his times. In an earlier novel, The Chequer Board (1947), he explored two examples of interracial marriage, a Black GI to an English girl, an English airman to a Burmese woman. In another of his Australian novels, Beyond the Black Stump (1956), he lampoons an American family for their appalled reaction when his Australian heroine mentions that her pastoralist father had fathered several children with an Aboriginal woman before her white mother arrived on the scene.

In a second novel derived from his time in the Gulf country, the weird and largely forgotten In the Wet (1953), he has a baby born to a Scottish stockman and his “half-caste” wife rising to become squadron leader David Anderson in the Royal Australian Air Force three decades later.

In the Wet’s picture of Britain in the imagined 1983 is grim, with rationing continuing under a miserable Labour government and pasty-faced people shuffling in bus queues. The white “dominions” are forging ahead, meanwhile, with the populations of Australia and Canada growing to near parity with Britain. Their dynamism is thanks to a modification of democracy, started in Australia, whereby one person, one vote is augmented by extra votes for having a university degree, overseas experience, raising two children to fourteen without getting a divorce, earning more than £5000 a year, being active in church, or being rewarded by royal decree.

As British prime minister Iorwerth Jones tightens the purse strings on the royal family, the Australian and Canadian governments, royalist to their bootstraps, each chip in a fully crewed jet airliner of the latest design (somehow this miserable Britain is still making advanced aircraft) for the Queen’s Flight regiment. When Anderson is tapped to fly the RAAF’s royal airliner, he asks if his race might be a problem. After all, he is a “quadroon” and commonly known as “Nigger” Anderson among his mates. Not at all, you just look a bit tanned, says Group Captain Cox, the Queen’s Flight commander. “We aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family.”

The dominions’ gesture only makes things worse for the royals. They secretly leave Britain aboard the two aircraft, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip travelling to Canberra in a jet piloted by Anderson and installing themselves at the vice-regal residence, while Prince Charles and Princess Anne disperse to Canada and Kenya. Her Majesty then appoints a tough army general, risen from the ranks, as governor-general of Britain.

Anderson meanwhile marries a Buckingham Palace secretary (another example of Shute’s stock heroine, a wise but intrepid young woman) who travels out with the Queen. She has checked out the possibility of a “throwback” baby, and been assured this could only happen if she too had non-European ancestry. On the flight out to Australia, it is Anderson who discovers a bomb in the cargo bay. “He was one quarter Aboriginal,” writes Shute, “not wholly of European stock, and in some directions his perceptions and his sensibilities were stronger than in ordinary men.” A 1970s movie version would have had a didgeridoo playing at this point.

In the Wet is the most bitter expression of Shute’s hatred of Clement Atlee’s Labour government and the welfare state bureaucracy he left behind. His autobiography, Slide Rule (1954), about his earlier career as an aircraft engineer, helps explain that hostility. During 1924–30 Shute had helped build a prototype airship, the British answer to Germany’s zeppelins, which made a successful flight to Canada. The rival public sector project, lavished with funding, crashed on its maiden voyage to India, with great loss of life.

Shute then founded his own aircraft company, Airspeed, and much of the book is about his struggle to raise capital. Government and banks were hopeless, he found, and the best source of funds was people with inherited wealth — the class found on the hunting field, the Cresta Run, the horse races and the yachting events. But they, he believed, were being taxed out of existence.

Tax was hitting Shute hard too. Having sold his shares in Airspeed for £3 million, and with his novels selling more than 100,000 copies in their first print runs and film deals starting to come in, he was a very wealthy man when he turned to full-time writing after spending the war thinking up fanciful weapons for the Royal Navy. By 1950, when he departed Britain, the top marginal tax rate was nineteen shillings and sixpence in the pound, or 97.5 per cent. Australia’s top rate was a less confiscatory 67 per cent.

He and his family settled on a small farm at Langwarrin, on the eastern side of Port Philip Bay, where he turned out more novels about Australia featuring lonely men and women finding each other in times of war or natural disaster, sprinkled with jibes at Atlee’s government and the miseries of postwar Britain.

Alice revisited: Bryan Brown and Helen Morse in Seven’s 1981 version.

While the British public lapped it up — A Town Like Alice sold 1.5 million copies — Shute’s infatuation with his new home country came to irk critics back in London. In Australia, though, there is little evidence that Shute’s portrayal was too cloying. It fed into self-laudatory stereotypes for decades, fuelling the huge popularity of the Seven Network’s 1981 miniseries of A Town Like Alice.

By then, of course, the country had changed in ways Shute couldn’t have envisaged. The exercise of Crown reserve powers in 1975, though not as drastic as the events in In the Wet, made us much more equivocal about the monarchy. The European migrants who figure in The Far Country (1952) had been augmented with Turks, Vietnamese and Lebanese. If he had existed, Squadron Leader (Retired) Anderson might have been joining a claim for his mother’s traditional lands. And Britain, far from being socialist, was getting tough conservative medicine from Margaret Thatcher.

Another forty years later, it’s not just the extra trees that make Burketown different. The 1967 referendum started profound social change, reinforced in economic terms by the 1992 Mabo judgement, for the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi peoples of the region. “It wasn’t always pleasant to upset the status quo,” Yanner tells me. “They were very violent in the upheaval that had to occur — the agitation of the soil to bring new growth.”

I query the use of that word, violent. “The miners, the pastoralists, were applying great levels of violence,” he says. “The police would come and arrest us if we were trying to defend ourselves. We drew a line in the sand and said, ‘What more can you do to us?’ We took it on the chin, went to jail but we stood up for ourselves. Till they realised we wouldn’t take any more pushing and they started to respect us. We were just defending ourselves and our rights, we weren’t attacking them.”

Aged only nineteen, Yanner assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. He was harassed by the Queensland police during agitation for compensation from the big Century open-cut mine southwest of Burketown, then owned by Conzinc Riotinto — events recounted in The Gulf Country, a book by University of Queensland anthropologist Richard Martin, commissioned by Burke Shire.

At one point, the police prosecuted Yanner under an obscure fauna protection law when they found two small crocodiles in his freezer. After a magistrate dismissed the charge, the government of National Party premier Rob Borbidge, who called the High Court judges in the Mabo case “historical dills,” appealed the decision. It went to the High Court, which upheld Yanner’s traditional right to catch crocodiles.

A spate of arson attacks followed. One destroyed Yanner’s house, another the council building. In 2002, someone torched a Coolabah tree on the Albert River blazed by explorer William Landsborough in his 1862 search for Burke and Wills, setting off fears that Aboriginal activists were intent on erasing the legacy of white pioneers.

But by 2015, the 150th anniversary of Burketown’s founding, the Century case had been settled by a court-initiated consent order with the state government. Millions of dollars were already flowing from the mine and the state into Aboriginal welfare and development projects. Large parts of Burketown were transferred to native title, including the town square, residential sites and industrial land, and the town now has an alternative Indigenous name, Moungibi.

Outside town, six pastoral leases came under Aboriginal ownership, making the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi the biggest landowners in the shire. Their commercial arm bought out many of the businesses in Burketown, including the pub, the garage, the airport, the tourism centre and the Savannah Lodge.

The Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council, from where these holdings are administered, is a kind of alternative government to the Burke Shire Council across the street, and the police and other Queensland government agencies.

“Most of Australia’s going to shit but here’s a place you can leave your key in your car, your house unlocked,” says Yanner. “Zero crime rate, no kids on the street, no mischief. No one beating their missus up, no one causing trouble. If they do, we restrict them access to our services and things and kick them out, because basically there’s dozens of people from less functional communities lining up to get in for their kids’ sake to a good community. We don’t do that with any state or government intervention, and deprivation of people’s rights, we do it ourselves: communally, locally. It’s far better than anything the government’s tried elsewhere.”

Doomadgee, to the west, Borroloola further along Highway 1 in the Northern Territory, and Mornington Island out in the Gulf are larger Aboriginal-majority towns notorious for problems of crime, addiction and poor health — and ineffective government interventions to deal with them. “The government doesn’t listen to the people’s ideas, or try out their ideas,” says Yanner. “They’re all concentration camps from the early days.”

He snorts at the idea of getting Aboriginal recruits into the police. “No, we wouldn’t accept it. They’d be the Jacky-Jackies. They’d be a tracker for them. Just like the old days. The only time Aborigines have been with the police is when you need an Aborigine to catch an Aborigine.”

Two of the shire council’s five members are Aboriginal, and a third is of Philippine descent, and Yanner says relations with the council are now cooperative. Ernie Camp, the mayor, concurs and adds to the account of community self-policing. “Sometimes it might be claimed nobody’s doing their parenting, single-parent families, but on the other hand everybody’s doing the parenting,” he says. “Everybody’s keeping an eye out, and certainly not going backwards in giving a shout-out if a kid may or may not be doing the right thing. It becomes community parenting, I suppose.”

Mutual advantage: Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp. Hamish McDonald

It’s not a community without problems, though. Youth suicide is a worry, Camp says, with one recent case involving a twelve-year-old, and social media grips young people who might previously have found solace looking after pet animals. Improving year-round road access would help reduce the sense of isolation, he thinks, as well as having national defence, biosecurity and a host of other benefits.

It still gets a bit fraught when, as mayor, Camp has to make a speech on Australia Day. He likes to use the analogy of a vehicle, with both a rear-vision mirror and a windscreen to look forward. “That’s the way life is, you need to have good vision going forward,” he says. “But we need to reflect on the past, and not to do the things again. It should be part of education to look back on history with no restrictions, and tell all.”

With our interview drawing to a close, Camp mentions how, in the midst of the heated negotiations over native title in the late 1990s, he was deeply touched when his three-year-old daughter wandered off from the family homestead and got lost in the bush. Yanner called and offered to bring out all his people in the search. (The little girl was found unharmed after many hours.) Anthropologist Richard Martin tells me that both sides had come to realise they could make native title and reconciliation work to mutual advantage.

The town now follows an annual cycle of tourism and cattle-raising set by the seasons. The three-month wet season, when the town is cut off by floods much of the time, is a wonderful, peaceful interlude, says Camp. “If you want to walk around naked all day you could — nobody’s going to bother you. Not that I’ve ever done it.” Then comes the annual barramundi festival, around Easter, timed so anglers can drive in from outside with the receding of the wet, but not so late into the cooler months that the big fighting fish has gone into semi-hibernation. Skilled fishers can still coax it to strike at the lure.

As the land dries out, it’s time for mustering the cattle. In September comes the unusual long cylindrical cloud formation known as the “morning glory.” Glider pilots fly their high-tech machines up from all over Australia to use Burketown’s airstrip as a base to ride its thermals.

Meanwhile, says Yanner, the Aboriginal peoples of the region keep up their traditions. “We are the only community in Queensland that still runs full tribal initiations here,” he says, holding an imaginary penis in one hand and bringing the other down in a slicing motion. “No painkillers, antibiotics, all that rubbish, no doctors, just the old days and the whole thing proper.”

The young float between the two cultures — among them Yanner’s son Mangubadijarri (“the barramundi jumping out of the water”), who has been studying law and international relations at Bond University on the Gold Coast and is currently managing the Burketown Pub.

One evening towards the end of my visit I took a “sunset cruise” run by the Aboriginal corporation’s tourism office. At the town jetty, I boarded a large, new steel barge and watched crewman Paddy Kunsing haul in a fine fish. Then we set off along the Albert River, the reddening sky reflected in its still waters.

Fish jumped along the shallows. A small crocodile lay on the mud. The crew broke out bottles of wine and beer, and laid out crackers, cheeses, olives and dips. My fellow tourists were eight well-off retirees on a bespoke tour of the Gulf, Cape York and the Torres Strait. Their pilot came along too, and extolled the capabilities of his aircraft, a Pilatus-12 turboprop with luxury seating that could still land on small, remote airfields.

Nevil Shute would certainly have cheered this aviation bit of the Burketown story. Who knows what he would have thought of Tony Abbott and his knighthoods, but I doubt he’d object to the notion of young Brits coming out to work on Australian farms under the proposed free-trade deal with the United Kingdom. And maybe he’d approve of the reconciliation painfully won in a town smaller but more inclusive than the “town like Alice” he envisaged. •

The post A town not quite like Alice appeared first on Inside Story.

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 Myanmar armed forces, the Tatmadaw, overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi following its sweeping electoral victory, bringing to an end the constitutional progress started a decade ago by Min Aung Hlaing’s military predecessors. Since the coup, soldiers have killed more than 800 demonstrators.

Adding to the cynicism of the whole affair, Min Aung Hlaing seems to have calculated that Suu Kyi’s lowered international standing — an ironic result of her defence of the Tatmadaw’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority — meant her toppling would not be greatly regretted by the outside world. The general’s claims of election fraud were a Burmese translation of those being made by Donald Trump. Myanmar was facing no national crisis at the time: the coup was all about his ambition and the Tatmadaw’s dominance.

Coming up to six months after the coup, the Australian government is still in two minds what to do. Should it join the United States, Canada and European nations in applying sanctions against Myanmar military figures and military-controlled businesses? Should it go as far as the Czech Republic, which has recognised the National Unity Government declared by the ousted civilian leadership? Should it work alongside the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’s softly-softly engagement while using bilateral contacts as leverage?

So far, the government has inclined to the last, safest option. But ASEAN is split between those with elected governments, like Indonesia and Singapore, urging harder pressure on their fellow member, and those with authoritarian regimes taking a tolerant attitude to the coup.

Australia’s military was directed to maintain contact with the coup leaders. Vice-admiral David Johnston, the deputy defence force chief, has had two phone conversations with his Myanmar counterpart, vice-senior general Soe Win, urging restraint and pressing for the release of the Australian economist Sean Turnell, an adviser to Suu Kyi. Turnell remains in Yangon’s Insein jail, now formally charged with revealing state secrets, one of the crimes with which Suu Kyi is also charged. The Tatmadaw trumpeted the conversations with Johnston as a step towards Australia’s acceptance of the coup.

An Australian version of the “Magnitsky Act” — the US legislation that initially applied financial sanctions to Russian leaders and kleptocrats but has since been used against figures in Myanmar and elsewhere — is yet to come before parliament, despite the bipartisan recommendation of a joint parliamentary committee last December. And the government doesn’t appear to have wielded its existing migration and foreign investment powers.

The listless response is not for lack of interest in Australia. About thirty federal members and senators across party lines belong to a Myanmar friends group, and the joint committee was quickly set up to analyse Australia’s response to the coup.

“That’s a level of parliamentary activity which is rare in this country,” says Chris Lamb, a former ambassador to Myanmar and president of the independent Australia Myanmar Institute, which is backed by several universities. “And there’s been very little response to that. It’s a country that probably has more political engagement at backbencher level than any other.”

The policymaking rooms of Canberra appear to be gripped by doubts that sanctions have any point beyond symbolism. In a joint committee hearing in April, Defence official Hugh Jeffrey saw no “silver bullet” in sanctioning the military. “The Tatmadaw is an institution that has been remarkably impervious to international influence,” he said. “We also need to provide options that incentivise the return to liberal-democratic governance.”

In the prime minister’s office, Scott Morrison’s national security adviser, Michelle Chan, is a former ambassador to Myanmar. Her term there in 2008–11 covered the transition from outright military rule to the present constitution, which gives the Tatmadaw blocking powers in parliament and control of key security ministries. An internal backlash against Chinese influence had prompted military overtures to Suu Kyi as an alternative to continuing Western ostracism.

“Targeted sanctions mostly do not work — they’re very much a political response,” says Trevor Wilson, one of Chan’s ambassadorial predecessors in Myanmar. “Look at the history, look at the facts,” he adds, citing Yugoslavia and other examples. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that targeted sanctions work.” But he admits he doesn’t have a better solution. “Certainly I don’t think we should go the other direction of approving the military coup,” he says.

Among the supporters of targeted sanctions is the Australia Myanmar Institute, which is aware that figures within government believe sanctions achieve no results and remove the possibility of leverage. “To which my answer is: what leverage?” says Lamb. “When you see Vice Admiral Johnston speak to his counterpart in Myanmar and see nothing happen, where is the leverage and where is the benefit?”

In fact, says Lamb, it’s hard to see what would be lost by applying sanctions. “The kind of sanctions we are talking about would be pretty narrowly targeted to a pretty small group of leading people in the military and their assets,” he adds. “I think you get your best leverage by showing the decent people in the army that there is a future for them in the country.”

Janelle Saffin, a former federal MP now in the NSW state parliament, is a long-time friend of Suu Kyi and influential in Labor policymaking. She thinks that if sanctions reduced Australia’s leverage in relation to cases like that of Sean Turnell, any loss would be insignificant.

“If I want sanctions I’d want them to be directed, targeted and meaningful,” she says. “I wouldn’t even go for Min Aung Hlaing; I’d go for the coterie around him who all get wealthy through him. I’d put judges in it, like the judge hearing the case against Suu Kyi. Other people, diplomats who spread slander that protesters are terrorists. If I was doing sanctions I’d do them so they hurt people who were culpable.”

While not going as far as formal recognition of the provisional anti-coup government, Saffin says Australia could step up “engagement” with the ousted civilian government. It could lobby the United Nations to maintain the accreditation of Myanmar ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, who came out strongly against the coup.

In the meantime, says Saffin, Canberra is “hiding behind” ASEAN, and not even speaking as clearly against the coup as Indonesia and Singapore. If and when the regional grouping gets to appoint a special envoy on Myanmar — a step adopted at an ASEAN summit in April but since stalled — she believes Australia should weigh in.

Lamb agrees. “There’s no reason why Australia shouldn’t be speaking like the Indonesians and Singaporeans,” he says. “Both of them have their ministers out there saying things. Not us.”

If the chosen envoy is a Thai, as rumour suggests, Canberra should not assume this would lead to a whitewash of the coup, says Saffin. The current Thai prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-Cha, is a former general who came to power through a coup himself. The Thais would not want to be seen as a “pushover,” says Saffin. Australia should be using its considerable influence in Bangkok, enhanced by the new “strategic partnership” signed last November by Prayut and Morrison.

All these experts lament the rupture of bilateral dialogue with China, which has maintained relations with the Tatmadaw but must be alarmed to see its southern neighbour drifting deeper into domestic conflict and potentially transnational crime. One sign of China’s hedging was an invitation to Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to send delegates to the recent centenary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party, which it did.

“It ought to be possible for grown-ups like Australia and China to separate the bilateral things that cause us so much grief and talk sensibly about a country like Myanmar,” says Lamb. “And if not directly, to do it through surrogates.”

Australia did have a call for a return to democracy inserted in the statement by the “Quad” summit in March, notably putting India and Japan more firmly on side against the coup. It is also understood to have helped extricate a number of political fugitives from Myanmar.

The position of some 1500 students from Myanmar here on study visas is meanwhile fraught with uncertainty, with Home Affairs proposing to transfer them to temporary protection visas when their study visas expire. No post-Tiananmen Bob Hawke gestures here. Within the Myanmar community, some finger-pointers are targeting the children and other relatives of figures working back home with the military regime.

Canberra’s diffidence is sending signals of its own. “I don’t see that having no discussions about sanctions, or producing the kinds of answers that Australia does, can do anything more than give some reassurance to the generals in Myanmar,” says Lamb. “What we do is also the counterpart to what we don’t. Not doing something is itself a statement.” •

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The odds of defence being a stepping stone to greater things are not high. “For the overwhelming majority of defence ministers over the last fifty years, it’s been a graveyard of political ambitions,” says ANU’s Hugh White, the gadfly of Australian strategists. “We’ve had a very long tradition of defence ministers being ineffective, and looking ineffective. Most defence ministers find it very hard to give the impression, to the public, to their colleagues, that they’re actually in charge of their portfolio. It’s rather that their portfolio is running them.”

On the other hand, Dutton is the most politically powerful figure to take on the portfolio since Labor’s Kim Beazley. “People speak of Dutton as a future prime minister,” acknowledges White, “and certainly he’s the first defence minister since Beazley that people speak of in those terms.”

Dutton’s most visible moves in the portfolio have been culture-war dog whistles. He reprimanded the navy for allowing a female twerking troupe to do a sort of “hello sailor” routine at the commissioning of its new supply ship. He banned anti-homophobia morning teas and rainbow-coloured clothing, saying, “We are not pursuing a woke agenda.” It’s par for the course from the man who voted against marriage equality and boycotted parliament during Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations.

But the new minister has also sent signals to two defence communities. Against the background of army inspector-general justice Paul Brereton’s report on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, he assured serving soldiers that the government “has got your backs” and pledged to prevent the sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, who helped uncover the alleged crimes, from getting further defence contracts. Ignoring Brereton’s advice and countermanding general Angus Campbell, the defence force chief, he allowed some 3000 present and former special forces personnel not accused of war crimes to retain their Meritorious Unit Citations.

Then he let it be known he was keeping to a minimum any secondments from the Department of Defence to his ministerial staff, instead bringing over trusted aides from Home Affairs. He wanted to keep out “skewed” advice from the department, Dutton told his and Morrison’s favourite interlocutor, 2GB radio host Ray Hadley. “I want to make sure that we’re looking at it objectively, in particular around some of the projects where there is a lot of money involved,” he said. “Decisions have been made in some cases I don’t think should’ve been made, or the contracting is inadequate.”

Thus, from the start, Dutton put himself at war, or at least in heightened hostilities, with both his department and his service chiefs.

White, who served on Kim Beazley’s ministerial staff before moving to a senior role in Defence, says it isn’t unusual for defence ministers to bring in outsiders for advice and employ just one or two departmental staff to navigate the huge defence bureaucracy. But it’s another indicator, he adds, that Dutton is “potentially the most demanding and potentially the most reform-oriented minister they’ve had in a very long time.”

John Blaxland, a former army intelligence officer and now ANU war historian, thinks Dutton’s early statements were carefully thought out. “He has been thinking about national security issues for quite some time, and he is iconoclastic. He’s not accepting the accepted wisdom as being good enough for the future. He’s challenging everything. He’s making a lot of people squirm. He’s making life quite difficult for people inside. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s causing considerable discomfort.”

So what is he challenging? “Querying the basis of decisions, from what I understand are first principles, challenging why we’ve done things the way we have,” says Blaxland. “And the thing is he doesn’t have any skin in the game. They’re not his decisions. And if anything, he’s quite happy to find things that might be a little untidy for some of his potential political competitors.”

Dutton has come to the job “with pretty good preparation,” agrees White, noting that Home Affairs has grown second only to Defence among federal departments in size and complexity. In fact, the two departments have come to overlap, with shared concerns about cyber and military technology security.

“The other thing is that Dutton comes to the job at an interesting time,” says White, “when people are talking up Australia’s strategic challenges in a way they haven’t done in your and my professional lifetimes. There was all the stuff about 9/11 and the war on terror, but nobody ever envisaged that was going to impose really high-order demands on the ADF. Now we’ve had Morrison, announcing the defence strategic update this time last year, saying the situation today resembles the late 1930s.”

This means the job of defence minister feels more serious at the moment, White adds. “I think that’s the way he wants it. He obviously wanted the job. And it is interesting to ask why he wanted it, what he thinks he can do with it. I believe he thinks Defence is in very bad shape, and not just bad shape administratively but bad shape strategically. That is, they don’t really know what they’re on about. They don’t just not know how to get things done, they don’t know what they’re trying to do.”

To a large extent, though, Dutton must work with major decisions already made: the $90 billion construction of French-designed Shortfin Barracuda submarines, the $35 billion build of nine frigates the size of second world war cruisers, the final delivery of the $17 billion worth of F-35 strike fighters.

Still to come is a decision on armoured fighting vehicles for the army, an order valued at up to $29 billion. As part of that, the government has just ordered a replacement of the army’s current force of seventy-five Abrams tanks with a new model, at a cost of some $1 billion. This suggests Dutton has gone with proponents of a “balanced” force structure, ready to cope with all kinds of conflict — not on its own, it’s hoped — rather than those favouring more “asymmetrical” forces to counter foreseeable threats. Assets like tanks would be kept for the Army Reserve, if at all.

With the first of the new submarines at least twelve years away, Dutton tackled the emerging capability gap with a $10 billion program to refit the navy’s six existing Collins-class submarines. A small Defence team has been assigned to look at “plan B” alternatives from Germany or Sweden in case the French design proves impossible, but so far this seems a bargaining tactic. “He’s holding the French feet to the fire,” says Blaxland. “They’re not at all comfortable with what he’s doing to them. He’s talking up alternative options to apply pressure on the French to deliver, on time and as close to the budget as possible.”

In terms of beefing up military capability in the shorter term, though, the two notable measures were announced by Morrison before Dutton moved into Defence: the plan to equip the navy and air force with longer-range missiles and establish a “sovereign” missile factory, and the expansion of the Northern Territory facilities to host the annual US Marine Corps training contingents.

If he wants to pursue more radical reform, both in force structure and force expansion, Dutton is seen as having the edge on Morrison, who has few developed views on strategic affairs and is wary about taking Dutton on.

But is Dutton up to the intellectual task? Hugh White says the “good news” is Dutton’s inclination to think outside the box. “The bad news is that I think his judgement looks likely to be extremely bad on the really key strategic questions about what exactly Australia should be doing to address the rise of China. He does seem to be beholden to the idea surprisingly common around Canberra that it’s worth going to war with China to prevent China becoming the dominant power in East Asia.”

Blaxland says much “skulduggery” is going on behind the scenes, and the two-week delay in announcing a Foreign Affairs replacement suggests that’s the case. This week we learned that Kathryn Campbell, secretary of Social Services and a major-general in the Army Reserve, will be the new head. The appointment ended one line of speculation: that Defence’s current secretary, Greg Moriarty, could be moved to Foreign Affairs, opening up that position for Dutton’s secretary at Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo. A former Defence employee with a dark view of world affairs, Pezzullo wrote the 2009 defence white paper that urged the doubling of the navy’s submarine force, which has since been adopted.

But Pezzullo might still have an avenue if and when the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, retires. Moriarty might be persuaded to move into that job, or Pezzullo could take it — “In which case he will be a good ally for Dutton,” says Blaxland.

Campbell’s appointment meanwhile extends a security-minded view across Canberra, and might worry those calling for more investment in diplomacy and aid. She has a technical background, and her Army Reserve specialisation was in signals. Apart from a short assignment in the Middle East as deputy commander of Australia’s task force in 2016, her career seems to have included no foreign postings.

If he does eventually get Pezzullo, Dutton will have a departmental head likely to encourage his questioning of the status quo. “He may well feel he’d really prefer to have his trusted old hand Mike Pezzullo by his side,” says Blaxland.

But Moriarty is said to be keen to stay in the job, and Blaxland sees advantages for Dutton in that. “In Greg Moriarty he’s got an extremely capable manager of the defence business,” Blaxland says, noting Moriarty’s experience as ambassador to Iran and Indonesia and as peacemaking envoy in Bougainville and the Solomons. “He has a pretty sophisticated understanding of where Australia fits in the great power equation.”

Moriarty is also “adept at playing the bureaucratic game,” says Blaxland. “My sense is that Greg Moriarty will capitalise on Dutton’s dynamism and drive, and also moderate possible excesses, if Dutton allows him to moderate them. It depends on whether Dutton trusts him enough.”

Hugh White also returns to the question of judgement and balance. “It’s easy to see that Dutton is in some ways a more powerful figure, a more formidable figure than almost any other of his cabinet colleagues,” he says, “but we don’t really have any idea of how bright he is, how effective he is.”

Although Home Affairs is an “administrative behemoth,” White goes on, “it’s hard to point out an actual policy question on which Dutton has done anything other than hang tough. And hanging tough has its place but it’s not the whole of good policy. Dutton has set himself up for a test, and I think it’s perfectly likely — notwithstanding he’s more formidable than any of his predecessors for a very long time — he will stick in the portfolio for a while, and in the end he will leave with the place still in a shambles.”

But perhaps Dutton will be hoping to move onwards and upwards before that becomes a possibility.

“Once upon a time Defence used to be a bit of a political backwater, but it’s becoming more and more a pivotal agency on the national stage,” says Blaxland. “We’ve seen that not just with the Covid vaccine rollout and taskforce, but with the prospects of great power conflict looming, increased investment in the defence industry, additional expansion and muscling up of the defence force. Dutton is seeing this as a strong base for potential future ambitions.” •

The post The best form of defence? appeared first on Inside Story.

Even in power, the former army general had been a much blander, if more successful, dictator than his predecessor Sukarno or contemporaries like Burma’s Ne Win, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.

So has David Jenkins’s long-awaited multi-volume biography missed its moment, at least for the wider reading public? This first volume suggests not. Written with Jenkins’s characteristic clarity and verve, and painstakingly sourced, it is an enthralling read. As the list of acknowledgements shows, he managed to speak with most of the key surviving figures from the Soeharto era before they died.

The knowledge Jenkins has garnered since he arrived in Jakarta in 1969 as correspondent for the old Melbourne Herald has been a long time brewing. The two scholars whose endorsements appear on the cover of Young Soeharto, Benedict Anderson and Jamie Mackie, both died some years ago. Rather than some Javanist feat of posthumous telepathy, their approval came from their close reading of the draft and their guidance as it proceeded.

There’s also a second question: does Soeharto deserve such a long and detailed study? This volume runs to some 500 pages and covers only the first twenty-four years of his life. Two more will follow, surpassing Herbert Bix’s Hirohito biography and equalling Ian Kershaw’s study of Adolf Hitler, though nowhere near Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (four 800-page volumes so far). Even then, Jenkins plans to take us only to 1966, when Soeharto pushed Sukarno aside.

The answer is yes. Soeharto ruled Indonesia for thirty-two of the seventy-six years since the republic was declared in 1945. Despite the subsequent shift to a popularly elected leadership, the country retains many important elements of the system he presided over: a military not entirely back in the barracks, powerful business conglomerates, and an ideology that stands in the way of a hard look at the violence of 1965–66 that enabled him to take power. Even now, Soeharto’s former son-in-law and present defence minister, ex-general Prabowo Subianto, could make a third try, perhaps this time successful, for the presidency.

The core of this volume is a highly readable narrative of some 300 pages, with debates and digressive detail pushed to the 200 pages of notes that most readers can skip. It shows how Soeharto overcame a troubled and impoverished childhood to become a “polite, clever and capable young man” at the forefront of Indonesia’s emerging military in 1945.

Dubbed “the smiling general” by one early hagiographer, Soeharto came out snarling in 1974 when a magazine called POP ran a cover article suggesting that, rather than being the simple anak desa (village boy) of the official story, he was the son of a member of the Yogyakarta royal family. His young mother, the story went, was married off to a village official when Soeharto, who accompanied her, was six.

Jenkins teases out this version, along with other speculation at the time about Soeharto’s origins, and even the improbable suggestion that he was the son of the Yogyakarta sultan himself. (The sultan was studying in Holland at the time, though some Javanese believed their semi-divine rulers capable of remote impregnation.)

The POP article appeared at a touchy time for the president. His ambitious internal security chief, General Soemitro, had allowed a clamour to build up about corruption and favouritism towards Japanese and local Chinese investors. Using the tried and tested method of pouring petrol on a fire, rival general Ali Moertopo’s Opsus (special operations) group pointed Islamic hotheads at a Toyota showroom. Neither general came out well in Soeharto’s eyes.

The article was Moertopo’s effort to regain favour through flattery. It failed miserably. Soeharto saw it as a slur on his mother that branded him illegitimate. As he had when students mocked his wife Tien as “Madame Ten Percent” in the belief she took a cut of government projects, he lost his cool, calling a press conference to denounce the story as unfactual and subversive.

The real story — long intriguing to psychopolitical analysts — is that Soeharto’s mother, aged sixteen, disappeared when he was six weeks old and was found hiding in the roof-space of a village house. She and his father split up, and the baby was placed with a village midwife. There followed a childhood during which the boy was shuffled between the households of father, mother and relatives.

Barefoot and sarong-clad, Soeharto gained a rudimentary secular education in Javanese-language primary schools, but also — while apprenticed to the noted faith healer Romo Daryatmo — a deep immersion in Javanese mysticism and, through the wayang (or shadow) theatre, a smattering of classical Hindu thought. Though nominally Muslim, Soeharto inclined to spiritualism until late in life, when the increasing piety that accompanied Indonesia’s growing prosperity impelled him to be more visibly Islamic.

This upbringing left the young Soeharto a cool, outwardly respectful but always distrustful person, observing traditional precepts to keep emotions in check and accepting the Mahabharata’s teaching that sometimes a prince has to kill in order to do the right thing.

His big chance came at nineteen, when Holland’s neutrality was swept aside by Hitler, and the Netherlands East Indies desperately boosted its defences against Japan. Accepted into the colonial army, he rose quickly over the next twenty-one months, completing a sergeant’s course just as the Dutch were surrendering in March 1942.

Discarding his uniform, he disappeared back to central Java, where a few months later he joined the Japanese-run police force. Again he excelled, winning the trust of his superiors. Then, towards the end of 1943, the adventurous intelligence officers of the Japanese Imperial Army’s Nakano school — partly inspired by T.E. Lawrence’s stirring up an Arab revolt against the Turks — set about raising a local military force, known as the Peta. Again, Soeharto advanced rapidly to become a company commander, with a rank equivalent to captain, by early 1945.

While many of the other volunteers saw the Peta as the nucleus of a future army for an independent Indonesia, Soeharto showed no sign of such feelings, though he was to claim otherwise later. He had signed up to the two armies keeping Indonesia under control for the pay, the food, the uniforms and a sense of belonging. When a Peta battalion revolted against its brutal and dissolute Japanese officers at Blitar in February 1945, the Japanese swept in, executed some of the Indonesian officers, and put Soeharto in charge of the disarmed troops. He stayed with them in a remote corner of East Java until Japan surrendered.

The disbanded Peta did indeed become the core of the Indonesian National Army that resisted the return of the Dutch. “Soeharto, blessed by luck and a born survivor, had had rather a good war,” Jenkins says. “He had served in two armies, first on one side, then on the other.” By August 1945, now aged twenty-four, he had “more military training by far, and more military experience, than perhaps 98 per cent of his fellow Peta officers, the men who would form the backbone of a new Indonesian army.”

Soeharto stood out from his contemporaries, most of whom were from the priyayi (gentrified) class, many of them educated in the Dutch language and European ways. Though his ability got him far, he was still an outsider, an aspect that Jenkins will no doubt show to be important later on.

This saunter through Soeharto’s childhood and its many settings, set against the last years of the Netherlands East Indies, is engaging. Most striking is its exposition of Japanese influence on the shape and doctrine of the Indonesian military. Jenkins was able to interview many of the Japanese officers involved in the Peta, including some who knew Soeharto personally, greatly illuminating a connection previously mapped by American and Japanese scholars.

The Japanese influence includes an emphasis on what they call seishin and Indonesians call semangat (spirit), and rigid obedience to compensate for any lack of firepower. It also, unfortunately, includes a lot of violence, by officers to their soldiers, and to civilians. As with Burma’s Tatmadaw and the South Korean army to some extent, the Imperial Army lessons live on.

David Jenkins’s second volume will cover the 1945–49 revolutionary war against the Dutch, with a third volume to deal with Soeharto’s career in the new Indonesia. Many will be looking forward to his account of the dramatic events of 30 September and 1 October 1965. On the pretext of an alleged plot against President Sukarno by an American-aligned “council of generals,” Lieutenant-Colonel Untung bin Syamsuri, one of Soeharto’s former underlings, led a pre-emptive coup by palace guards. The Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, endorsed Untung’s coup while Soeharto was in the process of quelling it, giving him an excuse to unleash the anti-communist purge that killed more than half a million PKI followers.

For more than fifty years, scholars have picked holes in Soeharto’s claim that the PKI made the first move. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey soon uncovered Untung’s former closeness to Soeharto and the role of a mysterious PKI agent called Kamaruzaman. More recently, the opening of the archives has revealed more detail. John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder showed how the army and the PKI were each waiting for the other to make the first move, at Sukarno’s feared imminent death if not before. In Beijing’s archives, Taomo Zhou found that PKI secretary D.N. Aidit had been telling Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai about plans to form a “military committee” to head off and confuse an army move. In The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder, Jess Melvin showed how the army was primed to kill the PKI membership.

So, whodunnit? Did the PKI’s Aidit tell Untung to move? Or was Kamaruzaman a double agent for the army who convinced the suggestible Untung that a council of generals existed and was about to make a move? Did Moertopo’s Opsus light the fire as well as pour on the petrol? If so, did Soeharto, perhaps channelling Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata, see the six generals murdered by Untung’s troops as a necessary sacrifice? That they included the more worldly, more senior-ranking contemporaries from Peta days did leave the field much clearer for him.

We await Jenkins’s verdict. •

The post Born survivor appeared first on Inside Story.

But there is a dark side to the region’s history, of course. The fields were cleared of volcanic rocks in the late colonial years by some of the 62,000 Pacific islanders brought here and to other sugar towns by the infamous “blackbirders.” Most of the forced labourers came from islands in what are now Vanuatu and the Solomons.

Behind the little wooden church that serves Bundaberg’s remaining descendants of those islanders is a memorial engraved with hundreds of names, mostly of young men from islands like Tanna and Malaita, who died more than a century ago of overwork and illness. The deaths were registered at the time, but the graves were outside the town cemetery and unmarked. The dry stone walls these “Kanakas” built from the rocks, and probably many of the graves, are now being cleared for more extensive farming.

The history still echoes. On land near the Hummock I saw the orange high-vis vests of workers planting sweet potato seedlings in a vast field. Three days later this work gang from Tonga was over near the road, their work almost completed at a Stakhanovite pace.

Talk to Pacific islander seasonal workers like these, and to the young foreign working holiday-makers in the area’s hostels, and you often hear the term “modern-day slavery.” Accounts abound of picking, planting and pruning paid at piece rates rather than the per-hour rates specified by the industry award, and of wages clawed back by excessive charges for poor-quality housing and other levies.

Bundaberg is not an isolated case, or even the worst. The same stories are heard in many other horticultural regions around Australia. The industry relies on a vulnerable, largely non-unionised pool of casual workers, some of them islanders brought here from nine neighbouring countries under the federal government’s Seasonal Worker Programme, a lot more of them foreign backpackers needing their eighty-eight days of farm work to renew their visas for a second year (or six months for a third year).

In a third category of exploitable labour are the mostly Asian workers variously called “overstayers” and “undocumented” who come into Australia on visitor visas and then either apply for refugee status — a process that can take three years while they go out and work — or go off the radar. An estimated 70,000 of them are working in rural Australia. Some were visible in a strawberry field I passed near Childers, a town inland from Bundaberg, and they moved nervously behind a line of trees when they noticed Geoff Smith and me looking at them.

“What’s the difference between 160 years ago and now?” says Smith, a retired construction worker and union delegate. With his wife Jane, granddaughter of a cane worker kidnapped as a boy from Tanna island in what is now Vanuatu, he provides pro bono pastoral care and advocacy for the many workers from Vanuatu among Bundaberg’s seasonal labour force.

Smith answers his own question: “It’s the aeroplane, rather than the schooner.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but with a kernel of truth.

According to Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary in the immigration department, exploitation of foreign workers has been on the rise in Australia. That has happened despite federal parliament’s passing the Modern Slavery Act in 2018, which requires employers with turnover of $100 million or more to report any such slavery in their supply chains.

“The issue is not just confined to undocumented workers but extends to migrant workers brought to Australia under a range of visas,” Rizvi writes in a book he’s finalising for publication. “Over the last six years, there has been a major increase in the misuse of visitor visas and the asylum system to bring in migrant workers, effectively as indentured labour.” Employers and labour hire companies are unlikely to be caught, he adds, and the penalties are comparatively minor. “The rewards from exploitation of migrant workers are substantial; the risks are small.”

But the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted this modern system of exploitation. With the numbers of foreign backpackers in the country down to about 50,000 from the usual 140,000, and with seasonal workers reduced to about 7000 from the pre-Covid 12,000, Bundaberg is sharing in a nationwide shortage of farm labour. At least temporarily, bargaining power has been reversed.

“There’s not enough workers to go round,” says a Bundaberg grower I’ll call Dudley. (He asked that his real name not be used.) “Once all this bullshit’s over and all the backpackers come back, the boot’ll be on the other foot. Now the boot’s on their foot, kicking our arses.”

Anecdotal evidence points to a lift in wages. “I had a bloke ring me the other day, and he’s whingeing that some other prick’s paying his workers a couple of dollars a bucket more than what he is,” Dudley tells me. “I said, mate, I was telling you this was going to happen.” A labour recruiter in Bundaberg tells of a sweet potato grower offering a bonus of $2 on top of the $24.90 hourly award rate, to be paid retrospectively if the worker stays at least five weeks.

The same recruiter says some growers are even willing to consider hiring local Australian workers. He has placed a few, including some with disabilities. Bundaberg has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, 11 per cent in the December quarter, but the recruiter says it’s hard to induce young people off the steady, if low, lifeline of JobSeeker for work that has a reputation of being short-term and brutally demanding.

“They have been shut out from the unskilled labour force and are now entrenched in the Centrelink system,” says the recruiter. “Some are only interested in putting down that they applied for our jobs, and 50 per cent don’t turn up if they are given positions. But it’s getting better, and we are committed to the 50 per cent who do turn up.”

The growers’ association’s Bree Grima says farmers increasingly rely on local workers. But the federal government’s offer of $6000 relocation assistance has not helped much in bringing in workers from elsewhere in Australia, she says, with only a 0.3 per cent vacancy rate in Bundaberg’s rental housing.

The labour shortage has allowed workers to bargain down charges in backpacker hostels, which are often tied to labour hire companies, or move to independent accommodation in motels. They can also pick the more congenial work — picking avocados, macadamias and passionfruit, for instance, rather than collecting sweet potatoes or watermelons in vast unshaded fields.

“I’m up on my cherry picker among the avocado trees,” says one British backpacker taking a break from his finance sector job back home. “I don’t have to talk to anyone and I can smoke weed all day.”

The islanders face more uncertainty. They’re here under the Seasonal Worker Programme, administered by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, or DESE, or are among the 2500 or so unskilled and semiskilled workers in the parallel Pacific Labour Scheme, run by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which targets a wider range of industries.

Coming from Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Tuvalu and Timor-Leste, they are normally tied to one employer — the seasonal workers for up to two consecutive six-month periods, the Pacific labour staff for one to three years. With the Covid crisis, workers have been allowed to stay in Australia after their visas expire. They are free to change jobs as they wish, though some seem unaware of this rule and others fear being dubbed absconders or unsatisfactory workers — and sent home — if they complain or seek a new job.

Two workers from Vanuatu I meet have worked around the Queensland towns of Emerald, Maryborough, Childers and Bundaberg, picking grapes, oranges and mandarins, watermelons and avocados. They’ve paid up to $230 a week for accommodation, sometimes for bunk space so tight they couldn’t sit up.

They mention “ethical” employers, naming one big avocado grower, and others who don’t fit that description. “One never explained the piece rate,” says one of them. “He changed it so it equalled the hourly rate for the fastest worker. The rest got lower. You didn’t have a choice.”

Both now have work with a grower who hopes to keep them long-term, one earning about $1500 a week on piece rates, the other around $1000 a week on the hourly award rate. They worry about illness, and whether the insurance the employer says it has taken out will actually cover them. “It would be better if we had proper healthcare like the Australians have,” one says. “We work here the same way, and pay tax — why not?”

According to ANU Pacific affairs experts Richard Curtain and Stephen Howes, some 48 per cent of seasonal workers are employed by four labour hire companies, and the rest by smaller labour recruiters or approved growers. The reliance on intermediaries creates a gulf between the islanders and farmers that contrasts with the goals of New Zealand’s longer-running Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme, which makes a greater effort to incorporate pastoral care for visiting workers.

Under the NZ scheme, island workers return repeatedly to the same farms and vineyards, and in some cases employers visit them in their home villages in the off-season. The aim is to build a group of workers “who keep coming back,” says Jill Biddington, an organiser with Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA in Sydney, who monitors Pacific island workers in Australia. “Australia just wants cheap labour. I’ve never seen an Australian farmer over there.”

In many cases, labour hire companies in rural Australia work closely with hostel owners, or operate hostels themselves. Until the pandemic, in fact, the hostels were the only channels for employment. Seasonal worker papers or a foreign passport were prerequisites and, says Geoff Smith, “locals didn’t get a look-in.”

One such hostel in an inland town is essentially a collection of temporary cabins, with gas burners in semi-enclosed spaces for cooking and a central block of toilets and showers. It was raining when I visited, and a group of backpackers sat out unpaid downtime looking at their computers and phones. One young woman pointed to a square camping tent for which she was charged $110 a week. Down the hill, two young men from Vanuatu pointed to a long corrugated iron shed where they live four to a room.

At my motel in Bundaberg, Aurora Garcia, a Spanish-Canadian backpacker, tells me she had paid $215 a week for a bunk bed at the inland hostel for several months early last year. The rooms were stifling hot in summer and frigidly cold in winter. The flammable walls meant that heaters weren’t allowed. The washroom was an open walk away, with three toilet cubicles and three showers for forty or fifty women, and the same ratio for men. When everyone returned from work late in the afternoon, the shower queue stretched across the compound. Then, eight people per gas burner, they tried to cook dinner.

“When I went down the hill to talk with one of the Vanuatu guys I met out picking, the manager came and ordered me back, and threatened to kick me out,” says Garcia. “It was like racial segregation: white backpackers up here, islanders down there, and no mixing allowed.”

She worked next at an avocado farm whose product was recently featured by a major national supermarket chain. There, she says, the supervisor exercised discipline fit for a military drill squad, ordering pickers who fell behind to do star jumps and push-ups as punishment.

Until February this year, a converted pub in Bundaberg housed nearly one hundred seasonal workers and backpackers, each paying $200 a week for a bunk bed, with up to twelve to a room. Some had been brought there when the owners, operating as an unauthorised recruiter, drove a bus out to Childers and recruited seasonal workers with the promise of better pay. According to Smith, they were delivered to growers nearer town and told that, as “absconders,” they were at risk of deportation if they complained.

Then, in February, the owners told the workers to move out, for reasons that are not clear. The move roughly coincided with a visit by Vanuatu’s high commissioner, Samson Vilvil Fare, who was told the exodus was to allow for renovations. When I went into the hotel to enquire, I was met by a young man who, in a menacing manner, ordered me to leave.

Vilvil Fare didn’t consider that the hostels he saw in Childers and Bundaberg met the standards he would expect from a “first world” country. “When I’m visiting those areas I am having lots of questions raised — I’m also dumbfounded, I’m shocked, I’m worried,” he tells me. Media reports about the conditions seem to have had no impact, and nor has academic fieldwork. “Since I’ve been here I haven’t seen much change when it comes to welfare for our people.”

Backpackers don’t usually have to endure these conditions for more than a few months; they aren’t generally saving money for their families; and they often have parental credit cards to fall back on. But Pacific islanders are much more culturally adrift and financially constrained.

Many don’t have the command of English needed to understand contracts, payslips, superannuation deductions, bank accounts, medical insurance, tax return requirements or avenues for complaints. Geoff Smith has to check they’ve cut off recurring subscriptions for phones, streaming services and so on before they leave, so that refunds of tax and super are not eaten up when they are eventually paid. Employers don’t explain how costs like airfares can be recovered. Young workers from the Polynesian islands in particular can have unrealistic expectations of how much money they’ll be able to send back for church projects as well as their own families.

Gouging is rife. The Bundaberg recruiter tells me of workers being charged $400 each for transport from work on the Sunshine Coast to a new workplace in Bundaberg. (A train fare is around $35.) “The contractors rip them off,” says Dudley, the grower. “Then the farmer gets the bad name for not paying the worker properly.” He now refuses to use labour hire companies, hiring individual staff himself.

The inclusion of female workers in the schemes has added the new problem of sexual coercion and assault. Geoff Smith says he’s been told of several cases where male islander team leaders tell women in their work gang, “You are my woman while we are here.” Smith says the problem is largely ignored. “The women don’t want to make a fuss. They have a fear of being sent home.”

Islanders unused to driving conditions in Australia are sometimes expected to drive work vehicles, or buy old cars to get to their workplaces, despite having experienced only the slow and sparse traffic back home. So far, says DESE, twenty-five seasonal workers have died in Australia since its scheme started in 2012, mostly as a result of car accidents or “pre-existing” illnesses. No one I met can remember any inquests. “Twenty-five is just extraordinary for such a small visa,” says Abul Rizvi.

Both of the federal departments administering the labour schemes are reluctant to comment on how they exercise pastoral care and enforce regulations. DESE says it is in the process of appointing “up to nineteen” “mobility officers” to carry out these roles, but it seems they will be located in state capitals. Last October the department announced that $9 million would be spent on seasonal worker welfare, and this April it gave $1 million to the Salvation Army for pastoral care.

Geoff Smith says he has only seen DESE officials when Vanuatu’s high commissioner came to look around Childers and Bundaberg, and after Bundaberg’s Federal hostel burnt down in July last year (without loss of life). Jill Biddington says she has never seen any DESE officers in the field and suspects most are satisfied with photos sent by hostel operators. “No one is enforcing standards,” she says. “It’s all self-regulation, tick-a-box stuff.”

The Fair Work Ombudsman’s office says it pays special attention to complaints by the vulnerable migrant workers, and has an agreement with the Department of Home Affairs that they won’t be subject to visa action for complaining. In 2019–20, it says, 44 per cent of matters it took to court involved visa-holder workers. The total amount recovered for these foreign workers was $1.7 million, while the ombudsman also won nearly $3 million in court-awarded penalties. Only 12 per cent of the cases the ombudsman acted on were in agriculture, forestry and fishing. Rizvi’s observations about the odds of getting caught and penalised, or even exposed, seem to hold.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade set up a Pacific Labour Facility to administer its Pacific Labour Scheme in October 2018. At some point the facility was outsourced to the international private aid-management company Palladium. Its office in Brisbane refers media queries to the department. Former foreign minister Julie Bishop, who supervised the disbanding of the widely admired AusAID agency within her portfolio and a huge reduction in Australia’s foreign aid program, joined Palladium’s board soon after she left politics in 2019.

Amid widespread criticism that the Pacific and backpacker schemes lack proper supervision at ground level, calls are being made for responsibility to be shifted. Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA’s Biddington suggests the Seasonal Worker Programme be shifted from DESE to Foreign Affairs. “DESE just fails to have the sensitivity needed for working with people from different cultures,” she tells me.

No one is suggesting that the two Pacific island worker schemes should be scrapped. When they work well, they allow villagers from nine Pacific nations to learn new skills and work practices, and to save up several thousand dollars to invest in small businesses, cyclone-proof housing or higher education for their children. While much official aid gets consumed by urban political elites or recycled back to Australia, the two schemes direct money from Australia to productive, grassroots use. They also build people-to-people contacts between Australia and its inner ring of neighbours.

But the behaviour of some labour hire companies and farmers risks tainting some Australian products — meat, fruit, vegetables and wine — with the modern slavery label, and denying them certification as ethically sourced. This would be a propaganda gift to countries smarting under criticism for their own forced labour. China and Xinjiang leap to mind. Trade sanctions could follow.

With the federal government now predicting international travel will not open up until mid 2022, regions like Bundaberg face another year of labour shortage. Rather than waiting and hoping for the old conditions to return, Australia could seize the opportunity for structural change in the regional labour supply, and implement measures to disperse backpackers around a wider range of sectors, increase opportunities for workers from the Pacific, and get Australians into the farm work from which they have been effectively excluded. •

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

The post Bitter harvest appeared first on Inside Story.

Four days earlier, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited a naval base on Hainan island for the commissioning of three new warships, including a giant amphibious landing vessel capable of putting hundreds of marines ashore by helicopter and hovercraft. Two more are under construction, and Chinese media listed Taiwan among their potential targets.

Here in Australia, Michael Pezzullo, the powerful secretary of the home affairs department — a man given to dark warnings — spoke on Anzac Day about the “drums of war” beating louder, declaring the need to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s by arming to deter aggressors.

In Canberra’s political, official and media circles, Taiwan is suddenly a big strategic question. Will China use force to gain control of the island of twenty-four million people it claims as ancestral territory? If so, when? How far will the United States go to defend it? And if Joe Biden is drawn into a war over Taiwan, will Australia be fighting alongside him?

Answering the last question is possibly the easiest for many of our most seasoned officials. “There’s absolutely no doubt that if the Americans were to go to war over Taiwan we would be in it,” says John McCarthy, a former Australian envoy to the United States, Japan, Indonesia and India.

“Australia is not a major player,” Cavan Hogue, a former ambassador to Russia, South Korea and the Philippines, tells me. “But if the Americans decided to defend Taiwan they would expect us to join in — or at least offer our flag even if the military contribution were minimal.”

The Americans would be hoping for a fair bit more than that, says Scott Harold, a senior China analyst with the RAND Corporation think tank in Washington. “US policymakers would be expecting, at a minimum, intelligence support, political-diplomatic support, probably facilities access of some sort,” he tells me, adding it would not be surprising if Washington also expected some “niche” capabilities, such as special forces, anti-submarine operations and air and surface ship deployments.

The Australian Defence Force has spent decades working up the capability to join in such an operation. The navy operates three Aegis destroyers that can be networked into a theatre air-and-missile defence system. Its submarines have American combat systems and weapons. Its two landing ships can each carry a battalion of troops to take back islands. The air force flies American F-35, P-8 and Wedgetail aircraft. All three services have senior officers rotating through US command positions. Seamless “interoperability” with US forces is the doctrine.

It would be hard for Canberra to decline. “If we lost a war against China over Taiwan and Taiwan was forcibly absorbed, and our allies stood on the sidelines,” says RAND Corp’s Harold, “then it’s quite clear that would be the end of the liberal international order in the Indo-Pacific, and quite possibly worldwide.”

Even if the United States did fight off a Chinese assault on Taiwan without visible help from Australia, it would mean the effective end of the ANZUS alliance, according to Australian strategic thinker Paul Dibb.

Only in recent years has a war of this kind become a contingency that the United States and its allies needed to worry much about. In the early decades after nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his Kuomintang forces in 1949, it became something of a pariah state. Washington transferred its recognition to Beijing in 1979, leaving the Chinese nationalist regime in Taiwan in a kind of diplomatic limbo. American defence assistance was promised only so long as the Taiwanese didn’t start a fight with China or provoke one by declaring independence.

But circumstances began changing after Chiang’s son ended martial law and his successor, a native of Taiwan, opened up contested elections. Since then, government has alternated between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party, which promotes a Taiwanese identity and has veered close to outright separatism.

Under president Tsai Ing-wen, the DPP has held power since 2016. Elections, a female leader, and liberal social policies have made it a successful testbed for Chinese democracy. Its handling of Covid-19, a danger it recognised before Beijing sounded the alarm, has added to its kudos. The transformation has weakened the argument, still held in some quarters, that Western powers and Japan, with their records of meddling and exploitation, should stand back and let two not-entirely-admirable Chinese regimes settle their differences.

Rather than the convergence many expected in the 1970s, the democratic transition set Taiwan on a path of political divergence from the communist mainland. The gap has widened, especially since Xi became China’s leader, tightening internal political and ideological control, promoting an expansion of China’s global influence, and crushing hopes of autonomy in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. He has raised the recovery of Taiwan to a sacred goal and has devoted huge budgets to converting the People’s Liberation Army into a high-tech force that can contest American control of nearby seas.

Xi’s deadline for taking back Taiwan is unknown. It is unlikely to be the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China in June this year — the preparations would have been apparent to US satellites. Xi himself has set 2035 as a target for some of his other plans.

In recent weeks, US Pacific fleet commanders have signalled to Washington their concern about a window of vulnerability within the next five or six years, before their own modernisation programs take effect. Scott Harold points out that America is responding to China’s growing power by dispersing its forces from bases vulnerable to Chinese strikes. It could be seen as a window of opportunity closing for PLA commanders.

Would Xi risk an all-out attack on Taiwan? It would almost certainly involve missile strikes on US bases in Japan, drawing Japan into the conflict by triggering the carefully drawn provisions about self-defence in its constitution. PLA generals talk about using nuclear weapons, which would invite retaliation in kind, shattering the carefully built-up economy and perhaps the party’s domestic grip.

“Would a communist regime really put those equities at risk when Xi Jinping knows that as long as I don’t do something incredibly stupid, I’ll still be the effective emperor of China tomorrow?” asks Harold. But hidden power plays within the Chinese Communist Party could work a different logic: “Xi could be pushed to be more hawkish than anyone else.”

Mark Harrison, a China specialist at the University of Tasmania with a deep knowledge of Taiwan, thinks all-out invasion is highly unlikely. China’s leaders know that seizing the island would be just the start, involving an occupation force of hundreds of thousands of troops who would be vulnerable to blockade. “It’s a crisis that would go on forever, and be incredibly testing of the PLA and China’s military infrastructure,” he says.

“Australia would be involved” in such a large-scale scenario, says Harrison. “But China is more likely to act in a way that makes it much more equivocal for the US and its allies, including the Taiwanese, about their best response. What we’re much more likely to face is a smaller event where you don’t have a clear choice. And Beijing will seek to use that to its tactical advantage.”

Smaller operations could include grabs for the Taiwan-held islands on the Fujian coast — islands like Kinmen, which the nationalists held against attack in the 1950s, or the remote Pratas islands in the South China Sea.

“It’s almost a version of grey-zone coercion,” says Harold, referring to China’s use of swarms of fishing boats and coastguard vessels to push its maritime claims. “A little bit beyond that because it’s actually occupying territory and kills a limited number of Taiwanese people. That’s a pretty serious threat, and to not respond to it would feel a bit like the militarisation of the Sudetenland” — Hitler’s occupation of German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

“There would be some people saying it’s either this or we fight the big war, and are we going to fight the big war over this small thing?” Harold adds. “The reality is that’s how status quo powers get manipulated by aggressive, risk-accepting, risk-manipulative rising powers.”

Since taking office, US president Joe Biden drawn Washington back behind the Chinese “red lines” that Donald Trump trampled all over when he sent high-ranking officials to Taiwan. But his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has declared “rock-solid” support for Taiwan, and supplies of missiles, extra F-16 fighters and other advanced munitions continue. When Biden met with Japan’s Yoshihide Suga the two leaders reiterated their support for “peace and security” in the Taiwan Strait — a coded signal that alarmed Beijing.

“In a sense,” says Harold, “this is in some ways more threatening because it suggests the US is returning to a recognition that it needs to be an active leader, not necessarily the only one but certainly the most capable one among others. If you look at the calculations of Tokyo and Canberra, clearly those are much more closely aligned with trying to respond to and support Taipei’s continued de facto independence from Beijing.”

Taiwan itself has been angling for more explicit support from Canberra, notably during a long interview with foreign minister Joseph Wu on the ABC last year. Some analysts see a division between Australia’s defence and foreign affairs departments. But foreign affairs secretary Frances Adamson, who has served in Beijing and Taipei, told a Senate estimates inquiry that Canberra had made several representations to China about Taiwan recently. Nor are defence secretary Greg Moriarty or his deputy secretary for strategy Peter Tesch — both former ambassadors — noticeably pushing for change. ADF chief General Angus Campbell says a conflict over Taiwan would be “disastrous.”

Australia’s official position is still strictly “one China” — that Taiwan is part of China — while urging that reunification happens by consent, which is now a forlorn prospect. Yet reports do suggest that the defence department is updating its scenarios for Taiwan to include some major military assets. ANU strategic expert Brendan Taylor sees this move as a response to pressure from Washington for Canberra and Tokyo to add their weight to American deterrence.

“Because of the capabilities that the Chinese have been developing it’s going to become more and more difficult for the Americans to come to Taiwan’s defence in the way they were able to, not without cost but relatively easily in the past,” says Taylor.

Harrison, at the University of Tasmania, sees no likelihood of an upgrade in relations with Taiwan. “There is a view in certain quarters that Australia is particularly belligerent towards China, but that really isn’t the case,” he says. “In really significant areas — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang — Australia’s actually been very reticent.”

Canberra’s loudest drumbeat of war comes from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose dire scenarios are lapped up by the media and some politicians. “The place is getting a lot hotter under the collar than it should,” complains former ambassador McCarthy. “Everybody is whipping everybody else up.” •

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

The post Is China’s claim to Taiwan approaching its end game? appeared first on Inside Story.

The Taliban are already moving openly around the fringes of Kabul and in the countryside of Uruzgan province, where the Australian taskforce operated up to 2013. The veterans, along with many others, will no doubt be asking whether Australia’s longest military campaign, which saw forty-one soldiers killed and hundreds injured physically and mentally, was doomed from the beginning.

Brereton’s report is an opportunity to extract honour out of this sorry failure. Even in the redacted form released on 19 November, it offers a devastating inventory of killings and mistreatment of civilians and captives by Australia’s special forces, mostly from the Special Air Service Regiment, or SAS. It finds plausible evidence of thirty-nine unlawful killings by twenty-five soldiers, and recommends war crimes investigations of nineteen of them.

Six weeks after Anzac Day, a federal court will start hearing the defamation case brought against Nine Entertainment by the highest-profile of the former SAS troopers, Ben Roberts-Smith, over allegations he participated in war crimes in Afghanistan. Those stories have been given new life by Sunday’s fresh revelations on Nine’s 60 Minutes.

The Morrison government moved quickly to implement Brereton’s recommendation for war crimes trials by setting up a new Office of the Special Investigator within the home affairs department. Led by Victorian judge Mark Weinberg, its director-general is former attorney-general’s department secretary Chris Moraitis, with one-time Queensland Police deputy commissioner Ross Barnett as director of investigations. Weinberg was the sole dissenting judge on the Victorian appeals panel that upheld the conviction of Cardinal George Pell (later quashed unanimously by the High Court); his appointment suggests the government wanted someone unlikely to let emotion override reasonable doubt.

Brereton didn’t expect quick results, and nor did anyone else. The new office is still assembling the team of investigators who will go through the evidence collected by Brereton and separate Australian Defence Force inquiries and winnow out what is admissible, what is protected by promises of immunity, and what needs to be re-sworn.

If this process involves taking fresh statements from Afghan witnesses, an article by Kabul-based journalist Andrew Quilty in the current Monthly suggests it will be fraught. As Quilty found in Uruzgan in January, most potential witnesses live under Taliban control, some even joining the Taliban in reaction to the killing of relatives. Many claim Brereton missed numerous other cases.

In the Roberts-Smith defamation case, Justice Anthony Besanko has ruled that four Afghans who claim to have witnessed unlawful killings will be allowed to testify by video link — a process Justice Weinberg might also employ. Even so, it will take years for cases to be forwarded to the director of public prosecutions and for trials to be held.

Brereton also made recommendations that needn’t wait anywhere near as long, and here the Morrison government, the defence department and the ADF are showing little sign of progress. Among these is the question of compensation for Afghan civilians harmed by Australian actions.

“In cases where it has found that there is credible information that an identified or identifiable Afghan national has been unlawfully killed, Australia should now compensate the family of that person,” Brereton argued. “Doing so will contribute to the maintenance of goodwill between the nations, and do something to restore Australia’s standing, both with the villagers concerned, and at the national level. But quite aside from that, it is simply the morally right thing to do.” This process need not wait on convictions, he added.

Prime minister Scott Morrison’s initial response, last November, wasn’t encouraging: “That is not a matter that’s currently being considered by the government at this stage.” This appears to remain the government’s position.

Perhaps work is proceeding behind the scenes? When I put this question to the defence department I was told that it is still developing “a comprehensive implementation plan” for Brereton’s recommendations. “This includes working with relevant agencies to provide advice to government on issues such as compensation,” said the department. “Final decisions related to compensation (including relevant processes and procedures) will be a matter for the Australian government.”

One possible complication involves the interaction of compensation payments and war crimes trials. Could compensation payments, which assume specific killings and injuries were unlawful, undermine the presumption of innocence for soldiers charged over the incidents? Clive Williams, an ANU security expert and former intelligence official, says this is a real risk. He points to the precedent created by the International Criminal Court, which ordered a convicted person to pay compensation to victims after being convicted.

Ben Saul, professor of international law at Sydney University, doesn’t share that view. Recognising Australia’s responsibility by paying compensation “does not prejudge the criminal liability of individuals,” he tells me. He sees an analogy with Australian state government schemes that make payments to victims of crime “regardless of whether an offender has even been identified, let alone criminally convicted; the former does not prejudge the latter in any way.”

But defence lawyers in any war crimes trials will undoubtedly question whether alleged victims of Australian actions are in fact civilians. “It’s common for local villagers to support Taliban insurgents in some way — whether they want to or not,” says Williams. “This could involve spotting for them to let them know when to detonate an IED [improvised explosive device], for example, while seemingly engaged in innocent farming activity.” They wouldn’t qualify as armed insurgents, he says, but it “does make them party to an attack on our soldiers. This has led in the past to items being planted on spotters by frustrated International Security Assistance Force soldiers to justify shooting them.”

The money itself isn’t the issue: the compensation is unlikely to break the Australian treasury. From 2009, while operating in Uruzgan, the military ran a scheme that made “expeditious non-liability payments” for property damage, injury or death resulting from military actions by deployed forces. The 2836 payments made before the troops’ withdrawal in 2013 totalled $206,937.

An existing compensation scheme heavily funded by international donors but run by the Afghan government is supposed to pay about US$1300 for every civilian killed in action by Afghan, American or other forces, and US$650 per wounded civilian, says Williams. In reality, he adds, the victims’ families seldom receive any money. “Afghanistan is such a corrupt society that any money paid by Australia for victims’ families is likely to be considerably diluted, with corrupt middlemen, distant relatives and the local hierarchy all taking their cut.”

A better option, he says, might be to determine what the victims’ village needs — a well, electricity, access road, mosque or school — and find a way of providing it. “Another option might involve funding a scholarship for a victim’s younger family member. It should be noted that the Afghan government has limited control below the district level, which would probably mean having the Taliban manage the payment process, which could also present difficulties.”

But Williams doubts compensation will change Afghan attitudes towards Australia. “As far as most Afghans are concerned, we are just lackeys of the Americans. I agree that paying compensation is the moral thing to do, but it’s going to be very difficult to deliver a satisfactory monetary outcome for the alleged victims’ families.”

Among Brereton’s other challenging recommendations is his call for soldiers who helped his inquiry to be spared any penalty. Those who witnessed and then disclosed summary executions, but didn’t participate themselves, should be promoted, he recommended. Those who admitted participation on the understanding that it wouldn’t be used against them should not receive “adverse administrative action.” This “will be an important signal,” Brereton wrote, “that they have not been disadvantaged for having ultimately assisted to uncover misconduct, even though implicating themselves.”

It’s not clear whether the armed forces are following that recommendation. On 24 March, army chief Lieutenant-General Rick Burr told the Senate’s defence and foreign affairs committee that seventeen defence personnel had so far faced “administrative action” on the basis of Brereton’s findings, with eight sacked. Some officers were among those facing dismissal, he said, though he refused to go into detail on privacy grounds.

Questioning by senators did not clarify whether the seventeen included whistleblowers. Some newspaper reports have said that soldiers potentially facing war crimes charges have been allowed to take a medical discharge, allowing them to retain certain veteran benefits.

When I asked the defence department about whistleblowers, I was told that the army had “initiated administrative action for termination of service against a number of individuals where failure to comply with Australian Defence Force expectations and values was identified.”

Need for change: the chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, after delivering the Brereton inquiry’s findings in Canberra on 10 November 2020. Mick Tsikas/AAP Image

The department and the ADF are also looking at other Brereton recommendations about the culture of the military, command responsibility, and internal reforms. Not surprisingly, the most fraught issue has been the question of ultimate responsibility for war crimes. Brereton attributed blame to a clique of non-commissioned officers in charge of operational patrols, in the SAS’s case with their junior officers out of sight in overwatch positions. A cult-like “warrior” image put these NCOs beyond challenge, with complaints by Afghan civilians tending to be dismissed as Taliban-inspired.

Brereton’s finding that the abuses escaped the attention of lieutenants, captains and their superiors is something many find hard to believe. Indeed, army legal officer Major David McBride heard many soldiers expressing concern about unlawful killings and tried to convey them up the chain of command. Frustrated by Defence and Foreign Affairs stone-walling, he gave the information to the ABC. For that, he is now awaiting trial on several serious charges.

The inquiry into command responsibility is being overseen by a generation of senior officers who served with the Australian task force in Uruzgan, in the SAS or in other positions connected to Afghanistan. The current defence force chief, General Angus Campbell, was commander of Australian forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan for part of the period, though based in the Gulf. Andrew Hastie, who became assistant defence minister in December, was an SAS troop commander in Afghanistan in 2013.

In the Senate hearing last month, Greens senator Jordon Steele-John bluntly told Campbell he should resign. “I think you’ve joined a distinguished list,” Campbell replied. At the same hearing, independent senator Jacqui Lambie, an army corporal in earlier life, seemed to suggest soldiers had been misled into cooperating with the inquiry by ANU sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, whose preliminary findings led to the commissioning of Brereton.

Lambie’s comments fit with the view that NCOs were left to do the dirty work while officers kept their reputations. One of Campbell’s first actions in response to the Brereton report was to remove the unit citation — shown in a bronze bar worn on the uniform — from some 2000 special forces soldiers who served in Afghanistan. After a campaign by the Sydney tabloid Daily Telegraph, radio shock jock Alan Jones and SAS veterans arguing that this was collective punishment, Scott Morrison overruled Campbell and restored the citation.

Campbell was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his command in the Middle East and Afghanistan in 2011, when some of the alleged crimes happened. Of the eighteen commanders of the task force in Uruzgan, twelve got the DSC, or a bar to it, for their service there. So far, all have retained these honours.

But two of the eighteen, Brigadier Ian Langford and Lieutenant Colonel Jon Hawkins, tried to hand back their medals after Brereton’s report was released. Campbell told the Senate committee he had urged them not to act “emotionally” but wait for “a sensible reform plan to be developed, and give opportunity for me and others to be more systematic in the approach we take.”

This is part of a broader study of cultural change and organisational reform taking place internally, supervised by an “independent oversight panel” made up of former inspector-general of intelligence and security Vivienne Thom, former attorney-general’s department secretary Robert Cornall and University of Tasmania vice-chancellor Rufus Black. No detail has been released about the scope and timetable for this study, or who will be invited to contribute.

One small bombshell was dropped on 13 April when the Australian reported that a colonel working on these reforms had himself been photographed, as an SAS major, taking part in a puerile drinking session in the unauthorised bar known as The Fat Lady’s Arms inside the Tarin Kowt base. In their Senate committee testimony, generals Campbell and Burr indicated any soldier involved in this breach of discipline should be sacked.

Not only are there many problems within the forces to review, but their causes also run deep. Military historian Peter Stanley, a former Australian War Memorial staffer, believes they can be traced back to the creation of a standing regular army, replacing Australia’s citizen military force, after the second world war. “One consequence of that profound change,” he says, “has been — it is now sadly all too clear — the creation of an army which is unduly insular and distant from broader Australian society.”

Before then, part-time soldiers lived in every community; now they are mostly regulars based in places like Townsville and Darwin, away from where most Australians live. “That has had several lamentable consequences,” says Stanley. “First, it’s made soldiers separate from the nation, and it’s allowed an insular military culture to develop. Even worse, the decision to create an exclusive SAS and to allow it to develop in isolation not just from Australian civil society but also from the regular army has now been shown to be disastrous.” The undue reliance on special forces, he says, has proved a folly.

“Second, it’s now clear that while Australian society as a whole has become more liberal, tolerant, inclusive and generally ‘softer’ over several decades, the culture of the ADF, and especially the SAS, appears to have become increasingly at variance,” says Stanley. “While several chiefs have addressed this — notably David Morrison in his celebrated and justified video address — and the ADF has embraced diversity, the SAS culture both in Australia and on operations has remained so doggedly entrenched and insular as to be unquestionable — until now.”

Stanley wonders whether the Breaker Morant legend also conditioned many Australians. “Largely as a result of the 1981 film there was a change towards regarding Morant as either a victim of imperial injustice or at least a man traumatised in war whose crimes were understandable.” Although the movement to secure him a pardon failed, Stanley wonders whether sympathy for Morant means that many people regard crimes like those documented by Brereton as a natural part of war. “They aren’t, of course — war crimes are a product of both the specific conditions of a war but also the society that goes to war and sends its citizens to war.”

Stanley says that “armies embody values,” and that the reaction to the Brereton report made it clear that “many Australians consider that members of our army have transgressed values we hold… It can never be acceptable for Australian soldiers to deliberately kill civilians, and that seems to be an essential starting point for considering the implications of the Brereton report.”

Australia’s armed forces need to go through the “painful” cultural reform that armies in countries like Germany and South Africa needed to undertake. “I’m greatly heartened by the way senior officers, and especially Angus Campbell, have spoken about the need for change,” says Stanley. “Though how far up the chain of command and how far back restitution needs to be imposed is a moot point. But they seem to understand that the culture Australian soldiers have operated within needs to be challenged.” •

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

The post Brereton’s unfinished business appeared first on Inside Story.

One witness was Ian Cunliffe, a former federal government lawyer who’d served on Justice Robert Hope’s late-1970s royal commission into the intelligence services. He had seen an Indonesian signals intercept concerning the Balibo deaths that he felt had been covered up.

Asked by his lawyer if he knew of other instances of intelligence being withheld from the government, Cunliffe instanced “a criminal trial in Sydney involving six defendants.” Canberra officials had agreed to keep material from the prime minister, he said, and had been willing to make intelligence material disappear if it was subpoenaed by defence lawyers.

During the court’s morning tea break, I asked Cunliffe which case he was referring to. “The Croatian Six,” he replied cryptically.

I had only the faintest recollection of the details of a case that had gripped Sydney nearly three decades earlier. As a young federal press gallery reporter I’d seen Labor’s Lionel Murphy and the Liberals’ Ivor Greenwood, two QCs from different sides of the street socially, do battle over Croatians living in Australia.

Murphy and many others on the left felt that the zealously anti-communist Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had ignored the threat of right-wing extremists, including former supporters of Croatia’s far-right wartime Ustase regime. Their fears seemed to be confirmed when a small group of Croatian Australians launched an armed incursion into Yugoslavia in 1972, crushed by Belgrade. Bombs went off outside Yugoslav travel agencies in Australia and military-style training camps were found in the bush.

Murphy and his supporters saw the contemporary Yugoslavia of Josip Broz Tito as a model of an open, non-aligned type of communism that reformists elsewhere could emulate. His feud with ASIO culminated in his controversial raid on the agency’s headquarters in 1973, accompanied by a posse of federal police. The idea that Australia’s Croatian community harboured fugitive war criminals was kept alive through the 1980s by author and broadcaster Mark Aarons; more recently, two thrillers drawing on the events of the early 1970s, written by ABC journalist Tony Jones, have helped sustain the violent reputation attached to Croatians.

Croatians and migrants from the other “captive nations” of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, had no illusions about communist regimes. They were more likely to support the Coalition, lend their services to branch-stacking efforts and help ASIO watch for Reds.

Cunliffe’s crisp response to my question set me off on a years-long tangent from my usual journalistic focus on Asia. It led me to research Balkan enmities, their diaspora echoes in Australia, and how some politicians and security agencies had favoured particular sides. It took me into the discredited NSW police culture of the 1970s and the inner workings of a high-profile Supreme Court trial.

Even then, it was an old case. In February 1979 a Yugoslav named Vico Virkez had walked into the police station in Lithgow, 150 kilometres west of Sydney, and said he was part of a Croatian conspiracy to plant bombs around Sydney that night. He was told to go home and act normally.

Later, police arrived from Sydney, arrested him and his tenant Maks Bebic, and discovered crude gelignite bombs in Virkez’s old Valiant car. With names supplied by Virkez, police also raided three homes around Sydney, in each of which they found two half-sticks of gelignite in the possession of a total of five other Croatian Australians, Joe and Ilija Kokotovic, Anton Zvirotic, Vjekoslav “Vic” Brajkovic and Mile Nekic. Taken to the old Central Investigation Branch at the back of Central Court, the five confessed to the bomb plot, as had Bebic in Lithgow.

That was the police version, anyway, and along with Virkez’s account it was enough for a jury to convict the six men of conspiracy in a terror-bombing plan, and for Justice Victor Maxwell to sentence each of them to fifteen years’ jail in early 1981. Those decisions were upheld on appeal the following year. All served their time with maximum remissions for good behaviour and were out of prison by the end of the 1980s. Their jailing didn’t improve the Croatian community’s already blackened image.

As I read the files, it quickly became clear that I was not the first person to have been tipped off by Cunliffe. Virkez, the informer, had been allowed to travel back to Yugoslavia soon after giving his evidence, and reporter Chris Masters had tracked him down to a village in the Serb-populated north of Bosnia in 1991. There, on camera, Virkez admitted he was actually a Serb, real name Vitomir Misimovic. He revealed that his evidence of the bomb plot had been false, that he had been coached in what to say in court by NSW police, and that the Croatian Six were, as far he knew, innocent.

After the interview featured on the ABC’s Four Corners, two defence lawyers from the original trial, David Buchanan and Ian McClintock, applied to the NSW attorney-general for the convictions to be reviewed. Three years after the broadcast, attorney-general John Hannaford decided against a review on the advice of two senior state government lawyers, Keith Mason and Rod Howie — advice still not public because of claimed legal privilege.

So, some thirteen years later, I set out on a much fainter trail. I discovered that Joe Kokotovic had split up with his wife Lydia while in jail, had a new family and was looking after his brother Ilija. Maks Bebic, married with two children, had started again in Geelong as a house painter. Vic Brajkovic had separated from his wife and daughter. Anton Zvirotic was somewhere in Melbourne. Mile Nekic had gone back to Croatia, but his time in Long Bay Jail had opened up his talent as an artist and his paintings had attracted considerable fame. All of them still insisted on their innocence.

The NSW Supreme Court’s registry pulled out the transcripts of the original trial, all 5000 pages in twenty boxes, and I spent weeks reading through them in between my other work for the Sydney Morning Herald.

It became clear that Justice Maxwell believed strongly in the integrity of the NSW police. All six defendants claimed to have been coerced during interrogation. The five taken to the Sydney CIB had listed bashings, kicks, partial strangulation and other physical violence, all of it denied by detective after detective.

Yet the defence found doctors and a nurse from Long Bay’s clinic who testified in a voir-dire hearing, with the jury absent, that Vic Brajkovic had arrived in jail with bruises to his face, loss of hearing in one ear consistent with having been kicked in the head, and burn marks around the neck consistent with strangulation. The defence also showed that the mugshot taken when Brajkovic was charged had been overexposed to hide the injuries.

Maxwell ruled that these revelations brought into question the voluntary nature of the written confession Brajkovic was said to have given — which he hadn’t signed but which was attested as genuine by a station inspector — and it could not therefore be brought as evidence. But he was making no reflection on police conduct, he added. And he refused to reveal to the jury during the trial that the confession, attested by police, had been ruled unreliable.

The judge also refused leave for the defence to summon police who had arrested a seventh Croatian that night in February 1979. A raiding party had brought in student Josip Stipic, and the magistrate at his committal hearing was told that they had found detonators in the drawer of his desk. After each officer had given this evidence, defence lawyer Jim McCrudden showed photographs of Stipic’s room: there was no desk, therefore no drawer, only a table. The magistrate discharged Stipic.

In his summing up, Maxwell told the jury it was a matter of whether to believe thirty-nine police officers or the six defendants, and a question of who had the motive to lie. The fact that he had suppressed two examples of police giving false evidence didn’t seem to bother him. It was, he said, “black and white.”

What also jumped out of the transcripts was the mystery of the informer Virkez. He had been tried separately by Maxwell, allowed to plead guilty on a lesser charge and held in custody until giving his evidence. Released, he was deported to Yugoslavia, where he received no penalty.

The voir-dire hearings included efforts by the defence lawyers to subpoena information about Virkez from ASIO and other federal agencies. Maxwell upheld Canberra’s objections on national security grounds without ASIO’s having to admit it had any such material. Crown prosecutor David Shillington could then argue, as he did, that there was “not a skerrick of evidence” that Virkez was some kind of Yugoslav agent or provocateur.

By the time I read the transcripts, the police involved in the case had all retired or in some cases been cashiered. The former CIB squads had been disbanded as hotbeds of corruption in 1979. Roger Rogerson, who led the raid on the Kokotovic house, had been dismissed in 1986. James Wood’s royal commission into the force had cut a swathe through the remaining ranks, and the Special Branch — which kept an eye on political and diplomatic troublemakers — had also been dissolved.

The former Special Branch officers who had joined the raids all refused to talk, as did several others. The NSW police said the Special Branch’s records were exempt from freedom of information requests. All they produced from other records was a collection of press clippings and charge sheets.

Rogerson was the only one willing to talk, so I went to see him at his home in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Padstow. Behind its neatly clipped lawn and security door, he was waiting for me, his famous charm on display: the steady blue-eyed gaze, the ready smile. His stoop from a back injury was showing, though it was much less pronounced than his crab-like walk a decade later when he was convicted of murdering a young drug dealer.

Seated in his den, he struggled to remember anything at all about the case. I reminded him about his interview with the ABC’s Neil Mercer in 1991, in which he’d admitted that the state’s CIB squads regularly fitted up known criminals. “The planting of a gun or explosives…” he told Mercer. “You know, a couple of sticks of jelly, found in their car or in their possession… It was all done in the interests of, ah, truth, justice and ah, and ah, keeping things on an even keel, and keeping the crims under control.”

“I never did it myself,” he hastened to tell me. “But there are many old stories, you might say urban myths, of famous policemen.” As for planting the gelignite on the Croatian Six, “you’d want to have guys with you whom you trusted implicitly,” and in this case there were just too many people from different squads. Even if he came out and said the Croatians were bashed and fitted up, everyone would put it down to “a jealous old bloke” getting back at the police force that dismissed him without a pension.

I put all this into a long piece for the Herald in 2012, arguing for a fresh look at the convictions on the basis of the Wood royal commission’s findings, new material emerging from scholars like John Schindler of the US Naval War College about the murderous war waged on the Croatian diaspora by Yugoslavia’s security service, the UDBa, and Virkez’s withdrawal of evidence.

David Buchanan, joined by a younger lawyer, Sebastian De Brennan, put a fresh application for a judicial review to NSW chief justice Tom Bathurst, appointed after the Coalition had taken government in New South Wales the previous year. Bathurst asked an acting justice, Graham Barr, to assess whether a review was warranted.

Barr reported that he’d found nothing in what he read to cause him any unease about the convictions. The police evidence was enough to convict, he said, whatever the doubts about the Virkez evidence, and Rogerson, after all, had explained the problems about planting evidence. The police of 1979 could not be held retrospectively to present-day standards that require the taping of interviews and ban unsigned “verbals” of the kind attributed to the Croatians.

In November 2016, though, another opening emerged. Military historians John Blaxland and Rhys Crawley published the third volume of the Official History of ASIO, covering 1975–89, the final years of the cold war. In a book vetted by the organisation and based on free access to its archives, they wrote that Virkez had been working as an informant to a suspected UDBa officer in the Yugoslavian consulate-general in Sydney, that ASIO regarded many of the alleged Croatian bombings as “false-flag” operations by the UDBa, and that ASIO had failed to note the seriousness of Yugoslav intelligence activity here. The result, they concluded, was the “wrongful conviction” of the Croatian Six.

I returned to the case, filing applications to see the ASIO records on which Blaxland and Crawley had based their conclusion. In mid 2017, I travelled to the former Yugoslavia in an effort to find records of the disbanded UDBa and former personnel who might talk. It brought the tortured Balkan history very much alive to me, and I met many young historians delving into the UDBa story. They agreed that getting Virkez to set up the Croatian Six was entirely characteristic of UDBa operations.

A senior former UDBa official in Belgrade agreed. But before switching their services to the new independent Croatia, the local UDBa had cleansed the Zagreb archives of incriminating material. The former federal UDBa archive was locked up in Belgrade by the present-day Serbian intelligence service, who did not respond to a request for access. Vico Virkez had died in 2014.

Then, in January 2018, a message arrived from the National Archives that certain files had been opened, though with redactions. I went to Canberra and found myself reading through two files on Virkez. They showed that he had been working with a UDBa handler in the Sydney consulate for six months before the arrests, speaking by telephone and meeting in Sydney, in all cases monitored by ASIO.

After the arrests, ASIO quickly concluded Virkez was the man working with the UDBa officer and circulated this information around state police forces through an intelligence channel. The reaction at NSW police headquarters was dismay. Assistant commissioner Roy Whitelaw contacted ASIO to say that if the men’s defence team became aware of this information, “it could blow a hole right through the police case.”

ASIO was initially inclined to let the NSW police reveal the information about Virkez as long as the source and wire-tapping involved were not revealed. It appears that Whitelaw opted not to pass it on, certainly not as far as crown prosecutor Shillington. With the court case set, ASIO then opted to throw a blanket around the evidence, persuading federal attorney-general Peter Durack to strenuously oppose the defence subpoenas during the trial and appeal.

Under its chief at the time, Harvey Barnett, ASIO tried to tone down its assessment of Virkez from “agent” to mere “informant.” Barnett wrote in the file that this reduced the likelihood of ASIO’s being accused of having been party to a miscarriage of justice. The Hawke government’s attorneys-general, Gareth Evans and Lionel Bowen, then signed off on moves to prevent Ian Cunliffe, by then secretary of the Australian Law Reform Commission, from raising his misgivings regarding the suppression of evidence about Virkez.

As Whitelaw correctly saw, this blew a big hole in the case against the Croatian Six — not just the information itself but the act of hiding it. As the counsel for the NSW Crown, Reg Blanch QC, admitted in 1986, during the brief and forlorn attempt by the Croatian Six to appeal to the High Court, it was “almost automatic” that a miscarriage of justice would be created by failure to convey relevant evidence to the defence.

This cover-up was detailed in my book on the affair, Reasonable Doubt: Spies, Police and the Croatian Six, which was published in 2019. Soon after, concerned lawyers — De Brennan and solicitor Helen Cook, with opinion from David Buchanan SC — began working pro bono on a new application to the NSW chief justice, who is still Tom Bathurst QC.

The application includes more recent evidence revealed by ABC Radio National producer Joey Watson in his two-part documentary on the Croatian Six, broadcast early last month on The History Listen. Watson rang all the surviving police he could trace. Some couldn’t remember anything; others told him to “fuck off”; but one talked, not for attribution, and said his raiding party had found no gelignite. (None was photo-graphed at the scene, fingerprinted or shown to the court.)

The application was served in the Supreme Court on 15 February 2021, with copies to NSW attorney-general Mark Speakman SC and NSW solicitor-general Michael Sexton SC. Their decision is expected later this month. Whether a case often compared to the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six convictions in Britain will receive an open review rests in their hands. •

• December 2022 update: In August 2022, after a series of delays, the NSW Supreme Court ordered a judicial inquiry into the convictions.

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

The post Held captive by cold war politics appeared first on Inside Story.

“Normally, Marshall, I wouldn’t send you to a place like Australia, but right now it is critically important,” Nixon told him, as recounted in James Curran’s book Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War. Then followed a string of presidential expletives about Whitlam. “Marshall, I just can’t stand that c—t.”

By most accounts, Green is the heaviest Washington hitter ever appointed to Canberra. Originally a Japan specialist — as secretary to ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo before Pearl Harbor and then in wartime intelligence — he moved to the State Department, where he headed missions around Asia before becoming assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In that capacity, he accompanied Nixon to his historic meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972.

“He was regarded as ‘Mr Asia’ at a time when [Henry] Kissinger’s expertise on the region was regarded as relatively thin, and indeed there is some speculation that Kissinger wanted him out of Washington for that very reason,” says Curran, a professor of modern history at the University of Sydney who closely studies the US relationship. “Green had the capacity to show him up.”

For this reason Green’s appointment was widely welcomed. “Even the Labor people were saying ‘we got Marshall Green,’ as if to underline that DC was at last taking Australia seriously,” says Curran.

In reality, Canberra got Green because several members of Whitlam’s government had seriously irritated Nixon by condemning the bombing of North Vietnam, which was designed to force concessions at the Paris peace talks. Whitlam’s people might have noted that Green’s postings tended to precede attempts to overthrow the host government — successfully, in the case of general Park Chung-hee in Seoul in 1960, and as a pretext for a crackdown by General Suharto’s group in Jakarta in 1965.

Concerns that Whitlam might blow the cover of the Pine Gap satellite spy station or even close it down were part of the drama around the 1975 dismissal of his government, but Curran found that Green had already helped soften the animosity between the two leaders.

“It was Green, along with Peter Wilenski in Whitlam’s office, who fixed the embarrassing problem where Whitlam had been frozen out of getting a White House meeting with Nixon,” Curran tells me. “By the end of his posting Green was pouring a whole lot of cold water on the ‘all the way’ mentality and rhetoric, saying that Washington now agreed with Whitlam’s call for a ‘new maturity’ in the relationship. Doesn’t that seem another world!”

Green is thus often seen as an exception among the twenty-six ambassadors sent to Canberra since the American embassy opened in 1940. “My bottom line on this is that by and large the US has sent to Canberra generous campaign donors and political bagmen,” Curran says. “We usually get the runt of the American litter in this regard.”

The posting gained most attention in Washington when George H.W. Bush sent Republican fundraiser Melvin Sembler to Canberra in 1989, not long after he donated US$100,000 to the Bush election campaign. The controversy inspired a celebrated Doonesbury cartoon strip.

Several ambassadors have fitted the stereotype of a back-slapping networker, among them Harry Truman’s appointee Pete Jarman, a former member of Congress described as a “big, good-natured, Rotarian type of man,” and Lyndon Johnson’s envoy Edward Clark, a Texan lawyer and oil lobbyist who came to be known here as “Mr Ed” after the talking horse in the popular TV series.

But the appointees also include several highly experienced career diplomats, more commonly but not entirely when a Democrat was in the White House. The first two wartime ambassadors were long-time China hands, and William Sebald (1957–61), like Green, had been assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Bill Clinton used Canberra to show inclusiveness as well as diplomatic professionalism, with Edward Perkins, the first African American in the post, followed by Genta Holmes, the first woman. Obama sent John Berry, the first openly gay ambassador to a G20 nation.

In February 2018 another Marshall Green moment seemed to be looming when Donald Trump nominated the retiring US Pacific commander, admiral Harry Harris, who was noted for his strong views about standing up to China. “If we’d got Harry Harris, in my view, that would have been the first time since Green that we’d been given a real heavy-hitter,” Curran says. “The US alliance true believers were like Pavlov’s dog when they heard he was coming. They howled when he got diverted to the ROK [South Korea].”

A year later, after a record two-year vacancy, Trump sent Washington lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse, best known for choosing Sarah Palin as running mate for Republican candidate John McCain in 2008 and Mike Pence as Trump’s in 2016. In Canberra he came to be known as an “honorary” member of the parliamentary group of China hawks.

Some of Australia’s top diplomats say that the two most effective American ambassadors of the past twenty years have come from outside the Foreign Service. Tom Schieffer (2001–05), a former business partner of George W. Bush in Texas, was in Washington with John Howard on 11 September 2001 and attended many of the war conferences about Afghanistan and Iraq. Jeff Bleich (2009–13) was an old lawyer friend of Barack Obama who helped guide the annual rotation of a US marine corps battle group through Darwin, the Australian end of the “pivot” to Asia.

Did the friendship of these political allies with their president make a difference to their usefulness to Australia? “Tom Schieffer did have a close relationship with Howard forged in 9/11, and as security and intelligence relationships got closer and closer in the post-9/11 period,” says Peter Varghese, former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Office of National Assessments, now chancellor of the University of Queensland. “But I can’t think of any intervention by Tom that was decisive. They help the flow that’s already got a bit of momentum and maybe give it a bit more momentum.”

Allan Gyngell, another former head of ONA and career DFAT official, and now national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, asked around about examples of successful interventions by US envoys. “The most specific response anyone could give was that we were able to fix a problem with steel tariffs through Tom Schieffer at some point in the Bush administration,” he says.

John McCarthy, who was Australian ambassador to Washington in the 1990s, also thinks Schieffer was the closest thing to a direct line to the president, and points out that he went from Canberra to Tokyo, a post usually reserved for very senior ex-senators.

But he says any US envoy here would struggle to get attention in the White House. “Most American ambassadors in Australia would pick up the phone and talk to the Asia guy in the National Security Council on almost any issue,” McCarthy says. “Or on a trade issue to one of the deputy US trade representatives. Or even someone lower down. It’s a question of how often you make the phone call.” Even a close presidential ally couldn’t ignore the State Department, where they would work with the assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs.

“A US ambassador with a close relationship with the president is going to be very cautious about raising anything with him as US president,” adds Varghese. “In the US system it would have to be something extraordinarily important and urgent for even a friend of the president to use that relationship and burn up capital as it were.”

Significantly, the most recent crisis in the relationship, when Trump was considering including Australian steel and aluminium in his higher tariffs in 2017, was settled despite the US ambassadorship’s being vacant. Australia prevailed simply on the merits of the economic argument.

Allan Gyngell argues that a political appointee can be preferable because “Canberra never really gets a professional high-flyer, as opposed to a nice competent State Department person, anyway, because the job is just too easy — at least since Marshall Green had it.” The top people with the best connections will go to key postings like Moscow and Ankara. “But you could, of course, get duds of both types, and in the end the competence of the appointee is what matters most.”

Unlike the United States, whose ambassadors are nearly all White House–appointed, Australia normally has about half a dozen politically appointed ambassadors at any one time. Under prime minister Tony Abbott that grew to about nine, a number Varghese thinks will be exceeded in the future.

The conventional argument is that appointing a senior ex-politician to Washington means the Americans can deal with someone who has a direct line to our prime minister. And their former career and profile might also give political appointees better access to American leaders.

Varghese has his doubts. “The reality is that a career diplomat in Washington ends up having a direct line to the prime minister anyway,” he says. “It’s in the nature of the job and the nature of the prime minister’s interest. Dennis Richardson and Michael Thawley both had very regular contact with Howard when they were ambassadors.”

Are ex-politicians better at schmoozing Congress? “At one level, yes, because there’s a kind of a style to those interactions which comes very naturally to an ex-pollie and maybe not to a bureaucrat,” Varghese says. “But we’ve had professional diplomats who’ve worked the Hill very effectively, like Thawley, Richardson and Michael Cook.”

McCarthy, who had an earlier congressional liaison post in the Washington embassy, says the capital is full of former politicians, foreign ministers and even prime ministers appointed as their countries’ envoys. It is a constant battle for access, and ex-politicians are not necessarily the best at it.

“If someone is known to be a very senior politician it can help a bit,” he says. “But again the basic work is wearing out shoe leather.” Most of the time a foreign diplomat ends up seeing congressional staff rather than politicians anyway. “You have to understand how important these guys are. [Biden’s new secretary of state] Antony Blinken was a staffer, chief of staff of the House foreign affairs committee. These are the people you need to contact. They know their subject. They’re not really into the good-ole-boy stuff.”

Varghese and McCarthy both see political appointments working best in familiar, English-speaking capitals with an envoy — like Alexander Downer as high commissioner in London — who knows how to work the system back in Canberra. “I’m not one who thinks all political appointees are a waste of space,” says McCarthy.

But Varghese is generally sceptical. “Frankly, I worry deeply that our system is going to have more political appointments. It would be unrealistic to have none, but they are ultimately an act of patronage. They are dismissive of diplomacy as a profession. What they are basically saying is: anyone can do this job.”

In terms of presidential access, McCarthy gives the accolade to former ambassador Joe Hockey, who got to play golf with Donald Trump. “If a guy can get a couple of golf games with the president that’s a plus,” he says. “I certainly never could with Bill Clinton. I take my hat off to him.” Hockey had hoped to trade that closeness as a lobbyist in a Trump second term. “But now Trump’s gone, he’s stranded,” adds McCarthy.

Arthur Sinodinos, the former Liberal senator appointed in Hockey’s place, will now be working very strenuously to see Morrison isn’t stranded too. How long Biden waits to appoint an envoy to Canberra might be a gauge of his success. And a high-calibre envoy could be a reverse compliment: it might mean Biden sees Morrison as a problem. •

President Joe Biden nominated Caroline Kennedy as the next US ambassador to Australia in December 2021.

The post Bagman, buddy or career diplomat? appeared first on Inside Story.

Now comes this book by Tim Harper, a Cambridge historian who has also collaborated on books with Bayly. Underground Asia takes us down the burrows of resistance to the Asian empires of Britain, France and the Netherlands, and into the struggles over the carcass of the Chinese empire in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

In this earlier era of globalisation, revolutionaries made use of post, telegraph, steamship and loose border controls to advance their causes. As Harper writes, “Many of them — although not all of them and not all of the time — travelled as seamen, labourers, servants, entertainers, students and, most often, as exiles.” These revolutionaries — people like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, China’s Zhou Enlai and Indonesia’s Ibrahim Tan Malaka — travelled light, often under false names, “with banned literature, illicit currency or encoded messages hidden in their luggage”:

They experienced a world of connections, but also a world upside down: the underbelly of the great port cities of empire where they found they were able more freely to organise and act.

The sites of their struggles were the waterfront, the lodging house, the coffee shop, the clandestine printing press in the back alley. They made these places centres of global awareness, and their experience of a secret underworld of empire helped shape a spectrum of radical ideas — about class and national identity, the position of women, the function of art and literature, the history of the future.

Some of them hid in plain sight. “If you want to hide revolutionary connections,” as the Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin remarked, “you had better travel first class.”

The strands of revolution and resistance were diverse. Some developed out of the anarchism portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s novels. “As a doctrine, anarchism was malleable to individual needs,” writes Harper. “[It] represented freedom from the state and feudal structures and a new moral purpose.” Less a system of thought than a “utopian horizon… it was not something passively received but elaborated on locally by men and women making sense of their alienation from the old order.”

Meiji Japan was an initial beacon, especially after its victory over Russia in 1904. “The remaking of the Japanese imperial order following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 exerted a fascination on restless minds across Asia,” Harper writes. “For Indian maharajahs, Malay sultans and Thai kings, Japan was a model for monarchical revival in the face of western encroachment. For critics of royal power, Japan was also an example of successful westernisation and liberal constitutional reform.” In 1896 just thirteen Chinese students were studying in Japan; by 1905 the figure was over 8000.

As soon as Kaiser Wilhelm II learnt of Russia’s mobilisation in July 1914, imperial Germany began trying to foment revolution in opposing empires. “Rapidly, German agents took advantage of the territory of neutral powers such as Spain, Siam, the United States and its colony in the Philippines to distribute calls to Muslims to resist the British and support the Ottoman Sultan and his ally ‘Hadji Guillaume.’”

The British countered with their Arab Bureau, run out of the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, whose tentacles reached across to Asia with the help of an expanding Intelligence Bureau in India and police special branches and MI5 posts in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai’s foreign enclave. “All of this drew the British empire deeper into an unprecedented global counter-propaganda exercise as it asserted its claim to be the world’s largest Muslim power and a defender of the faith,” Harper says.

Imperial police struggled to comprehend the enemy. Some were obsessed with “those capable both of ‘visiting addresses at which Europeans rarely call’ and of haunting the exclusive cafes and luxury hotels that only whites could enter.” The conspiracies they unravelled “conjured up an ‘underside India’ of ‘every sort of half understood thing and people,’ dark with the threat of thuggee and steeped in ‘the pathos of underworlds.’ Into this bestiary of empire was now placed the bomb-parast, the ‘worshipper of bombs.’”

The contending conspiracies could baffle even the closest observers. In 1922, Britain’s new Bureau of Political Intelligence reported activity in Malaya “in various guises, whose objects are uncertain but yet give no cause for definite suspicion, and it is difficult to prevent the feeling that more is going on under the surface than we are actually aware of.”

The imperial powers responded with brutal power and increasingly efficient security services. Conspiracy trials in India sent dozens to the gallows or the harsh panopticon prison in the Andaman Islands. Unrest after the first world war saw police and soldiers fire on crowds in Tonkin and Shanghai. In Amritsar, Brigadier Reginald Dyer had his troops open fire on a peaceful gathering of Sikhs, killing at least 379 and wounding 1200. A little-known uprising by Muslims in South Malabar saw 2339 killed by British forces, the largest casualties since 1857.

In the meantime, Japan had lost its aura for the rest of Asia. It had its own bomb-throwing anarchists, dismayed by increasing “Prussianisation” and the power of the zaibatsu industrial oligarchs. And it, too, had succumbed to imperialism. Sun Yat-sen was expelled in 1907, and then used the Penang and Hong Kong underground to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. Japan joined the victorious European powers in 1919 by taking over Germany’s footholds in China.

Now the beacon was Moscow, and rebels like Nguyen Ai Quoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, began to gather in the Soviet capital. The anarchists turned Marxist. The first Chinese translation of the full Communist Manifesto, from Japanese, came out in August 1920. A few months earlier, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI, had been the first to take the communist name in Asia, followed in 1921 by the Chinese Communist Party, the latter initially orchestrated by Comintern agent Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch former trade unionist in Java. Borodin, in Canton, oversaw the creation of the Whampoa military academy, with Japanese-trained Chiang Kai-shek as commandant and Zhou Enlai as a political commissar.

But the communists were overconfident. The Indian communist M.N. Roy failed in his effort to use Tashkent as a launching pad for agents, as had Berlin’s wartime India Committee, even though his British opposition, the “Great Gamer” Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey, had his cover blown: “the band at the most fashionable café would break off and play ‘Tipperary’ when he and his companions entered.”

When Chiang Kai-shek took his new army north against the warlords, leftists including Zhou Enlai made an ill-judged seizure of territory near Wuhan and were forced to a long retreat to the coast. The communists kept their heads up in Shanghai when Chiang took control of its Chinese areas, allowing his Kuomintang and associated triad gangsters to massacre some 4000 members and some 20,000 others. In Java, the PKI launched an uprising in November 1926, with the Dutch waiting to crush it.

By the late 1920s, the revolutionaries were quelled. Mao Zedong took China’s communists on two long marches to mountains in the northwest. The Kuomintang had expelled the Comintern. The imperial powers worried more about global economic depression and rising Japanese power. In India, the British were facing a more sophisticated challenge than bomb-throwers: from minds trained in London’s Inns of Court, following either Gandhi’s non-violence path or, as “constitutionalists,” taking up London’s promise of “dominion” status as a step forward, even while realising India would not be embraced by London to the extent that Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were.

Australia’s minor mentions in this book show us as willing assistants to imperial power in Asia. Sailors from HMAS Sydney helped Singapore police quell anti-Chinese protests in 1919. When prisoners escaped to Thursday Island from the Boven Digul prison camp in Dutch New Guinea, they were returned.

Eventually, of course, it was the Japanese strike into Southeast Asia that broke the imperial hold, though it imposed new forms of slavery. The British came to agree on Indian independence two years after a Japanese surrender. The French and Dutch tried to return, one power meeting its Dien Bien Phu, the other a growing international ostracism partly stirred up by the PKI prisoners it had transferred to Australia from Boven Digul in 1943.

The main strands of Harper’s story are fairly well known to readers of Asia’s national histories. His achievement is to draw them into a continuous narrative, kept alive by colourful vignettes of characters like the West Sumatran leftist Ibrahim Tan Malaka, summarily executed by an Indonesian army patrol in 1948, the Dutch communist Sneevliet, who perished in a Nazi camp, the women who took active roles in revolution, and the dozens sent to the Gulag or liquidated by Stalin.

It could look like a litany of failure, says Harper, but it helped break the imperial “hypnotism” of Asian populations. By carefully biding their time until opponents were exhausted by war, and by enlisting Soviet support, the revolutionaries did come to power in China, Vietnam and North Korea. Underground Asia is also a reminder of how subversive communities of thought were enabled across borders by the now-primitive communications of a century ago. What are social media and mass migration concealing today?

Later this year, the heirs of Mao Zedong and the small group that held its “first congress” in a Shanghai terrace house on 23 July 1921 will celebrate the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary. In 2018, when some Beijing students tried to apply Marxism and organise factory workers, they were arrested. Long after the revolutionary years, the descendants of Mao and his colleagues now rule a system locked into global capitalism. •

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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 problem was still unresolved when Scott Morrison flew into Tokyo on Tuesday, on his first foreign prime ministerial excursion since the coronavirus lockdown, to meet his Japanese counterpart, Yoshihide Suga. Nonetheless, the two went on to declare their commitment, “in principle,” to a “reciprocal access agreement” governing their armed forces training in or operating from each other’s territory.

The banal title belies the significance, highly symbolic at least, of Japan’s entering the first such agreement to allow foreign troops to operate on its soil in sixty years. That 1960 treaty with the United States allowed American forces to hold on to the scores of military bases they had occupied since Japan’s defeat in 1945.

With this “landmark” defence treaty, said Morrison, “our special strategic partnership became even stronger.” And, indeed, it represents a historic shift from the future presaged in the early postwar era, when Australia helped disarm Japan and then, in 1951, gained its own US protection — partly against a resurgent post-occupation Japan — through the ANZUS treaty.

After the culture shock when Japan replaced Western countries as Australia’s leading trade partner, a significant investor and a major source of tourists, the relationship settled into a cosy familiarity, with thousands of young people using the working holiday visa scheme started by the two countries in 1980, a first for Japan.

But the strategic setting is far from cosy now. China eclipsed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy some years back, and by some estimates has already taken the top position from the United States. It is contesting US hegemony in the Western Pacific, and has a particular historical bone to pick with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.

Canberra is also alarmed, and wants to join with Japan and other regional powers to push back against Beijing — though not to the extent of severing economic ties, since China is the top trading partner for Australia and most of these other countries. Starting with an agreement signed by John Howard’s government in 2007, Australia has moved steadily towards this week’s deal.

Alongside that push, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service has been helping Japan set up its own MI6-style external espionage service, and the then Japanese defence minister recently floated the idea of Tokyo’s being admitted to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between anglophone powers.

The basis of the new cooperation is “shared values,” and this week Suga repeated the mantra that Australia and Japan were mutually committed to democracy and the rule of law, and would “cooperate to realise a free and open Indo-Pacific.” It wasn’t necessary to state that both countries were backed by the power and values of the United States.

But something has changed to bring these members of separate US alliances together in an alliance of their own. “Historically Australian diplomacy has attached primacy to exchanging views with the United States on Asia,” John McCarthy, a former ambassador to Washington and Tokyo, wrote this week. “Since the lack of follow-through on President Obama’s pivot to Asia, and latterly the quixotic behaviour of the Trump regime, it has made equal — and arguably more — sense to talk to the Asians about the United States. Our most important interlocutor is Japan.”

Morrison and Suga would have spent much of their time swapping notes on what incoming US president Joe Biden might do in the region, and what damage Donald Trump might do on his way out. While signals from Biden’s camp showed determination to keep standing up for US interests, they also indicated a “much more structured” policy approach than Trump’s, and readiness to cooperate with China in areas like health, nuclear nonproliferation and climate.

“If this sort of thinking develops into policy, it makes sense to encourage Biden towards receptivity to indications, should they come, of a Chinese desire to wind back tensions,” McCarthy wrote. “Here, Japanese thinking is almost certainly more nuanced than our own. While rigorous on adherence to the security relationship with the United States, there is more two-way flexibility in Japan’s dealings with China.”

Instead of Canberra concentrating on naval power by promoting tighter integration among the “quadrilateral” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, McCarthy suggested that a deeper and broader engagement by America and Japan in Southeast Asia would be more effective. Getting the Americans to focus on that region might require patience, though, given that the pandemic, economic recovery and restoring North Atlantic alliances will be immediate priorities for Biden.

As well as the China relationship, Biden’s administration will have to formulate a new approach to Korea, following Trump’s theatrics with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Under current president Moon Jae-in, South Korea has declared itself uninterested in joining the Quad, especially as a junior to Japan.

The capital punishment question, meanwhile, was left hanging, as it were. Reporters were briefed that it will be tackled on a “case by case” basis — a reminder that not all values are shared in the Quad. Australia is the only member to ban capital punishment, and the other three have, if anything, stepped up their execution rates.

As the Australian National University’s eminent Northeast Asia historian Gavan McCormack points out, Suga has been at the forefront of efforts by Japan’s “Shintoists” to return their country to something like the state the United States, Australia and British India opposed before 1945 by restoring the emperor as the source of sovereignty and centre of a cult of cultural uniqueness.

“What committed Shintoists such as Abe and Suga seemed to find most offensive about the postwar Japanese state was its democratic, citizen-based, anti-militarist qualities and its admission of responsibility for war and crimes of war by the pre-war and wartime state,” writes McCormack. Referring to this week’s agreement, he adds that Suga proceeded under laws that the government’s own constitutional experts unanimously declared to be in violation of the postwar Japanese constitution’s famous Article 9, which restricts military action to self-defence. “The new ‘quasi alliance’ Tokyo–Canberra link seems to commit Australia to a view in support of Japan’s government and in opposition to its civil society on this most sensitive of issues,” says McCormack.

A similarly retrograde trend is seen in India too, where Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party is trying to impose majoritarian religious supremacism, often with sanctioned mob violence. And the last four years has even shaken the trust of many Australians in their country’s “shared values” with America.

If inclined, Morrison would have had much to reflect on during his nine-hour flight back to quarantine at the Lodge, unbroken by an abandoned stop-off in Port Moresby to meet Papua New Guinea’s James Marape, who is defending his leadership against a sudden defection of his ministers and MPs to the opposition — a reminder that domestic politics can trump diplomacy anytime. •

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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. •

The post Sabres rattling in Beijing appeared first on Inside Story.

Just two weeks earlier, though, a proposal by Japan to take the strategic partnership to even greater heights, ranking that country with Australia’s longstanding anglophone allies, had met with a resounding silence in Canberra.

In an interview with Nihon Keizai Shimbun on 14 August, defence minister Taro Kono said that Japan was keen to expand its cooperation with the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact that links the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “These countries share the same values,” he told the newspaper. “Japan can get closer [to the alliance], even to the extent of it being called the ‘Six Eyes.’”

Japan has been approached about sharing its information “on various occasions,” said Kono. “If approaches are made on a constant basis, then it may be called the ‘Six Eyes.’” The country need not go through formal procedures to join officially, he added. “We will just bring our chair to their table and tell them to count us in.”

The Five Eyes pact, created in 1946 with just two full members, Britain and the United States, grew out of collaborative efforts to collect and break the coded signals of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Australia had been involved in code-breaking against Japan since the 1930s, first with the British in Hong Kong and then with the Americans and other allies in Melbourne and Brisbane. Along with Canada and New Zealand, it was elevated from associated status around 1955 after upgrading domestic security.

The achievement of the wartime Allies in breaking enemy codes was kept secret for nearly three decades after the war, partly because the same capabilities were being deployed against the Soviet Union and other powers. It was blown open by the publication in 1974 of a book called The Ultra Secret by a former staffer at Britain’s now-famous Bletchley Park. Thanks to their “Cambridge” spy ring, though, the Soviets had long known about the code-breaking.

Japan has a highly developed signals intelligence capability and for decades has been a valued contributor in exchanges with the Five Eyes group. It listened to Chinese tank commanders preparing to enter Vietnam in 1979 during Deng Xiaoping’s “punishment” for its invasion of Cambodia. It heard the chatter of Soviet fighter pilots in the shooting down of the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 in 1983. In 2018, its agencies joined those from the Five Eyes in a US war game simulating a hostile attack on the allies’ satellite systems. It closely tracks Chinese and North Korean manoeuvres.

But Kono has not so far been rushed with invitations to the alliance top table. Although Japan clearly wants to move ahead of other powers sharing information with the Five Eyes — including France, Germany, South Korea, Norway and Denmark — even the most fervid Western supporters of bringing Japan out of its post-1945 diffidence about defence and security concede it will be some time before that particular set of eyes is a regular at the table.

No one is blackballing Japan’s membership of the club, it seems, but as yet no proposer or seconder has emerged.

Asked to comment on Taro Kono’s remarks, Australia’s defence department says that Australia values its “close and enduring partnership with Japan, including our strong defence cooperation” and points to the joint statement of a Five Eyes defence ministers’ meeting on 23 June, which “recognised the role of regional partners and institutions in shaping globally and across the Indo-Pacific a stable and secure, economically resilient community, where the sovereign rights of all states are respected.” Apart from that, “consistent with longstanding practice, government does not comment on intelligence matters.”

The chair of the Australian parliament’s joint committee on intelligence and security, Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie, did not respond to a request for comment.

The warmest endorsement for closer Japanese involvement has come from the Conservative chairman of the British parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, Tom Tugendhat, after a visit from Kono in July. “We should look at partners we can trust to deepen our alliances,” he said. “Japan is an important strategic partner for many reasons and we should be looking at every opportunity to cooperate more closely.”

Washington is not pushing the pace. “The Japanese are definitely keen,” acknowledges Michael Green, a senior Asian affairs specialist in the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council who is now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. “Full ‘Five Eyes’ is not on the cards,” he adds, “but there is support for an à la carte role for Japan.”

The most obvious inhibition is cited by another US specialist on Northeast Asian strategic affairs, Brad Glosserman, now at Tama University in Tokyo and previously at the CSIS offshoot in Hawaii, Pacific Forum. Japan’s partners recognised the value of its intelligence product, he writes, but worried about the security of information they gave Tokyo. Laws to protect official secrets passed by Abe’s government in 2013 have not completely allayed those concerns.

“The Japanese leak like a sieve and the idea of the secrecy laws is all about trying to plug those leaks or make it more difficult to leak,” adds a former senior Australian official closely involved with Japan. “If they were ever going to have access to high-level information they needed to assure the US and other Five Eyes partners they weren’t going to read it on the front page of the Nikkei the next day.”

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, agrees that more work is needed. “It is widely believed that Japan does not yet have the system of security clearances and standards of information protection that would be required,” he says. “Having said that, there is much that the Five Eyes could do to collaborate with Japan — and with France, the logical seventh eye and the way in to Europe.”

In seeking deeper protection for secrets, not only in military and intelligence affairs but also now in technology, Glosserman says the Five Eyes were up against “cultural obstacles” in the form of the Japanese public’s resistance to government secrecy and “thought control.”

This is certainly true, but it might be added that Abe only added to the fears with his push for great patriotism in school education, his erosion of the independence of the national broadcaster NHK, his attacks on the Asahi Shimbun and other liberal media, and his nostalgic nationalism, all of which stirred collective memories of pre-1945 conditions.

Then there’s the view from inside the clubhouse. “The second obstacle to Japan’s membership is also cultural — but this one exists among the Five Eyes members,” says Glosserman. “The group shares deep historical and cultural ties that stem from a common Anglo-Saxon heritage; they’re all native English speaking too. Seventy years of cooperation has given them a fluency, comfort and confidence that compounds their sense of identity and separation from non-members. All this is subtle and immeasurable, but it is palpable and it matters.”

Not that the Five Eyes partners share everything. During Sukarno’s Konfrontasi of Malaysia in the early 1960s, the late Hunter Wade’s position as New Zealand’s envoy in Singapore gave him a seat in its joint intelligence committee. At a certain point, Wade once told me, the British chairman would cough, and the American representative would leave. At a second cough, the Australian and New Zealand officials would exit.

During the 1999 crisis in East Timor, Canberra’s efforts to keep certain “Australian Eyes Only,” or “Austeo,” material from Washington led to the suicide of defence intelligence liaison officer Mervyn Jenkins, who had been blamed for passing it to the Americans.

But in its original core business of signals intelligence, Five Eyes has the firm rule that each partner must share, without being asked, its entire stream of “raw” material and “end product,” or the assessments made from it. The partners are not to spy on each other’s communications (unless asked), and their human intelligence agencies — the CIA, MI6, ASIS and so on — are not to recruit each other’s nationals without permission. Those are the rules, anyway.

Australia’s intelligence and military links with Japan have tightened greatly over the past two decades. After the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, the then secretary of Australia’s foreign affairs department, Ashton Calvert, and the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, started a regular trilateral security dialogue with Japan’s foreign ministry at vice-minister level.

Then, in 2006–07, the Australian army provided protection for Japanese military engineers in Southern Iraq. Prime minister John Howard signed a joint declaration on security cooperation with Abe during the latter’s first short spell as prime minister. As well as increasing intelligence exchange and joint operations to enforce North Korea embargoes, ASIS is reported to have joined MI6 in helping Tokyo set up its own external spy agency on the British model.

“There’s hardly anything we hold back, and they deeply appreciate that,” says Warren Reed, a self-disclosed former ASIS officer and Japanese-speaker once posted in Tokyo, whose latest spy novel, An Elephant on Your Nose, has Japanese and British agents working together against a terrorist plot. “I don’t know whether it is necessary to actually put the cherry on the cake.”

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party is still deciding on a successor to Abe, but it seems unlikely Taro Kono will get the job and be in a position to push his Five Eyes membership application at a higher level. As a Georgetown University graduate fluent in English, though, the relatively liberal defence minister is well placed to allay cultural reservations on both sides. And, at fifty-seven, he has more years on his side than the two front-runners for PM, Yoshihide Suga and Shigeru Ishiba, both members of the hawkish and retro-nationalist group Nippon Kaigi. His turn may yet come.

Still, if Canberra really wants to show its faith in Japan, it could openly agree to the cherry being put on the cake. •

The post No cherry on Japan’s cake appeared first on Inside Story.

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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That was October 2019, and the Chinese Communist Party was celebrating the fact that its republic not only had survived for seventy years but was also thriving, long after the Soviet pioneer of the Marxist-Leninist state had dissolved. Earlier that day, Xi stood on the balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square from which Mao Zedong famously declared in 1949, “The Chinese people have stood up.” Recalling those words, Xi added, “No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation from forging ahead.”

In the months since then, and especially since the coronavirus’s emergence in Wuhan, Beijing has confronted many challenges — and reacted to each of them with unabashed force. It imposed a new national security law on supposedly autonomous Hong Kong. It sent troops to a contested part of the Himalayan border, where they engaged in a deadly brawl with Indian soldiers. It dropped the word “peaceful” from its reference to reunification with Taiwan. It sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea while its navy was mounting large-scale exercises. It stopped imports of Australian barley and beef in response to implied criticism of the Wuhan outbreak. Meanwhile, Chinese fishing boats continued to swarm around the Japanese-held Senkaku islands in a “grey zone” assertion of ownership.

As American and Australian political leaders and intelligence chiefs have signalled, China is also ceaselessly breaching Western cyber networks, and its diplomats and front groups continue their covert influence operations. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has 2000 cases of suspected Chinese espionage on its hands, and Washington has closed down Beijing’s consulate in Houston, calling it “a hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”

Even among authoritarian regimes, China’s roll call of provocative activity is breathtaking. But judging what it all adds up to is far from straightforward. Is China demonstrating its strength, and reminding the West of its resolve never again to bow down? Or is it flailing around, picking fights it can’t hope to win?

“Just about everything in that set can be interpreted either as a sign of weakness or a sign of strength,” observes China historian Richard Rigby, a former consul-general in Shanghai who went on to be top China watcher at Australia’s Office of National Assessments. For Jane Golley, director of ANU’s China in the World Centre, it’s “the million-dollar question.”

American president Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have taken a bet that it’s weakness. In his extraordinary speech at the Richard Nixon memorial library in California on 23 July, Pompeo walked away from the China policy that Nixon initiated in 1971–72. America had to admit a “hard truth,” Pompeo said. “If we want to have a free twenty-first century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”

The expectation that China would become more open, free and friendly has not been borne out, he said. America had “opened its arms” to China and “marginalised our friends in Taiwan” only to have China steal intellectual property, take millions of American jobs and demand silence on its human rights abuses. “President Nixon once said he feared he had created a ‘Frankenstein’ by opening the world to the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said, “and here we are.”

After listing the Trump administration’s recent moves against China — banning semiconductor supplies to communications giant Huawei, sanctioning officials over the mass brainwashing of the Uighur minority, arresting Chinese students for espionage, declaring certain Chinese maritime claims legally invalid, closing the Houston consulate — Pompeo went on to declare a goal of regime change.

“We must also engage and empower the Chinese people — a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party,” he said, singling out in his audience two veteran exiles of crushed Chinese democracy protest, Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan. “Communists almost always lie,” Pompeo said. “The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.”

But people were waking up to this “from Brussels, to Sydney, to Hanoi,” he said. So now he was calling on “every leader of every nation to start by doing what America has done — to simply insist on reciprocity, to insist on transparency and accountability from the Chinese Communist Party.”

The ally most eagerly responding to this call has been Scott Morrison’s Australia. It had already barred Huawei from its future 5G mobile networks. Within days of the American declaration on the South China Sea, it issued a statement saying it too rejected many of China’s claims there, including the expansive “nine-dash line” delineating its claims of historical sovereignty over most of the sea. Five of the Australian navy’s most powerful ships were revealed to be engaged in exercises with US and Japanese ships off the Philippines.

Within a week of Pompeo’s speech, foreign minister Marise Payne and defence minister Linda Reynolds had flown to Washington for talks with Pompeo and US defense secretary Mark Esper. It was a pointed gesture of support, given that this routine annual consultation could have been handled by secure teleconferencing like most intergovernmental talks during the pandemic, and it meant that both ministers, their departmental heads and accompanying staff will have to quarantine for two weeks on return.

Australia duly got praise from Pompeo for “standing up” to China. But at what cost? It risked looking like support for Donald Trump less than a hundred days out from an election that polls say he will lose. And if China-blaming were going to be Trump’s election theme, to divert attention from Covid-19 disarray and unemployment, on whom would China take it out? And who could guarantee that Trump would not suddenly announce another “amazing” trade deal with Xi to settle it all?

The ANU’s Jane Golley, an expert on the Chinese economy, says we’ve just seen an example of that risk. “If you look at how the Chinese have played the barley story out here in Australia, they’ve been pretty clever,” she says. “Pushing forward a problem that they’d had with us in the past, but doing it to satisfy the demands of the US that they buy more exports from them. Then they cleverly turn around and target us, America’s number one ally, who keeps standing up and making all the noises, most obviously the Covid inquiry, that the US wants us to make. And then we turn around and say, ‘Isn’t China awful,’ and somehow the US gets away almost entirely scot-free.”

In the event, Payne and Reynolds declined to go “all the way” with Pompeo, saying Australia would reserve its decision on challenging China’s South China Sea claims by naval sail-throughs, and look to Australia’s national interests.

In China itself, Pompeo’s appeal to the Chinese people might actually increase popular support for the party leadership, according to an array of China experts. Daniel Russel, a China specialist who was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs under Barack Obama, calls it “primitive and ineffective.” In fact, a recent report from the Ash Center at Harvard University, Understanding CCP Resilience, reported that surveys of Chinese public opinion between 2003 and 2016 show citizen satisfaction with government to have steadily increased. “Chinese citizens rate the government as more capable and effective than ever before,” the authors say.

Since the post-Mao economic opening in 1978, per capita gross domestic product has grown sixtyfold, lifting 800 million people out of poverty but also intensifying inequality. Under the previous leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao the government attempted to compensate by allocating more spending to rural and inland areas and extending health insurance coverage to 95 per cent of the population. One big cause of the remaining dissatisfaction is air pollution so bad that it causes a million premature deaths each year — suggesting this is an area where China and the West could put aside differences in future re-engagement.

The anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping, who took over at the end of 2012, further improved the government’s standing. Although Xi’s campaign had elements of a political purge, the public saw it as evidence that even powerful figures no longer enjoyed impunity.

It soon became evident that the anti-corruption campaign was part of a drive by Xi to centralise authority in himself. The campaign reached into the Politburo Standing Committee itself, ensnaring Zhou Yongkang, the minister in charge of state security and public security and thus a powerful potential rival. Control of economic and social sectors was brought under various “working groups” chaired by Xi himself, rather than premier Li Keqiang. As ex-officio chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi launched a purge of officers running promotions rackets and other scams, then, having terrified everyone, started a wholesale reorganisation of the military to reduce the standing land army, boost the naval and air forces, and set up joint fighting commands instead of regional garrisons. Then, in July 2015, police arrested some 300 lawyers known for defending critics or victims of official abuses.

Xi overlaid it all with his China Dream, which envisaged a once-powerful nation restored to the respect of the world. In 2015, he revealed the Made in China 2025 blueprint for gaining leadership in cloud computing, quantum computing and a host of other new technologies.

Perhaps most revealingly, he declared in the run-up to the 2017 party congress that the distinction between government and party no longer mattered. At the congress itself, he declared that the party should be everywhere: “Government, military, society and schools, north, south, east and west — the party is the leader of all.”

And there was no doubt who was in charge of that party. The congress declined to follow the custom of nominating a new duo of heirs apparent, effectively abandoning the convention that presidents and premiers serve for two five-year terms and leaving it open for Xi to get himself a third term in 2022.

Australia’s ambassador in Beijing between 2007 and 2011, Geoff Raby, author of a forthcoming book on Australia’s place in the US–China contest, says that orderly succession had already been destroyed before Xi took power. Ahead of the 2012 congress, Bo Xilai, party secretary in Chongqing and son of a revolutionary general, tried to get himself onto the Politburo Standing Committee and thereby within leadership range with a very public campaign of “Red” patriotism. Helped by a scandal involving money and murder, Xi and his allies had Bo purged. But what was left in the party, Raby says, is “the law of the jungle,” and Xi “has had to wind up the authoritarian dial ever since.”

In his recent book, Xi Jinping: The Backlash, the Lowy Institute China specialist Richard McGregor portrays a leader who has made a heap of enemies with his purges and can’t get down from the tiger he has mounted. ANU’s Richard Rigby agrees that a secure retirement is not a prospect for Xi. “He hasn’t left himself an off-ramp.”

Although Xi is past the halfway mark of his second term, some educated Chinese are still bemused. “No one saw this guy coming,” one friend told Raby. “Who is he?”

Geoff Raby thinks that the key to Xi Jinping is his father. Xi believes that Xi Zhongxun should have run the early People’s Republic, not Mao, and that he would have done a better job of it. Despite the imprisonment and humiliation the father suffered, and the son’s disrupted education, it was time to correct history and restore the revolutionary bloodlines. “This whole generation of princelings claim that suffering as their legitimacy,” says Raby.

For all his modest personal demeanour, Xi has elevated himself to Mao-like standing. His writings, turgid and devoid of Mao’s poetic flashes, are promoted as comparable to those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. The party’s ninety-two million members are expected to read them religiously, and are quizzed regularly by a mobile phone app to make sure they are up with doctrines like the “Six Stabilities,” the “Six Securities,” the “Five Hopes” and, most basic of all, the “Two Upholds” (upholding the party’s total control, and upholding Xi’s control of the party).

At the beginning of July, just in case of any falling off in devotion, Xi signalled another anti-corruption purge, with the party’s central political and legal affairs commission, which supervises the police and the judiciary, announcing a new “education and rectification” campaign that would “thoroughly remove tumours… scraping poison off one’s bones.”

The only surprising thing is that a few intellectuals are still ready to be publicly critical. Among them is the Melbourne University–educated legal academic Xu Zhangrun, who published an essay in February attacking the regime’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Xu has been sacked from his position at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University and stripped of all entitlements, but is so far at large. Even more surprising is that many individuals have come out in his support.

But there is little reason to think that the Chinese public’s satisfaction with the government has fallen since the last Ash Center survey in 2016. Hong Kong’s protests drew little sympathy on the mainland, especially when some activists vandalised public property. And China’s leaders have been models of grown-up maturity compared with Donald Trump and his rotating cast of acolytes.

“Particularly in the US, there’s a lot of wishful thinking, that the Chinese administration is weak, that the government is weak, on the brink,” says Jane Golley. “It is one of the biggest questions of our time: how sustainable is a one-party system that becomes increasingly authoritarian and suppresses individual freedoms? But the people seem to be still signalling that they are still happy with it — or satisfied, let’s say.”

If anything, says Golley, Covid-19 has reinforced that sentiment. “I haven’t seen any survey, but what I’ve heard anecdotally is that Chinese people are looking at the US and their own handling of Covid and saying what a wonderful job their government’s done.”

As another China watcher, William Overholt, also of the Harvard Kennedy School, pointed out in Inside Story earlier this year, the Covid-19 crisis has brought out all the contradictions — as Marxists might put it — in Xi’s handling of the Chinese economy: support for market allocation of resources alongside massive subsidies to state enterprises; attempts to stimulate household consumption while pump-priming the economy with yet more infrastructure and construction; unleashing private entrepreneurship but putting party commissars onto company boards.

For a decade, China’s economists and technocrats like Premier Li, the only Politburo Standing Committee member with an economics degree, have been urging a “rebalancing” away from exports and infrastructure to private consumption. But politics, in the form of government spending designed to prop up GDP growth, has always beaten economics.

This tendency has given rise to a new wave of what Golley calls “collapsist” arguments — the view that China is heading for a massive bursting of bubbles. Certainly there are plenty to be burst, including a recent bull run on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges and a new housing boom despite an estimated sixty-five million unoccupied apartments across the country. Domestic debt is 317 per cent of GDP, and some small banks have gone bust because of bad loans, but tight currency controls and the central role of government banks may postpone the reckoning indefinitely.

In fact China, along with Vietnam, will be one of the very few economies to show positive growth this year, though that’s assuming the massive mid-year Yangtze valley flooding doesn’t damage the recovery from the first-quarter Covid-19 shutdown.

“The economy has been the leadership’s primary source of legitimacy for forty years, and even with this Covid crumbling they’re still doing better than anyone else,” says Golley. This matters to Australia, too. “We’re talking about what’s looking more and more like an economic war already, you might define it as a cold war,” and we risk siding with a country “heading for minus 10 per cent GDP growth” against an economy “likely to grow between two and three per cent this year.”

Debt is obviously a challenge for China, says Golley, “but they’ve got fiscal tools, they’ve got a little bit of scope with monetary policy, they’re the masters of intervention, so they will find ways to be the most rapidly growing economy coming out of Covid. And that’s going to give the government and the party more resilience, and more satisfaction.”

For Australia, says Golley, it’s the loss of jobs that will hurt if China keeps retaliating. “I’ve met barley farmers on Twitter and scrambling around trying to figure out what to grow next. I think the economy is going to take such a huge hit, but this current government, they don’t care. It’s all the poor and unskilled who are going to end up out of work.”

The big question about China’s strength is sustainability. Annual growth may not get back to the 7 per cent that has long been regarded as necessary to keep up employment and income levels. Xi seems worried about the prospects for the latest crop of university graduates, and is even suggesting that spells of rural work should be part of education. But even 5 or 6 per cent growth would keep China powering ahead against the United States and other rivals.

Stricter foreign investment controls in the United States, Germany and elsewhere is making it harder for Xi’s Made in China 2025 project. The Huawei issue has morphed from a concern about national security vulnerability in 5G networks to an American attempt to keep China down. And the trade war is not about trade any more, according to Columbia University historian Adam Tooze: “what dominates the discussion at present isn’t soy beans or blue-collar industrial jobs, but microchips, cloud computing, 5G and intelligence gathering by way of TikTok. What is at stake is technological leadership and national security.”

In the event of the United States “decoupling,” as some security hawks seek, China is comparatively well placed to thrive on its own. With 1.4 billion people, the long-delayed rebalancing would create a massive internal market. “They would be much better off in a globally closed economy than we are,” Golley says. “We’d be one of the worst off. The Americans could handle it better than we can with their population.”

Which raises the question of how many Chinese there are, and how many there will be. One demographer, US-based Yi Fuxian, thinks the official 1.393 billion figure may be overstated by as many as 115 million people, thanks to efforts to cover up the impact of the brutally enforced one-child policy between 1980 and 2015. Even since it was lifted, couples are not having more babies, which means that China will see Japan-style population contraction within a few years.

The fall in population might even have started, writes US demographer Lyman Stone. By 2080, and perhaps even 2050, China’s military-age manpower advantage over the United States and its allies would vanish (though future wars are unlikely to be fought that way). On the economic side, China will have to sharply increase the education, skills and creativity of its shrinking population to keep expanding. It could be caught in a classic “middle-income trap” before the presently impoverished third of the population achieves middle incomes.

A nasty corollary of that projected decline is that people of the Han majority are being encouraged to go forth and multiply but the freedom to have large families previously allowed to the ethnic minorities is being wound back. Hence the stories coming out of Xinjiang that Uighur women are being sterilised or implanted with contraceptive devices against their will. “Under president Xi Jinping, long-standing efforts to Sinicise minority groups have been ramped up to an unprecedented scale,” writes Stone.

For the moment, Xi Jinping enjoys a strong domestic position. How, then, has this not translated into greater world influence?

China’s most supportive foreign friends — the main recipients of US$5.5 trillion in loans from Beijing, or about 6 per cent of global GDP — make up a list of weak, corrupt and/or authoritarian regimes. Neither Turkey nor Pakistan criticises the oppression of the Uighurs, for instance, nor do governments in much of the rest of the Muslim world. And now many of these client states are pleading hardship about repayments.

Beijing has had to work hard to defend its early lapses in handling the coronavirus. It has had to deal with the backlash after local people discriminated against the many African traders living in southern Guangdong earlier this year, which led to Nigeria’s parliament unanimously protesting against “maltreatment and institutional racial discrimination” against Nigerians resident in China. Although China is spending billions of dollars on protective equipment and other health measures around the world, the fifty million–strong worldwide ethnic Chinese diaspora is experiencing a rise in racial vilification because of Covid-19, including in Australia.

But the United States in pandemic freefall is hardly a model for the world. How could China not be reaping the benefit globally? To the contrary, according to surveys by the respected Pew Research Center, trust in China has been falling in a swathe of advanced economies during Xi’s second term. It is unlikely to have suddenly rebounded.

“I find China’s behaviour inexplicable,” says former Australian trade representative in Beijing and Shanghai Michael Clifton, chief executive of the China Matters “second track” forum in Sydney. “The thought that they should be losing the global battle for hearts and minds in the era of Donald Trump is just beyond me.”

Beijing seems to lose its cool whenever events threaten its two core interests: territorial integrity and absolute party rule. At least four of the recent flare-ups relate to the first, and Hong Kong to both. In turn, the crackdown in Hong Kong led to deepened distrust in Taiwan, and a boost in support for president Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progress Party. Japan, its Senkaku territory and perhaps in future the Okinawan island chain subject to Chinese claims, has deepened its military engagement with the United States, Australia, Vietnam and India.

The border clash with India is still murky. International relations and territorial dispute expert M. Taylor Fravel thinks it might have started with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s decision last August to withdraw strife-torn Kashmir’s statehood and run its high-altitude Tibetan-populated region, Ladakh, as a “union territory” directly from New Delhi. Modi’s home minister, Amit Shah, followed this up by strongly reasserting India’s territorial claims and publishing a new map.

When China moved troops to the disputed area, Aksai Chin, India did likewise. Though China had created the conditions for the clash that followed, it had not been intent on one. “I don’t think the clash is something that China sought,” Fravel told the Print newspaper. “Because if one looks at Chinese diplomacy today, they are very much clearly trying to put the genie back in the bottle, restore China–India relations to a place they were before the clash. China hasn’t released its own casualty numbers, and so forth.”

It hasn’t worked so far. Modi has banned TikTok, among more than one hundred popular Chinese mobile phone apps, and welcomed a new factory in Chennai that would take manufacturing work on Apple’s iPhone 11 away from China. He is also moving to strengthen the “Quad” military alignment with the United States, Japan and Australia.

And while Trump has put the United States in a disgraceful position, China has clearly been taken aback by his wielding of non-military power: in getting Canada to detain the Huawei executive and heiress Meng Wanzhou for possible extradition; in placing sanctions on Xinjiang officials that could see Chinese banks blocked from international clearing systems if they don’t join in; in suddenly embargoing the semiconductors Huawei needs.

While Beijing officials have been cleared to make tough responses to challenges from countries like Britain and Australia, they take a cautious and regretful line with Washington. The closure of the US consulate general in Chengdu, in response to Houston, was a measured tit for tat, not an upping of the ante. Demonstrations by “patriotic citizens” were allowed as American diplomats moved out, but Chengdu residents were also allowed to post friendly social media farewells to the American consul and his wife and even put up clips of wartime newsreels from when the US military operated out of nearby Chongqing supporting China against Japan.

Nevertheless, it looks like being a fraught hundred days until the US elections are over. Trump is painting his contender Joe Biden as a sellout to the Chinese; Chinese propaganda officials are saying they want Trump to win because he will bring down America and destroy its alliances. It all means that under Trump or Biden, engaged or decoupling, Washington will have permanently firmed up against China.

As for Xi Jinping’s position, it will continue to be enigmatic. “Any shock will come in elite politics,” said Geoff Raby. “It will be played out in a way we can’t see, that we won’t know about until it’s happened.” •

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

The post His country, weak or strong appeared first on Inside Story.

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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Having looked pessimistically at the extent of Chinese influence operations in Australia, Charles Sturt University academic and Australia Institute founder Clive Hamilton has turned his sights on the rest of the Western world, and finds another bleak scene of venality and often wilful ignorance.

His new book, Hidden Hand, shows greater familiarity with the networks of the Chinese Communist Party and its coded stock phrases than did his 2018 book on Australia, Silent Invasion, thanks to his partnering with a German researcher with a doctorate in Chinese studies.

It cautions several times against conflating the party with the Chinese people or assuming that the ethnic Chinese diaspora is an agency of Beijing — lapses of which Hamilton was accused by reviewers of the earlier book, notably when he expressed alarm that the cleaning contractor at the Australian Defence Force Academy, an open campus, employed ethnic Chinese.

Hidden Hand focuses chiefly on influence-building by Beijing’s United Front Work Department, a huge, lavishly funded outfit that has been cultivating potential allies among non-communist groups since revolutionary days. With China itself under the tightening control of president Xi Jinping, the department has taken its tried and trusted methods to the wider world. “Its implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China’s dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile,” write Hamilton and Ohlberg.

The department, as powerful as any ministry in Beijing, sits behind the Chinese organisations that partner foreigners in sister cities, parliamentary friendship groups, business and trade cooperation associations, and the like. “Western leaders can believe they are dealing with leaders of genuine Chinese civic organisations,” write the authors, “whereas in fact they are dealing with party operatives or people guided by agencies in Beijing.”

The perks of dealing with these bodies — including expenses-paid trips to China and meetings with senior leaders — draw in many retired politicians, military chiefs, ambassadors and others who miss the limelight and enjoy the sense they are listened to. Journalists and other opinion makers are given their first introduction to China and come away dazzled by its advances without realising that Japan and other countries made similar, earlier strides.

Hidden Hand gives many examples of Western figures persuaded to publicly endorse Chinese policies using terms like “friendship” and “win-win,” and willing to remain silent about human rights abuses because they accept the United Front line that “quiet diplomacy behind the scenes is more effective than vocal diplomacy.” Certain figures in parliamentary China friendship groups have been prepared to downplay the contemporary relevance of the Dalai Lama or make sneering remarks about Rubiya Kadeer, the exiled spokeswoman for the Uighurs.

In fact, cringe-making examples can be found right down the political chain across the West. Hamilton throws in some from Australia, including the decision of city officials in Rockhampton to paint over the tiny Taiwanese flags put on a multicultural festival float by local children, and then to lamely defend their action as being in line with Canberra’s “one China” policy.

One prime example of United Front penetration, say Hamilton and Ohlberg, is Britain’s 48 Group Club, derived from a body of businesspeople and sympathisers who pioneered trade with China after the Korean war embargoes ended in 1954. Its current members include Tony Blair and other senior political figures, former Bank of England officials, the chairman of British Airways and five former ambassadors to Beijing.

The club’s chairman, Stephen Perry, is quoted by China’s Xinhua news service as saying Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative is all about “sharing” prosperity, which is the “essence of Socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Beijing’s current definition of its ideology). “In our judgement,” write Hamilton and Ohlberg, “so entrenched are the CCP’s influence networks among British elites that Britain has passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Beijing’s orbit would probably fail.”

The French and German pillars of continental Europe are also being eroded by leaders, former chancellor Gerhard Schröder among them, who are on the Beijing gravy train. And the embrace of the Belt and Road Initiative by Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and Malta resembles Mao Zedong’s old strategy of “using the countryside to surround the city.”

With many seeing the Belt and Road Initiative as a Trojan horse, the authors take another trip Down Under, where “wilful ignorance, and the influence of United Front agents at top levels of state governments, help explain why the state of Victoria in Australia signed on to the BRI, despite the federal government having expressly declined to do so, and the fact that the issue had been widely discussed in the media.”

In the United States, Donald Trump has filled his cabinet with bankers from Goldman Sachs and other outfits deeply compromised by investments in China, while Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is married to the daughter of a rich Chinese American who was a classmate of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. The authors suggest that Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact aimed at greater protection of intellectual property, was a result of their pro-China influence.

In Canada, they claim, Justin Trudeau has been weak in defence of the two Canadians who were arrested for “spying” in retaliation for the extradition case against Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou. Why? Because he is beholden to political donations from Chinese-Canadian businesspeople linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

By the end of this analysis, the authors come close — strangely, for the progressive Hamilton — to endorsing Trump for re-election as the only Western leader strong and confident enough to call out China. Joe Biden and John Kerry sat on their hands while Xi reinforced his islands in the South China Sea, Jeb Bush took Chinese money, and Michael Bloomberg is the most China-friendly of all recent presidential aspirants.

Like Hamilton’s previous book, Hidden Hand concedes no creditable motives to those who pursue engagement with China. They are either in it for the money or — especially in the case of the political left — inclined to “whataboutism,” pointing to instances of Western countries behaving as badly as China.

Hamilton and Ohlberg dismiss the argument that economic engagement will eventually bring political liberalisation to the Chinese system. Xi, they say, has shown the reverse to be true.

They do cut a little slack to those who have let themselves be duped by the United Front Work Department out of ignorance. They claim the West has not had to contend with such an adversary before, given its very slender economic ties to the Soviet Union. They don’t seem to recall the Beatrice and Sidney Webbs of the 1930s, the numerous peace fronts and Soviet friendship groups, the powerful pro-Soviet communist parties, the touring Red Army choirs, the ballet, the communist plants in other parties and organisations.

They think a West that stood up to the Soviet challenge has turned out to be weak before the cash-wielding cadres from Beijing. “Democratic institutions and the global order built after the Second World War have proven to be more fragile than imagined, and are vulnerable to the new weapons of political warfare now deployed against them,” they say.

They seem to accept that United Front work really is what Xi Jinping calls it: “a magic weapon.” They say that “Beijing has become the world’s master practitioner of the dark arts of economic statecraft,” with the Belt and Road Initiative “the ultimate instrument of economic statecraft or, more accurately, economic blackmail.”

Yet, with China’s economy halted and many loan recipients already seeking debt forgiveness, the Belt and Road moment may have passed. And how big is resistance inside China itself to Xi’s grandiosity? We don’t know, and may not for some years.

Hidden Hand does include examples of Western institutions resisting China’s reach. The University of Maryland supported a Chinese student who was pilloried from home for mentioning “the fresh air of free speech” in the United States during her commencement address, and accepted the loss of enrolments from China that followed. The Prague city council terminated its sister city relationship with Beijing over the inclusion of “One China” in the agreement, and switched to Taipei instead. Although Xi and the Dutch king attended the launch of the University of Groningen’s campus in Yantai, China, the university walked away from the partly completed project after Beijing announced a party official had to sit on the boards of all foreign-funded universities.

Indeed, the book’s concluding sentence concedes that “the pushback is growing by the day and the party bosses in Beijing are worried.”

If the objective of United Front work is to create a more favourable view of China around the world, it has demonstrably failed. Hamilton and Ohlberg have produced a useful compendium of what Beijing gets up to. But like the “grains of sand” theory that underlies China’s alleged mass espionage, what Hidden Hand produces is a pile of sand. And what is hidden about that? •

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In finer grain, though, there is a flaw in this comforting picture. On the surface of what used to be an Ice Age land bridge are a string of Australian islands extending to less than five kilometres from the coast of Papua New Guinea, or a fifteen-minute journey in the outboard dinghies used by locals.

The Torres Strait Islands were annexed by Queensland in the 1870s just as European powers were starting to carve up the huge and largely unexplored island of New Guinea itself. The fears in Brisbane were soon allayed by the British–German decision to divide the eastern half, with the southern portion of that half becoming a British protectorate.

Queensland resisted proposals to move the border with British Papua to a more central line in the strait, and as late as 1972, under premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, it maintained that attitude when Canberra was trying to fix the border ahead of Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975. In that instance at least, the premier could say he was heeding the voices of Indigenous people. The villagers of the three islands just off the Papuan coast — Boigu, Dauan and Saibai — wanted to remain Australian citizens.

Too Close to Ignore explores the hybrid border that resulted, and looks at what has become of the peoples on either side. This collection of essays is the result of extensive on-the-ground research, and adds up to a fact-laden dossier that points to potential new dangers and offers suggestions for easing the tensions that create opportunities for malign forces.

As several of the book’s contributors point out, the widening gap in living standards is putting the arrangement under pressure. As contributor Peter Chaudhry observes, “There are few places in the world where such stark inequality exists between two places that are so close.”

Since 1975, the Torres Strait Islanders have been part of Australia’s welfare advances, getting Centrelink payments and access to financial services, world-class hospitals and schooling. Onshore in PNG, the inhabitants of fourteen recognised “treaty villages” can travel to the three nearby islands to engage in “traditional practices.” Largely, however, they and the other people of what is known as the South Fly region must rely on a collapsed PNG administration while coping with estuarine fisheries blighted by silt from the giant Ok Tedi mine far up the Fly River.

Local health clinics are either derelict or without medicines and instruments, primary school teachers are often absent, roads are few and mobile telephone coverage spotty, and fuel for outboard motors is three times the Australian price. The only hospital, secondary school and ATMs are on Daru Island, in the main town where some 16,500 people live mostly in crowded squatter settlements without much clean water and sanitation.

“Daru is an ideal environment for the diseases of poverty to flourish,” writes Geoffrey Miller. “Malaria, typhoid, leprosy and tuberculosis are endemic on the island, its TB rate, including rates of drug-resistant TB, rivalling those found anywhere in the world. Daru is a risky location for residents and visitors alike.”

The emergence of multidrug-resistant TB led Australia to start giving special assistance to the Daru hospital in 2012 lest the disease find its way across Torres Strait. Although that help largely succeeded in containing TB in the South Fly, the hospital had to shut down twice in 2018 for lack of operating funds.

Australian government and NGO schemes have now extended into the South Fly, while respecting PNG sovereignty. The authors think Canberra will have to help out much more on a wider front, especially as Australian efforts to “harden” the border against perceived human and biological threats make life more difficult and exacerbate the sense of unfairness.

People from the PNG treaty villages make about 27,000 crossings to the three nearby treaty islands each year. They have to wait in their boats until local officials call them in for identity checks before landing, and are then subject, sometimes whimsically, to rules about what constitutes traditional activity. To go further — say to Thursday Island, the biggest town in the strait — requires an invitation and two-week wait for approval.

Treaty villagers can go to the clinics on Saibai and Boigu, but only get treated “if we’re about to die,” as one put it. Others are referred back to local clinics or, in more serious cases, to Daru’s hospital, to which they must make their own way. Sometimes the delay is fatal. Commercial trade with Australia is effectively barred by biosecurity limits on sales of mud crabs.

Even love is regulated: when an Australian island woman has a relationship with a PNG man, for example, he can only get permission to stay two weeks at a time. To marry and settle, as other spouses of Australians can, he’d have to travel to Port Moresby for a passport and then pay several thousand dollars for the visa application. Even so, the treaty villagers are privileged compared with their neighbours further inland.

Increasingly, PNG coastal people are drawn into trade with the town of Merauke, across the Indonesian border in West Papua, to shop, get cheaper petrol and sell live crabs and sea cucumbers, which can be airlifted around Asia to Chinese restaurants. The trade is illegal and, by sweeping up undersized and female crabs, ecologically damaging.

With calls for some kind of trade zone in which these people could develop direct links to Australian consumers falling on deaf ears, implied threats have been made. Treaty villagers portray themselves as Australia’s border sentinels. “We pick up when strangers come through,” one said. But another warned that, with their own security falling away, “we’ll be forced to do things to survive.” So far there is a little smuggling of marijuana and cheaper PNG alcohol into Torres Strait, and would-be asylum seekers are still being turned in.

The writers see little prospect of raising incomes in South Fly without further cross-border connections, an end to the narrow “traditional” filter on trade, and help for treaty villagers to participate in Australia’s seasonal work scheme without having to go through Port Moresby.

Meanwhile, a movement among the Torres Strait Islanders wants to separate from Queensland and become a federal self-governing territory. They and their island homes, portrayed in the recent ABC TV series Blue Water Empire, are indeed too close to keep ignoring.

The giant crocodile lurking in the Torres Strait picture is the unhappy indigenous population just across the PNG border in West Papua, now more than fifty years after a manipulated “act of free choice” was interpreted by the United Nations as a willingness to join Indonesia.

In colonial times, the border was not a problem. When two political prisoners from the Tanah Merah camps, inland from Merauke, reached Thursday Island by canoe in 1930, Queensland authorities delivered them back to the Dutch. In 1943, Australia let the Dutch bring the Tanah Merah inmates to the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp, until Australian leftists got them released.

It’s more difficult now. When forty-three West Papuan dissidents made it by canoe to Cape York in 2006, the Howard government had little choice but to give them asylum, placating an enraged Jakarta with yet more assurances that we recognise Indonesian sovereignty in West Papua. When seven others got to Boigu Island after crossing by land from West Papua in 2013, the Abbott government deemed them PNG’s problem and sent them back there.

That’s unlikely to be the last attempt. Time, more funds locally allocated from the giant Freeport gold and copper mine, and political concessions have not swayed a restive population still inclined to fly the Morning Star independence flag and paint it on their faces, often at great personal risk.

A new flare-up started eighteen months ago in the mountainous Nduga region. Guerillas of the OPM, the Free Papua Movement, seized workers on the government’s grandiose trans-island highway project and executed fourteen of them. A large Indonesian army operation followed, with many civilian casualties.

Then, on Indonesia’s independence day in August last year, Papuan students in Surabaya hoisted the Morning Star flag on their dormitory and were heckled as “monkeys” by an Indonesian crowd. Anti-Indonesian protests broke out across West Papuan towns; scores of Papuans were shot or arrested; in some places settlers from elsewhere in Indonesia were attacked or driven out.

Indonesia continues to keep a tight fence around its Papuan provinces. A Polish tourist got a seven-year jail term for “treason” when spies reported independence coming up in his conversations with locals, as it is wont to do. But what’s different from previous upsurges is that ordinary Papuans have been greatly empowered by the spread of smartphones. Everyone has a video camera in his or her pocket or bilum.

John Martinkus has mined this new source for his book The Road, as did the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent recently. He portrays the trans-Papua highway as an especially powerful instrument of subjugation, providing some description of the Nduga clashes and the flight of population across fearsome terrain. As far as it goes, this is moving documentation.

But The Road goes little further than Martinkus’s newspaper articles about these developments last year. In particular, he doesn’t bolster his report that Indonesian forces used white phosphorus munitions in Nduga. He includes the detailed declaration by the Indonesian security minister at the time, Wiranto, that Indonesia had no such chemical weapons and was subject to international verification, but simply notes that this was a “strange departure” for Wiranto, citing an instance twenty-one years ago when the general dodged a reporter’s questions about Timor. Martinkus might have tried to check with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, of which Indonesia is a member. Still, the cover blurb accepts that “chemical weapons have been deployed.”

Martinkus forgivingly skirts the execution of at least nineteen civilian captives by the OPM, and makes much of its improving weaponry and tactics. But clearly the organisation is still greatly outgunned and capable of no more than minor ambushes and sniping. Its division into several widely dispersed autonomous bands is not discussed.

A resistance force is important for a liberation movement, as the Falintil guerillas were for East Timor. But also important is the battle of ideas and history, as Bishop Belo and José Ramos-Horta showed in that case. With West Papua, this side of the struggle is led by the Oxford-based Benny Wenda, who managed to collect 1.8 million West Papuan signatures on a petition calling on the United Nations to allow a new vote on independence. The bid was rejected by the UN’s decolonisation committee, stacked with postcolonial states, but has been accepted by its human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet.

Wenda’s diplomacy and the renewed protests and crackdowns inside West Papua have led to growing concern among the Melanesian states. Bougainville’s recent 98 per cent vote to separate from PNG is shaking up the postcolonial status quo. Again, Martinkus could have taken this a lot further by interviewing Wenda about the diplomatic–military interaction — he is available on the phone, and transited Australia to Vanuatu in January — rather than relying on published statements and secondhand reports.

It will take a lot to crack Indonesia’s conviction that West Papua belongs to it. The Indonesian state seems unable to move beyond the ready use of military force. The police commander, Tito Karnavian, has tried without success to edge the military out of its public-security role. Joko Widodo tried to open up West Papua when he became president in 2014, but was quickly countermanded by the military–security establishment and his party chief, Sukarno’s daughter Megawati.

Now Prabowo Subianto, whose military career included chasing OPM fighters into PNG and using a Red Cross helicopter as a Trojan Horse to set free hostages of the OPM, is Wiranto’s replacement as defence and security supremo. Routinely, the Indonesian state is being described as NKRI — NK standing for “Unitary State” and RI for “Indonesian Republic.” Less NK and more RI might offer a possible pathway to reconcile the Papuans, but no one seems likely to try. •

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If Netanyahu was contentious then, he is even more so now. Two Sundays ago he achieved another first as prime minister, appearing in a courtroom on corruption charges, having felt no obligation to resign from office and having announced his intention to annex large swathes of West Bank territory previously earmarked for an eventual Palestinian state.

Perhaps not surprisingly, events in Israel have caused a shift within Australia’s 120,000-strong Jewish community, and it has been reflected in the formation of their delegation to the World Zionist Congress in October. The five-yearly congresses are an important opportunity for political representatives from Israel to hear how diaspora supporters of Israel as a Jewish homeland feel about their policies.

In a consensual process just completed, eight members of the small Australian delegation (just thirteen out of 500 congress delegates) will be representatives of “progressive” or liberal Jewish organisations, either secular or from the like-minded religious streams known as “Reform” and “Conservative.” The other five delegates will speak for the Orthodox religious stream and groups like Friends of Likud, which generally support the steady push by Netanyahu and his Likud party for Israel to fully absorb the West Bank areas they call by their Biblical names of Judea and Samaria.

A notable new voice in the progressive majority is a secular coalition calling itself Hatikvah (“The Hope”), the title of the nineteenth-century poem that became the lyric of Israel’s national anthem. It wants Israel to “fulfil its destiny as a just, free homeland for the Jewish people” that also “lives in harmony with its neighbours and upholds the rights of all its citizens.”

Hatikvah has managed to pick up two places in the delegation. Leading the push for support during the formation of the delegation were Liam Getreu and Maddy Blay, respectively from local groups Ameinu, which is aligned with the Labour Party in Israel, and Meretz, aligned with the greenish-secular Meretz party. Behind Hatikvah is a new voice in the Jewish community, the online magazine Plus 61J, established in April 2015 and edited by liberal journalist Michael Visontay. Strongly focused on the Israel–Palestine question, Plus 61J declares itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro–human rights” and supportive of a two-state solution.

Joining the Hatikvah ticket was the Melbourne venture-capital entrepreneur and longstanding supporter of Israeli–Palestinian contact, Ron Finkel, who modelled the push for places at the World Zionist Congress on a Hatikvah ticket for the big United States delegation organised by his American friend Kenneth Bob, long active in Ameinu and a board member of the American liberal Jewish group J Street.

Finkel says that the Jewish community in Australia, “or at least a large chunk of it,” had begun to “tune out” from Israel because of alienation from the values shown by the Netanyahu government. “The drift has been clearly in the direction of non-engagement,” he tells me.

That was not the Jewish voice heard by the wider public, however. “You have those who are dyed-in-the-wool Israel über alles and they seem to have by and large effective control of communal institutions,” says Finkel. “They are the voice you hear through the ECAJ [Executive Council of Australian Jewry], through various state councils, and if that is all that there is you would come to the very rapid view that these sentiments reflect ‘the Jewish community.’”

A group of Jewish Australians decided they wanted to promote a different viewpoint. “We have got to make it clear that there is a voice in the community that reflects core progressive Zionist values, that they’re still relevant,” says Finkel, “even though progressive Zionists don’t have much say in Israel at the moment. And that’s good because it’s the first time in a long time that progressive Zionists of all ages have decided to stand up and say: this is what’s going on.”

As well as sending representatives to the congress, Hatikvah wants to work in a more engaging, structured way to gain a voice within the Jewish community. “We don’t want to be outside the tent pissing in. We want to be inside the tent and being part of the shaping of communal strategies.”

Already the group has put out two statements, one on climate change and one on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. “We are not trying to replace organisations that are active in this space, but we want to make it clear these are issues that speak to us, that are important to us as Australian progressive Zionists, and we’re involved,” says Finkel.

All this is encountering some resistance among some older, established community figures. “They can’t grasp, they can’t get their heads around the idea that you can be critical of policies of the current government of the state of Israel, fight for the rights of oppressed minorities in Israel whether they be Ethiopians or different segments of the Arab populations, or point out Israeli soldiers can do obnoxious things,” says Finkel.

He believes these sentiments are understandable, especially in Melbourne, which had the highest postwar concentration of Holocaust survivors, per capita, outside Israel. “You can’t blame them when your family has gone through the horrors and as a young person in 1967” — during the Arab-Israeli war — “you thought there was a likelihood that a new holocaust was going to be perpetrated on the state of Israel.”

After the past year’s three Israeli elections, each of which resulted in a stalemate, Netanyahu is still in power. He has stared down his rival, former defence chief Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party, and persuaded him to accept second place in a governing coalition. So precarious is the political balance that the government includes fully thirty-six ministers and sixteen deputies, some with invented portfolios and no clear responsibilities, in a Knesset of only 120 members. Crucially, Netanyahu retains control of the law-related portfolios.

Israel’s High Court allowed Netanyahu to stay in office while being tried on charges of receiving gifts and favourable media coverage in return for political favours, partly because of the presumption of innocence and partly because prime ministers, unlike ordinary ministers, are not explicitly prohibited from doing so.

“A situation in which a defendant charged with serious ethical crimes forms a government and heads it raises a public and moral problem whose magnitude is hard to overstate,” said Justice Menachem Mazuz in his judgement. “Such a situation reflects a social crisis and a moral failure by both society and the political system.”

Still, Netanyahu is doubling down, announcing he will start annexing some 30 per cent of the West Bank, including many of the Jewish settlements there, on 1 July. Gantz has acquiesced as part of the coalition agreement. Cynics believe that Netanyahu, while advancing the Israeli right’s perception of an ancient destiny, also hopes to project himself in court as a heroic statesman rather than a slippery politician.

The start on annexation may be more token than real. While the American right and its evangelical component might support the aim, even Donald Trump’s administration seems to be telling Netanyahu to slow down. It wants presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “peace plan” — land for Israel, cash and connecting freeways for the resulting Palestinian enclaves — to stay in play.

Formal annexation would sever Netanyahu’s new dialogue with conservative Arab governments and possibly set off a new Palestinian intifada. It would not be recognised by most European nations, nor by Washington if Joe Biden becomes president.

Hatikvah still holds the hope that the two-state solution can be revived. “What’s happening in the trajectory of both sides has been a continuous path of delegitimisation to now, unfortunately, many elements of dehumanisation,” says Finkel. “And so that chasm is getting bigger, so we have to try and bridge it, and the only way to bridge it is bringing people in touch with each other so they can realise that not every Palestinian is a murderous terrorist and not every Israeli is a bloodsucker. The need to inject humanity into the relationships is paramount.”

Palestinians would find “an incredibly receptive” audience in Israel if they changed their discourse to frame their aspirations as a civil society alongside Israel, Finkel believes. At the same time, Israel should restrain its “messianic” expansion. “All these steps towards colonisation or the settlement enterprise are a cancer on Israeli society,” says Finkel. “They are really going to put a stake through the heart of the Jewish future in Israel if they don’t step back from it.

“But I am an optimist and I certainly believe we can get to a two-state solution,” he adds. “You’ve got to have the will in order to find the way.” •

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So declared a story by two members of the Sydney Morning Herald’s press gallery bureau based on “sources familiar with the negotiations” over the draft resolution.

Once again, Australia saves the world. Yet a closer examination of the emerging resolution, which Chinese president Xi Jinping also supported, reveals it to be nothing like as strong as the original proposal from Scott Morrison’s office.

Recall 22 April, when multiple news outlets carried reports from their Canberra correspondents that Australia was calling for reform of the World Health Organization. If necessary, went the plan, independent investigators would be given “weapons inspector powers” to investigate the source of disease outbreaks.

“Just got off the phone with US President @realDonaldTrump,” Morrison tweeted the same day. “We had a very constructive discussion on our health responses to #COVID19 and the need to get our market-led and business-centred economies up and running again.”

But almost immediately it became clear that Canberra was way out on its own. Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson and other leaders phoned by Morrison demurred at the timing and nature of the proposal.

China already had its hackles up after foreign minister Marise Payne’s earlier floating of an “independent investigation,” which a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman described as “political manoeuvring.”

In terms of its likely passage and acceptance, Morrison’s inspections proposal was preposterous. The veteran diplomat John McCarthy called it a “nice hoary bellow from our domestic political ramparts” but “a policy mistake.” Rod Barton, one of the former weapons inspectors in Iraq, pointed out flaws in the analogy. He might have added that the inspectors’ reports about Saddam Hussein’s evident lack of weapons of mass destruction were ignored by Washington, London and Canberra in the 2003 rush to war.

Back to the Canberra press gallery, though, and its role in helping whip up a crisis out of a bad brainstorm in the prime minister’s office. On 26 April, the Australian Financial Review’s Andrew Tillett interviewed the Chinese ambassador, Cheng Jingye, who elaborated the foreign ministry view. “Some guys are attempting to blame China for their own problems and deflect the attention,” he said. “The proposition is obviously teaming up with those forces in Washington to launch a political campaign against China.”

This was not yet a story. As Jocelyn Chey, a former Australian consul-general in Hong Kong now at Western Sydney University, has pointed out, Tillett then pushed and pushed Cheng with a series of “What if?” questions. Finally the ambassador conceded that if Australia came across as hostile to China, its public might reconsider buying Australian wine or beef, travelling here, or sending their children to our universities.

This threat of “trade retaliation” then blew up into a major theme of Canberra politics the following week. And instead of cool rationality, a wave of patriotic flag-waving took hold of senior members of the press gallery, urged on by China hawks in Canberra’s military-industrial circles.

The latter notably include Peter Jennings, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, financed by the defence department, military suppliers including Lockheed Martin, BAE, Northrop Grumman, Thales and Raytheon, and the governments of Japan and Taiwan. It was time for Australia to diversify its trade away from China, he wrote. Just like that.

Business leaders and vice-chancellors who tried to point out that the finger-pointing at China could have economic consequences were derided as traitorous. They “can’t handle the truth” about China, said Channel Nine’s Chris Uhlmann. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher described Cheng’s rather mild words as “gangsterism.”

“Cheng’s warning laid bare what those in political, diplomatic and foreign affairs circles have always known about the regime in Beijing,” wrote the Australian Financial Review’s Phillip Coorey. “It was a glass-jawed bully that viewed bilateral relations as one-way affairs that should be skewed in Beijing’s interest.”

Iron ore tycoon Andrew Forrest’s springing of a Chinese consul on a press conference with health minister Greg Hunt, “followed by a similar attempt at appeasement” by Kerry Stokes (who has the Caterpillar machinery franchise for China), “came as no surprise to those in the know,” wrote Coorey.

As James Curran, Sydney University’s specialist on the US alliance, observed, “It is one thing to be rightfully wary of the brand of Chinese exceptionalism espoused by Xi Jinping, quite another to thrash about in mouth-foaming fulmination.”

Whether Beijing was already planning trade retaliation when Cheng gave the interview we may never know. Its commerce ministry always has a grievance up its sleeve, as it showed when Canada’s pork and canola exports were blocked soon after the arrest of a senior Huawei executive in Vancouver.

But act it did, putting an 80 per cent penalty tariff on Australian barley as punishment for the alleged use of subsidies barred by the World Trade Organization and suspending certification of four large abattoirs. Effectively, Australia has lost some $900 million a year in barley exports to China and a large portion of its $2.6 billion in beef exports.

If anything, the China hawks in the press gallery doubled down. The Herald’s Hartcher praised Morrison’s assertion that “we are standing our ground on our values and the things that we know are always important. And those things are not to be traded. Ever.” Hartcher then noted that some business leaders and state governments were urging Canberra to use diplomacy and pragmatism to protect the trading relationship. “And, of course, when a business person calls for ‘pragmatism,’ the word used this week by Elders chief executive Mark Allison, he is calling for the abandonment of principle,” he added.

There’s been nothing in Canberra reporting to suggest that this loss of trade might have been the fault of Morrison, a close circle of advisers inherited from Tony Abbott, or the hawkish think-tankers and journalists who believe defence strategy can somehow be pursued without reference to the economy.

As the editorial board of the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum, headed by trade expert Peter Drysdale, noted, there was already “furious agreement” — including from Beijing — about the need for an investigation of Covid-19.

“The question has been about the nature and the timing of an inquiry, as well as the febrile international political context into which the Australian idea was lobbed,” the EAF board said. “There was no developed Australian proposal. There was no consultation with regional neighbours or partners, and they, not only China, were bemused at Australian guilelessness in spearheading a Washington-touted idea.”

Canberra had thus isolated itself from the region. “Later back-pedalling to distance Australia’s stumble-bum diplomacy on the crisis from the venal re-election politics of the Trump administration convinces no one but its proponents,” the board said. These evidently include some senior press gallery figures.

The burying of differences in Geneva this week, which produced a WHO-led inquiry with existing powers when the emergency subsides — a goal a properly advised Morrison might have seen as the only realistic one — doesn’t mean harmony is restored.

Trump is clearly out to scapegoat China for his own mishandling of the pandemic as he approaches the November elections. Poking Beijing further on trade and technology has already started.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping will hold the delayed meetings of his rubber-stamp congresses in coming days facing new questions about his ability to hold power beyond the previously normal two five-year terms. The Covid-19 shutdown means near-zero economic growth in China this year, the first such falter (barring the Tiananmen blip) since the Mao Zedong era. Xi also faces a rebellious Hong Kong and a Taiwan with its standing enhanced by its early intelligence on the Wuhan outbreak and its effective preventive measures.

Climbing out of recession means China will continue to rely on raw materials from Australia. Its only alternative sources are on the Atlantic seaboard, and already iron ore prices are shooting up. It’s in what former Howard government minister and long-time China trade-fixer Warwick Smith calls China’s “discretionary spends” — processed foods, education, tourism and other services — that further retaliation could come.

If China does make the transition to a consumption-led economy, these sectors will be a source of high-income jobs for Australians. They are worth pursuing at least as much as other emerging consumer markets. Rather than preparing for war or butting directly against Chinese communism, Smith advocates “patience, no quick judgements, and no emotionalism.” Which doesn’t make a good media story.

Instead of constantly looking for what “the Chinese” are up to, our journalists could take a step back and learn some lessons from this latest episode. They could go to Hartcher’s own recent Quarterly Essay, Red Flag, which concluded with the reasonable point that despite the pervasiveness of China’s political influence-buying efforts and its United Front Work within the diaspora, Australians can have faith in their institutions’ capacity to resist subversion by a regime that, unlike the Soviet Union of the 1940s, has no local following.

They could consider that the 1.2 million people of Chinese descent in Australia came here mostly to get away from the People’s Republic, not replicate it. They, and the 230,000 students normally resident here, are a threat more to the communist system than ours, especially if we upgrade the student experience. (Melbourne University’s Fran Martin has found that a majority go home disappointed, not having made Australian friends.)

They could consider that our own expertise, along with that of friends like the United States, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Japan and Israel, at least keeps us up with the level of cyber espionage coming out of China and Russia.

In short, we are not at war and we don’t need to match the “patriotic” journalism of Beijing’s intemperate Global Times. •

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The virus arrived just after the territory entered a period of calm following months of street battles between riot police and protesters after Hong Kong’s government tried to introduce a law allowing extradition of people indicted by mainland courts. The strength of this opposition, which at one point brought perhaps 1.7 million of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million people out to demonstrate, was reinforced by a voter backlash against pro-Beijing candidates in local council elections in November.

Largely thanks to the turmoil, the special autonomous region of China, as it’s been called since the handover from British rule in 1997, had experienced a year and a half of negative or only slightly positive economic growth.

Covid-19 provided another example of local people’s lack of trust in the administration of chief executive Carrie Lam. A four-day strike by frontline medical staff in early February, a week after the virus outbreak became public in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, forced the administration to shut down most routes into China’s surrounding Guangdong province, leaving open only three tightly monitored entry points.

This and other shutdown measures, plus the population’s experience of earlier mainland-origin epidemics, have got Hong Kong through with just over 1000 detected Covid-19 cases and only four deaths. But the economic cost has been high, with gross domestic product shrinking 8.9 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

The political resistance and the cumulative economic cost might have encouraged a more flexible government in Beijing to deal differently with Hong Kong’s relatively well-educated and internationally exposed people. Instead, the Chinese leadership under president Xi Jinping has upped the pressure.

In January, Xi appointed Luo Huining, a full member of the Communist Party’s central committee, as head of the Hong Kong Liaison Office, Beijing’s political watching post in the territory. He is the most senior cadre ever to fill this post. Luo had been party secretary in the important coal-mining province of Shanxi, where he purged officials belonging to the faction of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. Before that he was party secretary in Qinghai, birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, where he cracked down on the large Tibetan population.

He has quickly shown he is not in Hong Kong simply for a change of scenery. In mid April he called for stricter punishments for people who engaged in “protest violence,” and for creation of a “public opinion environment” that valued stability and security.

Soon after, on 18 April, territory police arrested some fifteen veteran politicians and activists long involved in the movement for full democratic elections for the chief executive and the Legislative Council, or Legco, the territory’s parliament. They included the former democratic minority group leader in the Legco, Martin Lee QC, and the media tycoon Jimmy Lai, founder of the liberal Apple Daily newspaper. The police charged them with organising and participating in unauthorised marches on three dates last year.

Luo also attacked a pro-democracy Legco member, Dennis Kwok, for using his position as acting committee chair to delay passage of government legislation, including a bill making it a criminal offence to abuse the Chinese national anthem. The Liaison Office called for him to be prosecuted for misconduct in public office.

These interventions violated Article 22 in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution since the 1997 handover, which states that no Chinese central government department will interfere in the internal affairs of Hong Kong. Except for foreign affairs and defence — powers reserved for Beijing and handled by the foreign ministry and the People’s Liberation Army — Beijing is supposed to put its views to the Hong Kong government via the channel correctly named the Liaison Office, rather than directly engage in debate about Hong Kong’s internal administration.

In response, the HK government issued three unusual late-night statements claiming that Luo’s remarks were legitimate, that the Liaison Office had the “right to weigh in on legislative committee matters” and, finally, that the office did not fall under Article 22 anyway.

As Hong Kong University law professor Johannes Chan wrote, “The mere fact that the government has to change its public statements three times to eventually agree with the position of the Liaison Office may serve the best testimony of an interference.”

Jerome Cohen, the pre-eminent American scholar on Chinese law, says the arrests and reinterpretation of the Basic Law were “a stunning advance toward the Chinese government’s demolition of One Country, Two Systems in fact, if not in name. This week’s actions may well be an attempt by Beijing to provoke a broad popular reaction that will then provide an excuse not only to finally bulldoze success passing controversial national security legislation in HK under Basic Law Article 23, but also to call off the crucial September election scheduled for HK’s Legislative Council.”

“We always knew there would be a reckoning for the events of 2019,” writes Antony Dapiran, a lawyer in Hong Kong and author of the recent book City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong. “Beijing was never going to let the Hong Kong people get away with the degree of insubordination, the direct defiance of Beijing’s rule, that they demonstrated last year.”

Like Cohen, Dapiran thinks the arrests are a prelude to the Legco elections, “part of a plan to convict and disqualify as many pan-dem [pan-democracy] politicians as possible to prevent their participation.”

If provoking street violence is the aim, Luo’s office succeeded over the last two weekends, with clashes between young demonstrators and police in parts of Kowloon. Last Friday, near-violence broke out in the Legco itself, when a pro-Beijing member, Starry Lee, tried to install herself as chair of the committee in which Dennis Kwok had been filibustering the government’s security bills. Security guards carried out two pro-democracy members during the scuffles and altercations that resulted.

The Legco’s legal adviser, Connie Fung, then reversed her decision last year that Lee didn’t have the authority to preside and a new chair must be elected. Fung declared Lee could remain in the chair because of the abnormal condition of a chair not being elected for six months.

Chinese propaganda has also ratcheted up, with the Hong Kong and Macau Office in Beijing framing the latest bleak GDP figures in this way: “We believe that the serious state of Hong Kong’s economy is caused by multiple factors… However, the biggest scourge comes from within, and that is the violent black force that openly calls for and carries out destruction… It must be solemnly pointed out that black violence and destruction are political viruses in Hong Kong society and the major enemy of ‘one country, two systems.’ Hong Kong cannot have peace until the black violence is removed.”

Many commentators have noted that, ominously, the term “virus” for political dissent has previously been used mainly to try to justify Beijing’s mass detention and “re-education” of the Uighur population of western Xinjiang.

After last weekend’s skirmishes between protesting flash mobs and police through the shopping malls of Kowloon, in which police arrested over 200 people and pepper-sprayed protesters, journalists and bystanders alike, Chief Executive Lam railed against an education system that was like a “chicken coop without a roof” in which students were being “poisoned” with “false and biased information.” The government would be “making things clear to the public within this year” on the subject of “liberal studies,” she told the Ta Kung Pao newspaper.

Hong Kong now seems set on another long, hot summer, marked by trials of the fifteen leading democrats and probably other attempts to block opposition figures from standing in the Legco elections — if they are not called off, that is. Approaching the halfway mark of the fifty years of autonomy promised with the 1997 handover, Hongkongers are trying to make the most of it.

Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time was how the late Australian journalist Richard Hughes titled a book about colonial Hong Kong. While the territory is no longer on loan from China, it still has some precious time left to show that electoral democracy and rule of law are not necessarily incompatible with being Chinese. And, unlike Xinjiang and Tibet, Hong Kong is where China has made a treaty pledge in the eyes of the world to behave well. •

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“It’s always a huge time of the year that everyone in the community looks forward to,” says Noeleen Timbery, who chairs the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council. “That’s one of the practices we’ve kept up. There’s no trade that happens from that. It’s the guys in the community, they pass it to their children, that they go out with the nets and whatever fish they bring in, it’s just there for the community to go and get.”

Many of the families at La Perouse have ancestral, cultural and traditional historical links to the area, Timbery adds. “Many of them can trace back their heritage to traditional people who were on the shore during the time Cook and the Endeavour were in the bay.”

At Kurnell on the opposite headland, however, another regular autumn event has been cancelled. Covid-19 has put a stop to the marking of James Cook’s landing there on 29 April 1770, and his expedition’s confrontation with the local Gweagal village.

Given it’s the 250th anniversary this year, the plan was for a bigger celebration than usual. Two years ago, when he was treasurer, Scott Morrison allocated $25 million, matched by the NSW government, for a comprehensive revamp of the historic site. The Australian Maritime Museum’s replica of Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, was sent on a voyage around Australia, calling at thirty-eight ports, with the plan to drop anchor off Kurnell on the day of a “Meeting of Two Cultures” festival organised by the Sutherland Shire Council and the state government.

It would have been a big moment for Morrison especially. His electorate encompasses Kurnell and is named after Cook. In video interviews at his office in Parliament House, a model of the Endeavour is often visible on the shelf behind him.

He now has much bigger issues than anniversaries on his mind. While the 1770 festival and the Endeavour voyage were abandoned a month back, in recent days workers have continued installing two new artworks in front of the old stone plinth at Cook’s landing spot. One, by Newcastle sculptor Julie Squires and Gweagal artist Theresa Ardler, represents the bark canoes seen by the Europeans and the whales, revered by the Gweagal, that passed the cliffs on the seaward side of Kurnell during their annual migration; the other, by Alison Page and Nik Lachacjzak, is an array of big wishbone shapes that could be either the ribs of a ship like the Endeavour or those of a whale.

The foreshore was already dotted with monuments erected at previous fifty-year intervals, along with some pictorial displays of their dedications. From ranks of troops in pipe-clayed helmets solemnly raising flags, they progress to contemporary civilian monuments that are more ambivalent about the impact of Cook’s “discovery,” a word now put in inverted commas.

We will never know whether this anniversary was going to be as happy as Morrison and the leaders of New South Wales and Sutherland no doubt expected. Last October, when the Endeavour replica called at New Zealand’s Gisborne, a previous stop on Cook’s voyage, Māori protesters burned Union Jacks in memory of the nine warriors shot dead by Cook’s marines. “I acknowledge the pain of those first encounters,” British high commissioner Laura Clarke told Māori leaders. “I acknowledge the deaths of nine of your ancestors… who were killed by the crew.”

One could imagine similar protests at Kurnell, perhaps with some contemporary touches added, such as a boat trying to land “refugees” on Australia’s “boundless plains to share” or a “Chinese expedition” declaring the place terra nullius.

As a “meeting of two cultures,” the events here in April 1770, best explored in scholar Nick Brodie’s book 1787, were essentially a stand-off. The Gweagal wanted nothing to do with the Europeans. Spears and rocks were thrown, buckshot fired the other way. After one local man was wounded in the leg, Cook’s men grabbed his abandoned shield and spears. The Gweagal ignored the trinkets left in payment. The shield and spears remain in the British Museum.

The ship’s crew filled water casks and cut firewood, and its scientists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander shot bird specimens and collected strange new plants. After eight days Cook sailed off, having noted the area as suitable for settlement and agriculture.

London eventually took his advice, dispatching the first convict fleet, which landed not quite eighteen years later. It was a catastrophic moment for the Indigenous Australians: violence and imported disease and diet reduced their numbers from possibly a million or more to the low of 74,000 recorded in 1933 before the rebound to the present 800,000.

“It was a clash of cultures,” says Tim Ella, another member of the La Perouse community. Along with his old whitefella football mate Grant Hyde, Ella runs Kadoo Tours, showcasing the area’s cultural heritage to school excursions and other parties.

“I can’t see any of my Koori friends being upset that the Cook celebrations are called off,” adds Hyde, who also writes historical novels set in the Pacific. “When La Perouse play against other teams in the Koori Rugby League Knockout, the other teams cry out, ‘Give it to this mob, they’re the ones that let Cook in.’”

Nonetheless, La Perouse and its Gweagal relatives have joined in anniversary events for many years now. The “meeting of two cultures” theme is “a shift from how they used to celebrate it,” says Noeleen Timbery. “It used to be commemorated as a very one-sided story. The meeting of two cultures brings it as a more holistic viewpoint, but there’s still a need to go a little bit further than that.”

Storytelling is a big part. “This year we were planning on doing something probably bigger, and much more focused on truth in storytelling: let’s talk about what really happened,” she says. “It was actually gearing up to being a much more culturally sound event.”

The Endeavour replica’s ahistorical circumnavigation of Australia didn’t help, Timbery says. (It was actually Matthew Flinders who circled the continent and charted the entire coast three decades after Cook’s voyage.) “There’s still a lot of Australians out there that confuse the storylines between 1770 and 1788.”

I ask Tom Calma, chancellor of the University of Canberra, whether the Cook anniversary means anything to him. He also co-chairs, with Melbourne University’s Marcia Langton, a study of models for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which arose from the Uluru Statement from the Heart

“To be quite frank, no,” he says. “But it will happen. It’s one of the bits of our history, but what I would like to see it really celebrate is the prehistory. It’s an opportunity, in raising awareness with the community, that when Cook did land there were people who’d been here tens of thousands of years before. So Australia wasn’t ‘discovered’ as such.”

“Australians are ready for it,” Calma adds. This year he’d been looking forward to marking the twentieth anniversary of the walk by some 250,000 Australians across Sydney Harbour Bridge to promote historical truth-telling and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The walk was held close to the 27 May anniversary of the 1967 constitutional amendment that counted Aboriginal people for the first time in the national census and gave the federal government powers to improve their welfare. That demonstration of support led to Kevin Rudd’s poignant apology for the Stolen Generations, on which Calma advised, and renewed efforts to “close the gap” in life expectancy and other welfare indicators.

Consultations on the Indigenous Voice have been slowed by the pandemic lockdowns, and federal Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt is yet to work out with Morrison the parallel issue of acknowledging prior occupation in the Australian Constitution’s preamble. Soon after his appointment last May, Wyatt expressed hope that a constitutional amendment would be put to Australians by referendum in the current term of parliament.

If embraced by Morrison, who is at the conservative end of the Liberal Party, the idea might have its best chance of approval under the Constitution’s near-impossible amendment process.

Despite the wrangles at federal level, Timbery says that progress is being made at La Perouse and elsewhere, and Calma notes that state governments are advancing their own reconciliation steps. “My community, like many others, are progressing our own local arrangements and relationships to forge ahead with some of the elements within the Uluru Statement,” says Timbery.

If you face away from the giant tankers feeding the oil refinery along the shore, and the container terminal and airport on the north side of Botany Bay, it’s still possible to imagine what it was like at Kurnell and La Perouse when Cook burst in. La Perouse people are hoping a proposed cruise ship wharf, even closer to them, will be another casualty of Covid-19, as sad the reason may be.

Rachel Neeson, whose architectural practice Neeson Murcutt + Neille produced the masterplan for the revamp of Kurnell, is acutely aware of the historical burdens around this place. As she describes it, the plan has far less of the European propensity for physical monuments and much more of the Aboriginal notion of commemoration by storytelling.

“This is an Aboriginal place as well as part of the Cook story,” she told me in a recent interview for Architecture and Design magazine. “When Cook landed there was a village here. So this is all about equity, a balanced representation. The rupture of people from land and language happened so early in Australia’s colonial history in this place — this makes reconciliation and healing very challenging. It can’t be without tension and without truth-telling.”

So the revamped Kamay Botany Bay National Park will have walking paths through the bush: away from the old monuments, they will showcase the middens left by millennia of eating the bay’s fish, and Aboriginal lore attached to the garden of the 132 plants collected by Joseph Banks (such as a note that when the acacia flowers, the whales are migrating by). And a new visitor centre will tell the pre-1770 stories as well as the story of the Cook landing.

The state government has agreed to reinstate the ferry link with La Perouse, halted decades back, so that visitors experience arrival by water rather than by the current rather tedious drive around Botany Bay past lines of building material wholesalers, apartment blocks, mangroves and the home ground of Morrison’s local rugby league team.

With all this still to be completed, and the legalities of constitutional inclusion and the Indigenous Voice still up in the air, maybe it’s fitting that this week’s rendezvous with history has been called off — ironically by a virus from overseas. Few thinking people are yet sure we’ve got the history right, but Kurnell is a good place to start. As Neeson told me, “This place really needs to lay a table-cloth for discussion, and that discussion might not be easy.”

And that discussion is being watched. Some weeks back in Port Vila, I asked Vanuatu’s then foreign minister (now opposition leader) Ralph Regenvanu if members of what Morrison calls our Pacific vuvale (family, in Fijian) would judge us on how we responded to the Uluru Statement. To my surprise, he jumped in to this domestic political issue, showing it’s wider than a local issue and crucial to Australia’s international standing.

“We very much support the recognition of the Aboriginal people of Australia,” he said. “We are the original people of the region, they are the original people of the region. This is a black region, it’s not a white region… It’s important to recognise that originality, and especially the fact that they were the first, and they were improperly displaced, and there needs to be a recognition of that.” Their voice needs to be given to them, he added. “We were heartened at the Uluru Statement and we were hoping that this would be a way forward that everyone could agree on.” •

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Oil Under Troubled Water, published this month by Melbourne University Press, is a trenchant and deeply researched account of those negotiations. It shows how the Australian government and its lawyers unscrupulously misrepresented petroleum discoveries in the seabed and used high-pressure tactics to push the cash-strapped UN administration and then the new Timor-Leste government into premature and disadvantageous agreements. And it recounts Australia’s March 2002 decision to withdraw from the jurisdiction of international courts on questions of maritime boundaries, a move that continues to jar with Canberra’s admonitions about a “rules-based international order.”

The bombshell in this book is that the Australian government, with the Coalition in power at the critical times, neglected to include in production-sharing contracts any mention of the helium component of the gas flow from discoveries in the area of joint exploitation. The price of this inert lighter-than-air gas — a critical component in high-tech processes including magnetic resonance imaging and liquid crystal displays — has shot up in recent years.

Helium is mostly recovered from flows of natural gas, and the Bayu-Undan field in the Timor Sea had more than enough to justify extraction. ConocoPhillips, the operators of that field, got it for free, and sent it via pipeline to a liquified natural gas plant in Darwin. The US oil major then sold the helium fraction to BOC Australia, owned by the multinational industrial gases group Linde, which opened a plant next door to the Darwin LNG terminal in 2010.

By 2015, according to Collaery, the annual output of the plant, which cost perhaps $50 million to build, was an estimated 200 million standard cubic feet. At prevailing prices, that’s $2 billion in revenue per year. When I enquired, BOC Australia refused to comment on these claims, saying it cannot reveal confidential information about agreements with suppliers or customers.

As Collaery’s account stands, both the Australian and Timor-Leste governments have neglected to obtain any revenue benefits for their people from a resource whose value seems to be greater than the petroleum gas in which it has been hidden. The same will go for the much larger Greater Sunrise field unless its production-sharing agreement with the Woodside Petroleum consortium is modified.

Timor-Leste’s negotiators, initially led by then prime minister Mari Alkatiri, were advised by a Norwegian expert to add the words “and inerts” to the Bayu-Undan and Greater Sunrise contracts, but did not pursue the point. They were bound by a statement — signed by Alkatiri, Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta — that the holders of contracts signed under the Indonesian–Australian regime would continue to enjoy the same rights under an independent Timor-Leste on terms that were “no more onerous.”

The statement was drafted and signed in September 1999 at a meeting in Darwin with officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Phillips Petroleum, later ConocoPhillips. Australian-led peacekeepers had barely begun securing East Timor from the rampaging of departing Indonesian troops and militias, and the Timorese had no legal advisers with them.

Collaery’s book will upset many of Timor-Leste’s friends. It is bitterly critical of Alkatiri and other Fretilin leaders, whom Collaery accuses of adhering to undemocratic doctrines and Leninist organisation and rushing to sign unfavourable agreements to secure revenue flows. He is comparatively soft on Gusmão, whom he has advised for twenty years.

Most of all, though, he paints an invidious picture of Alexander Downer, who was foreign minister for all the period from Timor’s move towards independence to the ratification of treaties in 2006 deferring any redrafting of the maritime border for thirty years and giving Australia half the revenue from Greater Sunrise. Downer was in thrall to Woodside Petroleum, Collaery believes, and came to identify its commercial interest with the national interest.

Warned about further prosecution and a possible ten-year jail term under post-9/11 intelligence laws, Collaery studiously avoids the matter that has him facing trial in the ACT Supreme Court: the Australian Secret Intelligence Service’s bugging of Timor-Leste’s cabinet room at the height of the maritime treaty negotiations in 2004.

Collaery is charged with conspiracy to communicate secret intelligence information to the government of Timor-Leste between May 2008 and May 2013, and with sharing some of this information with ABC journalists. One of the ASIS operatives involved in the Dili bugging, known to the public only as Witness K, is charged with breaching the Intelligence Services Act by discussing the operation with Collaery, even though he had been cleared to take his misgivings about the operation to Collaery as a legal adviser.

Collaery, deputy chief minister and attorney-general in the ACT government between 1989 and 1991, has spooky elements in his own early background. His book mentions training in commando-type operations while at university, an activity ASIS pursued with trusty potential recruits at least until the bungled “hostage rescue” at Melbourne’s Sheraton Hotel in 1983. He also worked for a little-known security section of the immigration department, and was a first secretary of the Australian embassy in Paris. This and his later political experience seem to have gained him the security clearances that led Witness K to his office.

Whether or not it was Collaery who told them, the Timorese informed then prime minister Julia Gillard in December 2012 that they knew of the 2004 bugging operation and were intending to use it as evidence of bad faith in negotiations to annul the treaties reached with Downer.

Not long after, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (then led by the ASIS chief at the time of the Dili operation, David Irvine) raided Collaery’s office and seized material. Later, the government withdrew Witness K’s passport to prevent him from testifying at the proceedings Timor-Leste had launched at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. After years of manoeuvres ended with Timor-Leste’s decision to withdraw its bad-faith case (to Collaery’s great disappointment), Canberra agreed to mediation supervised from The Hague. The result was a vastly more favourable carve-up of Great Sunrise for the Timorese.

While Canberra’s lawyers were fighting the bad-faith accusation in the International Court of Justice it would have been counterproductive to prosecute Collaery and Witness K for leaking about the ASIS operation. The threat of international condemnation removed, attorney-general Christian Porter authorised the director of public prosecutions to go ahead with charges against both.

In a hearing scheduled for mid April, Witness K is ready to plead guilty, apparently in return for not having a conviction recorded and being free again to travel. Collaery’s case will go to a jury trial, possibly in May if Covid-19 does not disrupt court schedules. But a preliminary hearing will test Porter’s invocation of the 2004 National Security Information Act, which allows intelligence material to be revealed only in closed court. So far, it seems, even Collaery’s own defence counsel have not been allowed to see the evidence being brought against him.

Affidavits have been given to the court by former foreign minister Gareth Evans and former defence forces chief Chris Barrie. According to Justice David Mossop, both men challenge Porter’s assertion that the evidence, if disclosed, would threaten national security. Both Gusmão and Ramos-Horta are ready to testify as defence witnesses.

Whether or not Collaery’s lawyers manage to have the trial held in the open with Downer and officials cross-examined, this book has given the case a wider moral setting that will greatly influence the court of public opinion. If they manage to have it introduced as evidence, it might well sway the jury.

The Dili operation taints not just the diplomatic and intelligence figures involved, but also the entire government of the time. Could Downer and his department head, Ashton Calvert, have authorised the bugging without seeking approval from cabinet’s national security committee, whose other members would have been prime minister John Howard, deputy prime minister John Anderson, treasurer Peter Costello, attorney-general Philip Ruddock and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone?

Why, one wonders, has Porter chosen to pick at this scab? The fact the prosecutions were launched confirms the ASIS bugging happened. With its 2015 decision to return to international jurisdiction, the Labor Party ended the shameful bipartisan effort to rob the Indonesians and Timorese. Porter is inviting a royal commission by a future government. •

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Fiji’s ordinary citizens, most of them struggling to pay their own bills, were donating to help Australians hit by our disastrous bushfires. “We’ve raised about F$5000 [A$3800],” a volunteer told me late in the afternoon. Asked why Fijians were so moved, she gave the reply I’d heard from many others: “When Cyclone Winston hit us, Australian aid was the first to arrive.”

The link will be made more explicitly this year as the bushfire crisis subsides. But Fijian leaders are already making the point obliquely. A few days earlier, when prime minister Voreqe (“Frank”) Bainimarama farewelled the fifty-four Fijian military engineers sent to assist the bushfire fight in southeastern Australia, he mentioned that other soldiers were cleaning up from the latest cyclones of the season to cross Fiji islands.

“Today is a proud day to be Fijian, as our nation comes to the aid of the climate-vulnerable on two fronts across Oceania,” Bainimarama said. “As Australians battle the bushfire crisis and Fijians recover from cyclones Sarai and Tino, we are bearing witness to the powerful resilience of the Pacific spirit. I have long said that we are all in the same canoe when it comes to combating climate change.”

His foreign minister, Inia Seruiratu, pressed the point: “As Oceania suffers a new and frightening range of climate-induced disasters, Fiji stands prepared to confront this challenge alongside Australia and all of our Pacific partners by continuing to advocate on the world stage to address the underlying causes of our changing climate.”

My embarrassment partly came from seeing the people of a nation far less wealthy than Australia giving their cash to a country enjoying massive trade and current account surpluses and pretty healthy public finances. But it mainly came from the fact that Australia continues to snub their leaders’ calls for more joint action on the climate change fuelling more ferocious cyclones and bushfires.

Scott Morrison started his prime ministership sixteen months ago with what he called a “Pacific Step-up,” outlined most explicitly at the November 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby. Its core was a number of hard-power projects: a new naval base on Manus Island, more island patrols by navy ships, more training with local security forces, efforts to edge Chinese companies out of undersea fibre-optic cabling, and a longer-term scheme with Japan to bring electricity to 70 per cent of Papua New Guinea’s people.

In soft power, Morrison employed his trademark combination of Pentecostal evangelism and blokiness, stressing his Christian faith to leaders of island nations made highly pious by two centuries of missionising, and playing up his enthusiasm for the Cronulla Sharks in a region where Australia’s rugby players, league and union, are household names.

One other plan, to insert Australian commercial TV soaps and gameshows into local channels so we can all grow up watching the same things, has quietly lapsed. Islanders already have what they want of Australian programming, and many of the series he had in mind were not his to place. Moreover, the more remote places say they need shortwave radio, accessible when cyclones knock out power, which would mean reviving a version of Radio Australia; and that would require more money for the ABC, a no-go for the Coalition.

The Step-up went well for a few months, including during a prime ministerial visit to Fiji that seemed to establish a new cordiality with Bainimarama, and official visits to Canberra by PNG’s new prime minister James Marape and the Solomon Islands’ Manasseh Sogovare.

But then came a disastrous performance at the region’s annual summit, the Pacific Islands Forum, in Tuvalu last August. When the island leaders went in hard on climate change, Morrison was either unprepared for the strength of feeling or convinced that his support back in Australia depended on resisting anything more than existing commitments to emissions reduction.

According to Vanuatu’s foreign minister, Ralph Regenvanu, the Australian delegation played it tough in drafting the traditional joint communiqué from the summit. Out went all references to coal, limiting global warming to less than 1.5°C and net zero emissions by 2050.

When pressed by the other leaders, Morrison showed the truculent side of his character so rudely that Bainimarama went public with his frustration. “I thought Morrison was a good friend of mine; apparently not,” he told a reporter from the Guardian. He went on: “The prime minister at one stage, because he was apparently [backed] into a corner by the leaders, came up with how much money Australia have been giving to the Pacific. He said: ‘I want that stated. I want that on the record.’ Very insulting.”

As one Fijian adviser put it: “It was like bringing kava to a session, then when you are all sitting down drinking it, reminding everyone that you paid for it.”

That was not the end of it. Bainimarama has made climate action the hallmark of his continuing prime ministership. To some extent, his advocacy has helped him climb back into diplomatic respectability by transitioning from military-backed ruler to elected leader, and to extricate himself from sanctions that had seen him excluded from the Pacific forum and meetings of the Commonwealth. But it also reflects genuine fear.

On the whole, Fiji is not like the coral-atoll nations, where a rising sea level is the main existential fear from climate change. Although many of its main roads run along sea shores only a metre above high-water, its main islands are craggy volcanic upthrusts, and the government began moving the first of forty-five villages to higher ground five years ago — an emotional business for people leaving behind ancestral burial grounds and abandoning land and foreshores that have provided food for generations.

Then, in February 2016, Cyclone Winston delivered the same kind of shock Australians have just felt from their firestorms. The tropical low moved into Fiji waters and turned westward, hitting the northeast coast of the main island, Viti Levu, with winds of more than 300 kilometres an hour. This was a category five cyclone, the strongest storm ever known to make landfall in the southern hemisphere. It killed fifty-four people, destroyed thousands of homes, ripped up infrastructure, and wrote off a third of Fiji’s GDP.

The fear is that this is the new normal. A cyclone like that hitting the southern “coral” coast of Viti Levu, the strip of resorts and light industries from Suva to Nadi, would set Fiji back for decades.

Bainimarama kept up the pressure on Morrison through the last months of 2019. Meeting in Canberra in September, the pair signed an agreement declaring their common membership of a Pacific vuvale (family), but Bainimarama went on to give a clear message at the Australian War College, noting that friendship requires “a degree of frankness that might sometimes offend but is essential to preserving any relationship.”

“I understand that politics is the art of the possible,” the Fijian PM told the assembled brass and officialdom, who included Morrison’s assistant minister for Pacific affairs and defence, Alex Hawke. “I understand the depth of feeling in coal-producing communities in Australia and the wider economic imperatives at state and federal level. But I also hope that we can eventually find more common ground in our vuvale on the climate issue…

“Millions of Australians — along with their vuvale in the Pacific — are already bearing the brunt of climate change. And as we have seen with the recent Australian bushfires, the ongoing drought and the fact that some Australian cities and towns face severe water shortages, the outlook is worsening.”

It was vital for everyone to “unite behind the science,” he concluded, reminding his audience that the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had called for the average global temperature to be capped at 1.5°C above that of the pre-industrial age. “It is a matter of great regret that certain fossil fuel producers have insisted that the IPCC report not be included in the ongoing global climate negotiations. What has been removed from the table must be put back on the table.”

Bainimarama was no doubt inclined to say more, but opted to be a polite guest. Pressed, Morrison and Hawke might have mentioned the A$500 million they had allocated to a new peacekeeping and disaster relief training camp being built near Nadi, and to diplomatic help in having Fiji’s peacekeepers in the Middle East forgiven by the United Nations for blackmarket sales of fuel and cigarettes.

Returning to his theme in December, Bainimarama made poignant calls to protect the oceans while announcing bans on single-use plastic bags and styrofoam containers. “For us, the climate emergency is an oceans emergency,” he said at a Commonwealth climate meeting. Our oceans — and the mangroves, seagrass and kelp fields they contain — are removing massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. But the absorption of carbon emissions is coming at a dangerously high price. If reckless levels of global emissions continue, our oceans will more closely resemble lifeless wastelands than the bustling, beautiful ecosystems my generation has sadly taken for granted.”

He also took another shot at Australia. To achieve the 1.5°C limit, the world must cut emissions by half in 2030 and achieve net zero emissions in 2050. “And for the international community to achieve net zero emissions, we must accept zero excuses,” he said. “Frankly, I’m tired of hearing major emitters excuse inaction in cutting their own emissions on the basis they are ‘just a fraction’ of the world’s total… As a retired seaman myself, I can tell you this: You can’t fix a leaky boat with Kyoto credits!”

After the bushfires, Morrison will find it tough to keep words like “coal” out of the next Pacific forum statement. So far, the visible signs of his Pacific Step-up have been prayers, self-congratulation and displays of Australian military power. But the big threats to security in the Pacific are not phantom Chinese military bases; they are things like measles, corruption and climate change. Morrison may have to accept that there is a wisdom here unknown on the Coalition backbenches. In the new Pacific vuvale, it seems, they don’t accept Australia as the father who can always say “no.” •

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The skies were clear except for fly-pasts by jets and helicopters. Factories had been shut for days, kites and pigeons banned. Residents of apartments facing the parade were told to stay away from their windows, or in some cases to move out temporarily. Citizens permitted to watch had been carefully vetted.

It was all very splendid, but in one corner of China rain was falling on the parade. In Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous former British trading post on the far south coast, demonstrators again defied police and expressed their alienation from the regime whose seventieth anniversary was being celebrated in Beijing.

With the People’s Republic’s birthday party now over, many are wondering if the gloves will come off in Hong Kong. The protests that started in June against a plan to permit extraditions to the mainland are entering their fifth month, increasingly spearheaded by young people willing to do battle with sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails.

Tens of thousands, many dressed in black and tossing the fake “heavenly” money usually used in Chinese funerals, defied a police ban and made a mostly orderly march through the main business and government district on Hong Kong Island soon after the Beijing ceremony. But across the harbour in Kowloon protests were at their most violent so far.

Police in riot gear fired tear gas and sprayed blue-dyed water on protesters, who fought back. Some demonstrators sprayed acid, police said, hitting bystanders and journalists. A policeman shot a high school student in the chest with his pistol, allegedly in self-defence when students attacked with iron bars, the first live-fire casualty since the protests started. The eighteen-year-old was reported likely to recover after emergency surgery. Across the city, battles continued into the night, in contrast to fireworks and staged ceremonies in Beijing. Police said twenty-five officers were injured, and some 180 protesters arrested for rioting.

The 30,000-strong Hong Kong police, long regarded as “Asia’s finest” as measured by training and discipline, have become steadily more aggressive, roughing up detainees and deploying nonlethal but injurious crowd-control weapons with little prompting. Some rumours suggest Cantonese speakers from the mainland People’s Armed Police have been put in local uniform. Untroubled by police, triad-like vigilantes have been attacking protesters.

According to Reuters, the number of troops at the People’s Liberation Army garrison in Hong Kong has quietly doubled to between 10,000 and 12,000 in recent weeks. They remain in their barracks, and local protesters have generally left them alone. But will that change? Can Xi Jinping, the Communist Party supremo showing off such firepower yesterday, allow the defiance to continue?

Forceful intervention would come at an awkward time, with China’s growth slumping and Donald Trump threatening further trade limits. While Hong Kong’s economy is less than 3 per cent of China’s (it was 18 per cent in 1997) and the enclave is no longer China’s main trade portal, its financial sector and share market remain vital to investment flows despite the rise of alternative financial marketplaces in Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Soundings by China scholars suggest Xi remains confident of being able to defuse the Hong Kong crisis without either the outright use of force, which would bring international odium and economic damage, or political concessions that would make him look weak to party peers.

Andrew Nathan, the Columbia University co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers, writes this week in Foreign Affairs that two well-connected Chinese academics assure him Beijing is confident that “its local allies will stand firm and that the demonstrations will gradually lose public support and eventually die out. As the demonstrations shrink, some frustrated activists will engage in further violence, and that in turn will accelerate the movement’s decline.”

Beijing is convinced, these sources tell Nathan, that its supporters among local elites, including big business, trade unions and politicians, as well as underground communists and some criminal triads, can eventually rely on a majority of Hong Kong residents becoming fed up with the disturbance. These elements seem to be assuring Xi that the protest derives from the stagnant incomes and escalating property prices that put even a garage-sized “nano-apartment” out of reach of young people.

Not coincidentally, party organs have started attacking the business oligarchs of Hong Kong. The People’s Daily has suggested the government seize some of the vacant land that big property combines develop at a pace that keeps apartment prices sky-high. Getting the message, one company has already promised to donate a fifth of its land holdings for new public housing.

Li Ka-shing, the ninety-one-year-old patriarch of the CK Hutchison conglomerate and once Beijing’s favourite tycoon, found himself called “the king of cockroaches” by a local pro-Beijing politician after taking out advertisements calling for restraint all round and suggesting that the territory government should make peace gestures.

Xi, as a Marxist, might be inclined to believe materialism will win. Not even the purging of his PLA marshal father and his own rustication during the Cultural Revolution have turned him from the belief that complete party control is essential for China’s progress. Yet many analysts suggest these blinkers are stopping Xi from seeing what is going on. Up to two million of Hong Kong’s people have come out on the streets at various times against the extradition law. The slowness in withdrawing that legislation allowed the protesters’ aims to expand to full democratisation of Hong Kong’s government, so far formed by a highly limited franchise.

Where nearly half of locals told opinion polls at the 1997 handover from Britain that they were proud to be part of China, only a quarter say so now. Steadily, Beijing’s attempts to draw Hong Kong closer to mainland norms, promote use of Mandarin over Cantonese, and extend its police powers into the territory have replaced pride with apprehension. The British legacy of freedom of expression and rule of law are now rallying points. Some protesters wave Hong Kong’s old British ensign.

Older people may not approve of throwing Molotov cocktails at police stations, but there appears to widespread admiration for the passion of the young. When peaceful action by two million citizens gets ignored, they tend to agree with the slogan daubed by the young people who invaded the Legislative Assembly on 1 July: “You have taught me that peaceful protest is useless.”

With twenty-two of the fifty years of “one country, two systems” gone, autonomy already being eroded, and Xi Jinping throwing China back to Maoism, these leaderless young people now in their early twenties are expressing a desperation that if they don’t act now, their freedoms will certainly vanish by 2047, if not before.

The next key date on Hong Kong’s political calendar is 24 November, when elections will be held for the territory’s local councils. Currently control is held mostly by the well-organised and funded Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, a pro-Beijing group, and allied individuals and trade unionists.

If these elements are swept from the councils by continuing protest, Xi Jinping faces a democratic revolt reaching from the grassroots into the lower echelons of government — long before any intervention in the housing market can show results. Let’s hope Xi is not asking himself: what would Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping do? •

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But it might be too early to declare an end to the northern hemisphere’s silly season. The Americans and Chinese may have agreed to resume trade talks this month, but the latest round of tit-for-tat tariff hikes remains in place, and plaintive calls for a wind-back from Scott Morrison and others at the G7 summit won’t have weighed heavily on Donald Trump, who sees trade machismo as a way to re-election in 2020.

In the meantime, American farmers have seen their exports of soybeans and pork to China plummet, an inversion of bond yield curve has revealed that US investors see a recession on the horizon, and Trump looks ever more detached from rational advice, either on trade or Iran.

By contrast, Xi Jinping looks like the calm adult. But beneath Beijing’s monolithic front are problems, notably the need for an already debt-laden financial system to do more to stimulate growth, the political challenge from Hong Kong’s savvy bourgeoisie, and increased US military support for Taiwan.

In this atmosphere of impending meltdown, talk in Australia about whether we must choose between the United States and China is beside the immediate point.

It’s true that Beijing has been playing the international order in a cynical way, stealing commercial secrets or forcing their transfer as the price of market entry, and trawling the West’s universities and research institutes for information it can use, all to seize control of the commanding heights of the future economy in areas like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

At home, Xi has punctured any notion that China is converging politically with the Western world, or that his show of Red orthodoxy was a “turning left so that he could turn right.” He has junked the distinction between the Communist Party and the state, replaced law with doctrine, and inserted party controllers into major private-sector corporations.

“Today’s China is not just a geopolitical challenge to the West,” says the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor in his new book, Xi Jinping: The Backlash. “It is a real-time empirical experiment challenging the West’s post–cold war ascendancy. Far from being a premodern throwback to discredited authoritarian ways, Xi’s project is taking shape as a postmodern phenomenon, a surveillance state with a fighting chance of success at home and the potential to replicate its core elements abroad.”

This is no cause, though, for the kind of defence–security panic that has swept Canberra. As signalled by the title of McGregor’s book, the outside world has woken up to Xi’s game and many of its biggest players — not just the United States — are pushing back. Xi’s foreign supporters, meanwhile, are mostly mendicant states.

McGregor reports seething resentment within elite Chinese circles over Xi’s clampdown, and some cheering that Trump’s bull-in-a-China-shop tactics might force a return to the path of opening up society and the economy. Among the party nomenklatura, Xi has made millions of enemies through his selective anti-corruption campaign.

The threshold for any attempt to depose Xi or clip his wings is very high, McGregor notes, but Xi has given himself little scope for retreat. And his timelines are shortening. Throwing money at every problem, including bailing out cash-strapped local government, “will only get harder,” writes McGregor. “By the time of the next party congress, due in late 2022, the issue of succession should return with a vengeance.”

All this is an argument for strategic patience. McGregor takes aim at Hugh White’s thesis that the era of American primacy in Asia is ending, and that China will soon be the dominant power. “This worst-case scenario makes sense for a defence planner, once White’s profession,” he says. “Diplomatically, however, the opposite is true. If Australia concedes, in effect, that it is game over and China will win, then policy-making becomes no more than a series of cascading concessions to the new hegemon.”

Complicating the picture are the current US administration’s self-inflicted wounds. Trump has driven a truck through the free-trade architecture. His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership weakened efforts to instil respect for intellectual property and online transparency — attributes he is now trying to extract from China using the tariff bludgeon. By vetoing appointments of new judges to the World Trade Organization’s dispute panels, he is crippling a trade system the United States itself sponsored, under which it regarded China’s accession in 2001 as a great advance. Since long before Trump, the US Senate has refused to ratify the same UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that Washington routinely urges China to observe.

According to Brad Glosserman, an Asia strategic specialist at Japan’s Tama University, calling this a “Thucydides Trap” — an inevitable conflict between a status quo power and a rising power — falsely treats these tensions as a binary dispute. “It is ironic that this reductionism is occurring as the US is being eclipsed as the most stalwart defender of the existing international order,” he writes. Historically, the United States has been the most prominent voice in defence of the status quo, but other governments, notably Japan, Australia and the European Union, have also assumed leading roles.

McGregor doesn’t believe we should prioritise preparations for an all-out war with China or create our own deterrence to avoid one, as White advocates in his recent book How to Defend Australia. Instead, Australia and other middle powers, as well as bigger players like Japan, Germany and South Korea, should push back together when China overreaches, well before the possibility of armed conflict arises.

“That does not mean replacing cooperation with confrontation at every turn,” McGregor writes. “It simply means competing with China, speaking openly about its actions and standing up to it when necessary.” He acknowledges that these policies might come at a cost. “But to do otherwise will allow Beijing to pick off smaller nations such as Australia one by one. That would leave not just regional nations isolated. Eventually the United States would be on its own as well.” •

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In early July, seemingly out of the blue, Shinzo Abe’s government restricted exports of three chemicals vital to South Korea’s high-tech industries, citing national security concerns. The row escalated quickly, with both countries taking other trade items out of the “white channels” that allow for quick customs clearance, and the South Koreans mounting a consumer boycott of everything Japanese, from Uniqlo clothing to hot-spring resorts across the Tsushima Strait.

According to Jeffrey Kingston, a professor of Japanese politics at Temple University Japan in Tokyo, Shinzo Abe is using trade as a “cudgel to get his way on other unrelated matters, right out of the Donald Trump playbook of scorched-earth diplomacy.” The acrimony was on display at an Asian security forum meeting in Bangkok this month: when the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, tried to get the foreign ministers of the two countries to pose with him for a happy photo, Taro Kono and Kang Kyung-wha twisted away, scowling.

The squabble is a case study in how visceral nationalism and historical memory can push aside what seems like economic and strategic rationality. It is a serious breach within the array of Asian democracies that America, along with Australia, hopes to bind together as a counterweight to China’s strategic rise. Yet it was not mentioned when Pompeo later visited Sydney for bilateral talks, at least in public statements.

The stoush began brewing in 2017 when South Korea’s conservative former president, Park Geun-hye, was removed from office by impeachment over an influence-peddling scandal involving the heir of the Samsung industrial conglomerate. Her replacement, the centre left’s Moon Jae-in, reopened the issue of the “comfort women” — the young women, many from Korea, forced or deceived into working as sex slaves for the Japanese during the second world war — which Abe thought he had finally settled with Park in a 2015 agreement.

At this point, an earlier agreement that Japan had also thought “final and irreversible” came under question, too. South Korean courts, which have a tendency to follow the political wind, awarded damages of around A$100,000 to four elderly men who had been taken to wartime Japan as forced labourers. To pay the damages, the courts seized property in South Korea owned by Japanese firms linked to the men’s former employers.

The treaty in question was the 1965 US-sponsored agreement normalising relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, under which Tokyo awarded US$500 million to Seoul for suffering during the Japanese annexation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Compensation for forced workers was factored in, but most of the funds were used for national projects rather than distributed to individuals.

Japan’s government now worries that the South Korean courts have embarked on an endless round of compensation cases on behalf of some 200,000 former workers (or, in the case of those no longer alive, their families).

South Koreans who see the 1965 and 2015 agreements as sell-outs have been bolstered in their view by what they see as a striking coincidence. The 1965 treaty was struck by military dictator Park Chung-hee, who had been an officer in the army of the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria. As president, he applied the same model of state-directed corporate capitalism used in Manchuria. Park Geun-hye, the leader who signed the 2015 comfort women settlement, is his daughter.

That relationship feeds a narrative running through current South Korean politics that also draws on historical consciousness. According to Andrew Horvat, a scholar of both Japan and Korea at Tokyo Keizai University, it boils down to feelings of resentment towards a South Korean elite.

“You have a small group of people who graduate from the right university, go off to study in the United States, get jobs with a chaebol [industrial conglomerate] and have very bright futures,” says Horvat. “And then a very large group of people who graduate from very mediocre universities, have very few opportunities, and are actually victims of neoliberalism and a whole range of other issues that are related to Korea’s rapid economic development.”

According to Horvat, these people see Korea itself as having been unfairly treated. “If someone is rich now it’s because their family once collaborated with Japan or they benefited from the US–Korea military alliance.” The current president, Moon Jae-in, is very much representative of the “out” class: “Here’s a man who has been elected to correct historical wrongs, as perceived by a group of self-styled aggrieved parties with a very simplistic view of history.”

By another weird coincidence, those on the other side of the dispute also have a connection to long-ago Manchuria. Shinzo Abe is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, who masterminded the development of Japanese-occupied Manchuria as a young technocrat and then, as a prime minister in the 1950s, used that experience to help manage Japan’s remarkable period of post-1945 recovery and growth.

Abe is a nostalgic figure, trying to restore pride in Japan’s early-twentieth-century record, nudging the media and education system in more “patriotic” ways, restoring greater mystery to the role of the emperor, and endeavouring to engineer a Diet majority big enough to amend the non-belligerency clause of the post-1945 constitution.

He appeals particularly to Japanese in ultranational circles, who see their country as a victim of Western encirclement in the late 1930s, forced to strike out, and think Koreans should be grateful for the railways, roads, dams, electricity and factories that it built for them. And that’s not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Japanese settlers evicted from Korea with nothing but suitcases after the surrender.

“Like Trump, Abe empowers a certain reactionary demographic,” says Jeffrey Kingston. He points to a recent decision to remove a sculpture of a comfort woman from the Aichi arts festival in Nagoya as an example of “how far freedom of expression is in retreat here.”

It’s likely, of course, that a majority of Japanese are reassured by their country’s “peace” constitution and mock Abe’s retro-orthodoxies, which include forcing the national broadcaster to use the quaint term “Nippon” instead of the modern “Nihon” as the country’s name. The spat with South Korea failed to boost Abe’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party in last month’s upper house election, held after his first trade sanction was announced. The LDP, which got about 19 per cent of the vote, remains safely in power only thanks to a vote-swapping agreement with Komeito, a party based on a Buddhist cult. “It’s not exactly a big mandate for anything,” says Kingston.

“The major problem is that the Japanese side is holding the Koreans to an agreement which, though in formal international law should be a binding agreement, shouldn’t be written in stone,” Horvat believes. “When the Koreans signed it their per capita GDP was the same as Sudan’s, and by that time Japan was ready to overtake Germany as the number three economy in the world. You couldn’t exactly call this an agreement among equals.”

Japan has had “many, many opportunities in the past to do what Germany did, which was to go beyond any legally binding obligations and to take the high moral ground,” he adds. “On countless occasions Japan missed this opportunity, mostly because of this divided memory within Japan.”

Opinion polls do show, however, that the Japanese public feels South Korea is excessively harping over occupation and wartime wrongs.

Both leaders have got themselves out on branches with no obvious way to climb down. While Moon has no affection for the chaebol, his popularity will suffer if the Japanese sanctions drag down the economy. Abe is also up against his own business establishment and home base.

“Regional supply chains were already rattled by Typhoon Trump’s trade war with China, and now have to cope with a petulant Abe,” says Kingston. “With Japanese business confidence at its lowest since 2009 the timing is terrible, because there will be blowback for Japanese firms. Still, it looks like this game of chicken will play out a bit more.”

So far, the Americans have been unable to bridge this argument. If it leads to an unravelling of the intelligence-sharing pact signed under Park Geun-hye and Abe in 2016, the row will have deeper strategic consequences. Reached under US auspices amid great mutual distrust, the pact was a key step in getting two of Asia’s most powerful militaries to cooperate. The new US defense secretary, Mark Esper, went to South Korea from Sydney to urge Moon to stick with it. “It’s key to us,” he told reporters.

“Trumpism is spreading in Asia with baleful consequences such as Abe’s epic own goal on South Korea and [Indian prime minister] Narendra Modi throwing fuel on the flames of Kashmir,” Kingston sums up. “These are troubling times.” •

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This week’s backdown by the territory’s Beijing-approved chief executive, Carrie Lam, has at least alleviated fears that Hong Kong was heading for a Tiananmen-style crackdown by the People’s Liberation Army forces, which have been stationed in the former British garrison for external defence purposes since the handover.

As massive demonstrations continued, involving up to two million of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million people at any one time, and with young protesters breaking into the Legislative Council to daub slogans on its walls and wave the British flag, the PLA held well-publicised exercises on dealing with civil unrest. Beijing had a taskforce of officials closely monitoring events from just across the border in Shenzhen.

Lam says the contentious bill to allow extradition to mainland China is now “dead” and concedes that the Hong Kong government’s handling of the issue has been a “complete failure.” But she has repeatedly refused to formally withdraw the bill, and has rejected calls for her proposed inquiry into the protests, and the police response, to be held by an independent commission. She also refuses to withdraw official descriptions of protests as “riots” or give amnesty to those arrested.

Nor does Lam show any signs of acceding to demands for her own resignation, just two years into her five-year term. No doubt she hopes that protests will steadily dissipate. But her fate is not entirely up to her. She has failed to deliver for Beijing, which sees Hong Kong as a haven for fugitives and critics, and she has also lost whatever confidence she had among the Hong Kong public. Installed in 2017 by a 1194-person panel vetted for “patriotic spirit” by Beijing, she is essentially there at the Chinese leadership’s pleasure.

More broadly, the question of how Beijing will react to this popular challenge, and how far Hong Kong’s activists can push it, is still unanswered. How the tensions play out will have deep strategic consequences for countries including Australia.

Just twenty-two years into the half-century “one country, two systems” agreement, Hong Kong’s autonomy is under severe strain. Not coincidentally, the erosion of the territory’s independence has quickened since the ascension of Xi Jinping to supreme power in China in early 2013.

A key proviso of the Sino-British transfer — that serious consideration be given to using a universal franchise to elect the chief executive from 2017 — was pushed aside. Chinese police have covertly snatched a critical publisher and a fugitive businessman from the territory. Transport links to the mainland have been expanded, including via a long sea bridge and a high-speed rail line to a terminal in Kowloon, where mainland immigration officials have an extraterritorial enclave.

Hong Kong is now grouped in a “Greater Bay Area” with nearby mainland industrial zones like Shenzhen and Zhuhai and the former Portuguese territory Macau. Authorities in Guangdong province say that the controversial “social credit” system, which uses facial-recognition technology to penalise citizens for infractions like late payment of bills and jaywalking, will be introduced in Hong Kong within three years.

All this is adding to perceptions that Hong Kong is at a turning point. Reports say inquiries about emigration have jumped. A tipping point might well arrive, with residents liquidating their assets while property prices are sky-high and moving their money, and themselves, offshore.

What is striking about the protest movements — ranging from the “umbrella” movement five years back to the latest anti-extradition demonstrations — is the utter alienation of Hong Kong’s young people from the present system, and their willingness to confront the official narratives of autonomy and consultation. This was vividly illustrated on Monday when Hong Kong pop star and democracy activist Denise Ho turned up at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to urge it to expel China.

The remedy proposed by activist groups and pro-democracy members of the Legislative Council is to move to a universal franchise for elections for both the chief executive and the legislature. Only half of the members of the latter are elected by popular vote, with the rest selected by various lobbies approved by the government.

Such a plan is unlikely to appeal to Xi Jinping, who has displayed deeply authoritarian instincts through his mass surveillance systems, enforced ideological orthodoxy, and attempted deculturation of the entire Uighur population of Xinjiang. Yet he, and any comrades brave enough to broach the subject, might consider how far the extradition exercise in Hong Kong has got Beijing.

Not only is the US Congress discussing targeted sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials involved in weakening the territory’s autonomy, but Taiwan is even less likely to be brought into the Chinese fold through a similar one country, two systems deal. In fact, Taiwan is playing up the Hong Kong crisis for all it’s worth. “These two outposts of democracy share the same values, and our paths and destinies are closely linked,” its foreign minister Joseph Wu told a forum in Denmark last month. “We both stand on the front line against the expansion of authoritarianism.”

Hong Kong has boosted the prospects of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, a member of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, in her re-election run next January, while causing her likely rival, Han Kuo-yu, the populist mayor of Kaohsiung from the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) to tone down his commitment to closer links with the mainland. The one country, two systems model would be applied to Taiwan “over my dead body,” he now says.

Support for Taiwan has correspondingly increased in conservative circles in the United States, Japan and Australia. The Trump administration has just approved a US$2.2 billion sale of tanks and missiles to the republic, and an even bigger sale of sixty-six advanced-model F-16 fighters is mooted. Taiwan’s armed forces chief has had a rare meeting with his US counterparts, and Tsai has been allowed to stop off in the United States on the way to visit four Caribbean states that still recognise Taiwan.

In Australia, the assumptions behind Canberra’s embrace of “one China” are weakening. The mainland and the island are not converging. The People’s Republic is growing even more totalitarian under Xi. Taiwan, once a military dictatorship, is a democracy heading for its seventh directly contested presidential elections and is now the most socially liberal place in the Chinese world, exemplified by its recent legalisation of same-sex marriage.

Visiting Honiara just after the Australian election, prime minister Scott Morrison was studiously neutral on the question of whether the Solomons government should shift its recognition from Taipei to Beijing. He did not go as far as Trump administration figures reportedly have in urging the Solomons to stick with Taipei, but his neutrality was a shift. “Time was when we advised the Pacific Islands countries to go with Beijing,” says a former high-ranking Australian diplomat.

Opposition to joining the United States in armed defence of Taiwan has been a touchstone among Australian critics of the US alliance. But how happy would these critics be to abandon Taiwan’s twenty-four million people — a population the same size as Australia’s — to a communist takeover, with all the detentions, re-education, trials and executions likely to follow?

The Hong Kong crisis has been closely followed by Australia’s 1.2 million people of Chinese descent, and has been too big to be ignored or played down by the local Chinese-language media, which are normally kept in line by Beijing propagandists through direct ownership or advertising flows.

According to the 2016 census, about 281,000 people — roughly a third of the Chinese-Australian community — speak Cantonese, the language of the region that takes in Hong Kong. The newspaper that most appeals to them, the local edition of the Sing Tao Daily — which uses the traditional characters taught in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore rather than the simplified ones adopted by the People’s Republic — has been giving full and generally balanced reports on the protests.

While certain security hawks have questioned the loyalty of Chinese Australians in recent years and raised fears of a fifth column, a remarkable aspect of our latest election was the contest in Chisholm between a Hong Kong–born Liberal, Gladys Liu, and a Taiwan-born Labor candidate, Jennifer Yang. Relations with China figured not at all, with most attention going to issues like negative gearing, tax rates and franking credits.

Liu emerged the winner. In a statement on Facebook this month she implicitly contradicted the Beijing depiction of the protests as riots. “I am one of the many people who have been moved by the recent protest action in Hong Kong,” she said. “The significant number of people who have taken to the streets to voice their concerns demonstrates to the world the kind of passion and commitment that the people of Hong Kong have for the future of their city.” Might members of the Chinese diaspora prove to be more of a problem for the communists on the mainland than for their host countries? •

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Little more than two weeks after an election result that News Corp had devoted so much reportage and comment to achieving, the media group found one of its star Canberra journalists subject to an Australian Federal Police raid on her home in search of leaked intelligence material and clues to its source.

“Outrageous,” said a headline in the Australian, above a story citing support from the kind of people the newspaper usually sneers at. That was just hours before a second raid that saw three AFP officers trawling through the emails and files on newsroom computers at the ABC’s headquarters in Sydney.

You don’t have to agree with former prime minister Paul Keating that the security and intelligence community has gone “berko” to have profound misgivings about where this is taking Australia. Suddenly, all the media are in the same boat — threatened with a drastic curtailment of freedom of inquiry and expression.

Home affairs minister Peter Dutton professed to have no prior knowledge of the raids by an agency under his recently created super-ministry. Prime minister Scott Morrison says everyone is subject to the law, so there’s nothing to worry about. The AFP insists the two raids were merely coincidental.

Yet the AFP is normally acutely sensitive to which cases its political masters want pursued vigorously and which they would prefer to be treated as too hard (wheat sales to Iraq, say, or Indonesian army culpability in the Balibo killings). It’s hard to believe it hasn’t been given a signal to go in hard.

The raids are aimed at finding and penalising those who leaked two matters of undoubted public interest and concern.

The first raid, on Annika Smethurst, the national political editor of News Corp’s Sunday tabloids, concerned a story based on leaked correspondence between Michael Pezzullo, secretary of the home affairs department, and Greg Moriarty, secretary of the defence department, about a proposal to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to collect domestic intelligence for the first time since it was created soon after the second world war.

The second, on the ABC, concerned 2017 news reports citing highly secret “Australian eyes only” intelligence that Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan may have deliberately or carelessly killed civilians. A week before the raid, former Australian military lawyer David William McBride was committed to stand trial in the ACT Supreme Court after being charged with leaking documents to the ABC.

It can be surmised that the source of the first leaks was deeply concerned about a fundamental shift in the power to invade the privacy of Australian citizens and enterprises in the name of national security. The leak headed this off, at least for the time being. In the second, the source was worried by a cover-up of possible war crimes that sully the reputation of Australia’s defence forces. A judicial inquiry is partly a result.

Defence and security agencies are right, of course, to try to protect sensitive information and investigate cases of disclosure. But their political masters need to balance those concerns with judgements about when to heed the message and not shoot the messenger. Unfortunately, balance isn’t in the nature of hardline former police officer Peter Dutton, the home affairs minister, or former state prosecutor Christian Porter, the attorney-general.

Evidence of Porter’s views came in June last year with his decision to pursue lawyer Bernard Collaery and former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer “Witness K” over the disclosure that ASIS had bugged the Timor-Leste cabinet room during negotiations in 2004 about Timor Sea petroleum. The only possible reason for the attorney-general to risk more disclosures about this embarrassing episode is that he wants to crack the whip over Canberra’s bureaucracy to head off public revelations on the scale of Edward Snowden’s or Chelsea Manning’s intelligence dumps.

The raids come amid widening unease about other trends in the intelligence community. One is the expanding public profile of intelligence agency chiefs. ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis appears frequently in parliamentary committee hearings. In a departure from longstanding practice, the heads of ASIS and the Australian Signals Directorate have given speeches, and the latter even tweets.

Under Lewis, ASIO seems to be cooperating with a number of journalists and academics in pushing the notion of a great and imminent danger of subversion by China, requiring more powers and resources for security agencies. There is a high risk of jumping at shadows, or at the very least pre-empting cool analysis of how to mitigate dangers of using Huawei and other Chinese-made technology without derailing a crucial economic relationship.

As Richard McGregor, the Lowy Institute’s China specialist, has observed, ministers now casually claim to have seen intelligence material that backs their assertions. “Their offices are awash in it,” McGregor wrote earlier this year. “They are not shy in demanding the material, by all accounts. The green-marked briefs, indicating the material comes from ASIS, Australia’s mini-CIA, have apparently gained particular popularity.” Raw intelligence has never previously been allowed anywhere near political offices.

Tensions have also been created by the massive integration of the intelligence community carried out under Malcolm Turnbull, which centralised authority in the offices of Dutton and his ambitious department head, Pezzullo.

The exchange between Pezzullo and Moriarty reported by News Corp’s Smethurst reflects a battle for control of the ASD. The intelligence reorganisation saw the ASD made a statutory agency. Though it is still under the defence portfolio, home affairs has eyes on its intelligence-collection capabilities for domestic security. In addition, it has been given cybersecurity and cyberwarfare responsibilities. In January 2018, the Defence Force established a new signals intelligence and cyber command aimed at ensuring that “support to military operations remains the agency’s highest priority.”

Another side of the intelligence shake-up was the upgrading of the small Office of National Assessments, created in the 1980s on the recommendations of the Hope royal commissions, into the Office of National Intelligence. Under a new director-general of national intelligence, the ONI is supposed to coordinate the operations of all intelligence-collection agencies and give a daily intelligence brief to the prime minister. The new director-general is Nick Warner, who came straight from eight years heading ASIS.

Some senior former ONA officials see the new coordination function as simply mimicking Washington’s approach to “connecting the dots” after the 11 September 2001 failures, and as unnecessary in Canberra’s already close intelligence community. They worry this effort will divert attention and resources from the respected analysis function of ONA and erode the independence of reporting that successive directors have strongly defended.

While those in charge of these agencies are not “nutters,” as Keating also put it, there is a genuine cause for concern that security officials have too much policy influence in Canberra, that there is too much reliance on clandestine intelligence material instead of obvious open-source information, and that liberties are being too easily sacrificed.

It may take another Hope-style royal commission to address the first two concerns, and much stronger independent safeguards to address the third. •

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Perhaps uniquely in the world, the national meteorological bureau issues maps showing a cherry blossom “front” moving northwards through the archipelago as buds burst open. Office juniors are sent to stake out territory in parks where convivial groups will gather after work, scoffing sake and snacks under lantern-lit pink canopies.

But this year April is also the month in which, after thirty years, Emperor Akihito vacates the Chrysanthemum Throne because of his failing health. In the first abdication in modern times, the eighty-five-year-old goes on the 30th and his son Naruhito is installed the following day.

Prime minister Shinzo Abe’s government is carefully orchestrating the whole process. It wants to use the sense of a new era dawning to shake Japan out of the economic lassitude of its “lost decades.” And it wants to promote a political message attuned to Abe’s retro-nationalism: that a restored Japan of proud tradition and identity can move from the soft and permissive democracy created by the post-1945 Allied occupation to a more rigorous version of its own.

The clue came on 1 April when the government announced the name of the new emperor’s gengo, or era, which will appear on the date stamps of everything official, from train tickets to tax returns. The choice, Reiwa, is being spun in different directions depending on the audience.

Abe’s supporters are doing their best to make it sound benign. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, for example, in its English-language online portal Nikkei Asian Review, explained the two characters in the name as “auspicious” or “orderly” (rei) and “harmony” or “peace” (wa). Tetsuji Atsuji, a Kyoto University scholar of Chinese-origin characters, which are known as kanji, was quoted as saying the rei character “conveys an image of seasonality with the change in emperor as well as the joy of peace.”

This interpretation derives from the character’s source in the Manyoshu, Japan’s oldest surviving anthology of poetry. Dating from the period 600 to 759 AD, the collection celebrates Japan’s changing seasonal beauties.

Prime minister Abe echoes this version. By referring to the Manyoshu, he is trying to pass on Japanese heritage to the next generation. “I want Japan to proudly bloom like plum blossoms,” he says. “Plum blossoms bloom beautifully after a harsh winter as a sign of the arrival of spring.”

But Atsuji also points out that the Japanese character for rei is a stylised image of someone giving orders to a kneeling person. This obvious allusion is not lost on Japan’s liberals and supporters of the postwar order, many of whom “cringed” at the announcement, says Andrew Horvat, a Canadian journalist and scholar, long resident in Tokyo, who teaches intercultural studies at the Josai International University.

“This is Abe’s statist philosophy in a nutshell,” Horvat tells me. “Japan will be a peaceful country, but there will at first have to be order, and by that I mean both domestically with restrictions on freedoms of speech and press, and regionally, meaning beefed-up armed forces and an ‘in your face’ foreign policy toward both Koreas and the PRC [mainland China].”

Japan’s foreign ministry is now putting out the message that the choice of Reiwa has been “misunderstood” and that of course it means “harmonious peace.” But that is “a bit funny,” says Horvat. “Because if you want to avoid misunderstandings then why choose a character that is so likely to be ‘misunderstood,’ unless, of course, you wanted to have it both ways from the start.”

The decision to select the gengo from a Japanese rather than a classical Chinese work — a break with a tradition that extends back over the 1400 years since era names were introduced — is also pointed. “That should already tell you what the people in power these days think about their ‘shared cultural past’ with China,” Horvat says. “It was a message to Beijing that Japan is not China. Basically, the choice reflects a present diplomatic, or rather undiplomatic, choice.”

Even so, Japanese themselves may not respond positively to this signal. So far voters have resisted Abe’s plan to amend the postwar constitution to allow Japan’s armed forces to operate more explicitly outside the self-defence role prescribed in the document’s famous Article 9.

Akihito’s own efforts to promote liberalism and openness within the constraints of his constitutional role have generated great affection among the Japanese public. From the start, he spoke to the public in ordinary language rather than the convoluted courtly style used by his father, Hirohito, who ruled for an unsurpassed sixty-eight years covering the invasion of China, the Pacific war and postwar reconstruction.

Akihito, whose consort Michiko was the first “commoner” in recent eras to marry a crown prince, made a point of referring to the emperor as a “symbol” of the Japanese nation, rather than a source of divine authority, as was expounded before 1945.

When a nationalist governor of Tokyo tried in 2005 to make it compulsory for public schools to fly the national flag and for their pupils to sing the national anthem, Akihito said these decisions should be left to individuals. Having often spoken of “standing close to the people,” he and Empress Michiko got down on their knees after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami to talk to survivors huddled in evacuation centres. When he visited Palau in 2015 to mark the seventieth anniversary of the final battles in the Pacific war, he said he’d come to remember “all people” who had lost their lives, implicitly including US marines and local civilians as well as Japanese defenders.

On his travels, as he recalled in his farewell address in February this year, he met many people of Japanese descent who were integrated into foreign countries, and expressed the hope that the foreign workers who came to Japan as its workforce declined would be warmly welcomed into Japanese society.

But since the name of the new era was announced, conservative mainstream reports have associated Akihito’s Heisei (“peace everywhere”) reign not with those positive attributes but with the recent decades of deflation and population decline, ignoring how the seeds of these problems were sown in the speculation and economic rigidity of the last decades of his father’s Showa (“enlightened harmony”) era.

With Japan’s economy slowing again, the Reiwa era may be starting with less than stellar prospects. The fact that the slowdown mainly results from China’s growth contraction, abetted by the protectionism of Abe’s friend Donald Trump, emphasises the degree to which Japan depends on its Asian neighbour.

Emperors used to choose the gengo of their own reign. With the removal of powers under the postwar constitution that he subtly defended, Akihito was the first to have it chosen by the government and its selected scholars. Likewise, the new emperor, the fifty-nine-year-old Naruhito, had no say, and was only formally notified of the choice of Reiwa in person by Abe a week after it was made public.

It remains to be seen whether he and Crown Princess Masako, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated former diplomat who has suffered greatly from the stuffiness surrounding the imperial household, will continue Akihito’s quiet pushback against Abe’s illiberal tendencies.

The post What’s in a name? appeared first on Inside Story.

The next day a call came from bureau chief Robert Delfs, crouching under his desk. Passing People’s Liberation Army troops were raking the Qijiayuan compound, home to foreign diplomats and journalists, with machine-gun fire.

The crisis in Beijing had been going on since 15 April. Many of us had expected the student protests in Tiananmen Square to have dwindled, mollified by a compromise between reformists and hardliners in the Chinese Communist Party. Some visiting journalists had gone home, the Sydney Morning Herald’s colour writer Peter Smark after racking up $20,000 in expenses for himself and supporting crew.

From what we now know, we shouldn’t have been surprised by the slaughter of 4 June 1989. Three weeks earlier, supreme leader Deng Xiaoping had embarrassed visiting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by praising the Soviet Army’s shooting of Georgian nationalist demonstrators in Tbilisi in April. Gorbachev had disowned his own army’s actions, and the Tiananmen students were holding up portraits of this exponent of glasnost and perestroika.

As the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing massacre approaches, there is still no hint of backdown or apology from the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 is seen as vindication of the party’s brutality. When communist hardliners in Moscow tried to halt the trend with their coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991, the Chinese communists applauded. But they eventually had to accept the end of the Soviet Union and the toppling of communist regimes across Europe and in nearby Mongolia.

Since then, expectations of a convergence with the West have repeatedly been foiled by party action. The internet was seen as the latest potentially fatal breach in China’s information dykes, but the party has added its own twist, adopting the technology of “surveillance capitalism” — facial recognition, artificial intelligence, big data — to deepen social control.

This year, as well as the looming Tiananmen and Berlin Wall anniversaries, the Chinese leadership will need to manage the sixtieth anniversary of the 1959 invasion of Tibet and the flight of the Dalai Lama. Two other events are more congenial to the party — the 4 May 1919 student movement against foreign enclaves, and the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic — but could also risk provoking expressions of dissent.

Xi Jinping is taking no chances. In January he convened top cadres at the Central Party School to deliver a dire warning. “Globally, sources of turmoil and points of risk are multiplying,” he said. Inside China, meanwhile, “the party is at risk from indolence, incompetence and of becoming divorced from the public.”

Last week, ahead of today’s opening of the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, the Central Committee reminded party members about “enhancing the political work of the party and some key points, such as consolidating political faith, upholding the party’s political leadership, improving the party’s political capacity, purifying the political atmosphere, and effectively enforcing [this] directive.”

Rather unusually, the directive also urged comrades to “resolutely prevent not believing in Marx and Lenin and believing in ghosts and spirits, not believing in the truth and believing in money.” As China scholar Geremie Barmé has noted, this harks back to a collection titled Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts, published in 1961 under the auspices of Mao Zedong.

But Xi Jinping is no throwback to Mao, despite having made himself effectively chairman-for-life by having term limits removed. Mao was frequently at war with the party, at one point exhorting students to “bombard the headquarters” during the Cultural Revolution. Xi and his father, a PLA general, were victims of that turmoil. His turgid “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in a New Era” is all about harmony, stability and unquestioned party control (under his own leadership, of course). His police have recently been arresting students who attempted some practical Marxism by organising factory workers.

“The goal of Xi Jinping Thought is not to launch a cold war with the West, or to export China’s political model,” as the University of London’s Steve Tsang writes. “Rather, Xi wants to shore up the authority of the party-state — and his own brand of authoritarianism — within China, including by ensuring that Chinese are not exposed to liberal-democratic ideas.”

More than ever, the party is pursuing Deng Xiaoping’s example from Tiananmen, though modern surveillance tools allow it to forestall any coalescence of unrest into a systemic challenge. But is Xi Jinping throwing out the more important lesson of Deng’s leadership — that high economic growth is only possible if the party unleashes private entrepreneurship, cuts back on state planning, and improves monetary and fiscal management?

As the US economist Nicholas Lardy notes in his new book The State Strikes Back: the End of Economic Reform in China?, Xi has thrown resources back at state-owned enterprises, kept zombie state-owned enterprises alive, and attacked tall poppies in the private sector through his anti-corruption campaign. Economists debate whether this has affected economic growth, but it can’t help to have the most vibrant part of the economy curbed. Xi could also be storing up future financial crisis by turning on the lending taps to keep growth at 6.5 per cent a year, the level generally seen to be necessary to maintain social stability.

After being the world’s worst-performing major share market in 2018, China has rebounded mightily this year. The reasons are murky, but are doubtless linked to a US$477 billion jump in credit in January — so big that premier Li Keqiang, unlike Xi a trained economist, distanced himself by warning about “new potential risks” from record lending.

Much of this credit-fuelled growth will come from construction, despite China already having some sixty-five million unoccupied dwellings. This in turn requires massive amounts of energy, mostly coal, to create the cement, steel, aluminium and electricity required. As Australian energy-climate analyst David Leitch put it, with only a touch of exaggeration, “Stop China’s construction industry and you stop global warning.” Of course, you might also stop Australia’s projected budget surpluses.

Xi is probably smart enough to see that this model can’t be endlessly propelled into the future. Hence his drive to modernise the economy through rapid technological advances — made by whatever means China can get away with — and export much of this surplus raw material capacity along the Belt and Road. Both efforts are meeting resistance inside and outside China, with much hanging on Donald Trump’s understanding that it’s not just a matter of quick fixes to trade balances.

There is another event in 1989 that is probably not on Xi’s list of awkward anniversaries. In May that year, the Bank of Japan began raising interest rates to try to deflate a “bubble economy” that saw share and property values at absurd levels (making the grounds of Tokyo’s imperial palace worth more than the entire land mass of California, for example).

The bubble kept inflating, with the Nikkei stock index hitting a never-matched peak at the end of 1989, before collapse to half that level by August 1990. Property values plunged. The business-banking establishment kept zombie companies alive through a deflationary “lost decade” that Japan’s government is still trying to banish. Then population decline and ageing set in — just as the trend intensified in China despite the lifting of the one-child policy (another unfortunate Deng Xiaoping legacy) in 2015.

Xi might thus be drawing the wrong lessons from 1989. The medium- to long-term risk to the Chinese system could be stagnation and pollution — stuck with “secondary power” status — rather than collapse. No wonder reports are starting to come in about a demoralised business class, and fewer couples are having babies. •

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