Tag Archive for: Labor

The statecraft and strategy of the Albanese government

At the mid-point of Labor’s three-year term, the international strategy and statecraft of the new government is more fully formed than its domestic identity.

Global turmoil—the polycrisis—has quickly tested and tempered the government’s world view.

Whatever its political instincts or policy hopes, Labor has run a grimly realist foreign policy seeking a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. Just as the government restored bilateral equilibrium with China, so it seeks regional equilibrium. Times are tough when just getting some balance is the height of Canberra’s hopes.

The government’s 18-month achievement has been getting stability with China while embracing the AUKUS deal with the United States and the United Kingdom. Balance, indeed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s twin trips to Washington and Beijing were highlights of a complex work in progress.

Labor has defined itself internationally; not so, domestically. Normally, at the mid-point of its term, a new government’s story to the voters is firming into place. Delivering a couple of budgets does wonders in forcing a government to choose. By their decisions, ye shall know them. Yet Labor has been buffeted domestically as much as it has been tested internationally. While some foreign policy returns are in, the domestic time of truth arrives next year.

Coming out of the Covid cave, Australians have been hit by inflation and a cost-of-living crunch. Whether from grumpiness or dollar pressures, the nation was in no mood to ponder history and write First Nations peoples into the constitution. Holding the Voice referendum spoke well of Albanese’s ambition and optimism; the failure asked how well his government could talk to—or understand—its people. The kindest view is that the Voice loss is just history repeating, as Australia again rejected a Labor referendum.

The political effect is that a government with the narrowest of majorities must reintroduce and redefine itself to the voters during the 18-month sprint to the next election.

The opposition has been wailing about ‘Airbus Albo’, arguing that the prime minister spends too much time overseas enjoying foreign exotica, when he should be at home mowing the lawn and paying bills. See that as political ju-jitsu, trying to turn an opponent’s strength into a weakness. The fact check says Albanese is on trend with his predecessors: 18 overseas trips in 18 months, nudging him ‘slightly ahead of former prime ministers Scott Morrison (17 trips) and Tony Abbott (16) at the same point in their tenure’.

Where Albanese is unique is that no previous PM left the country the day he took office: after being sworn in, Albanese zipped to the parliament building for a press conference, then flew to Japan for a Quad summit. That first day set the model for a government that had to confront foreign policy as the most pressing of priorities. It makes for a different—even unusual—Labor government.

Outward-facing international portfolios are held by those in command. For the first time since the Whitlam government (1972–1975), Australia’s defence minister is also the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles. Labor’s Senate leader is the foreign minister, Penny Wong, while the Senate deputy leader is the trade minister, Don Farrell. The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says the economic downturn in China is one of the two biggest risks facing Australia’s economy.

The foreign minister’s most important diplomatic relationship is always with the prime minister. And that makes Wong central to this government because she is the PM’s close factional ally and friend. The ABC’s Brett Worthington posited recently that Wong is actually Australia’s second-in-command, ahead of Marles:

A deputy leader typically gets whatever portfolio they want. Insiders say Marles wanted to be the foreign minister but knew it was a job he could never gain while Wong was in the parliament. Many in Labor see Wong as Albanese’s praetorian guard and enforcer, the person tasked with keeping those with leadership aspirations in check (looking at you, Treasurer Jim Chalmers).

The press gallery view is that Wong runs a tighter office than Marles, but that may merely reflect the fact that Defence is an unruly big beast. The beast is an expensive animal to feed, as the AUKUS submarines will prove.

Labor has grasped the AUKUS chalice bequeathed by Morrison’s Coalition government and made the policy its own. Whether the chalice is jewelled or poisoned or both, Kim Beazley notes that AUKUS was resoundingly endorsed by Labor’s national conference. The former Labor leader says the agreement ‘represents the most important revolution in Labor’s approach to defence policy in 60 years’.

Labor has tried to sell its strategic vision by constant use of the word ‘statecraft’, to bring defence and foreign policy together with broader elements of economic policy. The statecraft mantra offers product differentiation from the previous government’s banging of the defence drum. Certainly, statecraft is a useful idea for a powerful foreign minister seeking to give her department a bigger role at the top table, countering chronic underfunding over decades that has inflicted bureaucratic anaemia on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The statecraft story Labor can tell after 18 months is strong: rebalance with China, reach higher with the US alliance, and reassure the South Pacific by changing Australia’s story on climate change. In her first year as foreign minister, Wong made 10 visits to the South Pacific, fulfilling the promise to go to the 17 other members of the Pacific Islands Forum. The Falepili Union with Tuvalu is a ‘a grand bargain, albeit in microcosm’ that could offer much to the islands.

The international work to rebalance, reach higher and reassure is a model for a government that must use the next 18 months to reconnect with voters.

Time to prepare for a cyber version of the coronavirus crisis

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we think about national resilience in the face of global crises. It’s shown us, brutally, how such disasters can cascade around an interconnected, interdependent world. It also invites us to question what other potential shocks we might be vulnerable to as a nation.

In this new world, Australia should be thinking hard about its national cyber resilience. We can’t predict the future, but we often have forewarnings. We might not know the where or the when of the next crisis, but we often have a good idea of the what. In the past 100 years, Covid-19 was preceded by the Spanish flu, MERS, SARS, H1N1 and Ebola. We had seen enough to know the potential risk.

The next global cyber crisis will have been preceded by NotPetya and WannaCry. In 2017, the NotPetya malware, designed to propagate rapidly and automatically, began corrupting computer systems across the world. It happened swiftly and indiscriminately in a way that now seems analogous to the coronavirus pandemic.

When the NotPetya wiper was first unleashed by the Russian government on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, the malware crippled hospitals, airports, banks, the power grid and almost every government department. In an interconnected world, it quickly spread globally and ultimately caused damage that cost US$10 billion. The crippling of a major logistics company, Maersk, meant that one-fifth of the world’s shipping was affected.

Only a month before, the North Korean government released the WannaCry worm as a way of raising much-needed hard currency through cybercrime, in this case via ransomware. It spread rapidly, causing up to US$8 billion of economic damage while threatening even more serious harm. The network of Britain’s National Health Service was corrupted, causing panic and delaying surgeries. The UK National Audit Office reported that the attack had potentially serious implications for the NHS and its ability to provide care to patients. ‘It was a relatively unsophisticated attack and could have been prevented by the NHS following basic IT security best practice’, the audit office said.

Both attacks could have been much worse. A report commissioned by Lloyd’s as part of its cyber risk management project has warned that a global infection by contagious malware could cause up to US$193 billion of economic damage worldwide. The impact on interdependent essential services would be enormous.

Unfortunately, Australia is not well prepared to confront this kind of widely dispersed threat. Late last year, David Irvine, a former head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, warned that ‘we need … to have much more effort by both the government and the private sector and individuals into developing what I’ll call national cyber resilience to a far greater level than we have now’.

The Australian Signals Directorate has some of the best cybersecurity capabilities in the world, but throughout the nation, our cyber resilience is highly variable. Six years of reviews by the Australian National Audit Office show that 40% of Commonwealth entities continue to fail to implement basic cybersecurity measures. Last year’s review of the Commonwealth’s cybersecurity posture confirmed sustained indifference to this national vulnerability.

Australia’s major banks can draw on large teams of highly skilled cybersecurity professionals to confront the most sophisticated adversaries, but time-constrained and resource-poor small and medium businesses struggle to protect themselves from even the most basic commodity attacks.

The Australian Labor Party has released a new policy discussion paper, National cyber resilience: Is Australia prepared for a computer COVID-19? and convened a stakeholder roundtable to canvas policy options that should be considered now to ensure that Australia is ready for cyber incidents in the future.

To deliver national cyber resilience, we need to reconceptualise our approach to cybersecurity policy. We need to think like public health experts trying to improve the health of a diverse population rather than like defence professionals trying to secure a single entity. We need policies that bring cybersecurity to the community and build cyber resilience throughout the country.

In our paper, we call on the government to follow the lead of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and implement a framework for active cyber defence in Australia. That would provide a set of tools for automated, scalable mitigation against the most common cyberattacks. The objective is to ‘take away most of the harm from most of the people most of the time’.

The head of the NCSC, Ciaran Martin, said active cyber defence was based on the premise that in a modern economy ‘there are some market failures where the government needs to intervene if there is to be an acceptable level of national cyber security hygiene’. To promote national cyber resilience, Martin argued that the government needed to make ‘more fundamental interventions’ to ‘improve the digital homeland’. Or, as the NCSC’s technical director, Ian Levy, memorably put it, ‘getting off our backsides and doing something’.

Active cyber defence is not a silver bullet. It can’t defend against sophisticated attacks. But it could improve the collective safety of Australia’s internet by hardening our most vulnerable organisations against high-volume, low-complexity attacks.

We’re also exploring the creation of a civilian cyber corps, a kind of cyber version of the state fire and emergency services, made up of experienced cybersecurity professionals who work as volunteers to build the capabilities of vulnerable organisations in their communities such as not-for-profits and small businesses, and potentially to help respond to large-scale incidents in a crisis.

Such organisations are already at work. While Estonia’s volunteer-based Cyber Defence Unit is attached to its paramilitary organisation, the Estonian Defence League, it emphasises broad national resilience and public education. The unit runs courses in schools, conducts simulation exercises in government departments and educates policymakers while also providing an emergency response capacity.

After a series of cyberattacks crippled its government, banks and online newspapers in 2007, Estonia well understands that cyber incidents can threaten the nation’s resilience. It is a lesson Australia should draw on.

We hope the discussion paper kicks off a constructive debate and a reconsideration of our cybersecurity policies. We shouldn’t wait until another global crisis is upon us before we respond. Leadership requires preparedness, especially when the threats—and our vulnerabilities—are already well known.

Shorten’s not getting ahead of himself, but the tape measure is out

With the Australian federal election likely to be called in about a fortnight—the weekend after the 2 April budget—behind the scenes the Labor Party is ‘measuring the curtains’ of government.

Any sign of hubris must be avoided, but a prudent opposition—especially with polls suggesting it’s soon likely to be the executive—needs to be well prepared for the first days of office.

One advantage Labor has is that its leader, Bill Shorten, and many of its senior figures have been in power before. They have experience in setting up offices, establishing relations with the bureaucracy and working out early priorities.

Labor’s main frontbenchers would move into the ministries they’ve been ‘shadowing’. But there would inevitably be some shuffling for others.

One question the government keeps asking (not unreasonably) is who would get the crucial Home Affairs portfolio.

There is no current ‘shadow’ for Home Affairs. Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus has the national security area—Dreyfus is expected in government to be attorney-general but not home affairs minister.

The Home Affairs Department, controversial since its inception, is itself in the frame.

Labor’s platform commits it to review the Home Affairs portfolio arrangements ‘to ensure they are fit for purpose’. Assuming the department survived, a major issue would be whether it lost oversight of two key agencies, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

The Australian Federal Police Association recently called for the AFP to be shifted back as a stand-alone agency under the attorney-general’s umbrella, ‘to protect its organisational independence’.

ASIO—like the AFP, formerly under the attorney-general—also doesn’t look comfortable under Home Affairs.

In the security community, the future of the department’s secretary Mike Pezzullo under a Shorten government is a matter of intense interest.

Pezzullo has a past with Labor (in the office of opposition leader Kim Beazley); now he’s strongly identified with the Coalition’s harsh asylum-seeker policy, as well as being seen as one of the toughest operators in the bureaucracy.

Labor sources say there’s ‘a debate’ about what should be done with Pezzullo. Retaining him would have the advantage of sending a signal to the people smugglers about no weakening in border policy, something Labor would want to do from the start.

One senior public servant certainly headed for the chop under Labor (if he didn’t quit first) is Treasury secretary Phil Gaetjens. He was chief of staff to Scott Morrison when Morrison was treasurer, and the opposition regarded his appointment as highly partisan.

Among the names being canvassed to replace him are Jenny Wilkinson, head of the Parliamentary Budget Office (which is doing the opposition’s policy costings); Steven Kennedy, secretary of the Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities; and Blair Comley, a former departmental head sacked by Tony Abbott, who became secretary of the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet and is now in the private sector.

If Wilkinson got the job, she’d be the first female head of Treasury. If she didn’t, she’d be presiding over a PBO with an expanded role. Labor has said it would transfer the budget’s macroeconomic forecasting to the PBO to remove the number-crunching from political influence.

Of course, all this is running in front of the story. As the election contest turns into the home straight, Shorten is several lengths ahead in the polls. But he still has to win the race.

Labor will have to navigate some difficult policy announcements in coming weeks.

On climate change, it must outline final details of what it would do—in particular, the measures it would take in the non-electricity sectors (transport, large industry, land) as part of reaching its ambitious target of reducing economy-wide emissions by 45% by 2030. It is also to reveal whether it would use Australia’s Kyoto credits to help meet the target.

On industrial relations, Labor has flagged that it would change the legislation governing the Fair Work Commission’s setting of the minimum wage, to achieve a more generous deal for the low paid. But it has yet to say precisely what new principles it would insert. And it will have to be more specific about the extent of its support for the return of what it calls ‘multi-employer’ bargaining.

An especially sensitive announcement will be the date for the commencement of the crackdown on negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. When the policy was unveiled in the last term, the housing market was overheated. The situation has transformed, with downturns led by Sydney and Melbourne.

Setting an appropriate implementation date will require careful judgement about likely future trends in the market and the policy’s impact on them.

Arguably, it would be politically savvy for Labor to make one or more of these announcements quickly, before the campaign proper.

The government will try to use the budget to change the game as much as it can, and Labor can’t anticipate how far that will happen.

The budget is expected to contain big tax cuts. Shorten will possess the fiscal capacity to match these, but Labor will have to decide whether and how it would distribute them differently.

As an ardent practitioner of continuous electioneering, Shorten should be expected to put in a disciplined performance during the actual campaign.

Still, campaigns are obstacle courses even for the most seasoned players.

The election result will show whether the voters are willing to go along with Labor’s bold policies. We do know that they have been carefully thought out, not made up on the run. We can expect Labor’s transition-to-government plans to be given similar attention.

But there’s another challenge a prospective prime minister needs to think about.

With a fickle electorate, an often feral media and the torment of regular opinion polls, how does a government handle the public impatience that can make the business of governing for the long term so difficult, sometimes nearly impossible, these days?

This feature of modern politics can be as testing as winning an election.The Conversation

Labor commits to creation of Australian fuel reserve

Australia used to be a net exporter of oil but today, we’re at the other end of the international fuel supply chain and this puts us at the mercy of events.

We live in volatile times—and whether it’s trade wars or actual conflict, rising global tensions will directly impact Australia’s fuel security.

Security experts have made this clear. Dr Paul Barnes from ASPI has pointed out the vulnerability of our position in the chain.

The Lowy Institute’s Dr Euan Graham said that a lack of fuel risks undermining our investment in military hardware. What’s the point of all that high-tech machinery if we don’t have the fuel to power it?

And Curtin University’s Dr Alexey Muraviev has said that our current situation means we are ‘playing Russian roulette’ with fuel security.

In short, in a crisis situation, fuel security affects nearly everything else: our capacity to transport troops and equipment, our ability to move food and medicine.

Having a strategic fleet is one very important piece of insurance against this international risk because it reduces our reliance on foreign fuels.

If we’re going to increase our national fuel security, we need to increase our national fuel stocks.

As a member nation of the International Energy Agency, we’re supposed to hold the equivalent of 90 days’ worth of fuel on reserve.

Right now, we have just 23 days of jet fuel, just 22 days of diesel and only 19 days of automotive gas.

There are three ways we can increase these stocks.

One, parliament could pass a law requiring industry to hold more fuel reserves, putting the onus on private companies to do more of the heavy lifting. The problem with this approach is that the most likely outcome is that big business will do what they always do—pass the cost straight on to their customers. And the last thing anyone needs is to pay even higher prices for fuel and energy.

The second option, is we could purchase oil stock ‘tickets’, giving us a right to buy oil from other countries. This is a useful step, in the short-term. But it doesn’t make any real difference to our long-term physical supply.

The third option is a government-owned reserve buying and storing additional fuel to guard Australia against international shocks and to guarantee our energy security and independence.

If elected, a Labor government will create a national fuel reserve.

We’ll establish a new Australian fuel security company, to purchase and manage this national fuel reserve—and to help drive future research in bio-fuels. And we will work with the states and territories, with industry, with oil and gas importers, refineries, with your union and with national security experts on the detail, design and delivery.

A national fuel reserve is an investment in our national sovereignty, in our self-reliance. In volatile times, this is an insurance policy for the nation, a plan to protect us against international supply shocks.

And it is urgent.

Just over a year ago, a bipartisan report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security told the current government that ensuring a continuous supply of fuel was a matter of ‘national importance’.

The report called for a national security review of the fuel industry to be completed within six months.

But we’ve heard nothing.

And again, just as with the strategic fleet, other nations have already moved in this direction. The United States, Japan, South Korea, most of the European Union, South Africa, India, Russia and New Zealand all have government-controlled fuel reserves.

These countries are doing their part, they are taking responsible measures to boost global fuel security—but in Australia we’re not pulling our weight.