Tag Archive for: bipartisan politics

The purposes of the Pacific pivot

In the South Pacific, Australia confronts the law of untended purposes.

The law states that if you don’t tend to your policy and political purposes, stuff goes off course and the unexpected arrives. If your attention wanders, so do your purposes.

Like its cousin, the law of unintended consequences, the untended purposes law is politics obeying physics: all systems tend towards entropy, to shift from order to disorder.

Awoken to our drifting purposes, Australia’s political leaders have done a pivot—offering Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific a lot of love, a bit more cash and greater policy attention.

The prime minister and opposition leader are on a defence and foreign affairs unity ticket. Australia’s political consensus on the South Pacific is loudly reaffirmed.

Whoever wins the next federal election, there’s to be more attention and extra effort in the South Pacific. Good.

Scott Morrison promises ‘a new level’ of Australian commitment:

This is our part of the world. This is where we have special responsibilities. We always have, we always will. We have their back, and they have ours. We are more than partners by choice. We are connected as members of a Pacific family.

It’s why the first leaders I hosted in Australia as Prime Minister have been from Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. It’s time to open, I believe, a new chapter in relations with our Pacific family. One based on respect, equality and openness. A relationship for its own sake, because it’s right.

Bill Shorten promises to embrace the Pacific as the ‘blue continent’, offering partnership not paternalism: ‘A Labor government will put the Pacific front and centre in our regional foreign policy. We’re not going to forfeit the Pacific because we didn’t turn up.’

Shifting from defence to foreign affairs, Marise Payne made her first speech in her new job about the islands: ‘Stepping up in the Pacific is not an option for Australian foreign policy—it is an imperative.’

So the language is agreed: new chapter, step up, front and centre, imperative.

Australia acts because it sees its role in PNG and the islands directly challenged by China. Strategic denial is our oldest instinct in the region. And Canberra’s abiding instincts are aroused by the shock realisation of untended purposes.

The Pacific step-up is ‘one of the highest priorities’ of the foreign policy white paper. Bipartisan agreement can power up the step-up.

The polity confronts a complex discussion of Australia’s interests, influence and values in the islands. The interests–influence–values trifecta pulls in many directions. To clarify (and vastly oversimplify), view the trifecta and the pivot in two dimensions: power and Pacific people.

Power competition: Australia wants to be the South Pacific’s top security and economic partner. That’s why we’re the region’s biggest aid donor.

Rising competition prompts Australia to do more on Pacific infrastructure, rather than leaving this bit of the game to others (Hi, Beijing!) or merely giving via multilateral channels: $2 billion for infrastructure and $1 billion to get more Oz businesses operating in the islands.

One test of the power of the pivot will be how much extra cash actually arrives, as opposed to the rebadging of the existing aid budget.

New diplomatic missions will open in Palau, the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Niue and the Cook Islands, so Australia will be represented in every member of the Pacific Islands Forum.

The Australian Defence Force is out and about building and partnering, to play ‘an even greater role’ in training (with an ADF team rotating through the islands), capacity-building, exercises and interoperability.

The headline bit of the pivot is the US joining Australia to help PNG redevelop the naval base on Manus Island.

The evidence of long-term policy substance—where purposes have been properly tended—is the launch of the first of the 21 new Pacific patrol boats. The boats will be given to 12 South Pacific nations plus Timor-Leste.

The promise to get electricity to 70% of PNG’s people by 2030 certainly fits under the ‘power’ category. But it also takes us directly to the vital purposes of people and values.

Values and Pacific people: Australia’s Pacific policy too often doesn’t centre on Pacific people; that’s the most useful critique of the pivot merely as power competition with China.

Scott Morrison’s constant use of the ‘Pacific family’ image must be more than political-speak. If the family dimension gets as much attention as the strategic struggle, Oz policy will serve its values as well as its interests.

Australia is slowly talking itself back into the international media contest in the islands. That’ll be an important element in the family conversation.

Letting more of the family into Australia is the big and exciting project for the years ahead.

The Pacific labour scheme is to be opened to all Pacific island countries, offering chances for both seasonal and non-seasonal work in Australia. The win for the islands will need careful tending. Will Pacific workers get ‘priority’, as promised, or will many of the jobs go to those on backpacker visas?

Negotiating to bring PNG into the labour scheme can be a huge step-up. One of the great silences of our Pacific policy is that almost no Melanesians can come to Australia (Polynesian access is via New Zealand).

The pivot is a shift with substance if it opens Australia’s door to the people of PNG, Vanuatu and the Solomons (and, stretch the geography, to add Timor-Leste).

A pivot that can marry Oz strategic denial instincts with the fundamental needs of Pacific peoples will be a policy with enduring purposes.

Submission to the parliamentary inquiry into the benefits and risks of a bipartisan Australian defence agreement

The Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade is running an inquiry into the desirability of a long-term defence agreement. The idea is that the core components of defence policy (such as the budget and major capital acquisition programs) would be negotiated and locked in, effectively quarantining defence from the vagaries of party politics. Here’s our take on the proposal.

Thank you for the opportunity to make this short submission to the committee on the benefits and risks of a bipartisan defence agreement. We have each spent nearly a quarter of a century worrying about precisely the issues that lie at the core of the proposal before the committee. We have seen defence budgets ebb and flow with the vicissitudes of the political cycle, and we have watched major capability proposals go from concept to approval to delivery (or sometimes failure or cancellation). Given the sometimes decades-long timeframe required to deliver on defence initiatives, we can see the attraction of a long-term agreement that is quarantined from the politics of the day. But, for reasons we will explain below, we do not support the idea.

There are two broad issues that would presumably be at the heart of any bipartisan agreement— budget settings and capability priorities. Those two issues are obviously related, but we’ll try to tease them apart and tackle them in turn. We’ll begin by taking issue with the statement in the inquiry’s terms of reference that the aim of strategic planning processes is to ‘deliver the best and most capable Defence force that Australia can afford’. While there’s little doubt that such an aim would be welcomed on Russell Hill, we think that it would represent a failure of strategic thinking. Under that approach it would be possible to keep adding capability beyond the calculus of strategic cost-effectiveness, at an increasing opportunity cost elsewhere in the government’s budget. Defence and the ADF would almost always welcome more funds and more capability. The question that any government faced with a request for funds should always ask is whether the proposal represents the best available return on investment for the nation. Rational strategic planning would support investment in military capability only to the point where diminishing returns mean that further investment would cost more than the impact of the risk being retired.

What’s more, the benefits of defence spending must be compared with the opportunity cost that that spending imposes elsewhere on Australian society. To be clear, if $100 of additional defence spending delivers less benefit (in terms of reduced strategic risk) than, say, $100 spent on schools, it’s better to spend the money on schools. As circumstances change and the economic cycle evolves, the relative merit of alternative spending options will change. What looks to be a sound investment in defence today may be rendered a second or third best option by changing circumstances.

Australia faces many challenges beyond the strategic domain. The underlying forces that are reshaping our geopolitical environment are also reshaping our economic prospects and, indeed, to the socioeconomic fabric of Australian society. The character and severity of, and the possible responses to, these many challenges are only slowly being revealed. Such is the inherent uncertainty of the future. Consequently, governments need to have the freedom to respond with agility and, when necessary, to reallocate resources from one area to another. For example, if Australia were to be hit with a severe recession, it’s unlikely that our national interests would be best served by quarantining defence spending irrespective of the consequences for individuals and the economy as a whole.

As we see it, the strongest arguments for a bipartisan agreement that locks in planning parameters beyond the immediate electoral cycle are that it would allow Defence to make long-term plans with confidence and that it would provide industry with a more robust plan for future investment. To be honest, we’re not sure what problem would be solved by that approach. Without a formal bipartisan agreement in place, Defence has still managed to launch a 35-year-long future submarine project, and is well down the road to a rolling production model for warships. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter acquisition has survived two changes of the party in government (so far)—and, we might add, five prime ministers and even more defence ministers. Politics has caused some disruption to defence plans over the past 15 years—not least the decision of the government of the day earlier this decade to reduce Defence’s budget—but it’s hard to point to any change that has affected the ongoing development of capability in an enduring way.

In fact, and as we’re fond of pointing out, changes in the strategic environment or the domestic political scene don’t seem to have much impact on the development of Australia’s armed forces. The ADF’s force structure of today would seem very familiar to a defence planner from any of the past five decades. And the projects currently approved and underway will lock in a similar structure for the next few decades as well. It’s hard to see how lack of continuity in defence planning represents a problem for the ADF—it continues to happily replicate itself.

So, while the pace of development of the ADF hasn’t been as rapid as first envisaged in some instances, in the bigger scheme of things there has nonetheless been steady progress. At the same time, other areas of Australian society have benefited from the diversion of funds away from defence. It’s all very well to lament the frustrations of Defence planners and defence industry executives, but they are no more deserving of pity than the hospital administrators, school teachers and taxpayers who might otherwise have carried a heavier burden.

Finally, we think that the proposal being considered is at odds with Australia’s model of governance. Taking away the discretionary power of a future government to make different decisions about its strategic priorities would represent an unwarranted change to the executive powers of the Australian government. And there is a downside for the incumbent government as well: the negotiation of a bipartisan agreement would reduce the government’s executive prerogative by forcing it to shape its defence policy to a lowest common denominator. Defence is too important for that. The government should be able to assert its position, and the opposition should be able to test and challenge and contest government policy in defence as it does in other areas. A robust policy debate with substantive points of difference is a strength, not a weakness, of our democratic system.

And we would go further to suggest that it would create, rather than retire, strategic risk. The chapter titles in history texts are often distilled from dislocations—events that fundamentally change the strategic landscape, which can be caused by factors as diverse as geopolitical shifts, an economic crisis or the advent of revolutionary technologies. Governments must sometimes deal with dramatic changes of circumstance, and there’s no guarantee that the force structures and military hardware and software of today will be the right answer even a decade from now. (In that sense, all of our current multi-decade projects represent taking a substantial gamble on their enduring relevance.) The amount spent on Australia’s defence, and how that money is spent, should be subject to constant review and analysis. Locking in spending levels and capability priorities would render such analysis pointless.

Perhaps most importantly, our governments are elected by the people of Australia on the basis of the platforms they take to the polls, not appointed by Defence’s planners for their convenience. If the Australian people want a different approach to our defence—whether more, less, or just different—they will have their reasons for doing so. We don’t see why defence planners should have any more protection from changes in public and government priorities than those planning for the nation’s health, education or energy requirements.

Bipartisanship must not stifle crucial defence debate

Andrew Carr calls for a more active debate on defence in Australia, claiming that bipartisanship will not serve us well in the current uncertain strategic environment.

I agree with Andrew and I see it this way: ‘bipartisanship’ doesn’t necessarily mean that one side agrees with the other. Both sides may be too scared to rock the political boat because it either annoys their base or makes them vulnerable to political attack. There isn’t sufficient understanding of the need to rock the boat, because defence is too hard and the voters are unlikely to hold parties or members to account. Even though both sides may claim ‘bipartisanship’, when it needs to be abandoned, each will use defence as a discriminator for political reasons.

Bipartisanship isn’t good if the parties use agreement on defence to remove it as a political issue when it should be an issue for the government. Bipartisanship is only good if both parties get it right. The questions should be: How much bipartisanship should there be, where might political competition be valuable for voters, and what is the right defence policy?

In considering bipartisanship, both planning and policy are important. Defence policy is the statement of what a nation’s elected representatives determine defence to be now and what it will become in the future. That must remain a political activity.

Comprehensive planning should occur before defence policy is derived. The planning stage can and should be bipartisan and should involve elected representatives and voters in a process that forces discussion.

Competition between political parties is better when it focuses on how to manage risks in defence policy rather than on the fundamentals, such as the current capability of the defence forces, the readiness of the nation to support a defence effort, and the need for defence capability derived from the strategic environment.

Political competition that leads to more thorough management of the risks in defence policy should be encouraged. But such competition can only occur if the fundamentals are bipartisan.

The problem applies to all Australian post–World War II governments. Most voters and MPs don’t have any idea whether we are adequately defended by our government—and we currently have no way of finding that out or of making an assessment against which we can judge the government. We tend to naively assume that because we’re spending a lot of money on defence, we must be well defended.

The inability to assess the adequacy of our own defence occurs because defence policy over the years has been all about the inputs (lists of ships, planes and tanks to be acquired) and has nothing to do with outputs. Winning wars is the most important defence output, but that’s only partially about weapons and mainly about military operations. As Andrew says, not having a coherent defence policy hasn’t really mattered for the last 70 years. Now, in the current strategic circumstances, it has become critical.

In this strategic environment, governments must be prepared to commit to defence outputs—to being able to win wars, not just having the weapons that are inputs. They must specify what they think the next war will be like, at least generically, and set out the most dangerous operational scenario Australia is likely to face and how the government and opposition in turn will confront it.

And governments must be prepared to say this publicly so that voters can hold governments accountable for defence. Then we will get parliamentarians talking. The claim that a general operational statement of the object of defence policy should be classified is simply false. Our specific contingency plans against specific countries or eventualities should be classified, but not the general standard to which we should build our defences before a specific threat develops.

The problem for voters is that almost the only thing we can judge is expenditure: we said we would spend 2% by 2019 and we achieved that or we didn’t. But does that equal success? Defence is about winning, not spending. Risk in defence policy is all about how much is not spent on defence.

A methodological framework may be needed to encourage the kind of discussion that Andrew and I want. The steps might be as follows:

  1. Defence states the maximum sophisticated joint warfighting force that can be deployed and sustained by Australia and how long it would take to be ready for combat. That would clarify, as a defence output, what is being bought in operational terms.
  2. The strategic and intelligence communities describe the most dangerous but likely generic threat in operational terms.
  3. Defence then assesses the force needed to counter the generic threat, compares that to the actual force from step 1, and states and costs the deficiencies using ‘defence warning time’ and ‘defence preparation time’.

Such a process would provide voters and MPs with the information they need to understand the risk that’s being taken and conduct an open and profitable debate. Each political party can then explain how it would manage risk given the agreed costs. Instead of focusing on what defence has or needs, the political argument would be about how each party proposed to manage risk.

It’s not just our parliament that needs to throw off the shackles of bipartisanship; every voter needs to be involved. Once the voters have the knowledge and the will to vote in terms of how well each party is likely to manage defence risk, then parliamentarians will be counted in the debate.