Tag Archive for: Lessons in leadership

Defence processes need a rethink now more than ever, says Linda Reynolds

Successive attempts to reform the Australian Defence establishment over the past century have done little to improve processes, says former defence minister Linda Reynolds.

‘They’re a bit like herds of elephants sweeping across Defence and never being fully implemented, and never really realising any change before the next round of reforms,’ Reynolds says in a video interview as part of ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series.

She tells former ASPI executive director Peter Jennings that in her time as an army officer she developed a strong interest in why Defence went through cycles of totally unproductive reform.

Reynolds was minister for defence industry from March to May 2019 and defence minister from then until March 2021.

Long before that and with no idea that she’d one day be minister, Reynolds did her master’s dissertation in the need for reform in Defence. She looked back to before federation and concluded that no defence white paper had ever been fully implemented, fully funded and actually delivered.

‘And it was really clear to me that a number of trends over time were repeating themselves over and over,’ she says. ‘For example, in terms of acquisition capability, there has never been a golden age of defence acquisition, and there’s always been constant government disappointment and public disappointment in that materiel side of Defence. I wanted to understand why that happens, and how we could possibly break out of that.’

A rethink is needed more than ever today when geostrategic circumstances and technology are evolving, Reynolds says. ‘You need the right strategy, and it needs to be recalibrated regularly. You then need to have the right force structure plan, the capability plan to deliver that.’

But that’s still not enough to deliver the necessary strategy and capability, she says. ‘You then need to have the organisation, the Defence enterprise, which has driven I think many a departmental secretary mad, trying to harness and to do that in harmony with the military side of Defence.’ An additional issue, she notes, is that this can only be done with a sufficient budget.

A key report produced in Reynolds’s time was the 2020 defence strategic update, which concluded that with the technological transformation and militarisation underway in the region, Australia could no longer assume it would have 10 years’ warning time of a major conflict. With that came a force structure plan to re-equip the army, air force and navy and to identify two crucial new operational domains—cyber and information warfare, and space.

She says the pandemic and climate change have brought new threats, including more intense bushfires and floods and cyclones coming further south. Defence must adapt to deal with them.

The ADF’s response to the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 very quickly became the largest ever domestic mobilisation of the military in Australia’s history—exponentially larger than for Cyclone Tracy, says Reynolds. Many lessons were learned within Defence, by her as minister, and by the government. It was wonderful to see Australians understand the capabilities of the ADF and its personnel, not just on operations on the other side of the world but at home showing their passion for their nation.

It was clear, she says, that Australians expected the defence forces to do more in times of very large national crises that were beyond the capability of states and territories to deliver.

Reynolds says she spent a lot of time in the months before the fires with Defence and its chief working through ‘what ifs’. ‘We were expecting a bad season—catastrophic bushfires in the predictions.’

A key part of that planning was a trial call out of the reserves. ‘It was a very good thing we did, because it was a very clunky and slow process, the trial. So, when we unfortunately had to do it for real, it was done very quickly.’

‘There were still lessons that were learned from that process, but it worked incredibly well,’ says Reynolds.

‘Almost to the day, when we closed Operation Bushfire Assist, we opened Operation Covid Assist, and that has now become the largest domestic operation in our nation’s history.’

Reynolds was a senior officer in the army reserve in 2011 when what became known as the ‘ADFA Skype scandal’ erupted. A male cadet at the Australian Defence Force Academy secretly filmed himself having consensual sex with a female cadet and live-streamed the video to fellow male cadets. The female cadet was unaware she was being filmed.

That episode ultimately exposed deep prejudices against women in parts of the ADF that were profoundly disturbing, says Reynolds. The scandal, what it revealed and the work done to correct that behaviour shaped her as a female leader, she says.

The then sex discrimination commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, was called in by the defence minister, Stephen Smith, to investigate the episode and to examine gender attitudes in Defence more broadly.

When details of the scandal emerged, Reynolds was attending the Australian Defence and Command College at Weston Creek. She was asked by the then chief of the army, David Morrison, to join his gender diversity board. ‘It was somewhat ironic that I was the only female on the board at the time,’ says Reynolds, ‘but I understand things have progressed a long way since then.’

She recalls that experience as shocking and sad, especially a focus group meeting Broderick organised for female officers at the level of colonel across the three services. Broderick was surprised that some of the women hadn’t turned up and others made it clear that they didn’t want to be there. The commissioner asked why that was so, and one of the women responded: ‘I don’t want to be seen as a woman. I don’t want to talk about being a woman. I just want to put my head down and keep doing my job.’

Reynolds says she’d heard such comments from women throughout her career. ‘But it just dawned on me, what have we done to women in this organisation that they don’t want to be seen as a woman? What is wrong with being seen as a woman? What is wrong with leading as a woman? These are some of the most capable women in our nation, and they wanted to deny their own gender identity.

‘And the more I started thinking about it, and then looking with new eyes at the issue of gender, I realised that to fit in in the military, and in the Liberal Party, I had, like I think probably every other woman, adopted the behaviours, masculine behaviours to get by.

‘And I describe it now as an ill-fitting mantle that you go to work with. You feel uncomfortable, and you’re not quite sure why. And then after a time, you just forget to take it off when you go home.

‘So that completely changed and going through that whole process of understanding unconscious bias, understanding process, and change, and transformation was very empowering for me, because it was then that I found my voice as a female leader.’

Reynolds says a lot has changed since then within Defence. ‘One of the wonderful things now is that while I was the first female brigadier in the army reserves, I’m certain that there are many more behind me and there are now more above me in terms of rank.

‘And the wonderful thing is, there are so many women who are now doing things as women. It is much easier to have a career and have a family and deploy as a woman. There’s an amazing diversity of these most amazing women who are getting opportunities to command forces overseas as well as here in Australia, and they are doing a magnificent job.’

A new issue erupted in 2020, when she was defence minister. After an investigation by the Office of the Inspector-General of the ADF, the Brereton report found credible information that war crimes had been committed by the special forces soldiers in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.

That demonstrated that, despite a long reform journey, the ADF still had a long way to go, says Reynolds.

‘That was probably the most challenging issue for me personally, ethically and leadership-wise,’ she says. ‘It was very clear to me that it was going to be worse than most Australians would have thought possible, and certainly it would be incredibly challenging. And I think it was all of that and more.’

The government established the Office of the Special Investigator to work through the criminal justice process. That’s likely to take years, says Reynolds.

ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series is produced with the support of Lockheed Martin Australia.

Resetting the dial on Australian defence manufacturing

Christopher Pyne remembers well his dismay at the closure of the car industry in South Australia and his fear that it would have a serious impact on the nation’s skills base.

‘I thought to myself, “This is bad”,’ Pyne recalls. ‘It was said constantly that Australia needed people qualified in science, technology, engineering and maths, but if there were no jobs, they would not study those subjects.’

The motor vehicle manufacturing shutdown was a significant blow to Australia’s economic capability not well understood in parts of the country that were home to financial or agricultural centres, he says. ‘They don’t have engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, et cetera, working on the stock market floor or in Martin Place, but they do in manufacturing.’

In a video interview as part of ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series, Pyne tells former ASPI executive director Peter Jennings that he was determined to act on that concern when he was appointed defence industry minister by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in July 2016.

Turnbull wanted a cabinet-level minister in the portfolio because he believed that overseeing a massive program of defence acquisitions—particularly shipbuilding—was a job of its own. ‘We had to put in place the structures to give defence industry and Defence a very clear guideline of what the government wanted, and it was too much for one defence minister, who also has to manage operations and engagement with counterparts and is often on the road.’

Pyne says reinventing Australia’s strategic industrial base to meet the nation’s national security needs and industrial capability was a highlight of his career. ‘We’ve got $200 billion of the biggest military capability build-up in our nation’s history. A large part of that can be used to remake our strategic industrial base.’

He was proud to have moved the dial on industrial capability, knowing the impact that would have across the economy for decades, he says. Another highlight was serving the men and women of the Australian Defence Force, being their advocate in cabinet and in the National Security Committee and always keeping uppermost in the government’s mind: ‘Are they safe? Can we bring them home?’

His goal was to take the capabilities Defence’s leaders needed, assessing how much could be produced in Australia, and ensuring weapons were available if supply lines were cut in a conflict.

Pyne and longtime friend and then–defence minister Marise Payne were both in cabinet.

‘I think it worked well because it was me and Marise,’ says Pyne. ‘Malcolm used to describe us as being like Phobos and Deimos, the mythical horses that drew the chariot of Mars, where it’s two horses pulling the same chariot.

‘Marise and I were in constant communication. There were obviously tensions between our offices because, unfortunately, in politics people are tribal, but they weren’t between me and Marise, and we worked very well together.’

Pyne says that when he became defence minister in August 2018, that role operated on a different plane. He travelled a lot because he believed it was important to be out in the field as much as possible. Visiting personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at bases in the United Arab Emirates, brought home to him how vital their work was and it was important to ensure that they knew how much their country appreciated that work.

Pyne says ministers who don’t keep firm control of their day can be overwhelmed by the work and he was determined to keep close control over his own agenda. That included using the Parliament House communications system for his emails rather than switching to the Defence system. With each portfolio he held, he avoided using his department’s email.

‘The first thing that everybody does in departments is try to get you onto their network so they can look at all your emails. They also try and have access to your calendar so they can fill it with meetings or visits to far-flung parts of the nation or the globe. And they also try and fill your office with departmental staff.

‘So the first thing I did was tell Defence I was staying with the APH network, which horrified them, of course. Secondly, I wouldn’t allow them to have any access to my calendar, or my diary. And thirdly, I refused their very generous offers of filling my office with people from Russell Hill. Not because the people from Russel Hill aren’t fabulous—and I was often out at Russell Hill as the minister and used my office there more than most ministers had ever done—but because I had 18,000 public servants on Russell Hill and other parts of the nation, I didn’t need to have 16 more in my office.’

Pyne says the minister’s office is the political layer over the bureaucracy. ‘There’s no point in having the bureaucracy in the political layer because they have a different goal in their minds,’ he says. ‘They will return to the department and are unlikely to put the government or the minister’s political career ahead of everything else. They’ll be thinking, “What’s good for the department, and potentially my own career?”’

Asked what advice he’d give to an incoming minister, Pyne says they should ‘get control of the agenda and never let it go. And don’t allow yourself to be so busy that you can’t make decisions, because I think there is a danger in the Westminster system that you can be so busy that you’re not actually getting anything done. You are busy doing a lot of things that are useful, but who’s making the decisions?’

Pyne says ministers must be aware that they make the decisions. ‘If you get a recommendation from the department or a brief from the department that you don’t agree with, you can send it back.’

He says a sense has crept into federal, state and territory governments that if a minister doesn’t agree with their department, the media will say the minister is wrong.

‘It’s the minister’s job to make the decisions, and it’s the department’s job to make the recommendations—but it’s not the minister’s job to be a cipher for the recommendations.’

Advice from the military on operational matters is different, Pyne says. ‘You wouldn’t want a situation where the minister for defence is telling the chief of the defence force that we should put our military capability here rather than there, or I think you should land on that spot not this spot.’

Similarly, the bureaucracy must not believe that it’s the decision-maker. ‘You want Russell Hill to think it’s their job to give the minister the best possible advice and it’s his or her job to make the decision,’ he says.

The minister and the department must be partners. ‘If they want a cipher, they can buy a performing dog.’

Pyne recalls the then departmental secretary, Dennis Richardson, telling him: ‘You will be disappointed in Defence. There will be terrible things that will happen because it’s the nature of our business that you will have to address’. An example, Pyne says, was a later minister, Linda Reynolds, having to deal with the Brereton report on atrocities in Afghanistan.

Pyne has never been reluctant to express his views and when Jennings asks about his relationship with Richardson and the CDF, Mark Binskin, he responds: ‘Well, Dennis was the first secretary that ever swore at me in a meeting—which was very refreshing.

‘It was the first day. I said to Dennis, “Well, if that’s the rule, I’m perfectly happy to be part of that, but we’re going to have to meet sort of late in the afternoon so we can share a drink and you can swear at me.’”

Pyne says Richardson was a very professional public servant and, as a new defence minister, it was great to have him there because he was so experienced and a safe pair of hands.

Greg Moriarty, who followed Richardson, had been chief of staff in the prime minister’s office with a very long career in the public service. ‘So, I was very well served by my secretaries.’

In terms of regrets, Pyne says he would have liked to have done more for veterans who feel that they have been let down by Defence on mental health issues.

He says defence was the best portfolio in the government and he compares that to his time in education. State governments are not involved in defence, says Pyne. ‘You don’t have a ministerial council trying to stop you doing anything all the time. That was the problem in education; sometimes you felt that going to the state and territory and federal ministers’ meeting was like going into the Colosseum because nobody seemed to want to actually have any outcome from it except fighting. The most exciting things seemed to be the press conference after every state ministers’ meeting, where they just bagged the Commonwealth government. You’d think, “This is really a bit asinine.”’

Pyne recalls his time in cabinet. ‘Being the leader of the House, being minister for defence puts you at the centre of everything. You’re on the leadership group, you run the parliament, you’re on the NSC, obviously in the cabinet. And you’re in that small clutch of ministers who, if something really important is happening to the nation, you’re going to be consulted about it. So it’s very exhilarating.’

ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series is produced with the support of Lockheed Martin Australia.

Former defence minister recalls turning point in Australia–China relations

Kevin Andrews remembers well his concern when, as defence minister, he was briefed on developments that signalled a major turning point in Australia’s relationship with China.

When Xi Jinping stood on the White House lawn in September 2015 and declared that China was not militarising islands it had created in the South China Sea, ‘I knew that was totally wrong,’ says Andrews, who held the portfolio from December 2014 to September 2015.

In a video interview as part of ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series, Andrews tells former ASPI executive director Peter Jennings that he knew from intelligence briefings that China’s construction of these artificial islands was continuing apace, and Beijing was militarising those structures.

‘This was clearly a threat, because they weren’t being built as tourist spots, to go and look at the South China Sea; they were being built as military installations,’ says Andrews.

‘They were building runways, hangars, missile installations, ports that their coastguard and naval vessels could dock at, et cetera, et cetera. So, this was a reality,’ he says.

‘I suppose at the time both we and our major allies, including the Americans, thought that we would be able to somehow contain this, that this would be the limit of China’s aspirations or ambitions, but we’ve found since then that that’s not the case.’

Andrews says he strongly favoured Royal Australian Navy vessels carrying out freedom-of-navigation exercises through the South China Sea, ‘and so should the Americans and the Brits and anybody else who happened to be there, just make it a regular exercise’.

Other members of the government were more restrained and so, says Andrews, was the navy.

He does not recall being aware of a Northern Territory plan to lease of the Port of Darwin for 99 years to a Chinese company.

When he did find out about it, he was dismayed, he says.

‘I don’t know whether it ultimately did go to the NSC [National Security Committee], but it was obviously a decision that should have.’ Darwin was of national strategic importance as the jumping-off point to Asia and an important military installation.

With a long interest in social policy and a wish to do serious welfare reform, Andrews says he was surprised to get a call from the prime minister, Tony Abbott, asking him to switch to the defence portfolio. ‘I thought, look, it’s silly to remove me from this area when I’m just in the process of getting things done,’ he says.

‘My approach to every ministry I’ve had is to essentially put your head down for the first two months, learn everything you can, read everything you can, get as briefed as much as you can, make as few public statements that you can get away with making, and really try to get on top of the portfolio, at least at a broad, superficial, or a bit more than superficial level, and that’s the way I approached defence.’

He sought to build a close working relationship with Defence Department secretary Dennis Richardson and Australian Defence Force chief Mark Binskin.

One secret to being a successful minister is to be absolutely genuine, Andrews says.

‘Be yourself and don’t pretend to be anything else, don’t pretend to be an expert in the area when you’re dealing with people who are experts in the area in terms of the detail. Understand that your job is much more at a strategic and political level.’

Andrews says he aspired from the outset to ensure that when he, the CDF and the secretary spoke in public, ‘there would not be a cigarette paper between us’. While military operations are directed and commanded by uniformed leaders, the minister and the NSC authorise missions, he says.

Just 10 days after being sworn in, Andrews flew to Iraq with Abbott.

To go there was very important, he says, because to be on the ground provided experience of what was happening. ‘To fly from the airport to the “green zone” in helicopters, surrounded by special forces, just gave you a sense that this is a dangerous place.’

Talking to the troops gave an understanding of their experiences. ‘Coming at a very early stage in the ministry, I think that was very significant in terms of my better appreciation of what the defence forces are actually experiencing.’

Andrews says he tried to understand defence platforms and capabilities at a strategic level and not to get bogged down in detail. ‘I didn’t need to know how a destroyer worked in fine detail or the ins and outs of a submarine, but I did need to know what’s the strategic importance, what’s the timeframe we need to be putting in place.’

He was conscious that there’d been long delays in replacement of equipment, especially for the navy. ‘And so, it was I suppose easy enough to come to a decision that we’ve got to get on with this job.’ With that was a promise to return defence spending to above 2% of GDP, and the development of a 20-year equipment plan.

On Abbott’s wish to buy Japanese Soryu-class submarines, Andrews says that was about much more than just the submarine. ‘It was about how we build a strategic relationship in our area, in the Indo-Pacific, with a major power, namely Japan, that had been very friendly to us, and we were very keen to build relationships with Japan, with Singapore, with India, with like-minded nations in the region.’

There had to be a competition to get the best boat.

‘The competitive evaluation process was deliberately designed to address the technical issues, the financial question, and the political issue that we were dealing with domestically here in Australia,’ says Andrews.

Quotations were sought from the Germans, the French and the Japanese, which involved options of a full offshore build, a full onshore build or a hybrid build. That was done to compare the costs knowing that offshore would be the cheapest, because it was being built where submarines had been built before. ‘And it was also to try to deal with the domestic political problem, and that is that there was this clamour for the submarines to be entirely built in Australia,’ Andrews says.

‘My view always was that it should be a hybrid build. We know from other shipbuilding that the most expensive costs come with the first two or three vessels. We knew from a RAND study of surface ships that it can cost up to 45% more to build a ship onshore in Australia compared to offshore, and my view was with the submarine that differential would be even greater.’

Jennings notes that a mystery of the process was that the Swedes, the principal designers of the navy’s Collins-class submarines, were left out.

Andrews says that was discussed, but he could not go into detail. ‘The clear advice to me was that the Swedish submarine simply wasn’t up to what we required for Australia, whereas the other three, with modification obviously, could possibly meet our requirements.’

It was assessed that the German submarines were being built for the North Sea and the Baltic, and the Japanese needed to be bigger and more developed.

Ultimately the French proposal was accepted, even though it was a nuclear-powered design that had to be retrofitted with a conventional power plant.

Andrews says the submarine selection process was his most difficult task as defence minister.

‘I think Australian domestic politics, and if I can be absolutely frank, South Australian domestic politics, perverted this discussion for a long period of time under both Labor and Liberal–National governments.’

A colleague saying in the party room that every bolt and weld must be done in South Australia illustrated the extent of the problem. ‘I think the delays that occurred under the Labor Party in terms of making decisions were partly the consequence of how do you resolve this problem.’

Andrews says this was in the context of South Australia’s economy languishing with the end of the vehicle manufacturing industry and jobs being lost.

‘And some of those issues are still playing out today.’

ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series is produced with the support of Lockheed Martin Australia.

Former defence minister David Johnston: weigh carefully the use of lethal force

Former defence minister David Johnston attended the funerals of 26 of the 41 Australians killed on operations in Afghanistan, and he saw at close hand their families’ grief.

‘Then you understand that the application of lethal force and the exposure of men and women to risk has a price,’ he says.

In a video interview as part of ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series, he tells former ASPI executive director Peter Jennings that those experiences brought home to him the care governments must take in placing men and women in danger—and the responsibility they bear when delivering lethal force in combat to strictly comply with legal rules of engagement.

That targeting process was overseen by highly professional officers, in the Australian Defence Force’s joint HQ in Bungendore and in the Middle East, who would ensure that if an airstrike was to be launched, it would be aborted if a civilian was found to be in the blast radius.

‘As a lawyer, I was very keen that we would apply lethal force lawfully,’ Johnston says.

Johnston was defence minister from September 2013 to December 2014, and Jennings asks him what being a West Australian brings to the role.

‘Well, we’ve got about 2.8 million square kilometres in the west,’ says Johnston. ‘We’ve got a trillion dollars’ worth of investment in oil and gas and minerals off the North West Shelf, and we think that’s well worth defending.’

Also good value, he says, is the investment of the eastern states in a defence force with very effective intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to see what’s happening on Australia’s frontier, particularly the maritime frontier.

While he’d had a long interest in defence matters as opposition spokesman, Johnston was only the minister for a year. ‘I’m a reformer and I acknowledge that ministers, particularly in this portfolio, are ships in the night, and that you need to get things done really fast,’ he says.

He regarded the 2014 first principles review as important to improve the acquisitions side of Defence. ‘Not so much in the uniforms’ command-and-control side; that’s their business and they’re very good at it.’

The need to manage major projects was well understood in WA, he says. ‘We build big—$50–$60 billion—projects all the time, with some hiccups, but usually they roll out reasonably well.’

But when he became minister, many defence projects were causing problems. ‘I was very keen that we would reform the commercial side of the department.’

Years in opposition gave him a good grounding in the issues surrounding defence projects. He found that many reliable people came out of the woodwork to give their views.

‘That’s one of the points of massive difference. When you’re a minister, you don’t see anybody, because, “Minister, this is about probity, and you’re not allowed to see any of these people.” So the minister is actually, to some extent, flying blind. Whereas in opposition, everybody tells you what’s happening.’

Johnston says he found that aspect of being a minister very isolating and extremely frustrating. ‘Your one conduit of information, which is heavily controlled, is the department. Now, rightly or wrongly, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. So, I was a bit of a renegade out there, talking to people privately when I’d go to a function and I know that they were watching me talking to senior contractors and even senior officers who would very quietly say to me, we need to do this with Plan Beersheba and I’d go, “Well, thank you for that.”’

Johnston favoured a leaner civilian side of Defence. ‘I looked at countries like South Korea and Japan and others. The public service is in the ones, twos, threes of thousands. We had 23,000 public servants running about 55,000 uniforms when I came in and I thought that was a bit too much.’

That was contrary to his view of where Australia should be in the world—‘small, lean, mean’—and over roughly the year he was minister, he saw the number of Defence civilians drop to 17,000 or 18,000.

Johnston says he was a lone voice in the government of prime minister Tony Abbott calling for the privatisation of Australia’s government-owned submarine building company, ASC, which built the navy’s six Collins-class boats. Many large, reliable, trustworthy corporations were keen to buy the company, he says.

Meanwhile, Abbott had asked Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe if his country could provide Soryu submarines, but that caused a strong reaction from the submarine-building state of South Australia.

‘The prime minister was upset that his numbers weren’t as good as they could be. He needed the South Australians. He promised them a competition and it was a competition that the Japanese were never going to win. There was a lot of resistance from inside Japan, may I say.’

Johnston says the Soryu was an excellent submarine, but Australia needed boats that could traverse enormous distances.

The French won the resultant competition to provide Australia’s submarines.

Johnston says Japan remains a very good friend of Australia and that relationship is very strong in WA.

He spends much of his time now telling the Japanese that in terms of military equipment Australia is interoperable and interchangeable with the US, but without the complexities of the US processes over foreign military sales. And that makes Australia a good place for them to buy.

Johnston says that once problems keeping the Collins submarines at sea were overcome, they were very impressive. The US Navy was particularly impressed with how quiet they and other Swedish-designed diesel-electric powered submarines they worked with were compared to their bigger nuclear-powered boats.

Johnston says he understands the deterrent value of submarines. ‘I’ve seen it on frigates. Everyone goes, “There’s a submarine here somewhere”—it’s panic stations. The problem we have is that submariners love to hear bad things about their platform,’ he says. ‘They want potential adversaries to think it’s a lemon. It [the Collins] is very capable and if you lift the lid on what it’s done, it’s a very good submarine. I don’t want to say any more than that.’

Eventually Johnston caused outrage, including in his own party, by telling parliament of ASC: ‘You wonder why I wouldn’t trust them to build a canoe?’ Soon after that comment, which he described as a ‘rhetorical flourish’, Johnston was replaced.

Asked by Jennings what advice he’d give a new defence minister, Johnston responds: ‘Well, be a reformist but never be bigger than the game itself. Take advice, digest that advice, and be prepared to cop it sweet when your time is up.’

ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series is produced with the support of Lockheed Martin Australia.

Joel Fitzgibbon’s fight with NATO over its Afghanistan strategy

Joel Fitzgibbon recalls being shocked when he became defence minister in 2007 to discover that after years fighting in Afghanistan Australia did not have access to NATO’s planning documents for military operations there.

In a video interview as part of ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series, Fitzgibbon tells former ASPI executive director Peter Jennings that when then prime minister Kevin Rudd handed him the defence portfolio, the ADF’s operational tempo was high with the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

‘I had a very large focus on Afghanistan, and of course, while we supported our intervention there, and certainly supported our troops, we had hoped that there might be an end to that game at some point.’

Fitzgibbon made an early trip to the Australian base at Tarin Kowt. ‘I wanted to ensure the troops knew, absolutely, and were in no doubt, that they had the support of me and their government. I think that’s always critically important.’

He was also particularly concerned about NATO’s strategy in Afghanistan, regarding it as confused and ineffective and lacking strategic focus. ‘So I went to NATO, in some controversy, to share my view with members there and to try to give effect to some change.’

Fitzgibbon was startled to learn that while Australia had a significant number of troops serving in Afghanistan under NATO, the government had no access to the organisation’s planning documents.

‘It might be that we were getting most of it indirectly through our friends and allies in the United States, but it made no sense to me that we were sending our young people potentially to die in the battleground in Afghanistan, and yet we weren’t being given a seat at the planning table.’

He made his concerns clear to NATO officials and Australia was ultimately give a role in the decision-making process.

Asked about high points in his career, Fitzgibbon said he felt that staring NATO down was a rather courageous thing to do, and an important thing to do, and something he was very proud of. ‘There’s a great cartoon on my office wall, which depicts an Australian tank going up to the NATO headquarters with the Australian flag, and two European types looking out from the first floor window, and one asked the other, “What’s got into the Aussies?” And the other responded, “Regime change”.’

Fitzgibbon said he constantly had doubts about the wisdom of operations in Afghanistan. ‘We were committed to the operations on an ongoing basis, but I was really concerned that we weren’t in control of our own destiny, we were at the hands of NATO. And I had real doubts, to be honest, about our capacity to build a government and a democracy in such a failed state, and I think I’ve probably been vindicated in that sense, in the period since.’

Both he and Rudd believed the strategy was flawed and the prospects of success were poor. When the transition was made to training the Afghan army and police they agreed that it was time to start looking for a way out of Afghanistan, ‘but in doing so, not deserting the task we’d set for ourselves’.

Fitzgibbon had been shadow defence minister for the year before the 2007 election and he expected to be made minister when the Rudd government was sworn in. ‘But as you know, these things are never guaranteed.’

He kept in touch with his predecessor Brendan Nelson, who’d been defence minister in the Howard government. There was no formal handover but the two spoke ‘not irregularly’ throughout his time in defence. The two had a good relationship when Fitzgibbon was in opposition. ‘I don’t think he’d mind me saying that I’d ring him from time to time when I was the minister, asking for maybe some guidance and drawing on his experience. Sometimes we found that Defence was giving funny advice and he would joke: ‘Well, I’ll tell you what’s next!’

After more than 11 years in opposition Labor had what Fitzgibbon described as a highly defined game plan for Defence.

‘We’d made some pretty substantial commitments prior to the election, a defence white paper was amongst them, we hadn’t had one for many years, maybe a decade.’

He went straight into organising the white paper and an associated reform program. ‘We wanted to find internal savings to redirect them to the capability we were hopeful would be produced by the white paper.’

As work progressed on the white paper, Rudd was determined to grow Australia’s submarine fleet from six to 12 boats.

Fitzgibbon agreed that increasing the size of the submarine fleet was absolutely the right decision, but he was concerned that if the plan to build the boats in Australia failed, that would be his legacy, ‘trying to chew off too much’.

Asked if he felt at the time that the submarines should be nuclear-powered, Fitzgibbon said Rudd made it clear that he wanted nuclear submarines ruled out early. That did not concern senior ADF officers because there was a general view that Australia was not capable of building nuclear submarines, and it did not have a civil nuclear industry.

Fitzgibbon said he’d since come to believe that it was a mistake to rule out the nuclear power option. ‘I do wonder looking back now whether Kevin had his eye on domestic politics and the resistance in this country to anything that is nuclear. I haven’t asked him, but I suspect that might’ve been a part of his thinking.’

Fitzgibbon said that in retrospect he felt domestic views on nuclear power generation, in particular, should not have fed into the discussions on submarine capability.

When Jennings noted that Defence was inclined to swamp ministers with paperwork, Fitzgibbon agreed and recalled that this was ‘the most punishing job I’ve ever undertaken’.

And he recalled being conscious that senior people in Defence had regular meetings wondering, and working out how they might deal with a minister, but I think that’s pretty standard for any minister. You’d know better than me, Peter.

Being responsible for such a big and complex organisation as Defence was a heavy and important responsibility, said Fitzgibbon. ‘You cannot do it without a good relationship with the leadership over in Russell.’

Ministers were heavily dependent on departmental leaders for advice and guidance and there had to be trust.

‘A great treasurer is not the expert in the economy, a great health minister is not an expert in health policy. A good minister is someone who’s able to listen to competing advice, and instinctively make a judgment about which is the right advice. You’ve got to be strong and forthright and make it clear that you’re on your game. But, at the same time, you’ve got to maintain that good relationship and follow good advice.’

Fitzgibbon says the culture in the ADF’s Russell HQ ‘isn’t always A-plus’.

During a budget conversation and a search for savings he recalls someone telling him: ‘Minister, it’s $300 million, it’s rats and mice’. Fitzgibbon responded: ‘Don’t you ever say that in front of any of my cabinet colleagues’.

‘I mean,’ he told Jennings, ‘$300 million is not rats and mice. I mean, in the context of the Defence budget, it’s not a big outlay, but it’s still a big amount of money. So, there are cultural issues to overcome.’

Fitzgibbon said that after he left the Defence portfolio, friends would tell him he was looking good. And that he looked terrible when he was defence minister.

‘I used to call it sweet and sour. It’s an amazing job you do. You have the opportunity to do some amazing things, particularly in the areas of operations. But it’s sour in the sense that it’s so punishingly hard, and you do find yourself fighting Defence a lot of the time.

ASPI’s ‘Lessons in Leadership’ series is produced with the support of Lockheed Martin Australia.

Australia’s armed forces must be ready for the worst

Kim Beazley recalls the 1980s when he oversaw a restructuring of Australia’s military establishment comfortable in the knowledge that no major attack was likely in the coming decade. That luxury is gone, he says.

Beazley, one of Australia’s most experienced and accomplished defence ministers, is asked in a video interview as part of ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series what advice he’d have for a counterpart now. He tells former ASPI executive director Peter Jennings: ‘The whole world’s on your shoulders, mate. If anything goes wrong and the country’s not effectively defended, it’s your fault.’

Having held the defence portfolio from 1984 to 1990 and served as Australia’s ambassador to the United States from 2010 to 2016, Beazley recalls that when he was minister he’d sometimes wake up and ask himself if Australia had to fight a major war from a standing start, ‘Could we win?’

His answer was, ‘Probably not’, says Beazley. ‘And that would compel me to work a bit harder.’ He also had the reassurance of knowing that he wasn’t likely to wake up to find his country at war. ‘You can’t do that now. The current defence minister has to wake up and say, “What can I now do from a standing start if tomorrow the balloon goes up?”—because it might!’

That puts an enormous burden on the minister’s shoulders, he says. ‘Much more than there was on mine.’

The minister must issue dire warnings, and those warnings must be accompanied by solutions and not issued on their own, he says. The minister must be sure of getting the best possible advice from the Defence Department and from the armed services. ‘But at the end of the day, it’s just down to you, and it’s a very heavy weight.’

Beazley says the government needs to know what, if shooting starts tomorrow, is going to work and how much of it is needed. ‘We have never done defence on that basis, since World War II.’

And while there has been much speculation that the army will come off second best when new capabilities and resources are allocated as the recommendations of the just completed defence strategic review are implemented, Beazley has a different view.

He says a key to defending Australia will be large numbers of missiles with long range, and they’ll have to be mobile. ‘Basically, that’s the army. So I think that in terms of strike capability and distance, you’re going to see the army with a bigger role. They’re not thinking like that at the moment, really, but they’re going to have to.’

The government must ensure that the Australian Defence Force has enough weapons and ammunition at hand to fight a war that might last for months, he says.

Beazley had had a long interest in defence issues before he became minister and had written a master’s thesis on Indian Ocean security.

He says that after Vietnam, the Americans did not want to focus on this region and US President Richard Nixon made it very clear that Australia had to do more to look after its own security. ‘I thought that Nixon had done us an enormous favour by telling that the US, like God, helped those who helped themselves. And so he actually made it easy to do a shift in the character of Australian policy.’

Ensuring Australia’s long-term survival will not be easy, he says. ‘History has a way of correcting anomalies, and in many ways, we are an anomaly. And that means we have to be not so laid back. We have to be clever.’

Australia needs to be spending much more than 2% of GDP on defence, but that will be hard to achieve, says Beazley. ‘It’s difficult to convince people of what you ought to do unless you’re actually in the emergency.’

When he became defence minister in Bob Hawke’s new government, an early goal was to abolish the Department of Defence Support, which, Beazley says, ‘was wasting resources by the bushel’. The department was responsible for purchasing or manufacturing much of what Defence needed, carrying out research, developing Australian industry and providing support in dockyards.

Having those roles in a separate department complicated the running of programs for Defence, says Beazley. Australia’s industries, as they were then set up, were perfectly positioned for the production of ammunition and equipment for World War II, and maybe even the Vietnam War, but not for anything that might happen subsequently, says Beazley.

Dismantling the Defence Support Department was strongly backed by those running the military.

Beazley went on to oversee major reforms based in large part on Paul Dibb’s 1986 Review of Australia’s defence capabilities and the 1987 Defence of Australia white paper of which Dibb was the primary author.

A high point was the decision to build conventional submarines in Australia. Six Collins-class boats were commissioned, though a regret for Beazley is that the fleet wasn’t increased to eight. ‘The reason I wanted two more was simply this, and it’s still a consideration: there are about four choke points on entry to Australia; if you’ve got eight submarines, you’ve got a chance of keeping them all covered permanently, and eight was absolutely essential. And, to my mind then, on the math of it, twelve would be better but eight was essential. So that was a failure on my part, not to be able to get there.’

But he also felt strongly the requirement for a long-range strike capability because Australia needed to be able to hurt an attacker. ‘They won’t take much notice of you unless they know how much hurt you can inflict. That’s why the F-111s [long-range bombers] were fantastic.’

Beazley talks at length in the interview about his complex dealings with the US over New Zealand’s ban on visits by warships that might be carrying nuclear weapons, the process of building trust with the US intelligence agencies, and the importance of the shared facilities in Australia, including Pine Gap, which he regarded as critical to the global balance of power.

And he makes telling observations about Australians at the sharp end of diplomacy, intelligence and the military: ‘Our Defence and Foreign Affairs officials are probably better than just about anybody I’ve come across. They’re good all-rounders, they have to do a lot of things, so they actually know a lot; they’re not stove-piped. So, our public servants can readily hold their own; our intelligence officers and service personnel can hold their own. The services, I think, really do brilliantly with that. The way American officers are educated is well ahead of us, and they’re better qualified, but I think our guys have a rough and ready intelligence.’

ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series is produced with the support of Lockheed Martin Australia.